Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Sunday Scribblings #206: The Book That Changed Everything

I'm reading it right now . . . again: the fifth or sixth lenten reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I can't remember what derailed me from last year's attempt (or was it his Against the Day?), but derailed I got by something else. This year, we're on track again for completion, back from a beach run at it and five more days of Spring Break ahead.

Fall 1973, junior year at Harvard, newbie English major, switching officially from the Government major I'd all but abandoned spring semester of my freshman year, auditing Father J. Robert Barth's course,
Religious Dimensions in the Modern Novel (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Faulkner, Greene), JRB sockfooted on the lecture hall table, reading from Light in August. The romance was on, though it took me another two semesters to make it official. My sophomore-year tutorial leader certainly helped the transition, fifth-year grad student-turned poet, abdicating on his own poli sci dissertation, while laying Ram Dass' Remember: Be Here Now and R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience on his tribe of stunned Gov majors . . .

He got my attention, as I followed suit down my own dark ladder.


So, wintry grey fall Thursday afternoons in a cold seminar room over at the old rambling English Department's Victorian digs, the one-on-one junior year tutorials, independent reading classes, one undergrad with one grad student. Paul (last name now forgotten) gently guiding me into a new world - Stevens, Williams, Pound, Nathaniel West, Ralph Ellison, and lo and behold, Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49. All of it, all, way over my head, but Paul ever encouraging to the newbie. Somewhere in the midst of all the shivering sessions, Gravity's Rainbow was plunked down as some kind of Holy Grail for the future. Grail it remained, its fat gold paperback self on my bookshelf for another four years before I had gumption enough to feel like maybe I could crack it, if even an uncomprehending wee little . . .

Cambridge years behind, returned to San Antonio to work in a psych hospital as an aide to test out a counseling future, I sabbatical'd myself west of SA to live on the family's Uvalde County ranch: got a job surveying land, quickly was trained as the "instruments" man, which, practically speaking, meant I had hours on end daily to sit atop Texas hills, gorgeous vistas unfurling, waiting for the "rod" men to clamber around to shoot laser'd distances, denim overalls'd Southern boy reading Nabokov, Faulkner, Hemingway, and, finally, that first pre-Easter season,
Gravity's Rainbow. Evenings with it, too, spent Coors-wizzed, reading on, buzzed just enough to occasionally feel like I knew exactly what was going on . . .

For whatever crazy reason, Lent became the season for GR: hardly a Christian text, though assuredly, a holiest of holies, a haunting text that sent quivers and shudders and un-recognitions off detonating in the heart of my reading soul. It has rested, all my other reading loves notwithstanding, atop my Desert Isle Lists for all these years, "nudged" only recently by its "companion" sister text, Pynchon's own
Against the Day, both now atop the pedestal. The worlds in both novels are wide enough to encompass all our worlds and more. Never enough journeys into their radiantly dark hearts . . .

For a time, the lenten returns were the only alternative to the 17-year wait for
GR's follow-up. We waited, read the rumors of works in progress, only to be greeted, finally, by the charming but hardly towering Vineland. Mason & Dixon as sister? Not for this acolyte. I like to think that Against the Day was there all along, post GR, taking its time, decades-long midwifery.

Of course, as much any other book,
GR was responsible for the years it took for me to brave writing my own pages. Staring into the face of such inscrutability and finally saying, hey, these are different voices simmering in here, but they gots to be hatched.

God bless the boy . . . he sure done blessed us . . .
Easter eggs for us all . . .

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11 Comments:

Blogger Dee Martin said...

This is another one that is sitting on my list which has grown quite a bit from the ss prompt. Maybe have to break down and hit it this summer, especially since it has had such an effect on your writing. It's on my Amazon wishlist - the local library doesn't carry it. Thanks for loving my poem.

4:44 PM  
Blogger murat11 said...

Dee: Gotta say, I ain't vouching for GR for everybody's taste, just like - another beloved - Cormac McCarthy isn't either. It's certainly had an effect on my innards, but I can't say as I see any evidence in my writing: any attempt at mimicry would have been, in the words of my urchins, epic fail.

There was much much much to love in your poem. So glad you posted it for all of us.

5:19 PM  
Anonymous Richard said...

Oh you're driving me crazy. All right all ready, I'll give it a try.

Today I was thinking about giving Dhalgren another read. Carried that one around for years, have since read it twice again, and it may be time for another go.

Carried "The Last Temptation of Christ" around for 10 years before I read it. Then I read it three times. That's writing you can rub up against, and once you do you can't wipe the stink, sweat, and blood off of yourself. But I'm not ready for a re-read.

Moby Dick every few years. It might be Olson who said - written in the 19th century it's the first 20th century novel.

And, hey, Cormac is the main event, ain't he?

5:55 PM  
Blogger murat11 said...

Careful now, Richard: You could get yourself in trouble with anyone on that list of yours. You may not have read GR, but I suspect it's lived in you, brother. Olson was dead on about MB, and should know - he was a whale of a man himself.

McCarthy's Suttree, All the Pretty Horses, and The Crossing: all Top 20 on the list.

6:10 PM  
Blogger murat11 said...

Mea culpa, Dee: Reading this morning's latest poem, I can see some of the Pynchon under the skin, though the conscious models were always the French Surrealists and Olson and his Black Mountain crowd; my longer fiction tends to a much more accessible voice, but the poems are, for the most part, antithetically elliptical...

7:36 AM  
Anonymous Richard said...

"...antithetically elliptical," holy christ, so that's what you're up to.

1:07 PM  
Blogger murat11 said...

Richard: Busted. Leastways, now you know . . .

5:18 PM  
Blogger Teresa said...

I checked this book out of the library last summer, but it was too much to get through in and around the thesis reading. Maybe after I graduate. But I enjoy your exegesis.

1:45 PM  
Blogger murat11 said...

Teresa: What I failed to mention is that it is also comic book and musical comedy, along with all else. Fits right in with the kung fu novels. But, yes, graduate first. And here's to that, for sure!

2:32 PM  
Blogger Miss Alister said...

I fear the great Gravity’s Rainbow would hurt my head, therefore I’ve blindly objected to its invasion... Just finished reading Richard Godwin’s non-fiction piece, The Speed At Which We Perceive Threat: Some Reflections over at Full of Crow’s “On The Wing,” and there it was mentioned. So I sought out your mentions of it. I read ‘Fishing’, this post, two of your book memes, and even went to the Pynchon Party. I’m fixing my position like a treading golfer readying to swing. But then, if I use your time-to-gumption line, I still have 2 years left to buck up and crack it since first hearing about it from you ; )

4:53 AM  
Blogger murat11 said...

My Sweet Duchess, I do love your deus ex machina-ted appearances here in Muravia's hovel. I am at GR yet again, as we speak, how's that for liturgical? Slowing, slowing down has made a huge difference this time in the comprehension department: tome of this size has always spurred me on to reading this baby much too fast. Little missed bits are dropping neatly into the pinata, hefty fat pig that one. Pig Bodine, heh heh - well, that's another pynchonian matter, though he does have a cameo in GR.

I'd say it's time to swing those lovely gams of yours and give it a go. Looks like Tiger himself might could do with some swing lessons from the beast, too.

Love you - paschal.

8:43 AM  

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