China Mieville | Books | Interview | The A.V. Club

China Mieville on the benefits of undisciplined writing:

My second book, Perdido Street Station, was the one that a lot of people really, really liked, and it was tremendously sort of rumbustious and ill-disciplined. I feel like I’ve been getting increasingly disciplined since then, and some readers seem to miss that kind of amiable chaos. What I wanted to do with Kraken is tap into what you’ve kindly called an eruption. I wanted to indulge that. It does have a very different feel than The City & The City. It obviously won’t work for everyone, but I always think about books like—and I don’t mean this hubristically—Gravity’s Rainbow. If Gravity’s Rainbow is anything, it’s kind of this dreamlike meander. The idea of saying to Pynchon, “You know, you need to tighten this up,” it would destroy it. Kraken was an effort to tap into that same kind of pleasurable ramble.

Pynchon Speaks

I'm willing to buy the idea that TP is the narrator in the video trailer for Inherent Vice. Hippie dippie gumshoe man.

Pynchon in the Times

Kakutani sticks it to Pynchon for being a cartoonish relic, or something:

Though “Inherent Vice” is a much more cohesive performance than the author’s last novel, the bloated and pretentious “Against the Day,” it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself. It reduces the byzantine complexities of “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “V.” — and their juxtapositions of nihilism and conspiracymongering, Dionysian chaos and Apollonian reason, anarchic freedom and the machinery of power — to a cartoonish face-off between an amiable pothead, whose “general policy was to try to be groovy about most everything,” and a bent law-enforcement system. Not surprisingly, the reader is encouraged, as one character observes, referring to George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comic strip, to “root for Ignatz,” the anarchic, brick-hurling mouse, not Officer Pupp, the emissary of order and law.

Also, "Against the Day" was neither bloated nor pretentious. For the record.

Inherent Vice -- Thomas Pynchon

The cover for Pynchon's next novel is splendidly cheesy. Elmore Leonard meets John From Cincinnati meets, I don't know, Jimmy Buffett? I can't wait. The bad news is that the book does not arrive until August 4 (With the rise of the Kindle and the collapse of the economy it's hard to believe books will still exist in that faraway future).

Oakley Hall

The writer Oakley Hall passed away last week. I have his Western novel Warlock, as well as his highly readable The Art and Craft of Novel Writing. It's good stuff.

Here is Pynchon in his famous 1965 review of Warlock:

It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall.

Pynchon Studies

This book on Pynchon and the Political actually sounds pretty interesting:

Thomas Pynchon's writing has been widely regarded as an exemplary form of postmodern fiction. It is characterized as genre-defying and enigmatic, as a series of complex and esoteric language games. This study attempts to demonstrate, however, that an oblique yet compelling sense of the 'political' Pynchon disappers all too easily under the mantle of postmodernity. Innovative and unsettling discussions of freedom, war, labor, poverty, community, democracy, and totalitarianism are passed over in favour of constrictive scientific metaphors and theoretical play. Against this current, this study analyzes Pynchon's fiction in terms of its radical dimension, showing how it points to new directions in the relationship between the political and the aesthetic.

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Listening to: Beirut - Carousels
via FoxyTunes

They Fly Toward Grace

I have finished reading Pynchon's Against the Day. The final 200 pages are particularly strong, and I found myself loving the book much more than Mason & Dixon. In the end, the book becomes a meditation on family and relationships, and the many ways that people come together, form ad-hoc family units, reunite, say goodbye, and/or move on. It's really very beautiful.

The only person I really felt sorry for was Lake, who finds herself briefly caught up in a Raymond Chandler meets the Black Dahlia story without ever even realizing it. Kit ends up (finally!) with Dally, and seems to find Shambhala, only to discover that Dally may have gotten there first! Frank and Stray end up together and Frank raises Reef's son, Jesse. Meanwhile Reef, Yashmeen, and Cyprian form an interesting menage which inexplicably produces a daughter. Finally, Reef and Yashmeen make their way from post-war Europe to the states and meet up with Frank and Co. Reef finally meets his son and all in all the extended family of the Traverses seem well prepared to face the challenges of the modern world, however explosive those might be.

And thats how it goes: the good guys find happy endings, and the bad guys get their just desserts. The more fanciful figures realize that they are not suited to the modern world, or aren't part of this world, or transcend and become something else. The history of the Traverse family is a first rate family epic, and the Chums of Chance become one of the more charming literary inventions in Pynchon-land.

As I read, I felt completely immersed in this world, and patience allowed the story to unfold at its own pace, making each stop along the way that much more interesting. I am ready to begin again, and I'm sure I'll remember everyone's names this time around.

Pynchonesque in Our Emptiness

The normally smart Techsploitation blog comes up with this baffling bit of non-conformity:

On The Simpsons, however, the characters are nothing but stereotype. They’re practically Pyncheonesque in their emptiness — not people, but objects who get driven through various pastiches in order to become the butt of the audience’s arch, ironic jokes. I didn’t give a shit about any of them. The only way I could enjoy these characters was to say, “Haha look at the funny dumb poor people who are so incredibly stupid that they actually work at nuclear power plants.”

I don't know what's worse: the failure to understand The Simpsons, the failure to understand Pynchon, or the over-the-top knee-jerk reaction against strawman hipsters (with their "arch, ironic" jokes).

There seems to be an assumption that there is an intellectual elite sitting somewhere in their towers mocking dumb poor people for sport and profit. When in fact, that is exactly the sort of situation that would be ably lampooned on The Simpsons (with a guest appearance from Wes Anderson and a Royal Tenenbaums spoof). Because it is the situations in The Simpsons that we are meant to laugh at and the way they expose unspoken desires and power relations in the real world (just like a Pynchon novel).

If Homer seems like a stereotype its because he is archetypal in the same way Bugs Bunny is: able to be dropped into any storyline, role, or pastiche while maintaining his core identity. More importantly we don't laugh at Homer so much as recognize that his dumbness is a reflection of the world he lives in. We sympathize with Homer for his laziness, inflated sense of importance, weakness for donuts, and talent for disappointment (d'oh!). He is us. He is our everyman. At the same time he is also all of our own worst habits, all those things that annoy us in everybody else

Perhaps good comedies exploit that same tension that we find in the fear and entertainment experienced by audiences in a horror movie: "the frisson of ambivalent feelings". In The Simpsons we have characters who remind us that life is both wonderful and stupid. We laugh with as we laugh at and that ambivalence is what makes the show so brilliant.

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As for Pynchon, his latest book, Against the Day, is a steam-punk epic and a meditation on the unnecessary violence that gave birth to the modern world. His characters begin as types, but their true humanity is revealed for those patient enough to read to the end. No joke.

Against the Day Update: Shamanism

I'm still reading!

So by now, Kit Traverse has been traveling across Asia with a British divinity scholar named Dwight Prance in search of the fabled Shambhala. Way out in Eastern Russia, Kit and Prance get into a discussion about the nature of Shamanism (pgs 776-777). It's great. Check it out.

Prance says:

"Shamanism. There isn't a primitive people anywhere on Earth that can't be found practicing some form of it. Every state religion, including your own, considers it irrational and pernicious, an has taken steps to eradicate it."

"What? there's no 'state religion' in the U.S.A, pardner, we've got freedom of worship, it's guaranteed in the Constitution -- keeps church and state separate, just so's we don't turn into something like England and keep marching off into the brush with bagpipes and Gatling guns, looking for more infidels to wipe out. Nothing personal o' course."

"The Cherokee," replied Prance, "the Apache, the massacre of Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, every native Red Indian you've found, you people have either tried to convert to Christianity or you've simply killed."

"That was about land," said Kit.

"I suggest it was about fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch with powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of official church to mediate it for them. The only drug you've ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened."

"The Civil War? That was economics. Politics."

"That was the gods you tried to destroy, waiting their hour, taking their revenge. You people really just believe everything you're taught don't you?"

I love this notion that the religious debate is not really about faith v. reason, or theocracy v. secularism, but between oppressive state power and ecstatic personal freedom. What complicates western history is that sometimes the Church is the State, and most everyone sees themselves in the role of the Shaman, the holder of the true cause, battling the powerful forces arrayed against them.

In the Soviet Union atheism was the state's way of dealing with the shamanistic beliefs of the Eastern church and the Tsars. In the modern U.S., atheism and neo-paganism are quasi-shamanistic belief-systems that are oppressed by the Christianist state-empowered majority. American Christians in the mode of the Left Behind series see themselves as an oppressed minority of believers battling the evils of the anti-Christ, one world government, and secular humanism. In the war on terror, al-Qaeda and Jihadism represent a desire to achieve state power in order to battle the shamanisitic free-wheeling, feminist, liberal, gay-friendly, artistic West. But they themselves believe that the western nations conspire against their shamanistic version of Islam, and for them 9/11 was nothing less than their God's revenge.

It's not about what you believe, but how you believe. Are you free? or are your experiences mediated for you by the powers that be: consumerism, Christianism, nationalism; Fox news, neo-conservatism, and the religious right. Do you believe everything you're taught or are you in touch with powerful gods hidden in the landscape of art, literature, music and culture?

Against the Day Update

I'm on page 648.

Over the last many, many pages Kit's been in Germany doing lots of math and hanging out with the glamorous Yashmeen, who, as it turns out, has the ability to move through four-dimensional space.

Kit gets his money cut off by Vibe for keeping secrets and he gets a job with T.W.I.T. to help find the mysterious Shambhala. Along the way there's a cool bit about Gasophilia and the ability to communicate via gas-lines similar to the way an electrical signal can move through a wire. There's also a nifty discussion on the linguistic connections between the sanskrit word Akasa and the words Aether, Chaos, and Gas. Then Kit gets mistaken for a drug addict and meets a guy in an asylum who thinks he's a jelly donut ("Ich bin ein Berliner!").

On the one-hand a gloriously realized pre-Einsteinian pseudo-science, and on the other an equally anachronistic Kennedy joke.

In the final scene of this section, Kit, Yashmeen and Gunther go to a museum that turns out to be a tesseract, a four-dimensional analogy of a cube. When a mysterious voice announces that the museum is closing, they ask "Who are you?" The reply is straight out of Lost: "You know who I am." But of course, I have no idea.

We then cut to Frank who is still wandering around Mexico. There are some random meetings and the usual conversating: "...these folks down here at least still have a chance -- one that the norteamericanos lost long ago. For you-all, it's way too late anymore. You've delivered yourselves into the hands of capitalists and Christers..."

Ain't that the truth.

Against the Day Update

I am still reading!

For a while there, I was only reading at night before falling asleep, and was rapidly losing track of what was happening. Which brother was which? How many brothers are there (2 or 3)? Who were the guys that killed Webb? What were the Chums of Chance looking for? Why was the Iceland Spar important? What is T.W.I.T.? Who's the girl who goes to New York and sees her mother(?) in the department store? I couldn't remember and I was wishing that I'd been taking notes from the beginning.

Worse yet, I'd completely missed the significance of the scene where Frank kills Sloat!

The other problem was that the character of Webb Traverse was so well drawn in the early sections that you really adopted him as the main character. He was the guy you identified with and wanted to follow to the end. In that regard, it makes his death that much more shocking when it happens, but it also leaves you, as a reader feeling a little lost. Who do we attach ourselves to now? Who is the hero?

A conventional, but honest question.

Last weekend I managed to read 100 pages at a single sitting (basically pgs. 400-500), and I realized that the problem was not the book but the fact that I'd been reading too slowly. The book is meant to be read at a pretty fast pace, and the extended sequences are meant to be episodic. When we move from one locale to another it either heightens the tension or answers a question. This thing has a plot and it moves!

In this section alone we learn of:

• The Chums of Chance and their discovery of Time-Travel via Dr. Zoot.
• Candlebrow University where scientists study Time.
• The "brief aberration in their history known as the Marching Academy Harmonica Band".
• The adventures of the under-sand frigate Saksaul.
• A journey to the under-sand city of Nuovo Rialta.
• Merle and some crazy business about movie projectors which leads to the invention of a Time-Machine.
• Thorvald the tornado.
• Frank's homeward journey, and a reunion with his mother.
• Deuce and Lake's increasingly accusatory, guilt-ridden, and confrontational marriage.
• Cyprian Latewood and his obsession with the beautiful (spy?) Yashmeen Halfcourt.

Clearly I don't have a full understanding of everything that's going on but it feels like it's fitting together. It helps to flip back to the beginning every once in a while to keep track of what's happened and to whom.

Only half way though. More to come!

What I'm Reading

I'm currently on about page 300 of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. I tend to be a slow, methodical reader these days, and Pynchon's book (so-far) is a sprawling, leisurely, but not difficult historical/western/sci-fi mash-up. We're well suited to one another.

I'll post my thoughts as I go along.