Against the Blog

Get it? 'Cause he leaves, and also electricity? Is that a strained pun? It's a pretty strained pun. Why not just admit it? This flashes into the future--1899, and we're dealing with the youngest Webb son, Kit Traverse. Kit is the "scientific" son. He's not super-interested in following in his pa's footsteps, and this causes conflicts, as we'll see, BUT! When you think about it, they certainly could  work together in harmony, Webb being interested in how you put chemicals together to sort of transfer from the scientific to the political realm. To be honest, I don't really have a good grasp on Kit's narrative in the novel, so it'll be interesting to see how that works going forward. We start with a description of 1899 July fourth celebrations (that's how you know when this is), which involve a lot of explosions, and everyone getting all shook up with electricity. We celebrate our Independence Day by blowing stuff up, which HOLY SHIT i...

This chapter is a bit more realistic/grounded than the previous. Here we're focusing on Webb and learning about his background and the issues he has with the tension between blowing shit up and being a family man. It starts out with a little frame narrative, of him preparing to blow up a railroad track with his Finnish pal, Veikko Rautavaara (it's also July fourth, which is thematically relevant). Is Veikko an ancestor (well, given the timing, not really "ancestor;" more likely grandfather or uncle) of the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara? Is that where Pynchon got the name? Is he an opera fan? AM I THOMAS PYNCHON?!? Dude: trippy. On that note, let me also point out that Webb has a horse named Zarzuela, which is also the name of a form of Spanish operetta. And there was a Saint-Saëns reference earlier. Hell if I know, but wouldn't it be a thing? Finland was struggling for independence from Russia at the time, but to Veikko, there's no meaningful...

This is the longest chapter yet, and also probably the richest and most mysterious, and as such, this is also the longest blog entry yet. I don't know why I broke chapter two into two parts if I'm just dealing with this whole thing in one go, but here we are. The focus now is on good ol' Merle Rideout. It's a little hard to piece together at first when this is all taking place, but it makes sense when you realize that he's gradually moving west. He starts out in Connecticut, where he's apparently some sort of tinker (it's sort of hard to tell), and gradually moves, first to Cleveland, then Chicago where he meets the Chums, and thence to Colorado where he meets Webb Traverse. His initial impetus to go to beautiful Cleveland is that there's a lot of talk about luminiferous Aether, which supposedly serves as a conductor for light, and can alter its speed and trajectory. Your ears have to perk up when you hear talk of light: here we have this intangible thi...

Yes indeed: this chapter starts with Lew having to provide security for the visiting archduke, whose assassination twenty-one years later would spark the First World War, which is presented in this book as emblematic of the coming horrors of the twentieth century. Here he's presented as a "demented princeling" (46) who wonders is Lew can arrange him getting to hunt Hungarians for sport. Apparently he was  super-racist against Hungarians; wikipedia quotes him as having written "the Hungarians are all rabble, regardless of whether they are minister or duke, cardinal or burgher, peasant, hussar, domestic servant, or revolutionary." It's hard to know what to make of this section (which is really only a few pages), other than an ominous presaging of future events as well as an example of European affairs intruding into the United States. Then again, does it really  need  to be more than that? It does contain one good joke, where Lew is hanging out with Max Khäut...

We start out with a little Chums of Chance ontology, as the narration informs us that the Fair is good for them, as it "possessed the exact degree of fictitiousness to permit the boys access and agency." All of this gets very tangled and complicated when you think about their relationship to the world: are they outside of it? Kind of, but they're also now working with an anti-anarchist group, but now we're told that they're operating in an at least partially fictitious milieu, so to some extent this may be just the way the world works, but...to quote Cathy: ACK! Also, when asked whether or not they're "storybook characters," Randolph answers: "No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly, although the longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell fiction from non-fiction." I mean, okay, I get the point--real people who nonetheless are mainly known in a fictionalized way--but I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of...

This chapter is perhaps less eventful than the previous, but we do meet some important characters for the first time and we get further into the novel's politics. First, of course, we have Merle Rideout--briefly seen from above in chapter two--and his daughter, Dahlia. We learn that Dahlia's mother ran off with a magician (and the Chums are shocked, SHOCKED! to hear about this adulterous behavior); more on this later, natch. Merle is a photographer; I'm not one hundred percent sure how this fits into the novel's overall schema, but the fact that photography employs light is not incidental. Anyway, the Rideouts don't get much attention here; that will have to wait a bit. There is one part I find funny where Dahlia runs up to check out Lindsay, who responds in bafflement: "'This cannot be,' he muttered. 'Small children hate me.'" Lindsay's kind of fun; I find myself liking him more this time. Oh, I also just want to mention Merle...

This is a short chapter. It starts with Miles and Lindsay wandering through the exposition, with its riot of color and detail. You can extract all kinds of meaning from this, no doubt: the novel notes the invisible barrier separating "white" exhibits from ones that show "the signs of cultural darkness and savagery" (22). Clearly, this kind of thinking is emblematic of the American disease, but there's still, at least potentially, something positive about all this heterogeneity--in spite of the fact that, inevitably, exhibitors from far-off countries are playing up Orientalist tropes to appeal to the dumb Americans, like the Tungus people who are employing to scantily-clad women "who, being blonde and so forth, did not, actually, appear to share with the Tungus many racial characteristics" (23) (let's note in passing that the Tunguska Incident plays a role later in the book, though it's not clear how related to that this is). "This doesn...

This section is divided into two parts, and there's a lot to say about them, so I'm going to divide it into two blog entries...or that's what I was going to say, but then I decided to just do the whole thing at once. This has more or less the same tone as the first chapter, yet also rather striking differences. It opens: As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality--likes the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared increasingly likely, to help promote.  (10) I rather fancy you wouldn't see this in a boys' adventure novel. Beautifully written, though. Note the duality again: "the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction." And that they're here "to help promote" this "daylit fiction:" that they're here, in their capacity as these squeaky-clean boy adventurers, to push back against the world's dark realities...it'...

I think I'm going to give each chapter here a title. Whether these titles will be more descriptive, jokey, or efforts to imitate the chapter's particular idiom...remains to be seen. But it seems fun. Here we are introduced to the Chums of Chance. The book ends with them flying in and ends, twelve-hundred-odd pages later, with them flying out. These are heroes of boys' adventure stories in the Tom Swift of Submarine Boys vein. They are: Randolph St. Cosmo--he's the leader of the bunch; you know him well. Unfortunately, he has little or no personality behind that. Or so I remember thinking; maybe he will reveal himself to have heretofore hidden dimensions. Lindsay Noseworth--the puritanical, fastidious second-in-command. Miles Blundell--the ship's cook. In this first chapter he's presented as just clumsy, but later on he'll reveal himself as a kind of mystic. Darby Suckling--a few years younger than the others; presented as a brat, as well...

Well hi there, nobody. Welcome to this project I'm embarking on--at least, I think I am. If you're reading it, I certainly am. But given that you're nobody, I'm not sure whether you reading it actually means anything. Or...oh, forget it. I read Thomas Pynchon's  Against the Day when it was first published in 2006. I was in graduate school at the time, just deciding that this was the kind of thing I liked--long, postmodern novels. I'd read all of Pynchon, and it was an indescribable thrill to see more. A few years later, I wrote about it as part of my dissertation, but I haven't revisited it since then. So it's been a while. For whatever reason, I've been thinking about this book a lot lately. Yeah, for "whatever" reason. Obviously, the reason is that the United States is broken and corrupted as never before. The book was definitely written in part as an implicit response to the George W Bush administration, and we really do all lo...