FICTION // ill tomb era
“ja ja.” “oui oui.” “da da.”
Happy U.S. Tax Day. This week, some juvenile Pynchonalia from the archives, a post that’s not about Thomas Pynchon or his books so much as an early attempt to unball some of my own self-conscious tangle of feelings about them. Also, a short chunk of old fiction in which I use the word “wont.”
But anyways, to get the longish intro spiel going: those of us who have used this website--or any one of several unnamed analogues--in the last week will have heard that Shadow Ticket, the ninth Pynchon ripper and first since 2013, was announced by Penguin for release on October 7th of this year. Penguin’s press release for the book was accompanied by the same kind of cheeky story synopsis--high concept set and setting, shaggy dog mystery parameters, wink-nudge allusions to musical setpieces and plot bottoms dropping out--that has attended each of the three most recent Thom drops going back to 2006, when Against the Day was just a glimmer in the collective eye of the “pynchon-L” mailing list.
I was seventeen when that 2006 announcement hit, already a confirmed (and thirsty and obsessive and weirdly territorial) Pynchon fanboy, and the subsequent novels’ hype cycles, plus the one that accompanied the movie, have all brought new and itchy convolutions to my experiences of those books. Which is not to say that I didn’t find plenty to enjoy in Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge (even if the relative amounts do vary), or that I’m unaware it’s, like, so ridiculous to claim any kind of ownership over an author whose books sell in the literal millions. I swear, I understand that the new Pynchon novel is not about me. But this Substack is, which is why I feel compelled to note that, even though I’m unreasonably psyched to get to read Shadow Ticket, a part of me is also pre-stressed as to how--amid the lures and delusions of our present lit scene, the nightmare online economy and the blunt incentivization of glib takes and the dopey br*dernism “discourse”--I’m gonna handle the whole thing.
Let’s call it a “wait and see” for the moment, though I’m eager to do more writing as we approach the book’s release so that some actual nuance on the Pynchon oeuvre might be arrived at by October. Failing that, I’ll at least keep interrogating this legitimately confusing emotional state. If Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood link up for Penguin’s TikTok ad or whatever, you’re gonna hear from me.
In the meantime, here is some text from Ill Tomb Era, the novel manuscript I published in serial chunks from 2011 to 2015 or so via Pleasure Editions. This is writing I undertook across my years of peak maximalist lit consumption, during which, for better or worse, I pretty much basted my entire artistic sensibility in Pynchon and Gaddis and Marguerite and Alex (at the time we didn’t have the “blunt rotation” concept, which may have helped). Anyway, you’ll be shocked to hear that this .·:*¨rarefied aesthetic influence¨*:·. shows heavily in the work, which is why I’m only posting a little--and doing so with this long note appended as partial apologia, or at least explanation, for all the Pynchonisms to follow.
But also, to be clear, I do think parts of the text still rip. This section, the novel’s opening, also refers obliquely to the origins of Tristan Tzara, who showed up last week, so faithful subscribers will be rewarded or whatever. Good thing I only ever talk about like three things.
Love,
Mark
What is it that came before the word? Who is it laid bare the stakes? Some figure, hard to catch sight of then and harder to remember in the careening days that followed, though all were quick to recall that brush past the door, footstep in the dirt outside, tiny lift in the kitchen curtain just so, feeling of something invisible sweeping into the house as the first prayers went up, and on a night like that... Mothers with young children, for whom nursery rhymes were still wont to spill forth only half-bidden, were apt to think of him as Luceafărul, Eminescu’s famous evening-star, here finally descended down its ray of creation to smile on good, simple folk. Children, no less suckers for the magic conveyed in verse and raised on this heady backdrop of Sabbath chants, swore it was tiptoeing Eliyoho Hanovi come through to finally take that sip of wine. Others—the lush on his barstool, the old man behind the leather shop counter, those whose connections to those old poesies had just about fully eroded, and been replaced with poporanist workaday practicalities—cast meaningful glances at one another until the stranger moved on, mumbling afterward about the accent they were sure they picked up, a new Jew arendator, landlord oppressor, another sent by cosmopolitans to infest the area, this town, Moineşti, rotten with rites and tribalisms and secret societies as it was, and by now its every parcel of land just so much commerce to line the cabal’s filthy pockets. And such an odd timbre in the man’s voice—what had he said his name was? No one could recall; only the most recent exchanges lingered in the memory, then they too went gossamer, took wing and flitted. He had asked for directions to the railway station. Word was he was headed for the capital.
He is pictured, when done so—in fresco cycles on seldom-passed walls, or in shabbily-xeroxed concert fliers pinned to telephone poles—in a few key poses. Here lifting a gloved hand up to the big departures board, here wandering in the aisles and whispering in a conductor’s ear, hiding in the locker toilet during ticket control, gazing out the window, expression content, peaceable as the countryside that just rolls by. Smiling at the gendarme who walks past and doesn’t see a thing. Smiling at the downcast woman in black, husband felled of late in an attack by rampaging townsfolk, whose wan countenance now carries with it this obscene suggestion of earning for oneself, however she must do it, on the city streets. The train reaches the capital, in fact, just as the attacks back in Moldavia spill over into a full-blown workers’ revolt, those same Mojnescht Jews now in, yeah, some trouble... And this hazy shape—call him Domnule Zgomot, Monsieur Bruit, a Herr Rauschen, a Mr. Noise, names being academic, and meaningless where he’s concerned—what concentrated kernel, what diamond-dense nucleus of his essence comes ripping before the Word, appears as if by hap, in a Western-style tailcoat and Beau Brummel boots, on the rainslicked streets of Bucharest.
He gets to work immediately, slipping handfuls of foreign gold coins, francs, sovereigns, Turkish lire, in the designated pockets. He hints, sly in backrooms and sure steady handshakes, speaking whatever language is called for, on account he knows them all. He tracks down the children, those chosen whose mothers still speak of his golden descent, children whom he means, in accented sagesse and an eye on the longview, to initiate.
“It’s a hard path, and doomed,” he says, in the darkened out-of-the-way spaces in which he makes his offers, this funny paradox being pretty much the crux of the whole schpiel. “Do you accept?”
“Ja ja.” “Oui oui.” “Da da.” He smiles, and the cellars illuminate, with just the barest spark of countervailing light.
Initiatory rites are proffered. The magic used is very old. The girls are separated from the boys and each is cleaned thoroughly, from head to foot, in warm waters that smell of linden and chamomile. Dried with flowers, white basil petals and ruddy umbels of dill. Eyelids are shut, like a corpse’s, with the gentlest brush of the stranger’s fingertips, and each child falls into a warm and welcoming sleep, hardly settled into for exploration of the lengthy gestation ahead before the stranger is gone, whoosh, the doorhinge flapping once more.
Years pass, and they are bad ones. Suddenly there is this saying going round. It’s in French, about l’état, and it goes, “Il tombera.” The mothers in the countryside fret and observe with silent dread the way things seem to be getting worse and worse. Yet there are contraindications. In the city, on the street, people begin to speak strangely. Old languages up and reappear on the tips of their unaccustomed Orthodox tongues. A rich father brings his daughter to the doctor, says he can’t figure out why she’s been spewing these snatches of trashy old noise. The doctor, world-beater, Budapest-born and rational as they come, furrows a practiced furrow, bustles a filing cabinet, talks about the weather, stalling on account of, well, it’s strange but the way the girl just sits there—dark hair straight down and sticking out in front of her eyes, also black, hard-set, yeah she’s got that initiate look alright—and babbles, oblivious to the grownups’ conversation and all in an unearthly, tilting low register.
The doctor sets her up with a basic hearing test. Pulls a phonograph record off of a shelf, explains that musical tones will sound in groups of one, two, or three. “Repeat them, that’s all,” but when the recording pops and wheezes to life, what begins playing is something different. Before the doc has a chance to realize he’s put on the wrong disc, a shimmer of clarinet birdsong lifts into the dingy room, arcs over their heads and next thing you know the girl is whistling back the trilly beginning of the ‘Quartet for the End of Time’—that infinitely slow piece of Messiaen’s, composed and performed of late in a freezing German prison camp, at a performance attended only by fellow captives, starved and faded, and the guards who just sat there, as this doc sits now, rapt...
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