Oct 17
I'm in Connecticut right now, visiting my grandfather, looking around the little city of Wallingford, on vacation, dipping into the dozen or so books that I'm curious about, including one about the city of San Francisco, about the way it represents the concept of Manifest Destiny, the idea that America's westward expansion is both an advance of a Christian nation into a Western Hemisphere Land of Canaan and the rebirth of the Roman Empire. The visual part of my mind is still nibbling away on the feast the new environment here offers me, sights you just can't see in Anchorage Alaska, all these old buildings, cemeteries, thick trunked trees, churches with roof-tiles like reptile scales on their spires--and I'm thinking of all the effort that must go into preserving these traces of old New England culture, Yankee culture, a culture that's at once inspiring and offensive, a culture which is linked to those founding fathers we're all supposed to admire and which also seems especially to embrace all the ugly, elitist, exclusionary traits of America.
My mind's a jumble of ideas. It's usually a jumble of ideas.
To me, Thomas Pynchon represents a sort of salvation, a messy, rummage sale of a mind that's able to take the chaos of life and order it, but that chooses instead to rearrange it into a different sort of jumble.
This new novel of his is a delight, and it touches on the politics of arranging and rearranging American space, the political forces that lie behind the sudden destruction of neighborhoods, the big monies that invest in new casinos, the monetary carrots that are dangled in front of metropolitan police departments and that therefore help determine how the law is enforced and that therefore determine who is effectively a criminal and who is not, and that therefore...and that therefore...and that therefore...
All these threads of logic that weave themselves into a tapestry that we don't have time to look at exactly...Nor time to summarize in full...
Who reads Thomas Pynchon? Sadly, I've met almost nobody who does. Two people in college, but after that, nobody. Maybe the Internet will help bring me to someone who does. I always daydream that if I were to meet a woman who shares my passion for this guy and his writing, I'll have found my wife. We'll see. In the meantime, I feel like it's time to use this book as an excuse for organizing and disorganizing some of my thoughts on this old fogy who has defined how it is I see the world, maybe more than any friend, lover or teacher ever has.
