Added to the List

I heard about this a while back, but haven't made the move to purchase it. It's the lobe story left out of Slow Learner that was published by a British counter culture hotbed in the '60s.

Legend has it that one of Pynchon's teachers wrote a prompt on the board and told his writing students to write on the topic for the remainder of class. TP refused to turn his work in, rather he followed his professor back to his office, sat on the floor right outside the door, and went on to finish. I hear this is the result.

I also hear it's not considered good enough to have been included in Slow Learner. Of course that doesn't discourage me...time does a good enough job of that...

It's on eBay, and not really for unreasonable prices, considering other works by Pynchon.

Pretty Sweet Pynchon Map

So I found this Pynchon Artist Map, for before and after, and the accompanying interactive website. It's pretty cool, even if it doesn't have Chandler Brossard (before) or Tom Robbins (after, even is Another Roadside Attraction was published before V.).

And here's a link to the interactive website, so that you may be better able to check it out.

It can provide some new folks to checkout, because we both have so much time to discover and devour new authors these days, am I right?

A True American Character

As we wait for Pynchon's next caper, or Murakami's, or Flanagan's, or any other post-modern author we love, I try to pass the time. Having an infant around makes it kind of interesting when it comes to reading words.

The Boy has been enjoying both Leaves of Grass and a book ma sent me, Rise of the Rocket Girls, the untold history of the women who worked for JPL and NASA for the last six decades. It's a pretty interesting story.

Leaves of Grass is a national treasure, of course.

I tried a little of Gravity's Rainbow, but he liked it a little less. Maybe he was just hungry.

In the mean time, I got into a now-defunct comic series created by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson. It's called Transmetropolitan, and it was originally published by Helix Comics, a sci-fi imprint published by DC Comics. Helix folded after a few years, and Transmet moved over to their Veritgo line. It lasted for five years and sixty issues, with two specials with art by other people.

The main character is named Spider Jerusalem, and he's fully based on Hunter S. Thompson. Take a look:

The series is set in a future that looks surprisingly similar to now. The title ran from 1997 to 2002 when the Internet was in its infancy. The future depicted is a few centuries ahead of our own, but they've lost track of the year. You can go by any number of fast-food places and buy dog or human or whatever to eat, lizards have replaced rats as infestation vermin, and any number of weird things can happen.

You can download your memories and personality into a billion atomic-sized robots and become a "Foglet". One of Spider's old acquaintances is now a religious leader of the Transient movement. His name is Fred Christ and he's taken the traits to be half-human and half-alien:

Spider is a journalist fighting to bring down corruption and end ignorance. His drug intake borders on the archetype of "heroic." He dislikes people, but only because they're too connected to each other, willfully and happily ignorant, and too self involved. He has two helpers he calls his "filthy assistants," both ladies, and his first directive to each, separately, is to "take the anti-cancer trait on the counter, grab a pack of smokes and start chain smoking." His signature glasses can take pictures and came from a replicator. Replicators here are sentient and like to get high.

Beyond his bowel disruptor pistol, his only real weapon is the truth. He uses it to go after two corrupt presidents.

In the America depicted in this universe, there's the City (to where he must return at the beginning of the first issue), which is a MEGA-megalopolis, and the rest of the country. The City is an amalgam of many US cities, but is probably the natural outgrowth of the Bos-Wash Corridor; it seems like the Great Lakes are now called the Western Lakes.

Anyway, I love the idea that the persona that Hunter Thompson cultivated---the truth-searcher and truth-sayer, the hero-journalist, the method-performer with the drugs---is so original and, dare I say, so American that it would justify a half-decade of loving tribute comic series.

This is certainly not your super-hero comic.

If you ever feel like you want to look at graphic novel material in between the literature, this would be worth your time.

I mean, seriously...

Eisner, Kirchner, and the Psychedelic Realization of an Artform

Three Decades Ago in Comics

Part One

Click here for Part Two.

1986, three decades ago, is considered a seminal year for the comic book industry in America. Two of the most influential big-company projects were released that year, both from DC Comics: Alan Moore's "Watchmen" and Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns".

Both have been hailed as graphic novels that elevated the medium to literary status. Both brought renewed attention to comics, and have both been movie-ized lately, "Watchmen" back in 2009 and "Dark Knight Returns" in various forms over the years, most recently as the loose basis for this year's "Batman V Superman."

In the strictest sense, neither of these graphic stories, the Watchmen nor DK Returns, was a  "graphic novel." The Watchmen was a twelve issue "maxi"-series and DK Returns was an over-sized four-issue miniseries. It has only been in the subsequent years as each collection was collected into one graphic-novel-sized publication that the term "graphic novel" has been applied to them.

Both were influential and have shadows that loom large over both the industry as a whole and the creators themselves.

The phrase "graphic novel" was coined by the great Will Eisner, one of the creative cornerstones of an American creation. Over the years Eisner published stories steeped in real life, beauty and tragedy and truth about the human condition, in what he called "graphic novels."

The name has since become a catch-all for any comic-sized form of entertainment thicker than 96 pages. Today, many graphic novels are collections of story arcs in specific titles.

In 1986, though, there was a legitimate Eisner-styled graphic novel released.

And...it was a psychedelic mystery:

The words "psychedelic mystery" were ballyhooed in reviews, and that gets one's attention. What exactly could that mean?

The review I was reading was for a fancy new hardcover reprint. The interview had Kirchner talking about his friendship with the late van der Wetering. When I found plenty of original 1986 books floating around I had one shipped, the one pictured above.

The binding is stiff and vulnerable to cracking.

Inside, it's the pages that are the thing. Each page is its own composition, one idea or transitive verb action symmetrically posed with other connected idea-pieces. It's beautiful and interesting to look at, but is it a flowing comic book experience? No, not in the traditional sense, and maybe that adds to the psychedelic feel.

Disconnected-yet-connected: truth and fantasy simultaneously. The mystery unfolds in large full-page compositions.

One of these splash pages is probably the sexiest set of comic images I've come across in my few decades. The way the dancer reminisces about her former career is shown through her steadily stripped form, another example of the psychedelic nature of the book. The smirk and bush in the last drawing is hot:

Reading this artistic-project-masterpiece is well worth the fifty-five minutes it takes. 

Pynchonian Videos

I joined a group on the Facebook that is called W.A.S.T.E. You need to ask to join and then be admitted. It is pretty cool as far as closed Pynchon groups go. Members hail from all over the world and they have knowledge of all sorts of Pynchonalia.

I'll be putting the more interesting stuff up here as it comes. One thing I found while going down the rabbit-hole on one of the W.A.S.T.E. links was a connection for a review of "Impolex".

For some reason I remember it as Imipolex, with the extra letter and syllable, but it's the name of a type of living rubber in Gravity's Rainbow.

Years back I'd heard that there had been a short film, or a fully independent project film with this name and subject, so it was obviously this.

About the group W.A.S.T.E.: Very few people have read all of the books. Even fewer have read all of them, all of the articles, and even Mortality and Mercy in Venice (a project TP wrote during a college class and published in London---and not included in Slow Learner). I'm not in that last group, but I've got my eye on MMV as well as finishing his Watts article from '65. Anyway, these folks end up knowing about some cool shit to which I'm otherwise not privy.

Also, for a tripped out view of a tripped out book, check out this currently working link to the movie "Impolex" itself.

I'd Never Heard of "Pynchon Notes"

Here we have our own little Pynchon website, and just the other week I learned about a Pynchonian deal of which I previously heard nothing.

Starting in 1979, scholars interested in the works of Thomas Pynchon began collecting bibliographical notes on all essays and articles written about those works. Recently they ceased publication.

Here is a link to the remains of the hard copies available for sale. I've been trying to find some copies of my own, but after pulling up the website to grab the URL for the preceding link, I'm tempted to just make the purchase.

If ordered in time, they ship a DVD copy of Prufstand 7 along with the issues. Prufstand 7 is a German-made meditation on rockets and death that uses elements of Gravity's Rainbow. In an odd note, up until Paul Anderson's Inherent Vice in 2014, it was the only movie that got the okay from Pynchon himself.

Who knew?

Who knew he's a black guy?