thomas pynchon - mason & dixon

meh 

this would be my first fiction review, and i'm generally not going to write out plot summaries. that's not what i'm aiming for with this site.

mason & dixon is a story, and it's a fairly focused one, at that. it's almost entirely void of the sort of tangential narratives that i find are the most interesting part of pynchon's writing. i'm talking about the little short story allegories, the disconnected characters, the secondary plotlines in paranoia. when these devices do appear, they almost seem like they're just tossed in haphazardly to appeal to a market. pynchon was clearly aiming for something a little more in line with traditional story-telling. while the book has been well received on that level, i don't have much interest in the concept. so, i wasn't really able to get into it.

nor are the historical aspects drawn out as well as they are in some of his other texts. a number of historical characters (george washington, benjamin franklin, thomas jefferson and others) make appearances but the silliness is very heavy-handed, to the point that they're presented as cartoon characters. intentional? well, perhaps, but it's not all that satisfying. i was sort of hoping for a deeper exploration into the idea of the american revolution being a sort of a conspiracy by the landholding classes. rather than get into that, he talks about jesuits and a conspiracy in the royal society that almost seems borrowed from gulliver's travels. the discussions of fate that follow are sort of marginalized by the silliness of his chosen conspiracy. further, he kind of falls into the romanticism of the era more than he challenges it, and that's definitely a disappointment.

the general silliness is another thing to point out. pynchon is known for his sense of humour, it's one of the primary draws, but i feel this text is sort of dumbed-down on that point. the humour is less academic and more slapstick; i'm not presenting a dichotomy here, he usually delves into both, but the slapstick is really disproportionately high and that deprives the text of a certain difficulty that one expects from the author. the few things that he does get into at a higher level, like the allegory with the clocks, don't justify the length of the text that holds them.

slavery is a theme, and while he does portray it in a bit of an interesting light, he's also a little timid in condemning it. likewise, i'm not entirely sure why he went out of his way to hide the homo-erotic nature of the relationship between the two main characters. pynchon certainly usually isn't shy about sexuality. why be so veiled about it in 1997, when the taboo is finally on the cusp of being shattered? i can't help but feel that he let his gay audience down a little in obscuring things rather than discussing it openly.

the prose is long and thick, and if that's all you want then you won't be disappointed. however, when you put it all together, there seems to have been a push from somewhere - perhaps his publisher, or perhaps people well connected within the corridors of power - to present something more palatable, perhaps for academic use at the high school or lower undergraduate level. it's his least difficult novel and his least controversial. it doesn't challenge the prevailing understanding of events, perhaps because somebody instructed it be written that way. if that was the intent, he may have succeeded. however, the result is likely to come off as a little dry for all of the same reasons that all the other books that profs pick out are dry. if you want to get into pynchon seriously then you have to read everything because they're interconnected, but i wouldn't recommend this as a starting point.

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/books/congress/PS/3566.Y53M37/index.html

actually, it turns out man or astroman? has reformed. i'll have to keep an eye out.

first night out in windsor...

a few stories to tell. right now? glad i'm at home, in relative safety.

something i learned tonight is that, in windsor, start time means door time. so, showing up an hour after the time on the poster still means waiting over an hour for the show.

in ottawa, we have le cafe de kcuf. in windsor, we have the phog lounge. variations on the same theme. not dissimilar atmospheres.

waiting forever means too many spiked coffees...

at least the music for the wait was alright. meat puppets. mbv. sonic youth. and perhaps it was fitting that the first band started right as 'the sprawl' finished, given my thoughts on this new area to explore.

silent movie type were catchy, noisy and dissonant. not much that's novel, here. but i like the genre. and their record up on bandcamp is pretty good.

they closed the show with a cover of breed, which was sort of nice to hear. i scattered quickly to another show down the street....

there was a band in the 90s called 'man, or astroman?'. this machine kills robots are eerily similar to that band. in every way. 'cept they're not quite as good.



i wish i would have got to see man or astroman?, actually...

actually, i'm going to choose to not tell the stories i was going to tell. there's certain adjustments i'm going to have to make to living in a smaller city. i think this is one of them.

i couldn't quickly find audio for the second band, worry. it's a hard name to google. the audience they attracted seemed to enjoy faux moshing to it, but it was pretty generic hipster music. the hipster genre du jour is something called 'doom', which is a type of heavy grunge that incorporates screamed vocals into it. i'll give this band a tad bit of credit because the drummer was a bit more interesting in a weird sort of way; he was all agent orange while the rest of the band was all sleep. but, at best the result was 'crust', and crust is rarely worth listening to.

extra annoyance: no human could decipher those vocals.

famines, on the other hand, were excellent. it's a shame the place cleared out before they came on. i've seen this before, where local bands take over shows for touring acts and the place clears out when the locals are done. it's just bad research. extra head-scratching is the fact that there was a band down the street that would have brought in the proper audience. i took the walk, but...

famines is dance-punk done right in the after-punk era: rambunctious, hyperactive and entirely bipolar when it needs to be. bonus: moderately intelligent lyrics.

the walk home was a little surreal. i was drunk enough to slur my speech, but not tipsy or in any threat of passing out. cop cars on every corner...

well, there's been some issues in windsor of late. a pretty teenager disappeared (they found a body in the river and will id it this afternoon). there was a gang related stabbing downtown that involved something like ten people. fires. robberies.

that's not the reason the cops are actually there, though. they've been brought in by the bia due to concern about property damage. there was a press release. people are getting stabbed and abducted and arsons are raging across the city and the police department is being driven by a concern about broken windows (to my knowledge, there haven't actually been any broken windows).

regardless, it might be the first time i was happy to see some cop cars. i was a little uneasy walking home, and knew i would be. recent spate of violent crime aside, i'm in a city i don't know very well. and it was well after midnight.

getting out of the downtown core, i noticed a van was following me. it was turning into side streets, u-turning.....eventually it stopped down the street. i crossed the road. it pulled one last u-turn and zoomed off...

the night person at the quickie suggested that the driver may have mistaken me for a prostitute. apparently, a lot of people work up that strip. it's not the first time i've been mistaken, but it usually happens in the summer when i'm minimally clothed. tonight, my make-up was fairly light, and i was wearing my kurt cobain sweater (or at least the sweater that i think of as my kurt cobain sweater). i can't see how i was drawing attention to myself. but maybe it doesn't really matter if i was or wasn't drawing attention to myself.

i also started wondering about a few things walking back. i'm a new addition to the area. change always breeds uncertainty. my largest concern is actually that local criminals might think i'm a cop. i don't have anything for them, especially if i'm walking rather than biking. but the inevitable question is no doubt: what is this nut doing walking alone down the road at midnight? is she really impossibly oblivious to her own safety? if not, who is she working for? etc.

i sort of decided that i just have to keep going out at night regularly in order to create a comfort level. to normalize the locals to my existence. i'm not going to live in fear. it's not in my dna. if they get used to me, i'll begin to blend in. like a squirrel...

 getting inside the door was a relief, though. more so than i've ever experienced.

....and, now for zesty cheese....

http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/shows/2013/10/24.html