"Against the Day", Thomas Pynchon - 2015 / 2016 discussion

This discussion covers Part 1: "The Light Over the Ranges".

I think if this were to start in January, I may be able to read it.

J, some people will start in December and most of the group in January. There will be no strict schedule to follow and the topics for discussions will remain open.

Léonard Gaya started reading
Against the Day
by Thomas Pynchon
Currently Reading
0 minutes ago

And away we go! :)

:-) happy reading! I just realized the first episode is a short one... so here I go!

Just read the first episode! Met the Chums of Chance... an easy read so far (but I won't of course delude myself here)...

It's humorous as M&D I guess and we have a dog that can read (and has great taste as it reads Henry James!) Haha... I hope Pugnax gets to Proust by the end of the book.

I'm gonna take a look at the notes at the wiki to see if I missed something as I haven't felt the need during my reading.

It's funny taking another look at this image (http://img12.deviantart.net/6d73/i/20...) after reading a bit. I imagined the Chums of Chance to be younger.

That image is a bit G.I. Joe, at least compared to how I was picturing them. I see them a bit more like Lyle Lanley: http://i.imgur.com/AE5KDwP.png

Ah, comments are already underway.

OK, for you Pynchon veterans, how am I suppose to be thinking of all this fine grained detail - for instance the dog, whose name is the same as an asteroid from the large asteroid belt discovered in 1971 by three Astronomers at Mt Palomar. And is reading Henry James' novel about anarchists. I'm far enough along to see a recurrence of anarchists. But is the dog, name, and its literary interest in anarchy to be expected to show up later in the story, or are such details merely curiosities for the reader to explore or not as it suits them?

Well, it seems this topic is coming back not very far down down the line, with Lew's story in Chicago: if I got this right, he has a conversation about "anarchists" in the city with someone named Herschel (by the name of the German-British astronomer)... Not sure what to make of this sort of hint so far, but there it is.

Thanks, yes I'm farther along and anarchy keeps coming up, but what I'm curious about is whether the reader is assumed/expected to go looking up these background details on names etc. to better understand/enjoy the book or whether they are just "local color" as the story goes along. Writing out comments like this sometimes helps me answer my own questions.

I will add that there are some details I'm finding more interesting than others in that they "connect" with other points in my own life (two movies I've seen so far).

I was quite intrigued when I discovered that when songs were mentioned that I could go on UTube and listen to them. I would have missed the irony of one scene and perhaps a social commentary linking that scene to another if I had not done that. Locations (hotels and restaurants, neighborhoods) are historical accurate although sometimes poetic license is used in some detail.

This reminds me of a diorama of miniatures that display an age. You can enjoy it with an overview or you can bend down close and examine each piece in detail.

My best Pynchon advice is to enjoy the weird detours and rabbit holes he sends you down, but don't get bogged down in the details too much. Enjoy the kaleidoscopic freakiness but keep moving. No single reference or character name is the holy key that will unlock grand understanding of the book. I personally will check the wiki notes and Wikipedia episode summaries occasionally but, for me, trying to catch every single thing as it rushes past is a sure fire way to suck out the fun and hamper overall comprehension.

Overall comprehension - whatever that even means for a Pynchon novel

Thanks Max, I think that's how I'll settle into the read.

To me (and I agree with Max here), reading a novel such as this is like looking at the sort of paintings that were produced in the Netherlandish Renaissance. I'm thinking about Pieter Brueghel the Elder, say this one here:


I'd rather take a few steps back at first in order to have a sense of the global composition. Then, maybe, I'll look closer at each little scene and delve into its meaning...

Same thing here, although I can't just "take a step back" because reading is a continuous process (you don't get to read a book "at a glance" as you would looking at a painting or a fresco), but I will go about it in a cursory manner first, not trying to read every possible footnote -essentially because it would take ages, especially in this case, and I might eventually just give up!

So, in a nutshell, I basically drift along the stream of the book and catch whatever I can possibly catch. Then, if I feel like getting back to some scene or detail, I'll do that over a second phase.

I think Max's advice is a great one, and one I intend to follow as well. Veteran Pynchon readers have created deeper theories that I'm not sure would benefit our first read here... for instance, I always check the wiki mainly to get some background of the real people that appear (Franz Ferdinand, Tesla etc) as I don't have much information on them... but when the wiki starts creating far too reach theories — like the Chums of Chance not being real, only characters in an adventure book series (as cool as that sounds to me!) — I try to not get too much into it... at least not right now...

Dave, I didn't know the songs were on YouTube! I think I've 'read' two of them and enjoyed both. It will be even better to listen to them!

Dave wrote: "Thanks, yes I'm farther along and anarchy keeps coming up, but what I'm curious about is whether the reader is assumed/expected to go looking up these background details on names etc. to better und..."

Dave, I think they're not necessary in order to understand the book but they're the kind of details that when you find out were there all along you can't help but to admire the writer... kind of like re-reading Swann's Way and finding little clues Proust left of the later volumes...

---

Léonard, your analogy with the Renaissance paintings is so spot on. Nice way to put it :-)

When we get to hear more of Merle's background, he has a conversation with Dally about her mother... she asks rather mature questions for her age... when she first appears she was what, 5? And then in this background story I think she's supposed to be younger... am I getting the timeline wrong?

I've notice a couple of times where characters are introduced and participate in the ongoing plot for a few pages, then there is a flashback (of varying length) that gives the background on the new character.

Yes, I've noticed that... quite nice I think!

The section on Skip reminded me why I loved Mason & Dixon so much :-)

It's impressive how Pynchon manages to mix this kind of humour with writing as beautiful as the lines that start with:

"The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to...."

I'm really enjoying this "something's about the explode" atmosphere... does anyone also get that? Anarchism... alchemy... uh oh!

Yes Renato, I agree, there are some beautiful descriptions. I am often finding ends of paragraphs or sections either foreboding or poignant.

Case in point: the story then moves to the West, the land where it doesn't matter "what girls [the American Cowboy] has chastely kissed, serenaded by guitar, or gone out and raised hallelujah with", and I found indeed some very poetic and, at the same time, often sarcastic descriptions, such as that of

the Inner American Sea, where the chickens schooled like herring, and the hogs and heifers foraged and browsed like groupers and codfish, and the sharks tended to operate from Chicago and Kansas City --the farmhouses and towns rising up along the journey like islands, with girls in every one.

...which then leads (among many other things) to scientific accounts on alchemy, metallurgy, photography, the nature of philosophic mercury and so on. Go figure. :)

I think that's the great thing about Pynchon... humour mixed with poetry with songs and when then science to wake you up, haha!

"Was it any wonder that when the opportunity did arise, as it would shortly, the boys would grasp unreflectively at a chance to transcend “the secular,” even at the cost of betraying their organization, their country, even humankind itself?"

To add even more to my feeling that something's huge to come, Pynchon drops that line...

The ending of Part 1, with CoC flying though the bowels of the Earth with Gnomes all over the place fighting with green light crossbows is downright Dantesque-Lidenbrockish-Hobbitesque dope shit, ha!!! :)

PS. Loved the dog's gourmet particulars!

My review for Section 1, with an aim to whet fellow readers along and not to spoil any fun:


I had a tough time getting traction in this section. There were too many characters is keep track of, and I kept getting lost down the rabbit holes of digressive stories or vertigo of wormholes to alternate universes. Some of the drag for getting aloft into flight was the uncertainty in where this is all headed, which made me afraid of missing from key to a map for the journey or losing track of a character I wasn’t paying enough attention to. If you suffer the same seasickness, you just have to let loose a bit. Trust that you can skate past the thin ice and don’t worry about clutching to potential solidity of the stories of particular characters. Scouting out as far as the end of section 2, I assure you that anything or anyone really important to comprehension and continuity of your sanity will be returned to again and again.

At first you might get the impression that the Chums of Chance we start with are the most important characters to figure out. After all they fly around the world on missions of mysterious purpose handed down by an equally mysterious Upper Hierarchy. Their Pynchonian names and their responsibilities on the airship crew promote the idea of a microcosm of the can-do spirit of the human race: Chick Counterfly (scientific officer), Lindsay Noseworth (communications officer and historian), Darby Suckling (mascot), Miles Blundell (“Handyman Apprentice”), Captain Randolph St. Cosmo (scientific officer). But so far for me they are too cartoonish to take seriously and mainly serve as an amusing diversion and Greek chorus for the real-life adventures of the other characters whom are brought together at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and afterward dispersed into the world. The traveling photographer and electrical appliance handyman Merle Rideout and his daughter Dally. The detective Lewis Basnight, working to outsmart possible anarchist bombers. The powerful mogul with organized crime connections, Scarsdale Vibe, and his avatar, Foley Walker, whom he had formerly paid to fight in the Civil War in his place. The Yale professor of science, Professor Vanderjuice, whom Vibe contracts to undermine Nicola Tesla’s unprofitable plan to create a source of free electricity .

Just what are the Chums doing in Chicago? What do they remind you of? Are they really that compelling to a reader? To me the voice of the narrator speaks directly to the reader about them almost as a carnival huckster, breaking into second person in a way that keeps them as cartoon people. Pugnax, the dog that reads literature punctuates all with an inscrutable wisdom. The reference beyond the page to past dime-novels of the Chums adventures is a charming whimsy. The conception of world adventuring aeronauts and the realization of the hollow-world conception may remind most of Jules Verne, while the arcane physics, self-aware animals, and steampunk feel reminds me of Pullman’s “The Golden Compass” and Westerfield’s “Leviathan”.


A skycraft from Westerfield's steampunk series


I started getting more seriously engaged with the story when we head to the mountain west of Colorado with Rideout and his daughter. We feel for them with the breach caused by his wife running off with stage magician Zombini. The Indians are all gone from this frontier, and the remnant of wild in this west lies with bandits and bank robbers like Butch Cassidy and the rowdiness of gamblers and sad-sack alcoholics. The name of the game is exploitation of resources like gold and silver, and the class war of Europe emerges here between the capitalist mine owners and their minions and the downtrodden workers who look to the Unions and socialist ideology for recourse. We soon meet the next group of substantial characters in the book, the miner Webb Traverse, wife Mayva, and their three sons and daughter. Webb helps Merle Rideout find work at the mine as an “amalgamator”, in charge of the extraction process. There’s a wonderful metaphorical connection between Merle’s work and photography and his new job:

Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that ‘photography’ and ‘alchemy’ were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals. And maybe his and Dally’s long road out here was not the result of any idle drift but more of a secret imperative, like the force of gravity, from all the silver he’d been developing out into pictures he’d been taking over the years—as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice, and he’d been working for it as much as it for him.

Another link in the chain of fate these characters I am beginning to love comes out in a discussion between Rideout and Webb:
“But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange, eh? What do you make of that?”
Webb nodded agreeably. “Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt was not mant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.”

Dynamite is a powerful tool for miners and becomes a popular means self-expression and weapon of anarchy of workers against the capitalist infrastructure. A fabulous mythological figure in this story is that of the Kieselguhr Kid -named after clay that stabilizes nitro in dynamite. The tall tales about him are quite delicious:
“Don’t carry pistols, don’t even own a shotgun nor a rifle—no, his trade-mark, what you’ll find him packing in those tooled holsters, is always these twin sticks of dynamite, with a dozen more …”
“Couple dozen in big bandoliers across his chest.”
…”But say, couldn’t even a slow hand just gun him down before he could get a fuse lit?”
“Wouldn’t bet on it. Got this clever wind-proof kind of strike rig on to each holster, like a safety match, so all’s he has to do’s draw, and the ‘sucker’s all lit and ready to throw…
Even old Butch Cassidy and them’ll begin to coo like a barn full of pigeons whenever the Kid’s in the county.”

Lew’s work to catch anarchist bombers in Chicago gets extended to the West. As much as he hates the loss of life and mayhem among innocents by their mania of violence, he begins to empathize with the plight of workers against the greed and heartlessness of the capitalists. He begins to suspect that some of the destruction could be instigated by the oligarchs themselves to justify total war against the malcontents. There are so many spies working on both sides, innocents begin to get falsely tagged as combatants. This happens to Lew himself and he is led to avail himself of an escape to England with a couple of youthful aristocratic adventurers from there. Merle too becomes a target, and we are led into the stories of his children as they grow into the responsibility of doing something to fight back. The eldest, Reef, is too much into gambling to take constructive action. His sister Lake gets too diverted by selfish lusts for bad boys to be a force against evil. The youngest, Kit, is out of the picture at Yale studying advanced mathematics under the corrupt sponsorship of the Vibes. That leaves Frank, the mining student, to lead the effort of avenging his father. But he too soon gets into trouble himself with the bad guys.

Meanwhile, Lew has come under the influence of flakey spiritualists in England. They suggest his near-death experience with a dynamite blast may have moved him sideways into this universe from an alternate one. He comes to feed his altered states by procuring more of the hallucinogenic nitro-related drug he discovered in Colorado called Cyclomate. But he is too jaded to buy the séance nonsense that has infected England. He begins to tune into the world manipulator factions that line up behind certain key scientist mathematician figures at Cambridge and Tubingen.

Do these factions have anything to do with the faceless masters who call the shots for the Chums of Chance and their Russian nemeses they encounter in the skies over the polar regions? Their obscure mission is to intercept a French ship in search of a lode of a special calcite crystal with the ability to polarize light and show some kind of alternate reality. We are left in this section on the edge of our seats with lots of questions and worries. The chorus effect for our real characters on the ground comes from Mile’s lips:

“Explosion without an objective …is politics in its purest form. …If we don’t take care …folks will begin to confuse us with the Anarcho-syndicalists.”

Renato wrote: "The section on Skip reminded me why I loved Mason & Dixon so much :-)

It's impressive how Pynchon manages to mix this kind of humour with writing as beautiful as the lines that start with:


"Th..."

I will second this, Renato! I just read the section with Skip and it was amazing. Only Pynchon can evoke such feelings in me. This really put me in a Mason & Dixonesque mood -- almost making me want to re-read it!

And the whole thing about the aether and the Michelson-Morley-experiment was also hilariously fun to read -- and all that pop-sci I read years ago finally came to fruition! And also the theme of anarchism that is reverberating throughout.

Ah...! This whole book is so enjoyable. Pynchon reasserts himself as my absolute favourite writer with this - at least so far.

I am quite behind all of you readers and have laughingly enjoyed Franz Ferdinand's visit to Chicago with Lewis keeping a watchful eye. The tempo is now reminding me of Mason & Dixon--in a very good way.

Sue wrote: "I am quite behind all of you readers and have laughingly enjoyed Franz Ferdinand's visit to Chicago with Lewis keeping a watchful eye. The tempo is now reminding me of Mason & Dixon--in a very good..."

It was a fun setting to bring the characters together before sending them out. After all that WW1 reading we read one looks for the early roots of it in lots of places. This period we are in here is similar to that of The Proud Tower, a time of lots of transition.

Michael wrote: "Sue wrote: "I am quite behind all of you readers and have laughingly enjoyed Franz Ferdinand's visit to Chicago with Lewis keeping a watchful eye. The tempo is now reminding me of Mason & Dixon--in..."

Yes indeed! It's rather fun to take in these times of domestic and international anarchy through Pynchon's strange lens. I can feel the story starting to ratchet up now and I like that feeling.

I'm curious to see how the quarternion theme develops. A remarkable number of references to that, starting with Hamilton's great insight on the Brougham Bridge...

Manny wrote: " I'm curious to see how the quarternion theme develops...."

That was one element that I was compelled to go look up. All the average reader needs to know I suppose is that mathematicians were having a conflict between Quarterion and Vector camps. It really didn't help that much to look, though that bridge story was wonderful. The world being out of whack in accommodating all the changes, and math being part of the struggle is the accessible message.

That math developed in pure form came up with ways of using extra dimensions and irrational numbers (which use square roots of negative numbers) was fortunate for paving the way for physics to to use those tools for use in quantum formulations of probability waves. From college I remember all those triple integrals in the Schroedinger equations and the equivalent of Heisinger and von Neuman descriptions using matrix algebra. These I gather bear relations to the Vector and Quarternion schools.

Quarternions turned out to be important in formulating the Dirac equation, which basically links quantum mechanics to special relativity... I'm wondering if that will come into it! He certainly seems to be skirting round those themes. So many weird threads in this book...

The way he juggles genres is quite mindblowing.
Edit: Also, all this math talk is going way over my head, at least. Unfortunate.

Keep an eye out for the Tasmanian allusions, which relate to a Professor who encouraged female math students and whose wife was a prominent feminist. Our daughters went to a school named after Mary Somerville.

Ian wrote: "Keep an eye out for the Tasmanian allusions, which relate to a Professor who encouraged female math students and whose wife was a prominent feminist. Our daughters went to a school named after Mary..."

Thanks for advice from your point of reading way down the line. By coincidence Mary showed up in a book I am reading today on chaos. She was a physicist friend of Faraday and the painter Turner, helped interpret Faraday and energy theories in books for a general audience, and conveyed to Turner theories of light and color useful to him. Her work in 1830s predate the time of this novel.

Pynchon is covered amomg novelists trying to interpret conceptions of entropy and chaos. It was an obvious focus in Crying Lot and Gravity's Rainbow, but not so easy to perceive here. Anarchism has some affinity. Having so many characters in an order at Chicago, then diffuse out to Western or Arctic wildernesses goes with the flow of entropy I suppose.

Stian wrote: "The way he juggles genres is quite mindblowing.
Edit: Also, all this math talk is going way over my head, at least. Unfortunate."

I was trying to be reassuring that knowledge of math is not essential. The practitioners are made out as objects of satire in their adherence to arcane camps, when in reality there was convergence of their approaches later on. Kit is heading down one path and begins to get serious about it in part two.

Michael wrote: "Stian wrote: "The way he juggles genres is quite mindblowing.
Edit: Also, all this math talk is going way over my head, at least. Unfortunate."

I was trying to be reassuring that knowledge of math..."

Good to know. Also, thanks for your other posts here. Helpful. :-)

Not sure whether I can still join, but can start reading it today.

Got the book--can't wait to start! All the posts are really intriguing and thoughtful. It will be great to be a part of it. Thanks!

Stian wrote: "Edit: Also, all this math talk is going way over my head, at least. Unfortunate. "

Manny wrote: "I'm curious to see how the quarternion theme develops. A remarkable number of references to that, starting with Hamilton's great insight on the Brougham Bridge..."

I have to confess the Math went way over my head as well, Stian. In the beginning I did read about it and tried to make sense of it all, but nope, couldn't understand it. I think Michael's advice of simply understanding the Quaternions vs. Vectorists a great one.

To preface, I just got the book yesterday and was able to read only the first 20 pages or so. That said, I can't stand not participating in the conversation and feel compelled to say that mathematics is only a language among many other languages. It provides access to particular things according to its particular structure. I look forward to seeing how these languages are utilized in the book.

hey, I'd like to join in on this but I couldn't find a book online. Could anyone please send me a copy? I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks :)

Ishita wrote: "hey, I'd like to join in on this but I couldn't find a book online. Could anyone please send me a copy? I'd really appreciate it. "

Amazon has links to used paperbacks for $4 plus shipping. I lucked onto a library discard of a hardback. So heavy it makes sense to go ebook, but I balk at $15 for something so insubstantial as an electronic file.

Ishita wrote: "hey, I'd like to join in on this but I couldn't find a book online. Could anyone please send me a copy? I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks :)"

I found a new copy through Amazon for a good price, under $10 plus shipping but it's hardback and it is heavy. But it is in perfect condition. Are you able to use Amazon? Another place to check for both new and used books is bookfinder.com. They locate copies at all sorts of different websites so you can compare what's available.

Abebooks is another great resource, although often these are the same exact sellers/copies as on Amazon Marketplace. But hey $4 or $5 USD ain't bad.
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Searc...

I did look into all those sources but half of them don't ship here and the other half are way too expensive. It's impossible to even consider such a massive book as an ebook but I seem to have run out of options :P

It's snowing outside today so it was the perfect time to start this thick book. I read The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson a few months ago so I feel like I'm getting another take on that era.

I also read a book about the Archduke FF which kept mentioning the enormous number of animals he killed on his hunting trips. So I had to laugh how Pynchon poked fun at him by connecting it to the meatpacking industry.

I'm getting the feeling that anarchy is going to be important in the book. There's a big contrast between the lights and white paint of the fair (an artificial place), and the squalid conditions in other parts of Chicago (a reality).

This is the first time I've read a book by Pynchon. It's amazing how he combines humor with history, science, math, songs and a huge vocabulary. His mind must be on overdrive.