#263: Syphilis Patients on Brochure Vacations
ON THE DAY – stop – FUCK AMERICA – stop – THANKS FOR NOTHING – stop
This is the point: books are not made of "positions." They are not made of "arguments." Anyone can say they believe anything, in print, and the ostensible righteousness of their avowed beliefs does not make a book good. If it did, what glorious years for Democrats we would be living in, what a Belle Époque for every city council candidate who pretended to care about abolishing the police for 20 minutes 5 years ago.
A book is made of words. If the words aren't worthwhile, it doesn't matter what "argument" they "articulate," and it sure as FUCK doesn't matter what "story they tell." I will kill the next man who tries to talk to me about "telling stories." You sound like Kamala Harris.
Pynchon's novels from VINELAND onward are, without a doubt, better than 99% of other novels written in English during the same period. That is a pathetically low bar. The first time I picked up VINELAND, which is a solidly good book, after having read GR 3 times back-to-back-to-back, it felt like watching Kennedy's brain lurch out of his skull. If I know you're the man who wrote those first 3 books, and you want to publish VINELAND, do it under a fake fucking name. And if you want to write a book about AMERICA, now or any time, you better be ready to fucking die over it, and you better burn my fucking eyes out by the end of it.
William Burroughs never exactly wrote a book like GRAVITY'S RAINBOW – nobody has, and Burroughs wasn't trying to – but he knew whereof he fucking spoke until the day he died, and he died in shithole Kansas, a house I've been to half a dozen times, because Lawrence, KS is soaked with several hundred years of blood you'd better smell and taste before "America" occurs to you as subject matter, and because it was a day's drive from a fucking methadone clinic. And Burroughs did not supply anyone with Correct Ideas, and he did not do it from a brownstone he owned on the Upper East Side; he said
LOOK AT THE PRISON YOU ARE IN, WE ARE ALL IN. THIS IS A PENAL COLONY THAT IS NOW A DEATH CAMP. PLACE OF THE SECOND AND FINAL DEATH. ... NOTHING HERE NOW BUT THE RECORDINGS. SHUT THEM OFF, THEY ARE AS RADIOACTIVE AS AN OLD JOKE.
Ask some teenage boys in Afghanistan about the CIA retirement program. See what "stories" they've been told.
Comments (58)
who knows invented the rape and pillage via knife, the anglo saxon types probably innovated the use of pointing a gun at someone’s family while you go about your business, but the americans thought larger with the nuclear bomb. this could make it so you don’t even need to defend yourself actively
Or enable us to redefine "defend yourself" with such extraordinary breadth that if somebody complains, we can simply say, "Sorry, I didn't catch that – could you repeat whatever you just said to the only nation in the history of the world that's dropped atomic bombs on human beings?"
ELDER ABUSE
as far as Gravity's Rainbow being perfect, I can live without the extended graphic lolicon sequence. not to be all Your Fave is Problematic about it. and to a lesser extent, I still thought it was rude when Pig Bodine called that nurse a cunt.
I assume you're talking about the whole ANUBIS/Bianca part, and unfortunately I think it's really important, and relatively uncommented-upon because then you have to think about the fucking thing in detail – there are at least 3 major things happening in that section, and I've almost done a show about it several times and then gotten to Tuesday or Wednesday (especially since October 2023) and thought "Surely, after the shit I've seen in the last 5 days, THIS Thursday doesn't have to be Omnidirectional Underlying Western Pedophilia Thursday." In brief primitive notation: #1, the end of that entire sequence, that weird seamy Burroughs-dream of implicitly being in a movie theater, "Some whore," and then "Of all her putative fathers ... she favors you most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you" is the hardest smack-in-the-face in the entire book, except for the end. I have thought about that so many fucking times since Epstein became public "intellectual" property. You get however-many pages, 15, 20, of this molested adolescent presented as a shipload of fucking vermin want to see her, oh "Baby Vamp," oh – and this is the root of the whole thing, beyond the book, and I haven't done that show yet because I cannot figure out how to talk about it for an hour without thinking "I need to put down this mic, close this laptop, and go 'shcommit a shcuicide shcombing'" – the whole fucking root: "Oh, SHE knows what she's doing." I don't know how it got this way, I don't know when this started or why, but at some point, powerful Western men decided that their favorite thing in the world is to look at something or someone innocent, scared, confused, even just oblivious, in the sense of never having considered what might REALLY be going on, because that hasn't been NECESSARY yet – to look at that person or action or whatever and think "'Innocent'? Please. She's a little whore, and she knows it, and she knows I know it, and the entire point of this exercise is that she has to look at me and think 'He knows I'm a whore,' and I get to look back at her and think, 'That's right, you little bitch,' and she LOVES it." That, more than anything else, is what every man in every photo of Little St. James is determined to extract from the occasion – and though this is overwhelmingly a sickness of straight men preying upon young young young women and outright girls, I think it's important to remember that exactly the same thing applies to a lot of teenage boys on David Geffen's fucking yacht and in Bryan Singer's poolhouse. Not so much because "it happens to MEN TOO," but because the precise structural analogy allows us to understand that this is a question of power, and power relations, and not exclusively the disease of a gender or sexual orientation (though it is, here and now, mostly about powerful men and young girls) – I hope I'm getting my point across here, that it's not some equal-access bullshit about how MEN SUFFER TOO. It's that when you reduce something this foul to a "symptom" of a gender category, you have just given tacit permission to the idea that gender is the determinative force, and that, therefore, it's equally plausible to say "and the TRANS GIRLS do THIS, and the BUTCH QUEERS do THIS, and the SOB SISTERS do THIS." I am 100% certain that somebody, somewhere, in this very moment, is working out the argument that Jeffrey Epstein was somehow trans, and that the only way to end child sex abuse by global elites is immediate trans holocaust. If we find evidence substantiating the rumor that Epstein was also fucking Leslie Wexner, or we learn that, I dunno, he and Peter Mandelson were a couple, we WILL see "This is not a problem with red-blooded men who love hot babes! This is what happens when you let the FAGS in, and they undermine Western culture by slowly addicting good straight billionaires to more and more PERVERTED sexual practices, so it looks like MEN are to blame! Ask yourself: what's Kevin Spacey doing there? How did Peter Mandelson get to the island? Why are there photos of Epstein with Michael Jackson? Why was Chris Tucker, Michael Jackson's best friend, on the Lolita Express? Because, like so many times before, those FAGS are trying to make traditional heterosexual values look EVIL, so they can poison our children and our goddamn Way of Life with LETHAL DOSES of GENDER." (And of course that kind of gender-causal thinking, inevitably, permits the liberal delusion that if someone outside the "type" were the President, or the head of JPMorgan Chase, or the director of information extraction at Blacksite Diego García, then the problem would vanish. MORE clap FEMALE clap EPSTEINS clap. We are the daughters of the Maxwell sisters you COULDN'T arrest.) But I stray from the point, which is also a central feature of the thing I call the Eikonosphere: we are witnessing a disease, present from time immemorial but perhaps never so infinitely documented, of powerful men whose central desire is to project the idea that THEY are being seduced onto young girls, to project onto these young girls a silent expert whoredom, whereby ALL of them "want" to get fucked by Bill Clinton ALL the time, and ALL of them are infinitely studied in the ancient and subtle arts of coquetry, in order to heighten Bill Clinton's delight when he finally does fuck them. Which, presto change-o, retroactively "proves" that they were sluts the whole time. Look at that one – she's so self-possessed that she looks like a little girl. SHE IS A LITTLE GIRL. Look over there – this tableau has been so masterfully presented that it looks like Bill Clinton raping a 13-year-old. IT IS BILL CLINTON RAPING A 13-YEAR-OLD. And apart from the fact that all of these men have gotten away with a thousand other crimes that should've seen them crucified, their indignance, their outrage, their bluster at all this exposure, comes partly from the fact that *they need to believe they were seduced.* They need to believe it all "just happened" because they met this one girl who wanted to fuck them. And then another one. And then 17 more. And then maybe you put a gun in a 15-year-old's mouth while Jeffrey played a piano reduction of "La Primavera" from Vivaldi's QUATTRO STAGIONI – because it was the GIRL's idea. You understand. So, in GR terms: to have Bianca presented exactly like that, treated exactly like the girls on Little St. James were treated, and then to get one very brief moment in which she is "revealed" as a lonely and abused adolescent girl with no father, who exists for the hateful sneering "enjoyment" of frat-boy alcoholics in a porno theater – and to see that her CHOICE for a father, the one she wishes would stay and be nice to her, is a man "pushing 30" who has already fucked her, because she may literally not know any adult men who haven't molested her – ... jesus christ, I'm thinking of one read-through of GR when I was probably about 25, had stopped drinking, and (mostly through things that either had happened, or were happening, to women I knew) was suddenly seeing what the world looks like for women in one of the "GOOD" countries, in one of the countries where a lot of the women on Earth would probably RATHER be, at least until they actually got here, because they've been told about the Safety and Freedom and Dignity and Equality that women "enjoy" in liberal capitalist nations, every 7 years, like clockwork, when the CIA needs to depose their Prime Minister, and I had already been fixated on Juárez for a long, long time, and because I am a stupid man, I was just seeing the nightmare edge where Juárez connects to every place I've ever lived, I was just understanding that this was a matter of degrees, not a binary on/off, that the question is not "Is this Juárez" but "How MUCH is this Juárez," so I was reading this part of GR, and I don't remember why, but I was on my feet, like maybe reading until a section break before going outside or something, and the only "furniture" in this apartment was a mattress on the floor and two cheap fiberboard bookcases, and I had totally forgotten the "So someone as to tell you" ending of that section, and when I got to it, I genuinely dropped the book, it felt like I'd been shot in the throat with a blowgun, and I just stood there wincing like there was a flashlight in my face, I couldn't think of anything to do, and somehow I half-consciously walked over to one of the little faux-wood book cases and just slammed my right hand against the top of it, over and over and over, thinking "god – dammit – god – dammit – god – dammit," with the vague idea that either my hand or the bookcase would break, but instead, the middle and bottom shelves collapsed, so suddenly I was standing in a puddle of about 60 books, and I thought, "That's probably right. That's a way for this to end." And that, in short, is one of about three reasons I fucking hate reading the Bianca part of GR but also think it's important. I could've believed some dumb shit about Epstein, for example, if I hadn't already been forced to look at the heart of it. (And the nurse part, I feel 99.9% sure I can guarantee, as a writer, that Pynchon did that entirely for the grammatical and typographical chance to start a paragraph with "'Cunt,' he began reasonably," and anyway, it was only TEN cents at the Battle of the Bulge.)
I may have to quote you on this twin tower eden shit if I ever finish my novel…that was incredibly high bar insight poetry my friend
if you have a timestamp for it, what the hell did I say
Idk I think game of thrones is better than Vineland
You ever have a nightmare that seems throughout the waking day like a place you are going to return to? That Scott Walker song opened a wound into some place like that. Maybe I'm not saying it right. I've been having mild nightmares the past few nights which linger into the daytime, like an open door into the next room, and the song opened a second door to somewhere else.
You know, that's really quite a good description of my mind in general, and especially during/since withdrawal: it's not just the nightmare, it's that the nightmare is REAL, arguably more real than the day, and it EXISTS INDEPENDENTLY, not "in" your brain, not "under" your conscious mind, but on a nearby plane of reality that you can even learn to see, and you know for the rest of your life that it can and will drag you back in, whenever it wants to. Like one eye and ear are "awake" or "asleep" and the other eye and ear are trapped in the worst dream
"Look, let's face it, you're probably a much more intelligent person than I am. In fact, I guarantee it. But even smart kids stick they're finger in electrical sockets sometimes." - Bruce Willis, MOONRISE KINGDOM
This was the first song youve played in my memory where my brain was able to connect the music to the words you speak at the same base and profoundly moving level. I didnt need to have my brain actively ignore the lyrics and just let the static take me away. I sometimes wish I had the same ability you have to be moved or even understand music like you do. But than I just go back to listening the same beeep borp computer noises that is completely devoid of meaning and infusing my own into. Anyway great episode.
I don't know. You stretch yourself that thin for the better part of a decade, phasing in and out of reality as you wrestle with the muse in order to keep the circuit closed for hopefully long enough to get it all down. Before it slips away or destroys you. And by some miracle you actually do it. You wake up one morning with that giant pile of paper on your desk, that exhaustive how and whodunnit, so intellectually and metaphysically forensic that it reveals all of the necessary machinery and maps out all of the abstraction... And what does it get you? A slow and steady and never ending series of gilded invitations to join the rolling cocktail party thrown by the perpetrators and would-be perpetrators. And what can a poor boy do except sing in a rock n roll band? I can imagine it was all pretty brain-breaking. I can even imagine him needing to shit on it so as to be able to have ego enough to try and do it again (even if he knew he was never really going to try), because, what was he gonna do? Be a plumber? Go work for Dow or Rand? You might only have to look in the mirror for long enough to brush your teeth in the morning but still... Is the answer more that in order to compile all of the data necessary to write that monster into life, the relationships and connections in all of their glorious and dizzying overlaps, that he was already in too deep to ever get out? That the skin parchment you sign in your own blood at the forsaken crossroads and the still warm heart you bury there is always your own? No one throws a stone with more accuracy or panache than you do Mr. Judge, and I would not change a hair on your head (I'll never stop giving you my $5 a month either :) The list of 88 year old white guys who take up too much oxygen is sooooo fucking long though. It's not my job to decide for anyone else who gets a pass though so I'll just quietly hum Lay the Lily Low to myself. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm all for killing your idols - and even the occasional Buddha you might meet along the way - but it ends up being hard to listen to.
To be fair, its striking quite a chord with everyone in the comment section. This guy is learning to produce episodes that act as literary ipecac. Im trying to work here and instead of being focused, im wrestling with why I feel so strongly about what was said here.
After catching up on this show for the last 2ish months (Thanks Mike for keeping me company on my jaunt to Wichita once a week) this episode makes me feel a little conflicted. I have to imagine old Tom knew the consequences of publishing a book like GR, even if only a select few would understand it's significance, and maybe this was just the price he had to pay, either for his own protection, or sanity. Either way, keep up the good shit.
What does one, disinclined to ruminating, do with the knowledge of residing in Lucifer's invisible jail house? Asking for a friend...
As I see it, Pynchons late novel are the BLEAKEST of them all. After GR he developed nothing new as the culture was barely able to digest his earlier work. The reality is compromised in these late books. They are deliberately degraded, pastiche, and progressively detailing the impossibility of even any whiff of redemption. Shadow Ticket is a nightmare book, an AI slop book, there is a reason its about CHEESE. Hate to say it casuse nobody else seems to - pynchon is practically screaming at you that this is cheesy, it SUCKS, he is cataloging the deterioration of culture and the books get less fun, less deep, surface is drowing out the formerly rich subtexts. He has his moments in all of these books, you can see he isnt senile. Not even close. The late detective trilogy is him writing airport Pynchon. This is an idictment so bleak that we are deprived of anything but random blips of references and songs and ideas so corny they are late a fourth generation of copy of a pynchon tape. He is showing what depth is when all is beaurocracy - shadow ticket is like an animated dossier, unmoored from the even slight coherence the world GR was written in. It’s him saying: this is what America has become, and therefore this is what “a Pynchon novel” must now look like. This is not a new technique, but i think its honest. Its not great, it sucks, its bleak, its not fun to read. He is now writing from such a reduced world, such a compromised and corrupt place, pynchon novels of quality CANT exist. It is the death of his medium flailing in debilitating decline.
Vineland was the initial seed for this. He translated the Reagan era mass lobotomy through it. The flattened world of the novel is demonstrating the active erasure of history happening. Pynchons project cant exist in world that erases this much cultural memory. M&D and ATD is where Pynchon actively mourns every lost alternative. It’s maximal and ecstatic because mourning often swings into mania. I see him wrestling with this in those books. The late trilogy is post apocalyptic in comparison. Exhaustion, not sentiment. (sorry /rant, i just finshed shadow ticket and im in a weird head space).
Great episode. It’s a small kind of courage maybe, but I appreciate you saying things that a lot of your audience won’t enjoy hearing.
That's why he's the GOAT
Some pretty cold takes in this one boss
Virginia Is for Lovers, Thanksgiving Is for Killers, Bad News Is for the Holy Fucking Ghost
Shit forgot to ask. and now I can’t even remember if this was mentioned this or last episode. Are those shitty imitations of Finnegans Wake that you’re talking about the books by Arno Schmidt, Julian Rios, etc? I read the Wake last year and it fucking rocked. I’ve have Schmidt and Rios on my list for years but don’t want to waste my time or money if they’re the bullshit imitations you’re talking about.
Ríos is enemy #1; Schmidt I haven't read; Flann O'Brien wrote a hilarious, incredibly weird book called THE THIRD POLICEMAN, but his "Joycean" book AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS is not very good; G. Cabrera Infante for sure; the best of Severo Sarduy is incredible, but the worst is very bad, and I don't know that José Lezama Lima is worth much beyond historical context now: MULLIGAN STEW by Gilbert Sorrentino was co-#1 in my mind with Julián Ríos as I said it, and that book fuckiing sucks, but Sorrentino was one of those guys who wrote 15 books as if he were 15 people, and ODD NUMBER is by far the best Americanization of Alain Robbe-Grillet; he never did a full fake-WAKE novel, but in the Circle of Hell for the Floridly Erudite, William H. Gass might be the most overrated American writer of the last 80 years; David Markson did some BAD fake Joyce when he was young(ish), but he also wrote WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS, which is the only good book ever to mention Wittgenstein, and which is the closest we'll ever get to a post-Soviet Beckett novel; I know there are some Latin American culprits I'm forgetting, because there was a period when I tried to read The 3 Guys (gender-neutral) from every Latin American country, and fake Joyce was once a very popular luxury item for everyone south of Costa Rica; I'm told there are fake-Joyce Russians, but I don't think I've read any, partly because they're hard to find, but also – and here's another COLD TAKE for the Heavenly Host – because, having made many, many attempts to discover a reasonable standard, I do not believe anybody can adequately translate literary Russian into English yet, certainly not anybody who gets published. There is just no way, just no way, that Dostoyevsky is as awful as his English translators would suggest, and that's going from the very first ones, Constance Garnett and shit, to the supposedly "great" new ones by that married couple, Pevear and Volkhonsky iirc. We're so fucking bad at translating Russian that we still can't decide if it's "Dostoyevsky" or "Dostoevsky." Well in Cyrillic, there's no letter between "Dosto-" and "-evsky." Sure. And in Cyrillic, it's also spelled "Dostoevskyy." Remember when everybody had to write "Zelenskyy" for 2 years to be Serious. Am I going to die writing "Zaluzhniy" for a decade
Loving all the Scott Walker music lately. “The Drift” and “Soused” are back in heavy rotation thanks to these recent episodes.
Listening to you talk like that to Pynchon was like watching my father cry for the first and probably last time. Sad, cold, bitter, frigtening…. Anyways, thanks for the ep, much love!
About Pynchon*
I haven't listened to the episode yet so I'm more than likely in the territory of dumb fuck commenting about what I know nothing of, but is the argument something about the question of writing fiction from the position of being a fucked in the ass loser and dreaming of how to reconcile this fact through loser narratives about what might have been or how to make our loser reality somehow ok? I liked one battle after another well enough but I couldn't help seeing it through this lens. A fantasy wherein we make caricatures of the winners that fuck us and play with our bones, saying haha, these guys, Huh? Imagine if being good meant anything and what if the real story is the friends we made along the way?
I had a strange moment of synchronicity walking through my town this icy sunday morning. As Michael said "They didnt fall, they spread all over the world" I walked past a store sign that just said "all over the world". I dont live in the US, either. Very eerie.
I love all the people pushing back. This is fun to read the counters. Great work all around.
JESSE ARE YOU LISTENING
Every Thanksgiving I remember that the Puritans described their new home as "God's American Isreal." This is from Richard W. van Alstyne's THE RISING AMERICAN EMPIRE. Here's the full quote, which comes from a discussion of what would become the Monroe Doctrine: Expounded with particular force and clarity by the New England Puritans, who regarded themselves as founders of a new Israel in the North American wilderness, the doctrine of the two spheres became a fixation in the American mind prerequisite to the growth of nationalism. New England, which was "God's American Israel" according to its Calvinist divines, assumed from the outset an attitude of political independence toward the mother country. (p. 8)
This is why the middle-south, roughly what became the Louisiana Purchase – Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri – was referred to as "Egypt," as in "scary land of foreigners for the Old Testament Hebrews, and obviously we're them and we're reenacting the Bible on Earth 2.0." You can find phrases like "going down to Egypt" or "lighting out for Egypt" in American writing of a certain age, like early 1800s, and that's why there's a Memphis in Tennessee, and why states like Missouri are riddled with names like Cairo (which is KAY-ro here), Herculaneum, Hannibal, Lebanon (which is, of course, luh-BAN-un), Alexandria, most of which you can also find in Illinois or Tennessee. Those fuckin' freaks were living in a fantasy of History Redeemed and throwing around every goddamn Biblical and classical allusion they knew. Hence, in part, my sharp distaste for fantasies of History Redeemed
There's a certain conservatism I've long sensed in later Pynchon, and this elaborated what I've wondered about extremely well. I do wonder if pynchon believes any of it, or if this is why his later stuff is riddled with fantasy compounds or ephemeral places where the world briefly went better. Yet, like you get at, what sort of escape hatch can we really hope to find?
Interesting anecdote to this episode: one of longest running and dearest of friends is the grand-daughter of the guy who DID get to be the marine on the Joint Chiefs. That guys daughter, aka my friends mother, was the personal assistant at varying points to Storm Thurman, Donald Rumsfeld AND Dick Cheney. Let’s just conclude by saying, her and her mother have cut all ties.
Wilt Chamberlain shit. Supposedly Cheney had a huge dick, and I feel like anyone as close to being a literal slavemaster as Strom Thurmond has a giant lazy cock that doesn't really work but sees a lot of action as a threat and/or punchline. There are a million stories about LBJ whipping out his massive dong for other men, but I don't know a single WOMAN with a story about it – even the nearest equivalent, LBJ's famous dictum that "Panty hose ruined finger-fucking," is not actually about his dick
that glory hallelujah joint goes crazy
There is some astonishing accidental genius in live recordings of Elvis right before he died. He made the most cornbread American Family Good Times bullshit sound terminally poisonous in a way you could never pull off intentionally, partly because he was Elvis and he WAS dying. Hence "Jesse" at the end
Can’t agree at all on this one. Which is probably the first time I heavily disagree with your takes. I agree with some points (GR being far and away his best novel, M&D and AtD being entirely too long for what they’re doing and having unnecessary passages where GR never did). But they’re objectively not “alternative histories” any more than GR was. They fictionalize events sure, but that’s what every one of his books did. It’s not as if M&D glorified aspects of American history or that we saw history take an alternative path to where Washington or Jefferson were killed earlier, preventing some more evil path forward (like how Tarantino killed Hitler earlier in IB or prevented the Manson murders in Hollywood). All of Pynchon’s works show how America ended up where it is now. There may be motifs of “what ifs” but that’s not the crux of what any of his works have been about. Curious if you’ve revisited V. recently. I remember you not loving that one from a very early episode. I never have liked it but want to revisit it soon now that it’s been some time.
It's not "alternative history" in the form of a plotline, it's that every one of them ends with "Well, They won, again, after our heroes tried so very hard!, but AT THE END OF THE DAY, you've got Family, Friends, Reverend fucking Cherrycoke playing with his grandkids, and I'm rich now"
I feel like this isn’t a great or in-depth read of the later books tbh, especially ATD. Yes, his books want to be movies, and yes, mid and late Pynchon adopt Henry James as the ultimate writing daddy, but I don’t buy that it all reduces down to “what if America went another way?” but rather “how can we use American fictions and its history (his love) to show what America actually is” Shadow Ticket is def with the read, even if you don’t cover it!
AGAINST THE DAY is explicitly a book where World War I never happens
Was the General in question Bernie Trainor??!! Shoutout to my Holy Cross Jesuit-brained psychos! DMT blunt rotation: Bernie T, Clarence Thomas, Bill Simmons, and Pod Save Jon.
What is the key difference between the "American fate" passage in Inherent Vice and the Rosa Luxembourg fantasy in GR? Is it just that Luxembourg passage is presented in a kinda mawkish way by a ridiculous character, where in IV the author has become Leni Pökler himself?
You remember how the Rosa Luxembourg part ends? AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. It's a character with a toddler's understanding of Marxism saying things like "There will be a Revolution. The President has promised." It's 100% about everything I'm saying here
Ohhhh, that was a just a different time…
it's like it's not a betrayal of a dream but a betrayal that dreams
great episode, thank you
Finally saw One Battle After Another. I don’t like to say it, but PTA has turned Pynchon’s worst book into his own worst film.
PTA isnt all he’s cracked up to be , the older I get the more
Goofy and uncharitable episode. Yawn.
I agree with all except the yawn part. I loved the episode and enjoyed hearing the argument, even though I think he's completely wrong about Mason & Dixon especially.
I hope I get cigarettes, Hersey's, and CUNT in my stocking this year. 🥺
It's interesting you mention Portugal (aka diet Spain). Check out pictures of a public monument in Lisbon called Monument of the Discoveries. I was just there a few weeks ago and it's astonishing in many ways. First of all it's fucking huge, and like any sufficiently large structure, pictures won't capture how small you feel standing next to it. Secondly, on the back side of the monument, the rudimentary shape of a cross was integrated into the overall theme of the structure, which is that of a Caravel ship. Carved in relief on the surface of the cross is a massive sword with the blade pointed down toward the Earth. Finally, and perhaps most notably, flanking each side of the monument are sculptures of people associated with the "age of discovery", culminating with Henry the Navigator, one of the founders of the slave trade, standing boldly on the edge of the structure, facing the Tagus and out toward the Atlantic. The monument looks somewhat classical, but it was built... in the late 50's. Now, I don't know nearly as much about Portugal's rape and pillage of the world as I do about the Anglo-European's, but I've realized that not only can you view these monuments (in the US and elsewhere) through the lenses of normie patriotism or through what I'll just sloppily call here "liberal arts student first learning about all this shit" horror, you can view them as actual monument to genocide, actual monuments to extermination, and actual monuments to terror in all its varieties. And actually switching between the first lens of normie patriotism and the last lens of monuments to horror and realizing that they might even be the same lens, well, Mike, it's really something.
What do you think of Vollmann, especially Europe Central?
agree with you big time on Quentin Tarantino! Also, I am visiting museums in Texas, and I have viewed many "revered" paintings by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, which sadly very much whitewash the true history of the genocide of native Americans. I am also struck by the concrete natures of the downtown cities of Dallas and Houston, which help extinguish any possible spirituality from most people. Also, I am re-reading Crying of Lot 49 again, which I find to be an amazing book, so I was indeed mystified that Pynchon later on lambasted his own work in the introduction to Slow Learner. I agree that some artists do get more "secure" as they age, so that perhaps they end up moving away from the surreal, although I love what you had to say about David Bowie and Blackstar on one of your very early episodes! anyway, awesome work here.
Don't slight Padraic Colum, man. There's a generous sized roundabout named after him in Longford.
IN Ireland, sure, but nobody in America knows who the hell he is. O burger thou art shapely as a swan