I know it's been a heavy week, but you always have to find time for a distraction, right? So has anyone else had as much fun with the Thomas Pynchon comment appearing on Amazon this week as I have?
Last month Pynchon's publishers
announced that he would release a new book in December, his first in almost a decade. Penguin continued the roll-out promotion by throwing up a page on
Amazon that enabled readers to pre-order a copy. Originally included on the page was a description of the book "
charmingly, promising an archetypal Pynchonian buffet of settings, characters, and old tricks."
The description's full text reads:
Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.
With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.
As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.
Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.
Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.
Shortly after appearing on the Amazon page, however, the write-up
vanished.
For a blurb it seemed a bit too Pynchonesque, and since this particular writer's fan base tends to see conspiracy theories as a form of creative calisthenics akin to crossword puzzles and sudoku a great deal of chatting began over who owned the words' authorship. I personally had a wonderful time trying to parse the language to come up with an answer of my own and even went so far as to re-read Pynchon's wonderful introduction to Slow Learner, just to see if I could find any similarities (it's the only part of his work that I'm aware of where he talks openly about is own writing).
Then, Slate reported that, yes, it was indeed written by Pynchon and that the title of the book will be Against the Day.
It's not exactly as dramatic as suddenly appearing as a guest on The Simpsons, but with notoriously reclusively authors you take what you can get; and I don't know about you, but it's the little things like this that get me through the day (and naively hoping against hope that there might be a book tour).
On a personal note, there is a certain element of timing to all of this that might also explain why this became my healthy diversion during the last week. Last weekend I would periodically check the news channels to see what was happening on the Israel-Lebanon boarder only to be deluged by images of reporters scurrying around the rocky crags of the Holy Land amid booms and smoke trying their damnedest to explain the intricacies of the Kaytusha rocket or whathaveyou. There was a genuine expression of fear in many of their faces, one that betrayed the professionalism broadcast journalists are apparently supposed to convey when covering such stories, and one that seemed to foreshadow many of the "This time around feels much different than before" stories that came later this last week.
As rockets and mortars and artillery exploded behind them the reporters seemed to react viscerally to each new burst, basically giving unnecessary words to images that were already being captured by a camera. I pitied them their current surroundings, yet selfishly demanded more eloquence, even in the face of such danger. Don't get me wrong - being a war correspondent takes balls the size of which I have yet to comprehend, but after hearing rocket after rocket wail in the background I couldn't help but hang on every syllable waiting to hear the words
A screaming comes across the sky...