Acephalous

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life.  That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers.  The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton. 

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play.  That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists.  Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it. 

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship.  They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.  

My nightly vice (is inherent, and made of Pynchon).

It took three pages, but then he made it, and it was good (enough for government work):

He walked her down the hill to where she was parked.  Weeknights out here weren't too different from weekends, so this part of town was already all ahoot with funseekers, drinkers and surfers screaming in the alleys, dopers out on food errands, flatland guys in for a night of hustling stewardesses, flatland ladies with all-too-grounded day jobs hoping to be mistaken for stewardesses.  Uphill and invisible, traffic out on the boulevard to and from the freeway uttered tuneful exhaust phrases which went echoing out to sea, where the crews of oil tankers sliding along, hearing them, could have figured it for wildlife taking care of nighttime business on an exotic coast. (4)

Of course, I have suggestions about how to make this more Pynchonian—paragraph break before "[u]phill and invisibile"; eliminate the comma after "out to seas"; remove the indefinite article before and pluralize "exotic coast"—but for the most part, this is pure unforced transport, unlike Against the Day, which felt like Pynchon doing his damnedest Pynchon after having forgotten that he was, in fact, himself and could don the pig-suit and write:

Under a cold umbrella of naked light bulbs are gathered a crowd of Army personnel, American sailors, NAAFI girls, and German frauleins.  Fraternizing, every last one of them, shamefully, amid noise which becomes, as Muffage and Spontoon reach the edge of the gathering, a song, at whose center, with a good snootful, each arm circling a smiling and disheveled young tootsie, ruddy face under these lights gone an apopletic mauve, and leading the glee, is the same General Wivern they last saw in Pointsman's office back at Twelfth House.  From a tank car whose contents, ethanol, 75% solution, are announced in stark white stenciling along the side, spigots protrude here and there, under which an incredible number of mess cups, china mugs, coffeepots, wastebaskets, and other containers are being advanced and withdrawn.  Ukuleles, kazoos, harmonicas, and any number of makeshift metal noisemakers accompany the song, which is an innocent salute to Postwar, a hope that the end of shortages, the end of Austerity, is near[.] (593)

If I can find the time, tomorrow I'll explain the power of that "[u]phill and invisible" and describe the telescopic glory of the prose of those who fiddle with the dials, zooming in and out in an anti-willy-nilly, but who don't, as I do, sound like bad imitations of the Beats when they do it.

Not infodumps. Constellations.

The infodump, as Todd VanDerWerff points out, may well be the single generic feature shared by all flavors of science fiction:

You might find some infodumping in a Western or in a period piece, but for the most part, we know the rules those genres play by because those genres take place in our reality, just in the past . . . . To a large degree, the division between hard and soft [science fiction] often hinges on things like infodumps. The hard [science fiction] is often for the people who are really, really interested in the science part of the science fiction equation. The soft stuff skews more toward the fiction end of things and isn’t particularly concerned with plausibility much of the time.

This strikes me as wrong in one crucial respect: the infodumps about which people complain occur at the outset of a work. They're presented as the technological enablers of the narrative to follow. They are exposition before the fact—before readers have any emotional investment in the characters whose narratives are enabled by the infodumped technology. No surprise, then, that people whose primarily invest in character or narrative find the lengthy technological preambles of hard science fiction off-putting.

To label as infodump the exposition on the Battlestar Galactica episode "No Exit" is to be a little too literal. "No Exit" did "dump" quite a bit of "info" on its audience, but the information was not intended to make the narrative work, because it already does. You cannot have an infodump four seasons into a series: you can only have a revelation. The argument should be whether too much information was revealed too quickly, but what else were the characters meant to do? Naming an episode after Sartre's No Exit signals a forthcoming entrapment of the character's own devising. Their Hell will be the other people they're trapped with.

But that's not where I'm headed with this post. I think the thematic parallels with Sartre's play are important—certainly significant is the implication that this is a Hell of their own devising, one in which they remain not by force or compulsion, but through fear of the unknown. (That all the characters begin by talking about what happened on Earth, only to become increasingly occupied with their own infighting seems an important parallel, even if I am being a bit literal.) What I want to focus on the effect on a viewer when almost 70 hours of thin-streaming history are followed by one of torrential exposition.

On a certain type of reader/viewer, the result is little different than the cumulative effect reading Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest; namely, this person feels like the night sky yearns to snap into constellations—he feels like the heavens look down on, disappointed, because some personal failing prevents him from discovering the order they contain. So what does this person do?

If he's reading Ulysses, he maps Joyce's universe onto the tram-lines of William Martin Murphy in order to demonstrate that

[Stephen's] attempts at upward mobility are futile, frustrated in large part by Murphy’s reluctance to lower the tramfare. However, were Murphy to lower the tramfare, the people riding the tramcars would no longer comprise a tram-riding elite, and Stephen’s desire to ride the tramlines might atrophy into little more than a timesaving utilitarian impulse. Understood in this manner, Stephen becomes a pathetic figure obsessed with belonging to a class he can only feign membership in on payday.

If he's watching Battlestar Galactica, he writes the following post.

(x-posted.)

Demonstrations of Attentive Nostalgia: Thomas Pynchon's Liner Notes to Lotion's Nobody's Cool (and a Gift)

Once upon a time Thomas Pynchon was my world.  (Need I remind you of my disgraceful Honors Thesis?)  This was about the same time music meant something to me—surely you remember?  Before you bored of life and its trappings?  Back when everything radiated raw, brittle vitality? 

(Of course you remember.  You were young once too.)

So you can imagine my elation when I discovered Pynchon had penned liner notes for some band I'd never heard of.  Music and Pynchon?  What could be better? 

Nothing. 

Nothing could have been better. 

So I spent the better part of two months tracking down Lotion's Nobody's Cool.  (This was before the Internet was the Internet we know and love.  The only available options were CDNOW and a plane ticket to someplace with a decent record store.)  I finally landed a copy through a book distributor I'd befriended who lived in New York but was passing through Baton Rouge on his way to a family wedding in Bunkie.  This septuagenarian ventured into some independent shop in the Village for me. 

Only now do I understand his sacrifice.

Point being, eventually I landed a copy of Nobody's Cool and, in my unbiased view, it was the best album ever.   I listened to nothing but it for months and months and then I fell for this girl hard. 

You know the rest of the story.  I lent her the album in a sad attempt to impress. 

She declined my bait. 

I never saw the album again.

In the years since, I've longed to hear it again.  Was it everything I remember it to be?  (Surely not.)  Was I suckered into love by Pynchon's imprimatur?  (Most certainly.)  Is the thing any good? 

I didn't know ... until my best friend from high school visited a few weeks back.  Said he had a surprise for me. 

Can you guess what it was? 

Of course you can.  (My readers are no fools.)  (Although they waste too much time here to be taken too seriously.)  What does it sound like?

Judge for yourself.

I'll refrain from commenting on the album, if only because you'll find Pynchon's comments below the fold ... but if "Dear Sir" or "The New Timmy" seem draped in '90s alternative cliché, try listening to "Juggernaut" or the lyrics to "Sandra."  I'm making no grand claims about the quality of the album other than to say I love it ...

... but I'm all attentive and nostalgic and without fail would.