Chapter 5: Lew Basnight's Story

This chapter begins with the Chums of Chance ferrying Lew Basnight, the spotter for White City Investiagtions. But the chapter is another one of Pynchon’s diversions off the main plot line, in the case telling us Lew Basnight’s story. These stories are a frequent feature in his longer novels, particularly GR. In that work, the stories of Roger Mexico and Tchitcherine parallel the main storyline of Slothrop, giving the novel a structure symbolically resembling the musical leitmotif (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitmotif).

Baslight is guilty of some heinous crime, which causes hum to lose his wife, Troth, and leads him to a teacher of Country Dance, Drave, who sets him up in the Esthonia Hotel, where we meet Hershel the bellhop. Guilt and sin is one of Pynchon’s recurrent themes, and in the pasr he has made the Calvinist distinction between the damned, the elect, and the preterite, who try to act like the elect, though they don’t know their heavenly destination. Baslight seems to be one of Pynchon’s preteritr many (as opposed to the Chosen Few), and in the chapter identifies himself as a “Presbyterian” (41). Although hired by Nate Privett of White City Investigations to track “the labor unions, or as we like to call them, anarchistic scum” (43), Lew “was not in the detective business out of political belief” (37).

Nate also has a special talent (like Slothrop?): he is a sensitive; he can see better than other people. He notices details the average observer misses, a great talent in the detective business.

And Many Diverse Characters Appear

Chapter 4 begins with a scene in which we are introduced to a number of characters:

• Merle Rideout: the photographer who was seen by the boys in Chapter 1 chasing
  the nude model
• Chevrolette McAdoo: the model; dancer at the South Seas Pavilion
• Dahlia Ridout: precocious five-year-old, daughter of Merle and Erlys
• Professor Heino Vanderjuice: Pedagogical mentor to the Chums, inventor, Yale
  Faculty
• Ray Ipsow: a friend of the professor, and a Socialist
• Scarsdale Vibe: mogul and Capitalist
• Foley walker: One of Vibe’s thugs

The plot in this chapter revolves around Vibe’s efforts to get Vanderjuice to develop a device to counter an invention of the great Nicholas Tesla. Tesla’s invention promises free power, what Vibe describes as “the most terrible weapon the world has seen, designed not to destroy armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange” (34).

Chapter Three: Miles and Lindsay at the World's Fair

“The Asiatic midget” (21) who takes their admission yells “deadbeats” when the boys don’t tip. Welcome to the 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ arrival. Its theme: Capitalistic greed.

The center of the fair is civilized, white. The outskirts, darker and savage. Shades of Conrad, and GR.

“Pavilions seemed almost to represent not nations of the world but Deadly Sins” (22). Remember the author’s NYT Book Review article on this subject.

The combination of the native and Western Capitalism “doesn’t seem…quite…authentic” (23).

Lack of light plays tricks. Is there a monte game here or “an ancient African method of divination” (23). We’ve seen séances before in GR, always in low light.

Miles, clumsy though he is, has a special ability, an ESP?, a strange capacity to reach a point of knowledge “where everything fits together, connects” (24). Is Miles Blundell a Slothrop, Pynchon’s alter ego? This is certainly a description of his aesthetic.

“Manufacturing and Liberal Arts Building” (24). The union of Capitalism and art.

We meet Nate Privett, of White City Investigations, a man concerned with anti-terrorist security. The Captain seems to strike a deal. The Chums will be carrying a passenger.

Chapter Two

Chapter 2 begins with Lindsay looking down on “‘The Great Bovine City of the World’” (10), describing the maze of turns and angles the cows must choose before reaching the slaughterhouse. Immediately I think of the opening scene in GR where the train keeps knotting inward, its passengers as doomed as the Chicago cows. I can’t help wondering, whether Pynhcon is engaging in a kind of self-parody, or whether the two scenes might have been written contemporaneously. As little as we know of Pynchon the man, we know even less about his writing process!

From the seriousness of this opening, he moves into one of those slapstick scenes for which he is (in)famous—Miles Blundell’s foot, stuck in the hydrogen valve, sending the crew of the airship plummeting towards a certain death. In the ensuing chaos, we learn even more about the extent of Lindsay’s literacy—he makes reference to Riemann topology.

Who is the “stout gentleman” pursuing the naked lady with his camera. Probably an allusion I’m missing?

After safely landing we get the first song, with Miles on uke. Some allusions about the Captain’s sexuality, and we meet the members of another airship crew, “Bindlestiffs of the Blue:” Miss Penelope Black commanding, Riley, and Zip. On their trip to Chicago in the airship Tzigane (Fr=gypsy), the Bindlestiffs (Hobos) had encountered some sort of unearthly voices, or communication. Again, I think of the séance in GR.

The Rest of Chapter One

Either the remainder of the first chapter is less portentous, or else my mind is simply not making the connections I made yesterday. More characters have been added, including a fantastic animal reminiscent of Mason and Dixon. Pugnax, “a dog of no particular breed” (5). Actually, Canis Pugnax is the old Roman war dog, and the working dog, the Cane Corso is considered by some to be the descendent of this dog. The dog is “reading” Henry James (considering the inability of Darby Suckling to properly parse a simple English sentence, the choice of James, purveyor of some of the most beautifully complex sentences every composed is a hilarious choice). Actually, he appears to be reading; he is not (at least so far) a talking dog. But his nose is in James The Princess Casamassima, and when the dog is questioned, Darby interprets his barking, and guesses the subject of such a novel is “Some sort of…Italian romance, I’ll bet” (6). Noseworth, the literate Master-at-Arms/Executive Officer/Second-in-Command corrects Darby, and tells us that it actually a novel of “the inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism” (6).

Hmmmmm. Maybe more portentous than I FIRST THOUGHT. Roman war dog, a coming century of world wars, a century which Mary Any Caws, in her book on Manifestos (a book I used extensively in my dissertation analyzing the genre) describes as “A Century of Isms” (http://www.amazon.com/Manifesto-Century-Mary-Ann-Caws/dp/0803264070). Genres: we already know Pynchon is warping the adolescent adventure novel genre, and perhaps also will take a shot at the Italian romance and the political thriller. If the romances approach what we saw in GR, I’m sure it will be deviantly worthy of this period of interregnum.

Another character, Miles Blundell, clumsy but good-hearted handyman apprentice, destroyer of porcelain crockery (hmmmm—a bit of a metaphor for anarchism here. And the name—Miles, makes me think of Davis, purveyor of anarchistic jazz, and Blundell—well a bit of onomatopoeia here.

Some names mentioned in passing:

1. Dr. Heino Venderjuice, friend of The Chums of Chance, and inventor of the airships “ingenious turbine engine” (6) which is described “as no better than a perpetual motion machine” (6); yet another favorite subject of Pynchon. I wonder if Maxwell and his demon will make another appearance.
2. Chick Counterfly ( a name full of weight), the newest member of the crew: lower class, a bit angry.
3. President Porfiro Diaz of Mexico. A real character (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porfirio_D%C3%ADaz). The boys had contracted with his Interior Ministry to gather intelligence at a pelota fronton(http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelota_vasca). Political thriller meets adolescent adventure novel: The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico (7).
4. Richard “Dick” Counterfly, Chick’s father. Carpetbagger and con man. Chick came to the chums being chased by the KKK. Their sparks from their torches threatened the hydrogen of the airship as the COC rescued Chick.

An important conversation:
“ ‘Here it is an a nutshell,’ Randolph confided later. ‘Going up is like going north’ ” (9). And then Chick responds, “ ‘if you keep going far enough north, eventually you pass over the Pole and you’re heading south again” (9). A very postmodern comment which makes the commander uncomfortable. No one likes to be adrift, and uncertain of their direction.

I’m ready for Poggioli, and some Pynchonesque manifestos.

Woolf’s The Years is a much darker book, but is a book that also deals with “isms,” particularly the emergence of the fascism as a mental state. A very complex idea. If it fascinates you, read Andrew Hewitt’s Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avante-Garde (http://www.amazon.com/Fascist-Modernism-Aesthetics-Politics-Avant-Garde/dp/0804726973.)

Reading "Against the Day" against "The Years"!

I finally have the book, and my 120-day reading project begins!

Building on my comments about the historical period Pynchon covers, and Woolf’s coverage of the same period, I am going to be using Woolf as a lens; in other words, I am reading Against the Day against Woolf’s novel, The Years. Woolf has an advantage though—she lived through the period, where Pynchon was born about the time this book ends.

Pynchon begins the novel with a quotation from one of his beloved Jazz musicians. “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light,” comes from the mouth of Thelonious Monk. Of course light is a favorite metaphor of many writers, particularly Shakespeare, who used the formulation light=truth. In her short story “Kew Gardens,” as well as in The Years, Woolf uses light as a marker for significance, for meaning, for knowledge. As Todd Rundgren sings, “I Saw the Light!” Pynchon is always searching for truth and knowledge, for God’s word to emerge from the sky. He is a notorious skeptic about our ability to find such truth—especially truth about each other. Like the spectators at the end of GR, we are strangers in the theatre.

Interesting too, that where Gravity’s Rainbow (GR) begins with sound (“A screaming comes across the sky”) this novel begins with another sense—not sound, but sight.

I haven’t figured what the little red seal on the cover refers to yet. Like the Columbian Exposition (world’s fair) of 1993 medal above, it is round. Book One is titled “The Light Over the Ranges” and the narrative begins with the line, “Now single up all lines.” Already Pynchon’s aesthetic of connectedness is beginning to work on this reader. As ex- Navy, I recognize the naval terminology, which harkens back to Pynchon’s first novel, V. Ships are moored with ropes which are “doubled” to adequately secure the ship to the pier. All sailors recognize the command to “single lines,” as the preliminary to “casting off,” at which point the ship is underway. Pynchon is taking us on a voyage, a voyage through perhaps the most tumultuous period of American and world history, certainly a period which is central to understanding our relationship with technology and modernity.

In this case, our “ship” is the hydrogen airship, Inconvenience, on its way to the 1893 Columbian Exposition (world’s fair) in Chicago. If you can’t deal with Pynchon’s portentous aesthetic of connectedness, you are really annoyed by now. Inconvenience is a wonderfully humorous name for the ship, an abstract noun that harkens back to the use of such nouns for ship names during the Revolutionary War. In this case the ship is a product of the techno-scientific revolution, but a technology we will recognize as a failure, a technology abandoned after the Hindenburg disaster, one of the first spectacles in an age of spectacles. Al Gore is another who has noted the "inconvenience" of technological progress and scientific truth!

Spectacles—technology for seeing? You’re probably really annoyed by now!

Pynchon is famously skeptical about the promise of technology, and has been even been called a Luddite. I’m not sure it’s technology itself he is skeptical about, but rather the human beings behind the technology. That skepticism about humans, the realization that you cannot overestimate in ability of human beings to commit atrocities, is one of the reasons I particularly love Pynchon’s voice.

Interesting enough, he uses a voice reminiscent of the adolescent novels of this period (in describing the airship crew, the Chums of Chance his style reminds me of the Hardy Boy’s, whose friends were chums; writers of these serial novels often use language like Pynchon’s “as my faithful readers will remember”). On my own bookshelf you will find books like this—think Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible; or, Adventures Over the Forest of Fire by Victor Appleton (actually Edward and Harriet Stratmeyer, who also created the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift). The Swift novels always focused on technology, and in some ways helped create an audience for Science Fiction, the literary genre was built around the aesthetic of both worshipping and questioning science and technology. Like Science Fiction, the Swift novels approached technology with what critic Damon Knight has called a “sense of wonder.”

Another connection: I remember a Columbian Exposition medal like the one above that my grandfather, Zay Barnum, used to keep in his desk. I inherited the desk (though I destroyed it by moving it one too many times—a story of my life) but don’t remember what happened to the medal.

Character names so far: Darby Suckling (one of the crew), Randolph St. Cosmo (the commander of the ship).

Words I had to look up:
(1) Darby’s “tow colored locks.” Very light hair, perhaps the color of twine, of the ropes that were cast-off. Yet another connection.
(2) Leeward: the side away from the wind. More naval terminology.
(3) Factotum: a jack-of-all trades (Darby)
(4) Mascotte: French, for mascot. (Darby). Since St. Cosmo is a French name, I’m wondering if Pynchon is making connections to Antoine Sainte Exupery, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint-Exupé) French aviator and author of The Little Prince.

They are following a southerly wind to Chicago, “the fabled White City.” Can’t help but remembering Count Blicero and Enzain, and GR which spends a great deal of time dealing with Pynchon’s favorite themes of Colonialism, race (whiteness, associated with the occupying North; blackness associated with the Colonial south, and Africa). Of course, calling a city with a historically large population of African-Americans the “White City” is another one of Pynchon’s ironic little verbal jabs.

Some last thoughts: more naval references: scuttlebut for slang, the Chums like sailors have “summer” uniforms. The paragraph on the top of page four leaves us with Darby speaking an adolescent double-negative: “I can’t hardly wait.” I guess the grammar deficiencies of youth are not entirely a marker of the 20th Century’s so-called “failed” educational system.
I’ve finished page three, and I’ve written three pages. If I keep up this pace, the project will take me longer than 120 days, and my commentary will be as long or longer than the 1084 page novel!

The critics continue weighing in (http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/pynchon.htm. ) Amazing how negative they are. Or not! Is it really surprising that a media which loves sound bites can't deal with a text that asks its readers to luxuriate and indulge in a rich tapestry of prose and ideas. Is Pynchon indulgent- yeah! Is that bad--only in the ways that single malt Scotch and Swiss chocolcolate are bad. We need to learn a little patience, we need to learn how to indulge again!

Against the Day

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day (http://www.amazon.com/Against-Day-Thomas-Pynchon/dp/159420120X)
which is being released on Tuesday, November 21. Alreadt, reviews are appearing ( http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/popus/pynchon.htm), and most reviewers seem annoyed at the complexity of the novel, and they way it seems to resist easy characterization.

Pynchon has never been an easy read. I remember my own frustrations with Gravity's Rainbow over 30 years ago. I ended up reading the first 5o pages three times before I had enough of a grasp of his thematic and narrative threads to finish the novel. However, unlike most fiction I have read, lines and scenes from this novel remain in my head to this day. Pynchon was the first American novelist to achieve the scope and gravitas of a Tolstoi or a Dostoevsky in his fiction (Neal Stephenson is the second). Reading his work requires patience and effort, readerly qualities not particularly common in the age of Ridalin.

Chronologically covering the years from 1893 until just after World War I, Against the Day covers a period of particular historical importance to our own time. Modernization and globalization and industrialization all emerge as forces during this time, and the modern psyche is born, along with Futurism, literary modernism, and science fiction. Virginia Woolf, who chronicled the same period in much of her fiction (particularly in her highly underrated novel The Years), has argued that around 1910 something happened which altered our global consciousness. My own academic dissertation on the Manifesto genre seems to revolve around this period of time, a time I think we inadequately understand. I can't wait to get Pynchon's take on it.

Pynchon's novels are complex and difficult, but I never feel that his writing is complex for its own sake. Rather, it seems to be complex like life--messy, not always thematic, with narratives that multiply and intertwine. Not a reductionist art, not a monologue, or even a dialogue, Pynhon'c work is inherently a multilogue.

I'm looking forward to the next four months--I predict I will reach the finish line around March 21.

The Fifth Discipline

Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday Currency, 1995)

For more information, my source is:

http://www.fieldbook.com/DoC/DOChistory.html


In the early 1970s, Peter Senge was a graduate student in the systems dynamics program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Systems dynamics is an academic discipline which focuses on understanding all systems as entities with consistent, even predictable patterns of behavior. Such systemic behavior occurs throughout our world: the human body is such a system, so are corporations, governments, cities, markets.

Has anyone ever seen or played the computer games “The Sims?, or “Sim City.”

These games are examples of systems thinking—if you take an action in the game it has consequences which cause things to happen, which leads you to make decisions which causes other changes to occur.

After graduating and joining the faculty at MIT, Senge began building a consulting business with a man named Charles Kiefer. This consulting firm, Innovation Associates was based upon the idea of applying systems understanding to business. By the mid-1980s, Innovation Associates had developed a set of “systems archetypes”—diagrams of replicable situations that business people could use as starting points for talking through the far-flung patterns of cause and effect in their businesses.

While meeting with business people in his consulting work, Senge and his colleagues began to realize that in an information society, the real assets of businesses were in the knowledge they possessed: not just their patents, their industrial processes, the copyrights they owned, but also the knowledge and skills of their individual employees. If companies and other organizations were to achieve the results they wanted, they needed to embed a variety of “lifelong bodies of study and practice” into their day-to-day work. Senge sought out to identify these practices which became the core of his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline, which after reaching the NYT bestseller list, still sells over 40,000 copies a year nationwide. There are now close to a million copies in print. (Cover says 400,000).

The same year, MITs Center for Organizational Learning Opened, with Senge as its director. 20 major corporations became partners in this effort. Senge, and teams from MIT, Innovation Associates, and a number of other consulting companies began to put the ideas behind organizational learning into practice. Shell, Ford, IBM, to name just a few companies which are using or have incorporated organizational learning in their business and management models.

So what is this movement really all about? Our reading of The Fifth Discipline will answer that question in one way, but it is a dense, theoretical book, and now over 14 years old. Its not always easy to figure out where these ideas fit, and where they come from. So let me give it a try.

Epistemological Principles in Organizational Learning:

Knowledge is socially constructed. Knowledge is not facts or figures, or even procedures which you learn. Historically, education has been seen as a process which transmits ideas from one generation to the next, the elders (that would be me) transmitting their knowledge to the new generation (that would be you). This view assumes that society will pretty much remain the same from generation to generation, and that the knowledge can be packaged and packed on. Social constructivists disagree and argue that knowledge actually comes from ones experience working within social groups-in the school, in the family, and in the corporation.

Knowledge is non-foundational. There are no absolute or universal answers. What is right for your company may not be right for my company. Knowledge is not universal, it develops and belongs to specific communities which develop that knowledge using their own language, symbols, and artifacts.

Knowledge is lifelong, and omnipresent. (It fills space and time). It doesn’t just occur in schools. This has consequences: it is an everyday occurrence, and something we should pay attention to. Are our employees are learning things (i.e. this company doesn’t care about me) which are ultimately damaging to the organization’s performance?

Knowledge belongs to everyone. We all have knowledge, things we have learned. Yet schools have trained us to see knowledge as something given to us by “teachers” in our schools or “managers” at our work. People need to trust their own ability to learn, yet often our schools and our businesses instead teach people to learn passively, to “take in” information.
Process knowledge is more important than content knowledge. Learning “how to” is more important than learning “what.” Learning how to learn, to research, to write, and to trust your own ability to do so, is critical.

Wisdom is more important than expertise.
Expertise: I think, relying on what I’ve been taught, and I act.
Wisdom: I act based upon my thinking, upon my reflections about my experiences, based upon my body and its knowledge, based upon my emotions, and upon my spirit.

Last Reviews

The last four reviews of class blogs.

The blog on Spanish in the Business World (http://spanishinthebusinessworld.blogspot.com/) needs work. Only four brief entries. No links, no real reflection. The blogger asks some good questions, but I'd think the blogger could have found some answers in the time since the last post (September 22!).

Interesting posts on the Careers in Accounting blog (http://careersinaccounting.blogspot.com/), but no posts since October 18th, and only two posts at this point in the semester (week 11!) just doesn't hack it.

Another fine design, with interesting ideas at Michael's Business Finance blog (http://businessblogfinance.blogspot.com/2006/08/hello.html). But only four posts, and none since October 16 is unsatisfactory.

Amy's blog on Business Ethics(http://wysslerwisdom.blogspot.com/) It has great posts, great links, and she posts regularly to maintain a connection with her audience.

Cars and More (http://cars-and-more.blogspot.com/) is another great blog. It nicely covers the automobile business, and uses links and visuals. Nice work!

Two blogs that would receive good grades at this point, three that would receive failing grades.

I'm concerned that so many students seem to be virtually ignoring the blogging assignment. It is worth 15% of the grade, and while students with bad blogs can still pass the assignment if they start blogging regularly, they are running out of time. Since I will be grading on the frequency of blogs, the quality of the posts, and the use of the blog as a research tool, many students are running out of time. Large gaps in a blogs posting frequency will hurt the grade--after all, how can a reader connect with a blog if the blogger doesn't post on a regular basis?

This is the last day I will make comments on student blogs. Review my previous posts for examples and characteristics of good blogs, and not-so-good blogs.