Language Play of the Week: Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

We have an occasional feature here at Mad Padre called Language Play of the Week. Actually it's more like Language Play of the Quarter but I digress. Every now and then I come across a passage that makes me say "Wow, Writer Dude, you totally nailed that." OK, that last phrase wasn't especially felicitous, but you get my point.

Thomas Pynchon is one of the last men standing from the American literary subculture of the 1960s.  If your library or memory goes back that far, you know the guy - Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, etc.  Bleeding Edge was published last September and is a long novel, described by some reviewers as a shaggy dog story about 9/11 and the dot.com bubble years leading up to it.  Well, sort of.   The first three hundred pages are about a fraud investigator, Maxine, who tries to protect her precocious kids (adept in computer skills and Jewish martial arts), and reconnect with her WASP stockbroker husband Horst, well getting lured into a dark world that includes a renegade software company run by a sinister Bill Gates type, a Cold War experiment in time travel that may still be running, an alternate web world called Deep Archer (a kind of Second Life in which a kind of supernatural post-death existence may be possible), an IMF/CIA agent who may or may not have a heart of gold, a Russian mobster and his goofy Hip-Hop loving henchmen who also may or may not have hearts of gold …. and so on.  And all this in hundreds of pages before we ever get to 9/11, an event which plays strangely in the background of these busy and strange events.

Here’s a taste, a paragraph about the two internet pioneers who create Deep Archer.

"Having managed to score not only seed and angel money but also a series-A round from the venerable Sand Hill Road girl of Voorhees, Krueger, the boy, like American greenhorns of a century ago venturing into the history-haunted Old World, lost no time back east in paying the necessary calls, setting up shop around early ’97 in a couple of rooms sublet from a Website developer who welcomed the cash, down in the then still enchanted country between the Flatiron Building and the East Village.  If context was still king, they got nonetheless a crash course in patriarchal subtext, cutthroat jostling among nerd princes, dark dynastic histories.   Before long they were showing up in trade journals, on gossip sites, at Courtney Pulitzer’s downtown soirees, finding themselves at four in the morning drinking kalimotxos in bars carpentered into ghost stops on abandoned subway lines, flirting with girls whose fashion thinking included undead signifiers such as custom fangs installed out in the outer boroughs by cut-rate Lithuanian orthodontists."

This gets the Language Play of the Week award or a number of reasons.   First, it’s hard to believe that this stuff is written by a man in his 70s, and one who is notoriously reclusive at that.   Bleeding Edge is so full of 90s pop culture and tech references that it feels like a younger man’s work, say William Gibson in his earlier career.  Second, the language has a fluid quality, a sense that it could unspool itself like this for ever, and that the author is only capping his sentences with the odd period to give the reader a quick respite.   Third, there are references in the book that could or could not be real, and like the alternate web-world flickering on the edges of Maxine’s perception, it almost feels plausible.  I sort of new what a kalimoxto was, but I had the strange feeling that if I googled it, it might not exist.  Later, there is a reference to Ben Stiller starring in The Fred McMurray Story, which I am fairly sure does not exist.  It’s like the reference to the “cut-rate Lithuanian orthodontists” - of course they would have to be in “the outer boroughs”, but why Lithuanian?   It sounds faintly plausible, whereas if he had made them “Russian orthodontists” it would have seemed like a lazy stereotype, whereas just calling them “cut-rate orthodontists” would have just been lazy.   Lastly, there is the sense of the exotic, as in “bars carpentered into ghost stops on abandoned subway lines”.  Are there such bars?   How would one find them or find these “ghost stops”?  That’s the whole point of the off-the-grip hipster-hacker-nerd world that Maxine ventures into.   And using “carpentered” as a verb is to my mind a minor gem of a word play in itself.

I recommend this book highly for summer reading, but don’t feel cheated if you end up scratching your head and asking what the heck it was all about, though if you do, there’s a Bleeding Edge wiki here just in case.

Language Play Of The Week

We have an occasional feature here at Mad Padre called Language Play of the Week. Actually it's more like Language Play of the Quarter but I digress. Every now and then I come across a passage that makes me say "Wow, Writer Dude, you totally nailed that." OK, that last phrase wasn't especially felicitous, but you get my point.
I've just finished Ben Fountain's novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a satirical take on America and the so-called War on Terror (what do we cal the wars of the last eleven years - surely there is a better title?).
The prose is magnificent, excessive, scaled up to Fountain's subject, which is the lavish power and wealth and emptyheadedness of America and his rage about it. I could cite so many passages where I was left stunned by the language. This one comes at the book's climax, when a group of young US soldiers, instant YouTube heroes of the Iraq war, are feted at the halftime show of a Dallas Cowboys game. Be warned that the language here is rough.
"Such an unholy barrage of noise pours forth that Billy thinks he might be lifted off his feet. It is a dam bursting, bridges collapsing at rush hour, tsunamis of killer froth and boulder-sized debris revising the contours of the known world. Just assume you're going to die, so they were instructed the week before deploying to Iraq. Affirmative! Roger that! Sir yes sir! Carnage awaits us, we are the ones who will not be saved, the poor sad doomed honourably fucked front line who will fight them over there so as not to fight them here! A harsh thing for any young man to hear, but this is a part of every youth's education in the world, learning the risks that are never fully revealed until you commit. Destiny's Child is really laying into the strut, they could be wading through a storm surge up to their waists, goddam, so how is he supposed to redeploy with such sights in his head? Within days, no, hours, Bravo is back in the shit and he's waiting for them to say it again, he dreads it but the harsh words need to be said, you're going to die, just get that part of it over with please, but no, no one will do it, they get Beyonce and her mouthwatering ass instead!
Maybe it's not supposed to make sense. Or maybe not for you, Billy reasons, because you are a duh-umb shit. Then they turn, he's missed the hash mark by half a beat, the Drill grunts razor-sharp on the mark while Bravo flops around like loose shoelaces. "Change step march," Day woofs sotto voce; as team leader he's responsible for getting them through halftime with some semblance of their dignity intact, and now he counts time with the Drill grunts, trying to shoehorn the Bravos into lockstep. "Left, left,", the mantra settles Billy's mind and his feet start to follow, though it would help if he had a weapon in his hands. Just ahead are the Rots [ROTC students], a herd of shambling big-assed kids, many of them no doubt older than Billy and yet they look so young from the back, their soft, fleshy, baby- fat necks practically screaming for the sacrificial ax to come down.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Book Review And Language Play Of The Week: Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds.. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

For some years now I have been wondering when we might start seeing the literature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By literature, I mean something akin to the prose and poetry that emerged a decade or so after the Great War of 1914-18. A goodly number of memoirs have been published and some have great merit, such as Patrick Hennesy's Junior Officer's Reading Club. Some journalists have also written books whose literary quality is remarkable, such as Dexter Filkins' The Forever War. But where is the poetry and the novels which might be compared to Wilfred Owens and Seigfried Sassoon, or is it too soon?

Last week in our local public library my wife found a novel in the new Hot Picks section, and told me I had to read it. I immediately noticed the cover blurb from novelist Tom Wolfe saying that The Yellow Birds was "The All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab wars". Wolfe sold me on reading this novel with that one comment, and while he set the bar pretty high and comparisons are easy, I think this book may stand the test of time as an important war novel of the period.

The other thing that caught my attention from the dust jacket was the author bio, which sold me on Kevin Powers as someone who might be superbly equipped to be a literary voice comparable to an Owen or Remarque. Powers was a enlisted infantryman in the US Army who served in Iraq in 2004-05. He went on to earn a Master's of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the Michener Fellow in Poetry. You can here an interview with Powers on NPR's wonderful Dianne Rehm show here.

I won't say much more because the plot is complex and I don't want to spoil it, but the quick summary is that it followers two young US soldiers in the worst parts of the Iraq war. The novel jumps back and forth in time, and has a lot to say about the effects of war on the psyche. Anyone wanting to understand Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the debilitating way that it traps soldiers in the past should read this book. Powers writes prose like a poet, albeit a young poet. Some passages struck me as overwrought, but much of the novel, even the combat scenes, has a lyrical, even dreamy quality which strangely accentuates rather than conceals the brutality of the subject.

As an example of the literary quality of the book, I offer this passage, which also gets the Mad Padre's Award of Language Play Of The Week for the way in which it develops the metaphor of a stone into a complex meditation on memory and alienation.

Clouds spread out over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed. I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my mind's mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though it's hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war: the old life disappearing into the dust that hung and hovered over Nineveh even before it could be recalled and longed for, young and unformed as it was, already broken by the time I reached the furthest working of my memory. I was going home. But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among the innumerable grains of sand, how, in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember.

Language Play Of The Week

Every now and then I read something - a phrase, a turn of thought, and I think, "wow, Writer Dude, you just nailed that". OK, I realize that my last sentence wasn't exactly an example of the kind of effective writing I'm talking about, but you get my point. Here's the fifth in what is thus far proving to be a somewhat more regular feature in Mad Padre.

The church signboard is a medium for very short, pithy messages - think of it as the haiku or twitter of evangelism. Most church signboards are the realm of hackneyed phrases and cliches, but occasionally they can be quite good. Written on a piece of paper or on a computer screen, I wouldn't rate this as a Language Play of the Week, but in the context of the church sign, and given the ethical pithiness of the final line, I think this is deserving.

Thanks to the Chesterton and Friends blog for noting this. Fans of The Big Lebowski will recognize the Latter Day Dude reference.

Language Play of the Week

Every now and then I read something - a phrase, a turn of thought, and I think, "wow, Writer Dude, you just nailed that". OK, I realize that my last sentence wasn't exactly an example of the kind of effective writing I'm talking about, but you get my point. Here's the fourth in what is thus far proving to be a highly intermittent feature in Mad Padre.

Hilary Mantel as Holbein might have painted her. Very clever, New Yorker, very clever.

I am indebted to James Wood for his 7 May review of Hilary Mantel's second novel on Henry VIII's servant and chancellor, Thomas Cromwell. I like historical novels, but I had to wince in agreement with Wood that this genre is "not exactly jammed with greatness". He argues that what makes Mantel stand out is that she "seems to have written a very good modern novel, then changed all her fictional names to English historical figures of the fifteen-twenties and thirties."

Here's the passage that earns Mad Padre's Language Play of the Week. Here Thomas Cromwell is thinking about his son, Gregory, from Mantel's first novel in the series, Wolf Hall.

"He smiles. What he says about Gregory is, at least he isn’t like I was, when I was his age; and when people say, what were you like? he says, oh, I used to stick knives in people. Gregory would never do that; so he doesn’t mind—or minds less than people think—if he doesn’t really get to grips with declensions and conjugations. When people tell him what Gregory has failed to do, he says, “He’s busy growing.” He understands his need to sleep; he never got much sleep himself, with Walter stamping around, and after he ran away he was always on the ship or on the road, and then he found himself in an army. The thing people don’t understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking."

Wood notes that the passage works because it uses present tense (which overcomes the "long ago and far away" feel of the standard historical novel as well as "a free indirect style to establish Cromwell’s likable bluntness". I agree, and I love how that "free indirect style" veers away from Cromwell's son to his own experience as a soldier, and how Mantel captures brilliantly in a few, darkly comic sentences, what authors have been saying about war for ages, that it is stupid and chaotic, usually because it is run by stupid people. Update the language and it could be about any war up to the present.

Don't think, gentle reader, that I took James Wood's word for how good Mantel is. I grabbed Wolf Hall and devoured it over the long weekend. I now have the second novel, Bring Up The Bodies, which takes the story from the fall of Anne Boleyn to Henry's third marriage to Jane Seymour.

Because I am so fond of Mantel, let me give you another passage, like the fellow on your street who drives his car with the music cranked and the windows open because he wants you to love the Black Keys as much as he does. Except I'm quieter. This passage is from a conversation Cromwell is sent to have with a troublesome English lord, the Earl of Northumberland, who needs to walk back rumours he has spread about his love for Anne Boleyn, before she has become the queen. Like the first passage, it captures the foolish, archaic world of medieval warfare with the world of commerce that has shaped Cromwell.

"He will not. He respects all ancient titles. All ancient rights."

"Then let's say I will. Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends."

How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbone, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

"I picture you without money and title," he says. "I picture you in a hovel, wearing homespun, and bringing home a rabbit for the pot. I picture your lawful wife Anne Boleyn skinning and jointing you this rabbit. I wish you every happiness."

That passage works because, as Wood says, it is really about the modern world, about globalization and the power of finance which seems to be the only power that matters today. It works because of its internal lyricism ("the ships with sails of silk") and the contrast with Cromwell's blunt threat at the end, and it works because it supports the novel's overall characterisation of Cromwell as a pragmatic, modern man who understands the world, even if he does not control it. It's lovely.

Do yourself a favour and get to know Mantel. If you ever watched The Tudors on TV and felt dirty afterwards, you'll feel better.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/05/07/120507crbo_books_wood#ixzz1vdNPTOCq

Language Play of the Week

Every now and then I read something - a phrase, a turn of thought, and I think, "wow, Writer Dude, you just nailed that". OK, I realize that my last sentence wasn't exactly an example of the kind of effective writing I'm talking about, but you get my point. Here's the third in what is thus far proving to be a highly intermittent feature in Mad Padre.

Theatre critic Ben Brantley, in the 11 July 2011 issue of the New York Times, kicks an old theatre cliche up a few notches in describing Kevin Spacey's current performance as Shakespeare's Richard III.

LONDON — If a cloud of sawdust seems to hang over the Old Vic Theater these days, that’s because Kevin Spacey is chewing his way through the scenery there like an atomic termite.

Actually the rest of the paragraph is pretty good too.

In a ripping old-fashioned star turn as Shakespeare’s Richard III, Mr. Spacey gives fierce and flashy physical life to every twist of a power-mad man’s corkscrew mind. Richard may be slowed down by a hunched back and hobbled gait, but this performance spins a classic, much-interpreted character until we’re all dizzy.

Language Play of the Week

Every now and then I read something - a phrase, a turn of thought, and I think, "wow, Writer Dude, you just nailed that". OK, I realize that my last sentence wasn't exactly an example of the kind of effective writing I'm talking about, but you get my point. Here's the second in what is thus far an intermittent feature in Mad Padre.

This week's pick is more serious, from a novel I've just finished by Canadian author Sharon Butala. Didn't know about her until I discovered this book in the excellent Med Hat library. Butala is a western Canadian writer of some fame, and lives just down the Trans Canada Highway in Eastend, SK. I chose this excerpt, from her novel The Garden of Eden, for its descriptive quality. You might argue with the adjective `precious` but if you`ve ever been mesmerized by the clarity of light in a prairie sunrise, you`ll see how truthful this passage is. MP+

Àt the coulee`s lip every little knob and rock, every dip and badger bush stands out sharply. It`s the light the Great Plains is famous for and she`s grateful for it, too, on this brisk morning of her husband`s funeral. Even the drugged sluggishness is leaving her in the morning light and the cool spring air. In another fifteen minutes that precious light will have spread itself out more evenly and with less extreme attention; the high spots will flatten a little, the low spots will rise to meet them, and the promise of heaven will be gone until, as the sun lowers itself gently down the sky, its rays will once again make every stone and bladè of grace ring with golden light.``




Sharon Butala, The Garden of Eden, HarperCollins Canada, 1998, p. 72.

Language Play of the Week

Every now and then I read something - a phrase, a turn of thought, and I think, "wow, Writer Dude, you just nailed that". OK, I realize that my last sentence wasn't exactly an example of the kind of effective writing I'm talking about, but you get my point. Here's the second in what is thus far an intermittent feature in Mad Padre.

This week's language play has been around for a while now. It's from a David Sedaris piece in the August 9th issue of The New Yorker magazine, which I'm still nibbling at, entitled "Standing By: Fear, Loathing, Flying". An abstract of the piece is here (go ahead, treat yourself to a digital subscription while you're there).

Here's the sentence, a gorgeously over the top simile to defend the argument that the author's fellow Americans can be slovenly and unpleasant people to spend time on an airplane with.

"I should be used to the way Americans dress when travelling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, "F**k this, I'm going to Los Angeles".

If you google the phrase you'll find other fans of it.

Language Play of the Week

Every now and then I read something - a phrase, a turn of thought, and I think, "wow, Writer Dude, you just nailed that". OK, I realize that my last sentence wasn't exactly an example of the kind of effective writing I'm talking about, but you get my point. So, Mad Padre begins a new feature, entitled, "Language Play of the Week".

To start it off, David Rothkopf, in an opinion piece on why it's too early to rate Barack Obama as a President, earns this week's pick for his post-modern riff on an overused rhetorical phrase that he drops into his sentence.

"It was a well-argued, quite passionate piece. The problem with it was that it was arrant nonsense. (I recognize that the term "arrant nonsense" should usually be reserved for gaunt English character actors playing the Sherriff of Nottingham but in this instance it fits, and if you heard me say it with my not-so-plummy Central New Jersey accent, you wouldn't think it sounded half as pompous as it might appear in print.)"