Fred Astaire in 1941 (public domain photo).
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Another tai chi reference on page 264: I started doing t’ai chi ten years ago, and I have not reread this book during that time. This morning I heard a bit of a review of the Sex and the City sequel on television, and while reading the scene of Frenesi and DL talking in Mexico, I imagined Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Catrall playing them. (They could take turns playing the parts, the way some actors take turns playing Iago and Othello.)
I put an asterisk in the upper right hand corner of page. 265, probably back in 2006 when I taught this novel in a community college English class. I don’t remember doing it, and I don’t remember why, but I find this paragraph ominous in 2025:
“Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it – dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity - ‘I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to me be my way.’ If the President can act like that, why not Brock?”
The reference to Fred and Ginger on the next page makes me think of David Thomson’s idea of casting Fred Astaire as Dr. Jekyll and Jimmy Cagney as Mr. Hyde. Fred would have made a great Brock Vond.
9 comments:
I took the week off from Vineland to re-read the Catcher in the Rye. I got a copy for my son and thought I should refresh my memory. Funny to read something so straight forward that you can get through in just a few sittings.
The way things usually work I'll pick Vineland back up and there'll be some reference to Holden Caulfield or something waiting for me. Though I suppose there's already a connection via Pynchon and Salinger's shared reclusion.
Planning to finish Vineland before seeing One Battle After Another next weekend.
I read an interview with PTA where he says he got Pynchon's blessing to just steal the bits he liked from Vineland, because a straight adaptation would be too difficult. The buzz is that it's a quite a good movie though!
Bobby, I think I saw the same article, will do a blog post soon!
"can't you feel it, all the dangerous, childish stupidity..."
Yea, Pynch. Yes I can.
The quote above from p. 265 does sound prescient and ominous. I don't think Reagan took it that far, but it seems more literal today. Another parallel with current events: death and its aftermath seems a primary theme in Chapter 12 as death and its aftermath grips the USA media with a high profile political assassination.
Thanks for the comment about One Battle After Another clarifying why it's not a straight adaptation from Vineland. It does look like it'll be incredible. I saw an excellent clip from it different from the preview when Sean Penn was on Kimmel last week. I saw it on uTube.
Chapter 12 seems an experiment of using words to give a Bardo experience, moreso than any other chapter. That partly explains why it appears so weird, convoluted and all over the place. It starts with the information that Weed Atman has died then brings up the Bardo Thödol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead which brought awareness of the Bardo to the world; it's where the word originates. The first paragraph, last line gives it away with "mediated deaths."
Like the Bardo, this chapter jumps all over the place in time; I saw at least one anachronistic allusion which I'll get to later. It begins with Weed as a Thanatoid and at some point goes back in time to the events leading up to his death. Frenesi will experience the death of her identity as an anarchist filmmaker and eventually take a rebirth as a mother. The chapter ends shortly before Frenesi meets Zoyd which will produce Prairie who watches some or all of this.
The 24fps group dies. The College of the Surf dies along with it the People's Republic of Rock n Roll. We get the epitome of the confrontation between the fascist authorities and the hippies with Frenesi literally right in the middle.
Two more references to Deleuze & Guattari appear in this chapter. The second one looks more obvious coming in the form of the tricked out '57 Chevy Nomad, "the flagship of the 24fps motor pool" (p. 250). BTW, there's no possible way what Pynchon describes could be done to a '57 Nomad. For one thing, it never had a 4 wheel drive option, but I'll save the Qabalah for another time.
Chapter 12 in A Thousand Plateaus is "1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine." By the "war machine" D&G don't mean the conventional reflexive way of defining it as state military violence and terrorism. Their war machine resists the state with intelligence and creativity not with violence. From Google AI overview:
To Deleuze and Guattari, "nomad" refers to a war machine or rhizomatic "warrior", a powerful force that resists the State's attempts to impose fixed identities and sedentary social structures. Nomads embody a philosophy of "nomadology," characterized by constant movement, experimentation, deterritorialization, and a desire for freedom and new connections, existing in a perpetual state of becoming. Their way of being is less about physical travel and more about mental and spiritual fluidity, rejecting rigid categories and embracing a continuous variation in thought and being. "
The second reference seems more like if you blink you'll miss it, or I could be off and a different interpretation may be better, please let me know. Rex Snuvvle has plans to go to Paris p. 229. Later, p. 232, "Rex was heading for the land of the May Events." This seems to refer to the events of May 1968 in Paris when students and activists took over and stopped business as usual. Guattari was involved with this and it's brought up in their books. It was a really big deal there.
Coincidentally (or not), the day that Pynchon's Bardo chapter surfaced in this group EJ Gold wrote about the Bardo on his blog:
"The Bardo is not a place for cleverness. It’s not an escape room, a logic puzzle, or a courtroom. It’s a mirror, a sound chamber, a movie set rigged to echo your own mind. The “you” that shows up in the Bardo is made of habits — of reaction loops, karmic grooves, emotional defaults, memory patterns, and the tracks your soul has carved by repetition."
Of course, this applies also to the Bardo of transitioning to higher brain circuits. I quoted it for the sentence: "It's a mirror, a sound chamber, a movie set rigged to echo your own mind." It seems an apt description of, and resonant to events in this chapter.
This chapter is so great! Not finished but wanted to check in after a few very high points :)))
"How many Thanatoids does it take to screw in a light bulb? None - it gets too hot in there!"
and
“- reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra good behavior, maybe a cookie”
I'm a sucker for any bardo stuff. Psychedelic space and the between space seem to me the same space.
Also! Check out this awesome poster art someone made for Vineland as part of the movie hype: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThomasPynchon/comments/1nkjuz3/vineland_poster/
The Pynchon wiki highlighted a passage from p. 232 that I found interesting, an imaginary situation, or rather a future (from the perspective of the early 70s) that never came to be: “neither one could know how few and fortunate would be any who’d be able to meet in years later than these and smile” and “they all sit and eat crab and sourdough bread and drink some chilly gold-green California Chenin Blanc, and laugh, and pour more wine.”
This suggests to me that, perhaps, ‘Vineland’ (not an actual county in Real Life) can be taken as meaning the utopian California that could have been if the fascistic backlash of the Nixon counter-counterculture had not crushed and reabsorbed the hippie ideals of the 60s.
On that same p. 232, Pynchon makes it very clear who the enemy is: “you’re up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking crusades, retribution, closed ideological minds passing on the Christian Capitalist Faith intact, mentor to protégé, generation to generation, living inside their power, convinced they’re immune to all the history the rest of us has to suffer.”
Towards the end of this short scene, Pynchon gives us: “you get it yet? Huh? You get it?” I think I do.
Actually, he ends the scene with “Just a pair of innocent hippies, one with a service .38. Hard to say which was the bigger fool.” The use of violence to fight off fascism does not appear to be condemned here. The trailer for One Battle After Another gives me the impression that PT Anderson positions his film along similar lines.
After Nixon and after Reagan, now in 2025 it certainly seems to me that protesting peacefully in the streets will not only fail to accomplish any significant change, but could likely be met with police brutality and the loss of one’s physical integrity. This appear just as valid on the other side of the Atlantic, in “the land of the May Events”, where people right now as I write are using many varied ways to show their discontent, only to be contemptuously ignored by those in power, and gassed and beaten up by the repressive armed forces of the State, dressed in a way more fitted to go killing giant bugs in Starship Troopers than maintaining the peace.
‘Vineland’ as the revolutionary spirit of the 60s ideals, that needs being kept alive and passed on in order to fight off, one battle after another, the Christian Capitalist Faith.
Maybe this ‘wine’ is also the one found in the Book of the Law:
“To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, and be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all.”
Ewige blumenkraft, and “powder to the people!”
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