Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
|
|
| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
|
|
Thursday, June 03, 2004 The Pitch: It's like the Last Day of Summer Vacation! Things I did during my last day of vacation:* Finally, finally, finally finished my re-read of Gravity's Rainbow; * Swore a lot at Blogger, which would not let me log in until I was smart enough to reboot my computer just now; * Swore a lot at the Hulk game, which is cheap in almost all senses of the word; * Went to lunch at Hamano Sushi with my lovely, lovely girlfriend; * Swore a lot at my computer, which included but was not limited to: swearing at Dreamweaver; swearing at Windows ME; swearing at my file organization structure; swearing at Microsoft Word; and swearing at Wordperfect, for it no longer being on my computer. This, sadly, will end up being the sum total of working on the CE website this weekend. As for the Hulk game--one of the best things it's got going for it is the save and quit option so that you can finish a level, save and then quit so you don't play to the point of defenestrating yourself or your game console. As I think I mentioned earlier, I like stealth missions, and think they're a fine and sensible way to incorporate Banner gameplay into the game--and frankly, you just can't have a good Hulk story without a Banner story. Although my young teen self watching the TV show would have been slow to agree (I probably could have convinced him if the show hadn't, like every non-cop/non-doctor/non-PI hour long drama of its time, ripped off the Fugitive for its format), I have an appreciation for the format now. Plus, you get Eric Bana's line readings this way which are right up there with Brian Cox's from Manhunt. (I wonder if there's ever been any kind of award, even just on a newsgroup, for that kind of thing...) But as I said, the Hulk is cheap: the boss villains have a nasty habit of "hulking out" and regenerating all their energy after you've spent twenty minutes battering them down, and there's a squad of a gamma guys with guns who can batter away all your health in one sustained impossible volley. By contrast, as the Hulk, you cannot be injured if you are in the process of picking up and hurtling an enemy. I can't imagine I could have ever gotten this far in the game without a cheap exploit like this, although the walkthroughs in Gamefaqs are littered with references with the "jumping smash combo." Despite all the swearing and head-grabbing, I think the game's an okay time-waster, perfect for the times when I'm tired of swearing and head-grabbing in front of the computer. I can't believe I started Gravity's Rainbow five months ago. There's some strange external/internal schism about the fact. In the world, I'm kind of embarrassed I did such a slow, lax job of re-reading the novel (Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion ended up by the side of the bed after aiding me in the first 350 pages of GR). As mentioned in an earlier post, a lot of the re-read was accomplished while sitting on the can--which I find fitting, not only for the recurrent waste imagery in the book but also because if there's any book that would want to be read while your pants are around your ankles, it's GR. Yes, as opposed to "in the world," in the head (and I take no credit for the pun), I'm glad I took such a long time with the re-read. I didn't just push through sections I had no time or no patience for. The book affected my inner life, and the changing of my inner life affected how I read the book. Toward the end, Slothrop begins unravelling, losing his sense of what he's trying to accomplish or who he is, which is remarkably similar to how a reader in his fourth month of reading the book will see him. What's he looking for again? Why? In fact, as much as I shake my head at my youthful theory about GR from the first time I read it through (Pynchon's novel, which rails against closed systems, eventually becomes aware of the novel as a closed system and deliberately explodes itself), I think there is something to it. Gravity's Rainbow is about, among other things, uncompleted quests, and so the novel makes itself uncompleteable to the reader--there is no closure, even when there is revelation. But, this time around, Gravity's Rainbow strikes me as an incredibly sad novel about the triumph of the elite and the doom of the preterite, with perhaps a deeply encoded emotional autobiography buried inside, mixing personal and public obsessions into an imagistic whole--a literary tarot deck, maybe. Pynchon, like Slothrop, was of the elite and became preterite--more by choice than poor Slothrop, although whether there is actually such a thing as "choice" is a pretty iffy proposition in Pynchon's book--and may now be, like Slothrop, lost among the dopers and the doomed. This time through I was struck by a section I don't remember at all from my first read, tucked away as it is in the brilliant passage describing Weissman's Tarot spread: "He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and with to usurp the palce of, and fail.... So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others will sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willign to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death." (Pgs. 871-72 in the Bantam paperback.) I think Pynchon would be rightly horrified by my inference of this section as Pynchon's explanation for himself and where he ended up, private peripatetic writer, since it's supposed to be, perhaps, a suggestion of Slothrop and many of the other characters' motivations. If nothing else, it's a pretty brilliant summation of male American society, and a more fitting explanation of the failure of the baby boomer generation in particular than the whole of Vineland. And now, on the last day of my vacation, I'm free and wondering where to next. Reading Anna Karenina with the Oprah book club? That hangdog copy of Wild Cards Brian lent two or three months ago? Or back to my tottering cycle of Delillo, McCarthy and Chabon? There's still the hefty Mason & Dixon hanging over my shoulder, in fact--the only Pynchon book I haven't read. And I have to admit, part of me wants to pick up Gravity's Rainbow again, and start right in again, persisting in the illusion that if I do it right this time I can unlock all the doors, understand all the visions. (Kind of like that mention of the antechambers of the throne seen by Isaac the moment before his sacrifice: "For the working mystic, having the vision and passing through the chambers one by one, is terrible and complex. You must have not only the schooling in countersigns and seals, not only the physical readiness through exercise and abstinence, but also a hardon of resolution that will never go limp on you." And you know, now that I read this little section, the more I see that is about reading Gravity's Rainbow--how interesting.) I haven't decided yet. Maybe it's time to go play Hulk some more. posted by Jeff Lester | 4:43 PM | |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
