recourse to discourse

Inherent Vice

inherent vice: n. ~ The tendency of material to deteriorate due to the essential instability of the components or interaction among components.

 

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Inherent Vice cover and excerpt

Buried deep within the labyrinth of the Penguin Press catalogue is the following gem: an extract from Thomas Pynchon's upcoming 2009 novel "Inherent Vice".

She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn’t seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe and the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she’d never look.

“That you, Shasta? The packaging fooled me there for a minute.”

“Need your help, Doc.”

They stood in the streetlight through the kitchen window there’d never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.

Nobody was saying much. What was this? “So! You know I have an office now? Just like a day job and everything?”

“I looked in the phone book, almost went over there. But then I thought, better for everybody if this looks like a secret rendezvous.”

OK, nothing romantic tonight. Bummer. But it might be a paying gig. “Somebody’s keeping a close eye?”

“Just spent an hour on surface streets trying to make it look good.”

“How about a beer?” He went to the fridge, pulled two cans out of the case he kept inside, handed one to Shasta.

“There’s this guy,” she was saying.

There would be. No point getting emotional. And if he had a nickel for every time he’d heard a client start off this way, he would be over in Hawaii now, loaded day and night, digging the waves at Waimea, or better yet hiring somebody to dig them for him....

“Gentleman of the straight-world persuasion,” he beamed.

“OK, Doc. He’s married.”

“Some. . money situation.”

She shook back hair that wasn’t there and raised her eyebrows so what.

Groovy with Doc. “And the wife—she knows about you?”

Shasta nodded. “But she’s seeing somebody too. Only it isn’t just the usual number—they’re working together on some creepy little scheme.”

“To make off with hubby’s fortune, yea, I think I heard of that happenin’ once or twice around L.A. And... you want me to do what exactly?” He found the paper bag he’d brought his supper home in and got busy pretending to scribble notes on it, because straightchick uniform, makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever, here came that old well-known hard-on Shasta was always good for sooner or latter. Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did.

Definite resonances of Lot 49 and Vineland going on as Pynchon returns to the sixties!

 

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New Pynchon novel has a title: Inherent Vice

Courtesy of Conversational Reading, here are some details of Pynchon's 2009 scheduled novel, "Inherent Vice":

It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there... or... if you were there, then you... or, wait, is it...

 

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2009 Pynchon novel confirmed

Looks like it was more than just a rumour! The LA Times are now reporting on the rumours previously brought up here and on the Gaddis/P-List. Fall 2009 brings detective psychadelica to Pynchon.

 

comment from gry planszowe
Ciekawy post, dodalem twoja strone do ulubionych, bede tu zagladal czesciej, pozdrawiam

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Ladbrokes' odds for Nobel Prize for Literature 2008

As of now, Ladbrokes are giving the following odds for various figures on the Nobel Prize for Literature 2008. I've omitted the vast majority and skipped to those of "interest".

Philip Roth - 5/1
Don DeLillo - 7/1
Thomas Pynchon - 14/1
Umberto Eco - 40/1

Will Professor Irwin Corey get to make another appearance?

 

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Musil on Economic Stability

"But while man has in money, as Arnheim saw it, the surest control of society, a means as tough and precise as the guillotine, it can also be as vulnerable as an arthritic - how painfully the money market limps and aches all over at the slightest draft! - and is most delicately involved with everything it controls."

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London: Picador, 1997), p. 421.

 

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Rumours of new Pynchon book

According to Stephen Moore, relaying information from a Penguin sales representative to the Gaddis list and subsequently discussed on the Pynchon list, there is to be a new Thomas Pynchon novel published around Fall 2009.

 

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The church's metaphorical credit crisis

Ok, so I thought I'd weigh-in a little about the credit crisis. I'm not going to comment on executive bonuses, the infeasibility of bailout plans which merely restore the former mess or any of the many other issues that are being debated.

I instead want to look a little at the statements of two British Archbishops who condemned city practices. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams voiced his opposition to:

paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders

and that the economic setting

exposes the element of basic unreality in the situation - the truth that almost unimaginable wealth has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders

It is necessary to pause and consider that this is, in some senses, the approach that the church has taken for many years. If the financial crisis is to be seen as an opportunity for the church to reassert its long standing, if not always practised, opposition to usury then it is my assertion that many of their own undertakings can be seen as having "no concrete outcome beyond profit" involving "unimaginable levels of fiction".

Staying rooted thirmly in theory and Without denigrating the praxis of CoE, which I am sure has been of benefit to many people (profit), it seems that a hypocrisy is at work in the church calling for a rooting in empiricism and reality. The entire setup of Christianity can be seen as being founded upon a form of usury; mankind is lent time on Earth (concrete) and a place in heaven (abstract) in exchange for a repayment of the time on Earth (debt) in a morally acceptable fashion (interest). This is of course presented as a beneficial setup for mankind because the rewards reaped are far greater than the repayment, even with interest. The fact that the substantiation of the benefits are non-concrete and require faith are brushed aside as having no relevance here.

The "financial crisis" is not a crisis. It is a realisation. It is the realisation that the solidity upon which economic practice has been predicated is nothing but air; the Marxist doctrine of modernism. We have melted. The church seeks to distance itself and critique these events to mask the fact that they are also in danger from this de-solidification.

 

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The opposite of truth

The logical value of signification or demonstration thus understood is no longer the truth [...], but rather the condition of truth, the aggregate of conditions under which the proposition "would be" true. The conditioned or concluded proposition may be false, insofar as it actually denotes a nonexisting state of affairs or is not directly verified. Signification does not establish the truth without also establishing the possibility of error. For this reason, the condition of truth is not opposed to the false, but to the absurd: that which is without signification or that which may be neither true nor false.

Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (Continuum: London, 2003), p. 18.

 

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Foucault on Modernity

'Here I think, we are touching on one of the forms - perhaps we should call them "habits" - one of the most harmful habits in contemporary thought: the analysis of the present as being precisely, in history, a present of rupture, or of high point, or of completion or of a returning dawn, and so on.'

Michel Foucault, 'Structuralism and Post-Structuralism' in Aesthetics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954 - 1984, 433-458 (p. 449).

 

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