Against the Blog

Here we get our first extended look at Reef and Frank. Frank is a student in "mine school." Is that a real thing? Of course it's a real thing on some level, but it seems like the kind of thing that your managerial-type mine personnel would be doing. Is Frank trying to be upwardly mobile? I don't have a totally clear understanding, but there will be plenty of time to think about that later. Right now, you get all you need to differentiate between the two brothers: Frank is conscientiously doing his mine schoolwork, when Reef drags him off to Nevada to help him sort out his romantic entanglements. It's easy to see how Frank will end up wandering the US looking for Webb's killer while Reef is fucking his way through Europe. The said romantic entanglement is with his girlfriend, Estrella "Stray" Briggs, who has found herself pregnant (she will later give birth to a son, Jesse, who Will later show up as Jess Traverse, the aged labor-activism patriarc...

This is definitely the darkest chapter we've come to yet; it's short, I don't know that I have much to say about it, and yet it's also, possibly, the most important for the narrative as a whole. Or such is my belief. So first, Webb alienates his entire family, though at this point that only means Lake and his long-suffering wife Mayva. Kit's out east, and it's extremely unclear to me where Frank and Reef are at this point: when we last left this family, it was established that he was in the process of moving apart from his children, but that does not answer the question of what the heck happened to those two. It must be said: he is an extremely shitty father. It turns out Lake's staying out to all hours, coming home with suspicious amounts of money the provenance of which she's being cagy about. So he does what you do: drives her out, telling her "don't run no shelter for whores here" (190). There is a real problem with communicati...

That title is a Gravity's Rainbow reference, and a fairly obvious one, I'd've thought...but actually, a little googling reveals that I'm apparently the first one to ever make it on the internet, which is kind of amazing to me. But who IS the Kieselguhr Kid? I want a bumper sticker that says that. Like so: The best bumper stickers are the ones that only .0000001 percent of the population have any chance of understanding. But anyway, it's a question that Lew Basnight would like an answer to: he's now in Colorado, and White City Investigations (having subcontracted the case from the Pinkertons) is on the case. He's a mysterious guy, like a gunman, but instead with sticks of dynamite (kieselguhr is a kind of that can be used to produce same). Does it seem like it would be easy for an actual gunman to take down such an individual? "Wouldn't bet on it. Got this clever wind-proof kind of striker rig on each holster, like a safety match, s...

This chapter brings us back somewhat closer to what we might laughingly call "reality." Most of it's about Kit Traverse at Yale. Is Kit short for Christopher? As far as I can recall, he's never referred to by anything other than plain ol' "Kit." We are here introduced to a fair few Vibes, including Scarsdale's son Colfax, Kit's roommate. He has one other previously-unmentioned son, Cragmont (who I don't think ever actually appears in the book; he's merely mentioned here), who married a trapeze artist at the age of thirteen. You can do that? There's a strong temptation to want to see the three Vibe sons as doubles of the three Traverses: Cragmont, Colfax, and Fleetwood, their patrician names contrasting with the blunt, working-class Reef, Frank, and Kit. And yet, I'm not sure there's a lot we can do with that: Fleetwood is the only one who gets any degree of page-time, and even that's really not much. Besides, there...

This is extremely interesting for sure. I was wrong about this being about the Chums; they're only featured briefly at the very beginning. Mainly, it's about the city in which this damage was wrought, which I know I called Washington DC, but I think at this point it's more of a meta-city than anything else (I was amused by city officials being referred to as "Tammanoid creatures" (130); it took me a minute to realize this was a reference to the Tammany Hall political machine). So but the thing is, there's definitely more than initially meets the eye about this situation. You think, okay, the Arctic expedition brought back this...thing, and now it's fucking shit up. And this is true to an extent. It's explained that the scientists "believe[d] it was a meteorite they were bringing back . . . but who could have foreseen that the far-fallen object would prove to harbor not merely a consciousness but an ancient purpose as well and a plan for carry...

I wanted to make that title a play on "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," but Fleetwood Vibe has no middle name that we know, making it fall flat. Oh well. Anyway, the point is, there are obvious Poe and Lovecraft vibes here. I wanted to call it that because this takes the form of excerpts from his journal. The Étienne  is accosted by the Chums, only now they're big bearded men: "'You are in mortal  danger,' declared their Scientific Officer, Dr. Counterfly, a scholarly sort, bearded and bundled like the rest of them" (139). This is clearly related to the idea of reality splitting off in multiple directions; the fact that we're in the land of Iceland spar only accentuates that. Don't worry; they'll go back to being kids soon enough. Fleetwood and Company come aboard the Inconvenience,  which is very steampunky at the current time. The Chums warn them in very strong terms about the dangers of going after this...thing beneath the sno...

Somewhat surprisingly, this takes up more or less where the last chapter (and part) left off, with the Chums of Chance up in Iceland. It seems there's a "Ray-Rush" on, where people are looking to get "light and magnetism" (121)--one of those things that is perhaps more metaphorical than literal. We used to have gold rushes and the like, where people were looking for clear, tangible things--but this search for the intangible, outside the realm of what Pynchon would call the "secular," is something else. This first part of the chapter is sort of confusing because you have this Inter-Group Laboratory for Opticomagnetic Observation (I.G.L.O.O.) (122), and you get a conversation that appears to be members of this group, but then it turns out just to be the Chums again? It's disorienting, I have to think intentionally. Most notably, they meet their Russian counterparts--of course they have Russian counterparts--the Tovarishchi Slutchainyi, which, pe...

For the record, I've been able to put up an entry a day because I started writing these well in advance. That won't continue forever; I'm reading the book steadily, but I'm not bolting it down, and at a certain point it'll be at least a few days between entries. Considering that you the reader don't exist, I'm sure you'll be able to adapt. For the last chapter of the first part of the novel, we rejoin our ol' Chums, although we might be inclined to wonder whether these are the same Chums we know and love. You know, if you go look at the blog entries I wrote about this book when I was first reading it, they're pretty embarrassing to me now: very short, and often little or no effort at commentary or analysis. Just straight summary. Now, I realize that there's a lot I'm leaving out of these here entries right now--each chapter would probably merit a substantial essay--but hey, at least I'm making an effort. And one advantage of ...