(cross-posted from if:book)
I’ve got the somewhat daunting pleasure of introducing the readers of if:book to one of the Institute’s projects-in-progress, MediaCommons.
(What follows is long, so I’ve tucked it beneath the fold.)
There’s been a lot of hubbub about the Pynchon-speaking universe over the last couple of weeks, as Viking/Penguin let it be known that there would be a Big New Novel by the man himself released near the end of this year. I’ve been watching the wild speculation without chiming in, in no small part because there’s something both exhausting and depressing about the prospect for me. In late 1997, as I was trying like mad to finish up my dissertation, which focused heavily on the work of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, they each gave the finger to my completion, by releasing Mason & Dixon
I survived. I dissertated, defended, moved, taught, completely rewrote, submitted, resubmitted, and finally, the book
Except. Now there’s this
Oh, joy to those of you who work on non-contemporary fields; there is unlikely ever to be a new release by the authors you study.
All whinging aside, however, I’m looking forward to reading this one. And curious how much of the book description currently on Amazon can be taken at face value, not to mention whether it’s by the man himself, as the “signature” seems to suggest:
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.
–Thomas Pynchon
[UPDATE, 7.20.06, 4.30 pm: The plot thickens. See comments for more.]
Hey: this site is not your own personal publicity organ. Any future comments that are clearly serving no other purpose than promoting your work—not contributing to a conversation, not responding to a post or comment—will be considered spam and will be deleted forthwith. Moreover, I will close comments on any posts that seem to generate such comments.
This is my blog. ‘Kay? Thanks.
[Note: this post probably makes little sense, as I’ve already deleted the offending comment. But an official announcement of this policy seems appropriate.]
[UPDATE, 10.14am: In fact, I’ve just instituted an automatic comment-closing procedure. Should you find yourself wanting to comment on an older post, but the system won’t allow you to, you could always email me instead.]
Sitting here at my desk in the niche on the second-floor landing a little while ago, I started to realize that I had been hearing some kind of small aircraft overhead for a few minutes. I didn’t think terribly much of it, as there’s a small private airport not far from here. But—and not for the first time—something made me get up and look. Back in spring 2001, I heard circling helicopters at about 6 am, and for some reason was possessed to get up and turn on the news to see what was going on. If you knew my town you’d know the extent to which this makes no sense whatsoever; Claremont is 35 miles from downtown L.A., and whatever happens here isn’t exactly breaking-news material.
Except this time it was: I turned on a local affiliate and was immediately greeted with an aerial shot of one of my college’s dorms, on fire.
Today, remembering this, I almost went straight for the TV; instead, I decided to look out off my front balcony.
Smoke. Tons of thick black smoke.
The old Claremont citrus packing house, a block down from me, which has been in the process of renovation into what promises to be groovy gallery, retail, and beverage service spaces, was on fire. They got the fire under control in relatively short order, but between the fire and the water damage, this will no doubt have set the renovations back by months. Which is a major drag for those of us living here: I want my fabulous wine and cheese shop, and I want it yesterday.
Anyhow, I went outside and down the block to make sure that the fire wasn’t threatening to jump toward the condos across the street, and managed to meet several of my neighbors, whom I’d never gotten to meet before. They’re wonderful people—sweet and warm and really happy to chat. I’ve lived here for a year and a half, as has one of the women I was talking to; the other woman and the guy who lives next door to her have been around for at least a year. And yet we’ve never talked.
It’s sad, and somehow revealing, that it takes something like this to bring us together.
As I’ve mentioned several times of late (so many, in fact, that I’m not going to link; you can check out the “electrapress” category, if you’re interested), I’ve been working with the Institute for the Future of the Book this year on a project that attempts to reimagine the scholarly press as a wholly networked venture. I’ll be posting something big about our project soon, probably Monday—but in the meantime, a bit of news from elsewhere:
Rice University Press, which went out of business a decade ago, is relaunching as an all-electronic entity, combining free web delivery with fee-based download and print-on-demand. Many of the exciting new features of this venture—including the ability of authors to revise published texts, the possibility of creating links amongst texts, and the creation of space for discussion between authors and readers—are very much in line with the project we’ve been working on. Rice plans, however, to “solicit and edit manuscripts the old-fashioned way,” which strikes me as a very cautious maneuver, one that suggests that the change of venue involved in moving the press online may not be enough to really revolutionize academic publishing. After all, if Rice UP was crushed by its financial losses last time around, can the same basic structure—except with far shorter print runs—save it this time out?
I’m excited to see what Rice produces, and quite hopeful that other university presses will follow in their footsteps. I still believe, however, that it’s going to take a much riskier, much more radical revisioning of what scholarly publishing is all about in order to keep such presses alive in the years to come.
(See if:book’s post on the announcement, which has more background on Connexions, the open-access repository that will serve as Rice UP’s electronic platform.)
So here’s what’s going on around here, that made my dream so open to Meg’s instant analysis: as I’ve mentioned before, my department has suffered some major losses recently, with three senior colleagues all departing at the same time. The up-side of this is that I’ve got an amazing new office. This comes with a major down-side, though: because of those three departures, and a slew of terribly timed leaves, the department hierarchy, in terms of seniority, will in the fall look something like this:
– Our new chair, who’s been at the college for quite a while, but will be chairing for the first time.
– (Our new poet, who’s coming in at full prof, but who will be in her first semester, and thus can’t be expected to be up to speed yet.)
– (A co-terminous associate prof whose primary job functions are in the administration.)
– Me.
And that is all of the tenured/senior faculty who will be present on campus during the fall. And we’re doing a search, in a field that is quite far removed from my own, and I’m getting a lot of pressure to be very heavily involved in this search, despite the fact that my program is also going to be doing a search, which I’m co-chairing, at exactly the same time.
Let me emphasize that this field is quite far removed from my own, and that while I’m happy to be involved in the search, I’m not comfortable about being asked to play a key role in it, because I really, really don’t know what’s going on in the field today at all.
Did I mention that our new chair’s wife is a pianist?
I had this dream the other night, which I’d almost forgotten, but which came back to me just now for a reason I’m not at all sure of. I’d been drafted to be the accompanist for some musical theater production that I was involved with. How I’d gotten involved, and who was producing the show, I’m not at all sure. But we were very, very close to opening, and yet no one could find the score, which obviously I needed if I was going to play. I tried to track down B.—my department’s administrative assistant—to find out what she’d been using in lieu of the score when she accompanied during rehearsals, and once I finally did (she was very hard to find), she showed me how the score was integrated into the script: the music was less melodic than it was about punctuation, key chords being played in tandem with key lines of dialogue. So, next to each line of the script was a little notation about the note or chord or brief trill that should be played. Easy peasy. Now I just needed to figure out what those little notations meant.
And that’s when it occurred to me, as if for the very first time: I don’t play the piano. Have never had piano lesson one.
So I’m very curious, now that I’m awake, what it is that I’m so unconsciously alarmed about having gotten myself into…
Here are some quotes from a pro-abortion person, Miss Caroline Weber, who wrote an article at The Onion online magazine.
The rest, you must read for yourself.
And make sure you at least take a crack at the 272-and-counting comments. They’re priceless.
(Hat tip, Apostropher. I’m going to be devastated if this turns out to be some kind of double-reverse-meta-satire or something.)
[UPDATE, 9.46am: There’s a followup:
Either way, I think I did a good job of turning the “satire” right back at them, don’t you?
Um… yeah.]
Confirmed and ticketed:
Tentative:
Almost certain, but too early to make plans:
—
*No, I haven’t changed fields; I’m on a joint search committee doing preliminary interviews there.
**The Paris part of the journey is both for fun and for economy, believe it or not. A roundtrip ticket from SoCal to Vienna is currently in the $1300 vicinity, and requires me to fly in and out of LAX, which adds another 3 hours to the journey, and is without question the worst part of the trip. I managed, instead, to get a roundtrip ticket on Continental from ONT to CDG for $1000 (still more than I’d like to have spent, but it has good travel times and is, alas, pretty much the going rate) and a roundtrip ticket on Air France from CDG to VIE for $175. And all the better, I save some money on hotels, and get to hang out with my pal Marcus!
I’ve been attending relatively regular Bikram yoga classes since late May, and it occurred to me yesterday that the time might have come to take stock of my practice and reflect on how it’s going.
I took extremely well to Bikram right off the bat; the intensity of the heat and humidity took some getting used to, but the poses were largely familiar from past yoga experiences, and, with a few exceptions, my body likes them. I had a fair bit of soreness for the first couple of weeks, mostly in small connective tissues that hadn’t really been worked to that extent before. Like the muscles that hold your rib cage together; most of my back was fine, but those tiny little muscles between my ribs ached like mad.
That soreness has since faded, as has the tendency to feel completely dopey and out of gas after class. I’m still going to late-afternoon classes, mostly because that’s best for my summer work schedule, but I’m optimistic about my ability to attend morning classes in the fall and still manage to be functional during the day.
I realized yesterday that I’m learning something new—something small, but clear—at almost every class of late, that there’s some moment at which I make a tiny adjustment and the lightbulb goes off over my head: “oh, that’s what he’s talking about!” Yesterday it was, in a couple of the back-bending postures, that I wasn’t really letting my head fall back as far as I could. I thought I was; I thought that’s all the backward bend my neck had. But, in fact, I was protecting something, keeping myself from letting go. Yesterday, for the first time, I really relaxed, and really let my head fall back, and it completely changed the feeling of the poses.
There’s a lot of physical stuff left for me to work on yet—my hips, for instance, have always been a problem; they simply will not open. But there’s also a lot of non-physical stuff that it would be good for me to focus on—how much of my ego, for starters, is bound up in the idea of being good at this; how much of my mind is focused on invidious comparisons with the other students in the room. Physically, the bikram is doing very good things for me (honestly, between the yoga and the weightlifting I’ve been doing, I think I’m in the best shape of my life), but I could stand to let it do a bit more psychic work for me, I think, letting go of some of the thought patterns that protect me, too.
