(no subject)

[proximoception]

1. Blood Meridian's antecedents include what? Obviously Moby Dick. I'd say "Young Goodman Brown" and "My Kinsman Major Molineux" are also structural sources, and presumably Aguirre. Banville adds Dante and Homer, Bloom would say Shakespeare and maybe Milton. The Trial seems to me to be at least as important. Once I mentioned the book seemed like a hellified Faerie Queene, and maybe one could say as much re. Huck Finn. The two burst-out scenes in Karamazov contribute: Jesus v. Inquisitor in the jail, the devil needling Ivan. Would he have read any Carpentier? And Faulkner, but what thing more than others in Faulkner? And I keep failing to think of something prior to Catch-22 that anticipates the falling away of friends and enemies alike, and in droves, in the 2nd halves of both BM and Suttree - that Gashlycrumb Tinies effect.

Oh, wait, that's in Crying of Lot 49, which shows many other signs of being a presence here (the silly-ass parts of the book so neatly obscure its greatness). Lot 49 effect, then, or trysterosion or something.

2. Reminds me: in the Kroger parking lot yesterday I mentioned that there should be a word for the specific disappointment you feel when the radio starts playing "Under Pressure" but then Vanilla Ice is there. And my wife agreed and said "why don't you BLOG about it" - her scorn and amusement were all for the word, I hope, which always makes her laugh. Quod erat bloggandum.

1. Back to McCarthy: seemed like there were some specific tributes to predecessors, at points - the phrase 'as he lay dying,' the judge travelling with the idiot being compared with a king exiled by his own stupidity accompanied by his fool, a 'unanimous dark' echoing Borges' 'unanimous night', a ridge that looks like a white whale. So discrete that I can't tell if the Faulkner and Borges ones are even there, or anyway deliberate.

Comments

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

What's the edited Lot 49 lose? I mean, I have some guesses, but I'd like to hear.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know. The main offenses are in the first couple of chapters, but there's a lot of crucial stuff in there too, some of it even in the particularly long and stupid scene with the aging child star Don Juan and the slovenly rock band. The darker novel sort of bursts out of the Tom Robbins-y one like a jack in the box, also, and that's a nice effect - I just wish he'd found some other representation of rancid, bored, in-denial normativity to invade than that one. But this is why I'm not a Pynchon fan.

What other stories start comedy and end elsewhere? Middlemarch is awfully funny at first, in the Jane Austen vein but outdoing her humor-wise, to my mind seemingly without effort, and kind of amazingly as people always accuse George Eliot of being constitutionally humorless, but then the novel mostly sobers up into more admirable, less lovable strains of greatness. I wonder to what extent that was calculated.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I confess I've never attempted any Eliot.

"The slovenly rock band." I think Pynchon conceives of himself as a slovenly rock band, in the "a writer isn't a person, he's a group of people attempting to impersonate one person" (credit to F. Scott for that) kind of way. Where Pynchon got not-so-great (got kind of weekend Robert Anton Wilson) was where he really let go and went all Rock Band, all the time.

I liked also your mentioning the kind of story where all other characters peel away. There's this abandonment that happens without drama, and it's kind of mesmerizing. The only other thing I could think of that does it is the movie for The Ninth Gate, which is, YES, not good, but which I find really likeable wallpaper from time to time. And partly because of that aspect - the main character gets upset, is sometimes threatened, things happen, but really he's on a long cord that keeps just getting longer and thinner as everyone falls away. Until there's no cord, and it just feels like no cord was how it was all along.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm Ninth Gate's biggest defender - that and AI get me in a lot of arguments. Superb movie. And a definite cousin of Blood Meridian.

Feels like there's billions of cord plots like that, where you find out you were never anything but alone, or anyway alone with It, but then I can't seem to think of any. Even in Ninth Gate Depp's a loner from the first - the people who die are just nasty ones he meets.

Procrastination has robbed me of argument, I'm just maundering.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

"the people who die are just nasty ones he meets"

Yes, I know it's true, except I come to like a lot of them. I *like* the lady in the wheelchair, even though each time I see the movie again I'm a little taken aback by just how rude she is, at first. I don't know, maybe it's because there seems to be an order to their awfulness? The Europe he goes through does feel very European, in that way, even if it's fake - it feels ruled by an order that goes so far back it doesn't belong to anyone personally. That mansion they end up in at the climax doesn't feel like it belongs to anyone personally, it seems like a house to make a movie in, and here we all are.

I'm sad every time he comes to and that room is on fire, and the cello - isn't it? - is in the pond. The cello shouldn't be in the pond. We should be able to bring in sack lunches and research the Devil's book forever.

Re: Procrastination has robbed me of argument, I'm just maundering.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Maybe they're delightfully nasty? Langella definitely is.

But it is true that the world itself seems to fall away, as though a stage set, and he enters the truer world that was there all along. Gnosticism 101 I guess.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Yup. Not by accident is there a rock band called The Paranoids. Pynchon is the most Deleuze-ional writer imaginable. Since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd.

Franny was listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like to be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid you can't be one wolf, you're always eight or nine, six or seven...

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Is that, by any chance, Franny and...? In which case, I really ought read it, because that's wonderful. That's how many wolves I'd like to be, for sure.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Both of the quotes are from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze sometimes quotes at length without saying where it's from. I don't know if it's a quote or original. It's in the chapter on Freud's Wolf-Man.