Words

The rumors are apparently true: Thomas Pynchon has a new book coming out, scheduled for release on December 5 of this year. We know they’re true because the book already has an amazon.com page where you are welcome to buy it. As Slate notes, an intriguing aspect of the story (you knew there would be one, didn’t you?) is the appearance — followed soon thereafter by the disappearance — of an “author blurb” on the amazon page. Here it is, rescued from the amazon discussion board.

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.”

–Thomas Pynchon

Did Pynchon really write this blurb? Why did amazon remove it? (I’m guessing that it was written by an overly enthusiastic publicist, and that’s why they removed it.) Is it true that Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya will play a prominent role in the new book? What is the title, for crying out loud? Wondering is half the fun.

The notoriously reclusive Pynchon is fond of sprinkling science throughout his works, and scientists are fond of reading them in turn. Gravity’s Rainbow, his masterwork, has a well-deserved reputation for being somewhat intimidating. But I would encourage anyone to read Mason & Dixon, his most recent book and arguably his most entertaining (not that it’s a breeze, mind you). Admittedly, there are scary parts:

“Gentlemen,” advises this ominous Shadow, “— you have fallen, willy-nilly, among a race who not only devour Astronomers as a matter of habitual Diet, but may also make of them vile minature ‘Sandwiches,’ and then lay them upon a mahogany Sideboard whose Price they never knew, and then forget to eat them. Your only hope, in this room, is to impersonate so perfectly what they assume you to be, that instincts of Predation will be overcome by those of Boredom.”

My most important contribution (to date) to literary scholarship is the discovery of the subtle deployment in M&D of the collapse of the wavefunction as a metaphorical theme for the progress of the surveyors over the hills to the West, observing as they go and reducing Probabilities to Certainties.

Update: according to a followup article in Slate, the title of the novel is Against the Day, and the blurb is really written by Pynchon. Shows you what I know.

No time for quality blogging, so here’s a poem in honor of the Dark Energy Task Force report — Darkness, by Lord Byron. (Line spacings added by me to make it easier to read on screen.)

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires – and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings – the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire – but hour by hour
They fell and faded – and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash – and all was black.

The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;

And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless – they were slain for food.

And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again; – a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought – and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails – men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corpse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress – he died.

The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects – saw, and shriek’d, and died –
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful – was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –
A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge –
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expir’d before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them – She was the Universe.

It would appear, then, that Byron is predicting that dark energy will continue to dominate in the future, resulting in the ultimate heat death of the universe; no phase transition to a true vacuum, nor a Big Rip. He doesn’t mention the possibility that quantum fluctuations will produce new baby universes in the future, but perhaps that was another poem.

A couple of publishing events of possible interest to CV readers:

1. As an interesting experiment in web publishing, Robert Frenay’s new book Pulse is being fully published online. The book is about the future of computers, technology, and complex systems, so its appearance in blog form makes a certain kind of sense.
2. Morse and Feshbach’s Methods of Theoretical Physics, a classic textbook and reference, has been reprinted after being out of circulation for a while. At almost $300, it’s not really an impulse buy, but you do get two volumes of about 1000 pages each. The reprinting was done under the supervision of Mark Feshbach, son of co-author Herman Feshbach.

Truth in advertising compels me to admit that I have not read either of these books! Nor I am getting anything for mentioning them, so it’s not really “advertising.” But both events are interesting.

By W.S. Merwin.

When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering space
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven