"It’s true that Pynchon can construct a cathedral out of language, but he also seems to have no idea where the light switches are located."

"His fiction’s chief flaws include characters so flimsy they are dead on arrival, superficial plots, a tin ear for dialogue and an adolescent awe of spectacular violence. These are merely the charges that Pynchon cheerfully levies against himself, in the introduction to 'Slow Learner' (1984).... To them I would add: an unfortunate habit of delivering exposition through dialogue ('Let me guess, you’re wondering why are we sending you eight hundred miles out of town'); pacing so robotic it feels lifted from 1950s comic books; an almost compulsive busyness that feels like a kind of horror vacui, a fear of the empty page; flat jokes; wooden romances; ridiculous attempts at menace ('It’s OK, I’m a creature of the streets, all gatted up, don’t trust nobody'); and an uncomfortable fixation on Shirley Temple. Can I confess that this list was compiled with affection, even admiration?"

Writes Parul Sehgal, in "Thomas Pynchon Saw Where America Was Headed. What Does He See Now?/The novelist anticipated our bizarre present. How does his latest book hold up in an age of eroding reality?" (NYT)(reviewing Pynchon's new novel "Shadow Ticket).

"'One Battle After Another' is a movie that connects with the moment we’re in like nothing you’ve seen...."

"As the United States gets pushed, day by day, closer and closer to autocracy, that’s a situation that ought to be setting everyone in the country on edge. Yet it’s part of the nature of autocracy to narcotize people into numbness, delusion, fear, and a kind of self-perpetuating apathy.... 'One Battle After Another,' on the other hand, is a wildly entertaining, awesomely unpredictable screwball political thriller that on some level forces you to confront… the fate of our fucking country.... [I]t’s also the kind of galvanic and enveloping movie that imprints its themes onto your headspace.... The red-state demo has tended to shun films... which it views as liberal-left agit-prop, but I suspect that there’s something about the big vision of 'One Battle After Another' that could prove uniquely inviting.... The film depicts an underground band of revolutionary guerrillas, but instead of holding them up as shining heroes, it portrays them in shades of gray, spotlighting their naïveté and selfishness...."

Writes Owen Gleiberman, in "'One Battle After Another,' With Its Thriller Vision of Authoritarianism, Is the Rare Movie That Could Rule the Cultural Conversation/Paul Thomas Anderson's wild swing of a movie connects with the moment we’re in like nothing you’ve seen"
 (Variety).

And here's Ben Shapiro's view of the movie, from the right:

"A description of the book in a news release announcing the publication on Wednesday sounded suspiciously like it might have been written by Pynchon himself..."

"... and Penguin confirmed it was his handiwork," it says in "A New Thomas Pynchon Novel Is Coming This Fall/Featuring a Depression-era private eye, 'Shadow Ticket' will be the 87-year-old writer’s first book since 2013" (NYT).

Here's that description:

“Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.”

He withholds commas until he doesn't and I presume he's got his reasons.

I like "lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee" and "Milwaukee and the normal world."

"'Love is strange,' wrote Thomas Pynchon, citing the 1956 Mickey and Sylvia hit single, in his 1988 New York Times review of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel 'Love in the Time of Cholera.'"

"As we get older, he continued, 'we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teenage pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.' This sort of marginalization of love stories — that, for one thing, they don’t qualify as 'legitimate' novels — threads through the 125 years of The New York Times Book Review. And yet there are lessons to be learned about the necessary ingredients for a good love story from even these sorts of condescensions — along with the review that took them more seriously, of course." 

 

From "Love Potion No. 9, or, the Nine Ingredients of a Great Love Story/What can we learn about romance from 125 years of New York Times book reviews?"

5 things about the word "job."

1. The oldest usage is a verb, meaning to peck or poke or stab at. Early examples recorded in the OED: "The Tool will job into softer parts of the Stuff," "Mendoza jobbed his opponent in the throat, who fell, evincing great weakness." High-tone modern example from classy novelist Thomas Pynchon affecting an old-timey speech pattern: "If you dare to leave your lawful wife, tonight or ever, this’ waving the Fork, ‘gets jobb'd in your Guts, are we in Agreement’?"

2. The noun originally appears in the phrase "a job of work," so the word "job" functioned to refer to a subcategory of whatever the work was. From 1557/8: "Doinge certen Iobbes of woorke." Early on, criminals used the word to refer to individual crimes. From 1690: "She rode about seven-miles farther, and then a Stage Coach she did Rob; The Passengers all cry'd out Murther: but this was a Fifty-pound Iobb." (Read the whole thing here: "The Female Frollick: OR, An Account of a young Gentlewoman, who went upon the Road to rob in Man’s Cloaths, well mounted on a Mare, &c..")

3. The boring meaning to which we present-day Americans gravitate — as discussed in the previous post — is (OED): "A paid position of regular employment, a post, a situation; an occupation, a profession." This is the meaning in the common phrase "Get a job." The OED gives us this quote from "American Speech" in 1858: "But when he gets a good fat job For dat am all he cares." Hmm. They don't transliterate speech like that anymore. I rankled at the racism (that I can only guess is there).

4. I'm just going to say "blow job" and "boob job" so you don't feel you have to write a comment telling me about such things.

5. What I really want to talk about — and the whole reason I'm writing this post — is:

... and by the way the Lions got jobbed on that pass interference call.  I don't care what anyone says, the Lions got jobbed on that call. Yeah, the Cowboys still won, and the Lions didn't do enough to win.  I understand all that.  I'm not saying it's a conspiracy, but they got jobbed on that call, that pass interference call where they picked up the flag.

That's Rush Limbaugh, on his show yesterday. I read that out loud to Meade, and he laughed heartily the first time I said "jobbed," which made it especially funny to hear the word 2 more times. The Lions got jobbed. According to the Urban Dictionary, "jobbed" means:

To be the victim of a conspiracy; to lose a seemingly fair contest because of deceit; to be guaranteed to lose. The term derives from the professional wrestling term "jobber."

Brett Hart was jobbed in the infamous Montreal Screwjob.
The Seahawks got jobbed in Super Bowl XL.

I note the footballcentricism of those examples.

I added the link on "jobber," going to the Urban Dictionary meaning of "jobber" that explains the role of a willing loser in wrestling. And I almost got distracted into the Beatles lyric...

Out of college, money spent
See no future, pay no rent
All the money's gone, nowhere to go
Any jobber got the sack
Monday morning, turning back
Yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go
But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go

... but I got back to where I once belonged — to point #1, above, and the OED — and felt a nice sense of closure — a blog post's worth of closure — seeing that the oldest meaning of "jobber" is a person (or thing) that pecks or pokes at something.

"I called Lena Dunham... She said, 'Oh my gosh, it’s the coolest thing. It’s so subversive. You’re going to be in drag.'"

Said Allison Williams, who plays a character on Dunham's "Girls" and who got cast in the role of Peter Pan. Quoted in "The Cast of ‘Peter Pan Live!’ Knows You Hatewatched ‘The Sound of Music’/Allison Williams, Christopher Walken, and the cast of ‘Peter Pan Live!’ talk about bracing themselves for hate-tweets and our collective PTSD from last year’s ‘Sound of Music.’"

“I have full faith that this will happen.... People will hear the opening strings of music that they know deep, deep down in their heart, and it will make them nostalgic again. And they’ll crumble. And they might get one hate-tweet out really quickly, and then we won’t hear from them for a while—because they’ll have been sucked into the sense memory that hopefully will be Peter Pan.”

Is it "cool" to watch "Peter Pan Live!" on the theory that you are "hate-watching"? Or is the message that it's "cool" — that you're only hate-watching to snark and follow tweets — a device put out there by the network to overcome the defenses of those who really actually want to watch it because deep down somewhere they love the musical "Peter Pan" and they feel like rooting for the earnest efforts of actors performing it live on television but they're afraid it might be uncool? Well, you know, it's not cool to try to be cool or to think about being cool and there's always the old theory that the coolest thing is the straightforward, sincere embrace of something requires disdain from people who are insecure in their sense of personal coolness.

Oh my gosh, it’s the coolest thing. It’s so subversive....

What does "it" refer to?

ADDED: The relevant meaning of "subversive" in the OED is "hat challenges and undermines a conventional idea, form, genre, etc., esp. by using or presenting it in a new or unorthodox way." Example:

2007   Guardian 16 June (Guide Suppl.) 23/3   Enjoying commercial success with herky-jerky pop based on the ideas of Noam Chomsky and Thomas Pynchon,.. Devo were the most subversive band to ever crack the mainstream. 

Happy birthday to Professor Irwin Corey. He's 100 years old today.

Here's video of him performing in 2011, when he was 97:



And the video below comes from way back in 2007, when the President of the United States was George Bush, and Professor Irwin Corey looked much more than 5 years younger. He criticizes the President in both videos, and perhaps the years weigh very heavily as you approach 100 — I'm saying "you," but do you really think you'll have the opportunity to feel the increasing weight of the years leading up to 100? — but perhaps for a true left-winger like Professor Irwin Corey, the experience of disappointment in Obama hurts far more than getting what you knew you were going to hate from George Bush.



From Wikipedia:

"Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental..."

"... that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"

Thomas Pynchon, "The Crying of Lot 49."

"The ice caps are melting, oh ho ho ho ho ho."

Hey, it's the Tiny Tim song Thomas Pynchon was talking about!



This insane song appears on Tim's 1968 album "God Bless Tiny Tim," so all that ice caps melting business has nothing to do with our present-day angst over polar bears and obeisance to the Great God Gore. Unless Tim started it all. Who are those kids anyway? And why did adults subject the youngsters to this trippy apocalyptic weirdness? Perhaps little Al is there, absorbing the crazed wisdom of Tiny. Mysteries! Wow. It's so far out!

And here's the Pynchon book, "Inherent Vice."