Today is the solstice, which means it’s the beginning of winter, also the beginning of the end of winter — every day will be a little bit longer for the next six months, which is nice.
Where I live we’re already in the midst of Humboldt Winter, which means what feels like 38 straight days of pissing rain. A minor inconvenience for me, a major hassle for those without a roof over their heads. I feel very fortunate today as I sit here sipping a Super Shroom Mocha and listening to Mulatu Astatke on the stereo.
In a few days it’ll be Christmas, and this year I’m finding very little enthusiasm for the holiday season. But maybe a Festivus Miracle will happen two days hence.
Books Acquired: Naked Came the Stranger, Penelope Ash The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham
Books Offloaded: The Blacker the Berry, Wallace Thurman
Progress Made: The Wonder Effect, C.M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl V., Thomas Pynchon Wampeters, Foma & Granfaloons, Kurt Vonnegut
Books Finished: The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
This month’s reading was 90% Pynchon, which does weird things to your head. Tommy’s universe is one where the interconnectedness of all things is constantly palpable, where no conspiracy or confluence of events is too outlandish to be plausible. Absorb enough of this and it seems to extend out into the “real” world, so that you see coincidence everywhere and feel yourself at the center of a web of vague but significant meaning.
It may just be that he crams so many obscure references into every page that you’re statistically certain to run into them in the wild. Or possibly he is a warlock of some kind. The jury is out on that one.
When in Pynchonland I cycle from thinking he’s the greatest writer ever to write, to thinking he’s the most exasperating person ever to live, and back again, sometimes several times in the course of a page. At times I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through V., particularly during a lengthy tangent about Malta, but then it settled down and I was able to find a groove.
Reading Pynchon is like going down a river — sometimes the current pulls you along nicely, sometimes the rapids bash you on the rocks, sometimes you get mired in the doldrums and don’t go anywhere for a long while. You just have to keep at it (or as Chef would put it, never get out of the boat). As of this writing I’m on page 478 of V.’s 547 and feeling pretty good about myself. The plan is to use that momentum to tackle Shadow Ticket, TP’s latest, which I’m led to believe is on the more accessible end of his spectrum.
That would leave Mason and Dixon — another 700-page-plus doorstopper in the tradition of Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day — as my only unread Pynchon novel. Is it possible that sometime in early 2026 I will foolishly launch a suicidal attempt on this mountain? Certainly it is. The future is an unmapped territory.
The Razor’s Edge I came across in the free box. It’s a nice edition in good shape and I felt like I ought to have it. No immediate plans to tackle it, but we’ll see.
I forget now where I read about Naked Came the Stranger, which Wikipedia describes thusly:
Naked Came the Stranger is a 1969 novel written as a literary hoax poking fun at the American literary culture of its time. Though credited to “Penelope Ashe,” it was written by a group of twenty-four journalists led by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady.
McGrady’s intention was to write a book that was both deliberately terrible and contained a lot of descriptions of sex, to illustrate the point that popular American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. The book fulfilled the authors’ expectations and became a bestseller in 1969. Later that year, they revealed the hoax, spurring the book’s popularity.
So of course I had to have a copy. I haven’t popped it open yet; that may be a reward for finishing V. Which will happen all the sooner if I get on it now. Over and out.
