Backlisted - The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Our guests are both Backlisted old hands: Professor Sarah Churchwell, Professor in American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and Sam Leith, literary editor of the Spectator. We are discussing the 1966 postmodern novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, by some way his shortest book, but no less complex and intriguing for its relative brevity. Sound the muted post horn! Also in this episode, Andy extols the subtle virtues of former guest Susie Boyt’s novel, Loved and Missed while John discovers the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s dramatic sequence, Deaf Republic, which tells the stories of a fictional town falling under foreign occupation. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 07:38 - Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt. 14:43 - Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky. 22:16 - The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Sarah, how's your book going? It's going. It's going. It's going. It's going in on Monday. I feel like you've been on before, Sarah, and you've been up against a deadline.

And so is appearing on Backlisted, I feel like you've been on before, Sarah, and you've been up against a deadline. And so is appearing on Backlisted, does that help you finish a book or does it delay the book? We'll have to see what people think of it when it comes out, whether I felt the final hurdle because I came on tonight. Because I'm definitely going to blame you if the reviewers don't like it. That seems fair. Because I could have fixed everything about it in the two hours that we're going to take to do this

if it's bad. That's right, yeah. Sam, where are you calling from? I'm calling from glamorous East Finchley in North London. Have you managed to get out of East Finchley much? Barely at all.

I haven't been to my office at The Spectator for approximately two years now. Wow. So I'm a complete shut-in. I'm becoming more Pinchonian by the day. Aren't we all? I mean, we're all... We're all now Thomas Pinchon.

It's his world, we're learning to live in it. Exactly. The world Pinchon dictated, yeah. Oh dear. Johnny, should we start? Why don't we? Why don't we kick on in? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books.

Today you find us in the mid-60s, squinting into the sunshine behind the wheel of a rented Impala as we speed down the freeway towards the city of San Narciso in Southern California. In front of us looms a vast sprawl of houses. To the left, miles of barbed wire-topped fencing and the entrance to the Galactronics Division of Yo-Yo Dine Inc., the city's biggest employer, its main gateway flanked by two 60-foot massals. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound,

the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we welcome back two friends of the podcast, Dame Sam Leith and Dame Sarah Churchwell. Welcome back to both of you. Thank you. It's very nice to be promoted. Thank you. It's lovely to be back. Two dames. I don't know why I said that.

Anyway. I'm nothing like a dame. Yeah, exactly. I've usually been called a dame by worse people than you. Oh, dear. Can you spare a dame? Sam is literary editor of The Spectator magazine and the author of a handful of books,

including You Talking to Me, Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama, and Right to the Point. That's right with a W. Right to the Point. How to be clear, correct and persuasive on the page. He's now working on a book about the history of children's literature. And he joined us for the 96th

episode of Backlisted, which was dedicated to Ray Bradbury and the Illustrated Man. And also, Sam is the host of the Spectators Books podcast, aren't you Sam? Very good. I am. A minnow

to your whale. Is that podcast currently up for an award at the British Press Guild Awards? I suspect that the answer is no, but yours is. Is it? Oh, how... How nice of you to mention...

So nice of you to bring it up, Sam. I can't... That's so generous of you to bring it up, Sam. I can't... That's so generous of you. Well, congratulations, Andy. Absolutely shameless. Shameless. I'm just asking. I'm just asking the question.

This is a freedom of speech issue. Right. That's what it is. And it is... Well, we haven't said it, have we? We haven't said it. We've just let Sam say it. So, anyway. Also, we're joined said it, have we? We haven't said it. We've just let Sam say it. So anyway.

Also, we're joined by Sarah Churchwell today. Hello, Sarah. Hello. Sarah is Professor in American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Behold America, A History of America First and the American Dream,

and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, which in 2022 inspired a four-part CNN documentary narrated by Jessica Chastain. Her latest book is The Wrath to Come, Gone with the Wind and the Myths of Modern America. Because she likes a fight, everybody. And that's coming out. You're not wrong.

It's coming out in July 2022. Is that the book you finished today? Yeah. I'm literally here as I've just finished the edits and I've delivered it. So it comes out in the summer and I've been immersed in Gone With The Wind and Civil War, so I'm going to have to shift gears to the 60s, as John said, but I will do my best.

Amazing turnaround from head of Zeus, your publisher. Respect. Yeah, they've been great about it. I actually delivered something a while ago and I wasn't happy with it and they've been really great about it. And I was like, can I have a do-over? And they said yes, which was incredibly marvelous of them. So now i have to really really really hope none of my authors are listening to this it's just this is well they should take they should take note that you've begun the publicity campaign within hours

of finishing the book indeed indeed and of nothing but praise for my publisher yeah so keep them sweet. This is Sarah's sixth appearance on Backlisted. She joined us previously to talk about Nella Larson, Anita Luce, Gail Jones. Gail Jones, imagine that. As Gail Jones publishes novel after novel at the moment. Incredible. I think we inspired her, don't you think?

Yeah, William Faulkner. He's got one coming out too. And she made a cameo appearance on our Priestmas, and I saw a Priest episode as well, which was great. Johnny. The book we're here to discuss is The Crying of Lot 49, the second novel by Thomas Pynchon, first published in the US in 1966 by J.B. Lippincott & Co., although excerpts had appeared the previous year in Esquire and Cavalier magazines. Its first UK publication was in 1967 by Jonathan Cape. Usually described, we might come on to this, as a classic of postmodern fiction,

it follows the attempts of a young Californian woman, Edith Pumas, to make sense of why she's been made executrix of a former lover's estate. As we will doubtless discover, the book is impossible to describe succinctly. It's a brilliant and intricate satire in 60s America, a gripping page turner, a literary hall of mirrors which scorches its way into the reader's consciousness through the strange beauty of its language, the audacity of its ideas and the

zaniness of its plot and characters. Anyway, before we start comparing notes on Jacobean tragedy or trolling Instagram in search of muted post horns. Andy, what have you been reading this week? So I've been reading a book that came out last year by our former guest on Backlisted, Susie Boyt. It's her seventh novel and it's called Loved and Missed. And Susie said something to me after we recorded the episode. John Berryman, wasn't it? John Berryman and the Dream Songs.

And Sam, I know you're a big Berryman fan, aren't you? We were talking about the role that alcohol and addiction played in Berryman's life and work, both those things life and work and she said to me you know, my novel that I've just published is sort of about a similar topic but coming at it from a different angle coming at it from the angle of the people who had to live alongside John Berryman and that's really stuck in my mind

but what was one thing and another I wasn't able to get to the novel straight away but I'm really pleased that I did because it's just brilliant I'm almost pleased I hadn't read it before she came on I know that I should have done but I think I would have been considerably more intimidated. It's just such a brilliant book. It's her seventh novel. It's about four women. Ruth, who is a teacher. Her friend Jean, who teaches at the same school she does Ruth's daughter Eleanor who is an addict

and Eleanor's daughter and Ruth's granddaughter Lily who is not around at the course of the novel grows up from a baby to a teenager. And what I think the novel is about is the long-term effect, over almost 20 years in this case, on a parent of the behaviour of their child, most generally, but more specifically, the long-term effect on the parent if their child is an addict, how that manifests itself at different points in the parent's coping mechanisms,

in their self-reproach, the extent to which they do and don't blame themselves and how much that changes over time. The effect on the parent's social circle, their colleagues, their friends, who know about this never-ending, seemingly never-ending problem and how they position themselves in relationship to their work colleague or their old friend and but also how the behavior of the addict and how the parent feels about it into the parents existing self-esteem self-image whatever parcels of guilt or inadequacy Ruth may have picked up in her

60-odd years before we meet her, how are those in turn catalyzed by having to deal with her daughter Eleanor and Eleanor's decision to have a daughter of her own? and Eleanor's decision to have a daughter of her own. I mean, in narrative terms, what it means is that Ruth effectively kidnaps Eleanor's daughter for, as she tells herself, her granddaughter's protection. bringing up the granddaughter becomes an opportunity to try and do things right that she feels may have gone wrong even though nothing may have gone wrong in relationship in relation to her daughter and if I've made that sound a bit chewy that's my fault that's not Susie Boyk's fault because it's written with such clarity and with such emotional poise. It's also sort of quietly experimental. The narrative voice switches around in a way which is sort of ambitious and risky.

And I just found it. I found it incredibly moving, not sentimentally, so really deeply moving i i had to keep pausing between the chapters to try and weigh up what had happened to any one of those four women at any any given moment and i found it profoundly illuminating so suzy if you listen to this thank you very very much i feel like I learned so much. Can I just read two paragraphs? The start of chapter two. I'd particularly like to draw listeners' attention to the first sentence of this.

I mean, one would be so happy if one wrote this sentence, and Susie Boyd did write it, so here it is. On the morning of the christening, I took the sicket in a Sainsbury's carrier to a man off Bond Street. I'm just going to read that again because I like it so much. On the morning of the christening, I took the sicket in a Sainsbury's carrier

to a man off Bond Street. We stood facing each other while I muttered something formal and incoherent. We were in a darkish Italian cafe three quarters empty. Twelve shiny lozenge-shaped rosewood effect tables, not much wider than ironing boards and Elvis droning on and on about missed opportunities. I was nervous. I felt shipwrecked almost. Ship-wracked. He took the brown paper from the painting, narrowed his mouth, dipped his shoulders.

He was organising himself for disappointment, I could see. I stored it up, his little insincere routine, thought it might come in useful later. The man was wiry and weak-chested with a stale Dickensian pallor, nicotine stains on all ten of his fingers, wild of hair. It's not a great picture, he said. A sketch. The ancient-looking painting of a sparrow-like figure on stage in white organdy flanked by red curtains, one arm raised in the direction of the gallery, was the best thing I had. It is what it is, the man said. She gets £4,000 for the painting and she gives it all to her daughter

in the full knowledge of what the daughter will do with it and takes the granddaughter. So that's Loved and Missed by Susie Boy. It's an absolutely wonderful novel and it's out now in hardback and it's published in paperback in June. And who's published it? Virago. Virago, brilliant.

John, what have you been reading? I have been reading a collection of poetry by the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky called Deaf Republic, which was published in 2019 and was published kind of to very very good reviews both here and in the US. I suppose I started reading it because like everybody I've been looking, reading, listening to stuff that helps you kind of pick some kind of emotional trajectory through what's happening in Ukraine at the moment. And I have to say, this book, reading it now, I'm not sure what I would have felt.

I'm sure I'd have admired it if I'd read it two years ago. But it really feels like it has a kind of clairvoyant power uh it's unique i suppose in in kind of collections of poetry i've been reading recently and it has a narrative structure he described it himself as a fairy tale in verse it tells a story in two acts it's like a play in two acts concerning a group of characters in a city under siege uh being besieged and um without giving away too much it's two of the characters are uh a puppeteers there's a there's the the sequence starts with the murder of a by a soldier of a small boy um in a public square um and gradually as you work through the narrative,

the second half of the narrative concerns another, both the husband and wife are puppeteers and have a baby. And then the second half is about another older puppeteer who looks after the baby. But gradually there is a lot of death through the sequence. You're going to read us a poem from the beginning of the book and then one from the middle of the book and then one from near the end of the sequence. You're going to read us a poem from the beginning of the book and then one from the middle of the book and then one from near the end of the book so listeners can get a sense of

the structure that you're talking about. What's the first one? So the first one is the very near the beginning it's called Gunshot. Our country is the stage when soldiers march town, public assemblies are officially prohibited. But today, neighbours flock to the piano music from Sonia and Alfonso's puppet show in Central Square. Some of us have climbed up into the trees, others hide behind benches and telegraph poles. When Petya, the deaf boy in the front row, sneezes, the sergeant puppet collapses, shrieking. He stands up again, snorts, shakes his fist at the laughing audience. An army jeep swerves into the square, disgorging its own sergeant.

Disperse immediately. Disperse immediately, the puppet mimics in wooden falsetto. Everyone freezes except Petya, who keeps giggling. Someone claps a hand over his mouth. The sergeant turns toward the boy, raising his finger. You! You! The puppet raises a finger. Sonia watches her puppet. The puppet watches the sergeant. The sergeant watches Sonia and Alfonso, but the rest of us watch Petya, lean back, gather all the spit in his throat, and launch it at the sergeant. The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water. That's our opening sequence which sets the poem up. I mean, it's one of the things that he does through this ilia is um his heart of hearing he lost most of his hearing i think most of it he's now managed

to restore through electronic means but for a lot of his life he's he's lived as a death person so one of the things that uh the older puppeteer mama galia does in the book is create a sign language they resist the occupation by speaking in sign language and this creates an extraordinary reflection on silence and the meaning of silence he said silence doesn't exist for the death it's an invention of the hit of the hearing writing the notes at the end of the book but should we hear the next poem andy so this this is Ilya. Ilya reads his own audio book of Death Republic. So we're going to hear him

reading a poem now from the middle of the collection called A Cigarette. A cigarette. Watch. Washington citizens do not know they are evidence of happiness. In a time of war, each is a ripped-out document of laughter.

Watch, God, they've got something to tell that not even they can hear. have something to tell that not even they can hear. Clabber roof, in the center square of this bombarded city you will see one neighbor gives a cigarette, another gives a dog a pint of sunlit beer. You will find me, God, like a dumb pigeon's beak. I am packing every which way at astonishment. John, I did read this two years ago. Yeah. I thought it was all right.

And it's depressing to say that when I came back to it, when I knew you were going to be talking about it, I found it jaw-dropping for all the wrong reasons in terms of because of what's happening in the world at the moment. I'm going to go tonight, I'm going to read the whole thing again. Really, really unbelievably powerful. And as you say, clairvoyant. It's powerful. I think the final, final poem is this one, and it ends after this. There are some of the sign language that has been developed through the book for the people in the town. The sign language says, the town watches earth's story. That's the final, as it were,

poem in the book, and it's just pictures of hands on the page. The town watches earth's story. That's the final, as it were, poem in the book, and it's just pictures of hands on the page. The town watches earth's story, which is a kind of, again, this sense that somehow things endure, that things happen, buildings are destroyed, lives are destroyed, but there is something that endures. And this final poem that he's going to read

gives a sense of that. And he up on some nights, our country has surrendered. Yes, later, some will say none of this happened. The shops were open. We were happy. And when to see puppet shows in the park? We were happy and went to see puppet shows in the park. And yet, on some nights, townspeople dim the lights and teach their children to sign. Our country is a stage. From patrols march, we sit on our hands.

Don't be afraid. A child signs to a tree, a door. From the patrol's march the avenue's empty, air empties, but for the squeaks of strings and the tap-tap of footing fists against the walls. Zavall's. You know, to most people, the vast job of handling the mails is a mystery. Folks simply drop their mail in the neighborhood mailbox, then don't give it another thought. They just have faith that it will be delivered to the addressee within a day or so anywhere in the United States. Your post office has given such dependable service for so long

that speed and accuracy are taken for granted. We're glad for this confidence. But today we can't take it for granted any longer. Let's face it. Our method of handling the mail is old-fashioned. We have some very serious problems. But we are solving them. We are making real progress.

Now our narrator will show you how. It's the crying of Lot 49. And to quote Gore Vidal, Lot 49 has been cried. Who will open the bidding? I think we should open the bid. I think Sarah should make the opening bid because she chose this book for us Sarah when did you first read The Crying of Lot 49? I first read The Crying of Lot 49 as I began my journey into postgraduate education in English literature. And I had a not dissimilar experience to the one that

you just described, Andy, in that it was one of many, many books that I read as I began my education, but that everybody had told me was brilliant. And I read it and I didn't see anything there. And I thought it was full of dumb, puerile jokes. And by the way, it is full of dumb, puerile jokes. And I mean, and by the way, it is full of dumb puerile jokes. Just to reassure listeners. Yeah, in my defense, it is definitely full of those. But that's very much on the surface. And I didn't see past the surface at all at first. And then there's something about it that works on you even unconsciously, or at least did on me. And, and I went back to it. And it was one of those where it just kind of, you know, the scales fall from my eyes.

It was in fact a revelation. It was an epiphany, which is very, very appropriate because this is a book about epiphanies. And it kind of works on that level, I think. I have now spent the last kind of 20 or 30 years teaching it over and over and over again. And it's easily, in my opinion, one of the five greatest American novels of the 20th century. And it's easily, in my opinion, one of the five greatest American novels

of the 20th century. And it's one of the reasons that I brought it here because now I've been on this kind of run to bring the ones that I think are the masterpieces. And it's a weird thing to say about Pynchon because he's so lionized. But I think this book, The Crying of Lot 49, has a real claim to be called a neglected masterpiece.

How many times have you read it to the nearest... Round it up. How many? Oh, 50. Very good. Very good. I'd expect nothing fewer. That'll pass the Miller test easily. Indeed, yeah. So, Sam Leith, Sarah has opened the bidding at 50.

Yes, I think I'll probably get three. Even so, respectable. Which is an amateur hour, but there we are. I am trying, because you said you were going to ask this, to kind of remember how I got into pinching. And you find yourself talking about it a bit as if it's one of those sort of drug almost, you know, what was the gateway drug was it kind of lot 49 or was it the very very funny beginning of gravity's rainbow i know that i read both of those books in my teens or early 20s and kind of was entranced by them and didn't you know like sarah completely get them but i could see there was something going on there because pinchons among other things his ear the cadences are so good i'm sure we'll talk about you know, like Sarah, completely get them. But I could see there was something going on there

because Pynchon's, among other things, his ear, the cadences are so good. I'm sure we'll talk about that later. But actually the sort of, you know, the time I suddenly dropped two Pynchons at once and really got it was when I was asked to review Against the Day, which is enormous. And, you know, none more Pynchon. The more pinching the pinchiness is dialed up

to 11 in that book and because I had had it for review I had to read its thousand odd pages in about two weeks and therefore I did literally nothing else for two weeks and it's one of the very very few experiences I've had of having finished reading a novel and for about a week afterwards, actually feeling like my entire brain had been rearranged and I was seeing the world in a different way. And it really was like having taken some sort of psychedelic. John, have you read, what's your history with Pynchon? OK, so I read this when I was a teenager and I read this and I read Gravity's Rainbow. You know, we used to show off because we'd read Gravity's Rainbow. I was so interested in the ideas, particularly all the kind of physics

and the kind of conspiracy theories in the book. I had not realised how unbelievably beautiful the language in this novel is. You know, I do this all the time, I'm backlisted, but I've not had so much fun as the last week of rereading this novel. And I've actually read it twice because it's so rich. It's clearly a great novel. What about you? Yeah, same as you, really.

I mean, I've read The Crying of Lot 49 when I was a teenager. I read Mason and Dixon when that was published in the 90s. I didn't really understand that at all. And so I reread The Crying of Lot 49 for this. But I thought, ah, I'm going to get ahead of these experts this time. So what I did was I bought this, a Companion to the Crying of Lot 49 by J. Kerry Grant. And I've got to tell you,

this is one of those rare instances where I was, after reading a Companion to the Crying of Lot 49 by J. Kerry Grant, I was even more confused than after reading the Crying of Lot 49. Nothing against J. Kerry Grant,

I have to add. But such is the range of Melville-like, cosmic, scientific, historic, universal stuff within this little 150-page book. I felt J. Kerry Grant himself was sort of exasperated while he was trying to race through, telling you all the things that are being referenced in The Crying of Lot 49. So I'm totally fascinated. We're going to come back to this later in the podcast. And I'm totally fascinated by where Thomas Pynchon sits now

in the canon. The 20th century novelist, Thomas Pynchon sits now in the canon, the 20th century novelist Thomas Pynchon. I want us to come back round to that. I think what would be great, Sarah, could you read us a bit and then I'll share the blurb from the original first edition. I'm doing it that way round because I want people to hear the language before we then try and explicate it. I feel like if we just signal listening to one aspect of it, which is that it's a novel about metaphor and it's a novel full of metaphors and similes, epic similes. And but they're kind of postmodern jokey epic similes. Right. And they're how meaning is built. So I'm going to read an extended metaphor, which is how the book begins, which is our heroine. which is how the book begins, which is our heroine. Now, we've had conversations about how to pronounce names on this program before, but now I'm going to hold out for the American pronunciation here for a simple reason,

which is so her name is Oedipa or Oedipa as the female version of Oedipus. And the reason I'm going to say Oedipa in the American style is because her friends or her husband actually calls her Ed, and it's spelled O-E-D. her friends or her husband actually calls her Ed, and it's spelled O-E-D. So unless we think he's calling her Ode, I believe it's pronounced Oedipa. Now, I actually want to come back to O-E-D, because that's a very Pynchonesque joke, and there's a reason why her name is Ode. But I think we have to say Oedipa for it all to work. So the novel opens with her learning that she's become the executrix of her ex-lover, and she learns at the same time that he died. So it opens with her learning that she's become the executrix of her ex-lover, and she learns at the same time that he died. So it opens with her discovering that her ex-lover died,

and that she has been made his executrix. And at the end of the first chapter, she has a memory of this trip that they took together to Mexico. And it sets up everything really that the novel is going to do through this extended metaphor. And it's a comparison to a real painting, which is worth everyone knowing as they listen to this as well. This is one slightly long paragraph. As things developed, she was to have all manner of revelations, hardly about Pearson Verarity or herself, but about what remained, yet had somehow before this

stayed away. There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation. She had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie just perceptibly out of focus that the projectionist refused to fix, and had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl, somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say, hey, let down your hair. When it turned out to be Pierce, she'd happily pulled out the pins and curlers, and down it tumbled in its whispering, dainty avalanche. Only when Pierce had got maybe halfway up, her lovely hair turned through some sinister sorcery into a great unanchored wig, and down he fell on his ass. But, dauntless, perhaps using one of his many credit cards for a shin, he'd slip to the lock on her tower door and come up the conk-like stairs.

Which, had true guile come more naturally to him, he'd have done to begin with. But all that had then gone on between them had really never escaped the confinement of that tower. In Mexico City, they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Barro. In the central painting of a triptych titled Bordando al Manto Terrestre, were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void. For all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships, and forests of the earth were

contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment, she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever. See the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears,

as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing. There'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are, like her ego, only incidental. That what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning

to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition or take up a useful hobby like embroidery or go mad or marry a disc jockey if the tower is everywhere and the night of deliverance no proof against its magic what else oh my mic drop sarah churchill can i say one thing about before we move to the next thing which is those last four options are exactly what happens in the book yeah but i want people to hear that resonating as we talk before we go to sam sam you're going to be first off this nikki it's time for your question that all listeners enjoy take it away guys what is the book actually about sam go that's such a hard question I would say it's about paranoia as a way of apprehending the

world um I'm gonna need to qualify that slightly in the sense that paranoia we normally talk about is you know in the vulgar sense is people are out to get me I don't think that's what the book's about but in the broader sense that as I understand it paranoid schizophrenia can manifest as a sort of understanding that absolutely everything's interconnected and everything rhymes with everything else and everything's a metaphor for everything else so it's it's this kind of hall of mirrors and hall of echoes that i think is what what it's getting at it's almost a way of seeing the world rather than a series of events. And as you, I think you said to me, and certainly there's the sense I got from that passage Sarah read, when you say what it's about, when we try and, and we were having a laugh really with the idea that you can say what it's about, but there's something fractal

about it, right? The sense that it goes round and reflects in on itself and everything's connected to everything else. Sarah, if we ask you, what's it about? Well, you just said, well, it's about those four things. No, I said that's the plot. That's what happens. So it is partly about those four things. Right. But I will say something different about what I think it's about. Do it for me. I'm going to quote Pynchon from this novel here. So I don't want to take credit for this phrase. And in fact, we'll come back to this phrase. It's about the high magic of low puns. It's about the ecstasy and insanity of language as a desperate search for meaning that we may

not want to know. And it's about how this kind of antic surface of language and comedy and irony and energy is actually dancing on the grave of a profound grief and loss. All right. John Mitchinson, what is it? No, Nikki, you ask John. You ask John. John, I don't get it.

What's it about? You will by the end, Nicky. It's about, among other things, Nicky, it's about the importance of the postal service. That's true. One of the things that really struck me about this was this is a book written before email and the idea of people's lives bleeding and leaking into one another,

which is affected now, I suppose, electronically. I mean, this is a novel that somehow manages to be brilliant about the digital age when the digital age was kind of in its infancy. So the idea that having networks and networks within networks and that those networks can turn very, very nasty. There's kind of the alt-right are predicted in this novel in a really sort of creepy way. So it's about the connections that generate meaning

but the connections also that repel people from one another. Sarah, what was the phrase you highlighted there from pinching the low the high magic of low puns okay the high magic of low puns so that what that makes me think of is which seems relevant is that pinching of course who's who has made very very few public appearances over the years almost none we have almost no recordings of his voice but one of the recordings that we do have of Pynchon is from his guest appearances in The Simpsons. With a paper bag over his head. Right, with a paper bag over his head. And we know that Matt Groening is a huge Pynchon fan,

and we know that Pynchon was a big fan of The Simpsons. And one of the things I remember Matt Groening said that they discovered very early in The Simpsons is for the balance was really important yin and yang was really important in the gags in The Simpsons so that every time you included a high concept high culture reference joke you had to balance it with a gag of Homer banging his head and as long as you as long as you have both those things circling one another then the show worked it's Shakespearean right it's that it's that basic concept of it's it's it's that you have to the tragic and the comic have to be in balance for the for the thing to work I can I can I say one thing to answer Nikki's question just because I feel there is also another line from the novel

that does answer the question and I always say my students, because this is a book that is, it's a quest and it's a mystery and it's a puzzle. And about halfway through the novel, a character says something. And I always say to my students, if you're reading a book that's a puzzle and a mystery and at the center point of the book,

a character shouts, communication is the key, then communication is the key. communication is the key to the puzzle um in my view and i think and it and it does actually connect all of the things that we've already been talking about as particularly what john was saying there i think that postal service you mean the postal service as an email but email as well the networks that the um the importance of communication or the attempt to create a true communication, to find true communication. Okay, so what we're going to do in a minute is I'm going to read you

the jacket blurb from the US first edition. Before people knew the crying of Lot 49 was the crying of Lot 49, somebody had to try and write a sales pitch and we're going to hear what that is. But Sam, could you read us a bit from the book as well so we can get some more of the pinching prose? Well, this is another passage that I think, as well as being extraordinarily beautiful, has that sadness that Sarah talked about and has that concern with metaphor, with connection.

And it comes from a passage after she's been wandering the streets in this sort of fugal state where she suddenly starts seeing the muted post horn everywhere. And she encounters an old drug sailor who has the muted post horn tattooed on his hands. And she sees him and he's sitting on this sort of ratty old mattress and she realises he's dying. And she says, it astonished her to think that so much could be lost.

Even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DTs. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind's plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organised in spheres, joyful or threatening, about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth, all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you were, inside, safe, or outside, lost.

Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sideways, screeching back across grooves of years to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love, ray-glosing, bitching among us and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity about his freshman calculus, DT. God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself for something innocuous, like an average rate, where velocity dwelled in the projectile, though the projectile be frozen in mid-flight, where death dwelled in the cell, though the cell be looked on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other

man had seen, if only because there was that high magic to low puns because DTs must give access to DTs of spectra beyond the known sun music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright but nothing she knew of would preserve them or him she gave him goodbye walked downstairs and then on in the direction he told her wow I mean just wow everyone who takes part in this episode will be awarded their Cub Scout reading badge afterwards because this is really I mean it's not easy to

necessarily to read but what I get from both of you is your pleasure in the your pure pleasure in Pynchon's pleasure in making the language dance right there's a sort of the the luxuriating in the vocabulary which I could see Mitch uh your face was utterly transported there while Sam was was reading it it's just it's so it's just so rich, that's the thing. It's profound and beautiful, which is, you know, what else do you want from fiction, really?

I think he has the most astonishing ear. Yeah. I mean, the cadences. Absolutely. It's interesting you say they're tricky to read, Andy, and you're right there, I think, because one of the things Pynchon loves to do is produce a great long sentence or fugal series of sentences

where, you know, he has these suspended clauses right in the middle and sort of holds off to the main clause or to where the sentence is heading. Can you give me... I'm not saying give me an example, but when you say a suspended clause, what do you mean? I mean, the sentence is, it sort of defers constantly the sort of completion. So, you know, the saint whose walk of delight laps, the clairvoyant whose laps and recall, the true paranoid.

You know, you're heading for the verb, but there's always something else interposing between the beginning of the sentence and the main verb. Exactly. I mean, the first sentence of the book is a brilliant example of that. Go on. Okay.

One summer afternoon, Mrs. Oedipa Mass came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time, but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Something gleeful about it, isn't there?

Yeah. The sense that, oh, look, I could go here or I could go there. But let's also remember there that, so, what we know as we read the novel is that she's discovered that this is the death of her lover. Yeah. And in the passage that I just read, she calls him the knight of deliverance.

And the image is that even the knight of deliverance couldn't break her out of the tower in which she's trapped, which is to suggest that he is more than just an ex-boyfriend, right? He's the knight of deliverance, and even he couldn't get her out. I actually think this book is also a love story. I think she wasn't profoundly in love with Pearson Variety. And part of that comedy there is a way of deflecting around all of that. Because she goes on this quest to find out whether he cheated death, whether he left her

something, not money, she's not interested in money at all, whether he left her some, whether he constructed something meaningful for her her that could help them find this connection and whether it will make sense of the world, whether it will make sense of her life, whether it will make sense of anything. And then it spirals her into this paranoia as she seeks it. So it's about grief to me. And we were talking a minute ago about the, about, as Sam said, these wonderful suspended clauses and, and these metaphors, these riffs, right? And yeah, Pynchon is like, he's just showing what he can do. It's a tour to force this novel of 150 pages. But he can also write beautifully simple, piercing sentences. And

there's one where she's drinking some dandelion wine that has been made from the dandelions that were, there was a cemetery that has been turned into a freeway and, and somebody has preserved some of the dandelions and it was land that Pierce owned. And she's gone on this quest and she's given this bottle of dandelion wine, this glass of dandelion wine. She gets a little bit tipsy again as she does in the, as she is in the opening scene there.

And the narration says, no Oedipa thought sad as if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine. It's an incredibly beautiful sentence, right? And I mean, I just did that, you'll all attest, I just did that from memory, because it's a book, a sentence that has stuck in my head. It's Shakespearean, I think, in its rhythms. And it is so simple and lovely, but it's also getting at the heart of it, that she thought Oedipus sad. I just want to orientate listeners, if they're wondering,

we're still answering Nicky's question, and perhaps always will be. Well'll be answering it all night. You know, twice it had never occurred to me, but the word buffering has come up. But that's, you know, sitting looking at that little spinning wheel. That's what reading, that's what the book's like, Nicky. That sadness that Sarah talks about is absolutely integral and it's sort of throughout Pynchon,

I think that's one of the things that really makes him so special and sort of unique. Often people think of him as being clever and think of him as being kind of antic and all the silly names and the puns and the daft jokes and the kind of Looney Tunes zaniness of it. But there is, and it's a line, again, I think it's from Against the Day that I found,

that he talks about how it's the incorporation of death into what would otherwise be only a carnival ride. There is a carnival ride quality to Pynchon, but underpinning it all is a sort of profound seriousness. And the seriousness and silliness kind of combine and mesh in a completely unique way in pinching. Balance again, right? The high magic to low puns.

The seriousness and the silliness, right? Who wants to hear the jacket blurb? Yeah, come on. Because the list, in that right sense, arrives in the marketing department of Lippincott's. Right. No, I think, well, I suspect Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. may have had a hand in this blurb.

We'll see. So, this is from the US first edition. Flap copy. Is there a secret privately owned post office operating on the... Who isn't gripped by that? There is now! Is there a secret

privately owned post office operating in competition with the state monopolies? A slightly sinister method of communication for those who have opted out of our society? This is the question that increasingly bugs Oedipus Mass, heroine of Thomas Pynchon's second work of fiction, The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon, whose first novel V was widely and

enthusiastically reviewed, was described by George Plimpton in the New York Times Book Review as a young writer of staggering promise. In his new book, there is the same combination of wild hilarity and grim reality that made V so notable. Pynchon's work has been called avant-garde, as indeed it is, but its basic concern with breaking the walls of human isolation is as old as literature itself. The crying of Lot 49 takes place in California. It is the story of Oedipa Mass, a young woman who finds herself appointed executrix of a former lover's estate. This is annoying enough. But when it leads to the gradual revelation of the secret postal system of the outcasts,

discovered, of course, through a bizarre philately. Oedipa begins to want out. Unhappily, by this time, she is in too deeply with, among others, a fake British musical group called The Paranoids, a child actor-turned-lawyer called Metzger and a whole gang of dangerous zanies trying to kick the love habit. Thomas Pynchon is a young writer.

He is splendidly talented. And The Crying of Lot 49 is a book that will sell to the ever-growing market of Pynchon fans. That's pretty good. I think that's great. I think that's really good. If you were coming to that cold, I can definitely detect some Tom at work

in the latter stages of that, right? That's why I'm usually talented young copywriter for Lippincott, because I kind of got it first time. That young man has a future. And who heard of William Gaddis after that? So what I did when I was preparing this episode was I'm going to ask each of you one of these questions. Thomas Pynchon, as we know, is famous for being a recluse,

and we're going to hear a little clip in a moment of CNN reporting on that in the 1990s. But first, I googled the name Thomas Pynchon, and up comes the thing on Google with questions that people have asked about Thomas Pynchon. So I'm going to ask you one each. Nikki, what is Thomas Pynchon known for? Don't know. OK, excellent.

What's the answer? He's a novelist. I doubt that. Yeah, OK. Yeah, no, no. That's fine. No. What's he answer? He's a novelist. I got that. I thought you were going to say the answer. Yeah, okay, yeah. No, no, that's fine. What's he known for? He's known for writing a lot of 49.

I got that. He's playing it straight. John, next question. What happened to Thomas Pynchon? What happened to Thomas Pynchon? That's such a big question to answer. I mean, Thomas Pynchon became very, very famous and has remained famous,

although we haven't nailed the, is he as famous as he used to be? We'll come on to that. Is he as important and influential as he used to be? I love, Sam earlier said that we kind of grew up surrounded by Pynchon's children. Well, let's ask Sam the next one. What is Thomas Pynchon's writing style?

The answer Google gives is probably postmodern, but I'd say Pynchonian. Pretty good. Very good. Pinching my back. Round we go, the spinning wheel. Buffer, buffer, buffer. And finally, Sarah, to you that the question people wanted to know above all other questions on google is thomas pinchin real

i mean i can't personally attest to it but i have i have reason to believe that he is real and and and i i have i have met people who purport to have met him. So I've got one degree of separation. So I think he's real, but I can't prove it. And, of course, this is very much a novel about paranoia and about how do we know if we know what we think we know is true or not. I thought that was such a great question. Is Thomas Pynchon real and does it matter?

Exactly, exactly. I could get very paranoid wondering. Salman Rushdie had dinner with him, didn't he, and said, and when they asked, because I think he'd given a, was it a nice review of Vineland when a lot of people were not being, and anyway, they had dinner and when asked about it afterwards, all Rushdie would say, he was the Thomas Pynchon I wanted him to be, which I think is a pretty good answer. Well, he's famous for being supposedly a recluse.

And in 1997, CNN set a reporter on his trail. And here's a little excerpt of the piece that they ran back then. One of the 20th century's most respected novelists, many of his fans don't even know what he looks like. Sinon Charles Feldman tries to pierce the mystery of Thomas Fincher. He's the Greta Garbo of literature and this fascinates quite a few readers. Some of them have tried to seek him out, others suspect that he's a kind of a Wizard of Oz type character behind the scenes who has access to all sorts of special knowledge. Fans may be disappointed to learn Pynchon leads a somewhat conventional life in New York City.

In fact, should you pass the now 60-year-old author on a busy Manhattan sidewalk, you wouldn't even know it. To prove a point, CNN caught up with Pynchon, and he is among the people you have been looking at. At Pynchon's request, and after much debate, CNN has opted not to point him out in the crowd. Pynchon told CNN by phone, a rare public comment, let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed. And as for the notion that he is a recluse, Pynchon told us, and we quote, my belief is that recluse is a code word generated by journalists, meaning doesn't like to talk to reporters. He's actually a recluse and not an author. He's famous for being a recluse. That's correct. He's a recluse in Manhattan. correct he's a recluse in manhattan he's not a

recluse yeah it's a code word of course it's a code word deborah rogers the late literary agent knew him well knew him a little and knew his wife who was also a literary agent very well she said to me you know tom goes out yeah he has friends he has has a normal life. They all cover for him. I think he falls sort of perfectly between two stools because the sorts of newspapers that would want to doorstep Pynchon aren't going to be interested in him because their readers aren't interested in him. And the sorts of newspapers that are really interested in Pynchon,

they'd regard it as bad manners. So they wouldn't dream of arresting him. Exactly. I mean, the Observer or the New York Times wouldn't do that sort of story. He reminds me that that idea of him being a recluse is really like how people felt about the late Scott Walker, which is that Scott Walker would say, well, I'm not really a recluse. I just don't do public stuff when I don't want to do it. And Scott Walker would famously, I mean, I wish, who wouldn't want to do this?

This is just common sense. He'd have his phone plugged in for one hour a week. So if you wanted to get Scott for any business stuff, you had to call him on a Wednesday between 4 o'clock and 5 o'clock. And the rest of the time, you couldn't get him because he was working and he was you know doing the stuff that he wanted to do without having to deal with anything else and I feel like like you say that's surely what Pynchon is Pynchon just doesn't want to be in that game but he wants to be in all the other games yeah yeah so I was going to say sort of slight sidebar but it is one of the great satisfactions in my professional life.

I have reason to believe that Thomas Pynchon possesses a photograph of me in a Santa hat reading Inherent Vice. You're going to have to unpack that one for us, Sam. That's too good. Well, for about a year, I was writing the lead book review for the Daily Mail. And around Christmas, they wanted me to do, you know, Christmas books to read. And so slightly in the spirit of the organ I was working for,

I insisted on doing Inherent Vice. And obviously, it being the Mail, they wanted to photograph. And so they took me into this hotel sometime in October. And they had a Christmas tree. And they put a Santa hat on me and I had to put a big stack of books. And obviously the book I chose to be photographed reading was Inherent Vice, which, as your listeners may know, is a kind of all about a sort of weed head 1970s private eye, which is not not perfectly daily mail stuff and fitch i think that might have been why i lost the gig shortly afterwards deborah rogers said oh we love i sent that to tom i thought he'd like it apparently it takes a great interest in the british tabloid press wow can i that cnn clip just heard, there's a particular pleasure in knowing that Pynchon gave them a statement which began,

let me be unambiguous. Unambiguous. I was enjoying that very much too. What? For one and one time only. Yeah. What joy. One of the things I didn't understand

in The Crying of Lot 49, and I'm being brave, one of the, I didn't understand in The Crying of Lot 49, and I'm being brave, one of the, you know, several, the whole Maxwell's demon element of it. I found that I couldn't get my head around that at all. After 50 readings, do you feel more relaxed with it? Well, I do and I don't. So I have no background in physics. So anybody who does have background in physics will be laughing their head off here. Right. But my

tongue was very much in my cheek when I said 50. I'm not sure how many times I've read it. But 50 is the number, of course, that comes after 49. And this is this 49 is not an arbitrary number. Lot 49 means things in this book, and it means a lot of things. And there's a phrase he has at one point, Oedipus thinks about, she wants to bring the world into pulsing, stiliferous meaning. Pulsing star-like meaning. And everything, all of the key things here have kind of pulsing star-like meaning,

and Maxwell's demon is one of them. So Maxwell's demon is an image of, was an attempt to explain the second law of thermodynamics before the second law of thermodynamics was understood. And of course, as all of our listeners know, the second law of thermodynamics is the law that governs entropy. Now, this is where the physicists are going to start laughing because I'm going to garble it. is the law that governs entropy. Now, this is where the physicists are going to start laughing because I'm going to garble it. But basically, it's why things don't get spontaneously hot, but they will spontaneously go to a stable temperature because what happens is that atoms will disperse evenly but randomly. And that's actually one of the images for how the book works. It's about the dispersal of energy evenly but randomly and how that then may or may not create equilibrium it

may or may not create well it will create an equilibrium of energy right but entropy of course is about heat death now as i said i think this is a book about death right fundamentally it's a book about grief and one of the things that there that Oedipus finds herself stumbling on is this interest in the ways in which physical entropy, that entropy of thermodynamics, the gradual running down of the world, the gradual running down of matter because of thermodynamics, which is the running down of earth, the running down of stars, but also, of course, the running down of human life, actually meshes with another metaphor, where entropy is also about noise and communication theory. We all know what noise means now. Pynchon had to explain it in 1966, but the interference between the message and the meaning and the

attempt to get there, right? So what Pynchon really, I think, begins with here is the beauty of this one word linking these two ideas and the whole book is really about how those two ideas come together maxwell's demon is it is and where it comes into the the post office is that maxwell's demon is an image of of so when they were trying to attempt to explain thermodynamics there was this early theory that basically there was a little man who sorted the atoms like a homunculus oh yeah just like a little like who sorted the atoms like a homunculus. Oh, yeah, like a little, like a male guy. Yeah, like a little male guy. And he sorted the hot from the cold.

And he kept the hot things hot and the cold things cold. And then, you know, kind of started moving them around, right? And what's important about this is that the idea was that the sorting didn't, they thought that sorting didn't necessarily require an input of further energy, right? Because the irreversible process is the energy will eventually run down. You can't keep putting energy in, right? And eventually you're going to run out of it, right? So the search for the irreversible process is an attempt to find something that doesn't require an input of energy.

And if we can do that, we reverse death. If we don't, that's the idea, right? That's the theory. I don't think you can plot spoil a mystery that has no solution. So I'm just going to say that to me, what makes this book so ecstatic, and it me it's an ecstatic experience reading this book. I get goosebumps every single time I read it, because what I believe Pynchon does is posit that metaphor reverses the irreversible process, because it explodes meaning without us having to put anything into it. The metaphors create pulsing, steliferous meaning. And that's why it's such a dizzying experience. And why I said at the beginning, it's about the ecstasy and the insanity, because the language goes places we don't expect it to go. And one of the things he does in this compact

little novel is create these patterns that control it and that resist entropy. The whole thing is constantly threatening to pull apart from him. All of these ideas pulling in all of these directions. But he has these metaphors, these anchoring metaphors that hold it together. That was amazing. I asked you a hard question. You answered it effortlessly. But I want to ask Sam, right? Sam, can I ask you, in your role as literary editor as much as pinch and fan where what does pinch and mean

now what is where's pinson's reputation sit i feel like he was incredibly perceived as incredibly important in the 60s and 70s maybe drained away a little i don't know't know, I'm not sure where he lives now in the canon. I think it's hard to say. I mean, he's... I think he had a sort of 60s, 70s, 80s sort of cult following that was a kind of counter-cultural following and the sort of literary fruit of Pynchon, you know, which I've described earlier,

that sort of everyone started to band thing, that there are a lot of novelists who are influenced by him or important is still there. I think it may be that we've had a sort of turn in the last 15 years or so, sort of back towards, if you like, slightly old fashionedfashioned novels yeah people rediscovered the joys of the more or less realist novel and that therefore that kind of post-modern fracturing novel that sarah so well describes is kind of semi-marginal at the moment

i don't think it's gone away and i don't think it ceased to be important. And I certainly don't think Pynchon has ceased to be important or get the respect that he deserves. But he's not sort of in the centre of fashion at the moment, I don't think. I don't know whether you guys would agree with me about that. I think you're absolutely right. I think there are probably writers out there who, and you've mentioned some of them, I'm thinking of Tom McCarthy, in a sort of crazy kind of way, what Pat McCabe is doing in his latest book that we're just about to publish, with bringing sort of that comic book energy and folklore into a reflection on death.

It feels there's a connection there with Pynchon. Rushdie's always writing in a kind of sub-Pynchonian way. And it does strike me, actually, that, you know, going back to that Californian thing, surely Wozniak and Jobs and Gates, they were all, that generation, the people who created the world that we now live in, were probably raised on Pynchon, right? His influence, I think, I guess what I'm saying,

is maybe more profound in the culture than in than in the the actual writers who are writing today. Sarah, what would you say? For me, one of the reasons why I love this book so much is that although it comes so early in his career, I think there is a falling off afterwards. afterwards and he was i think he is somebody that we could describe to a certain extent um aesthetically as a little bit of a victim of his own success because his ideas are so huge i think his career kind of follows that entropic model that i was talking about a second ago to a certain extent the books just start to fall apart they're not fall apart i mean i'm not saying that they're bad right but but he can't control them in quite the same way and this book is so is so rigidly controlled.

And it's almost like this little prose poem. And one of the reasons why I think it's useful to think about it in relation to Gadsby is that he keeps it short and simple and compact, and it lets all of it get really explosive, whereas all of the other books get quite diffuse. And he is allowed to be a little bit self-indulgent because he is the great American writer. And so for me, I can't quite, I enjoy all of his novels always. I mean, we heard why he's very funny.

He's always brilliant. It's all great. But this one to me is the masterpiece because for whatever reason, he forced himself to rein it in and then it gets it gets explosive and so i feel like it's not completely a question of fashion but also whether his books continue to quite pull pull it off in quite the same way that this one does well i want to before we we say our farewells i think we should in the pinchonian way counter counterbalance what Sarah's just said with the bit from

Against the Day, is it, Sam, that you have here? I would like to return us to the prose, to the Pynchon prose from another book, because it's just an amazing piece of writing. Yeah, I think this is lovely. It's buried in that

enormous book, And it's when two of the characters, Kit and Dally, they're in Venice and they're parting. It's a farewell scene. Around them, travellers drank wine out of cheap Murano souvenirs, clapped shoulders, brushed away leaf and petal debris from last minute bouquets, argued over who had failed to pack what. Dally was supposed to be past the melancholy of departure, no longer held by its gravity, yet, as if she could see the entire darkened reach of what lay ahead, she wanted now to step close, embrace him, this boy, for as long as it took to establish some twofold self, renounce the sombre fate he seemed so sure of. He was gazing at her, as if having

just glimpsed the simple longitude of what he was about to do, as if desiring to come into some shelter, though maybe only her idea of it. So, like terms on each side cancelling, they only stood there, curtains of Venetian mist between them, among the steam sirens and clamouring boatmen, and both young people understood a profound opening of the distinction between those who would be here, exactly here, day after tomorrow to witness the next gathering before passage, and those stepping off the night precipice of this journey, who would never be here, never exactly here, again. again. When the machine takes over and by reading that code, sort the letter properly.

Here it is, reading the codes and sorting letters. And we're working on many other machines. So you can see that with what we already have and what we are developing and planning for tomorrow in research laboratories, we are making very real progress. And as the demands on your postal service increase, as they will, we will work even harder to serve you better. That is the kind of mail service our great country should have. That's the kind of service we want to give you, the kind you expect.

We can do it, and we know we can, and we will. That is amazing. And I'm afraid that is all we have time for. Although it's entirely possible another version of this very podcast exists and is continuing to record in another temporal dimension. Huge thanks to Sarah and to Sam for offering us such strong circuits through the Pynchonian entropy. And to our producer, Nicky Birch, we await silently the edit.

In joke. And to Unbound for the cloudy dandelion wine. You can download all 159 previous episodes of Batlisted plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at batlisted.fm and we're always

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Storytellers, the highest tier in the backlisted firmament. Thank you both, thank you guys, thank you for your generosity and all our patrons for enabling us to continue to do what we love and enjoy. We have as is now tradition, we have to hand over to our guests to ask

them before they go. Is there anything? I know Sarah has got nothing left to say. We'll see if we can coax her out of her shell one more time. Sam, is there anything you would like to add that we haven't said about the crying of Lot 49 or about Thomas Pynchon? Should he hear this? What would you like to say? I would like to congratulate him on inventing a Jewish philatelist called Genghis Cohen. Highly specific but... We've taken in good part. Sarah, is there anything, I mean I know there's lots we haven't't covered but is there anything in particular you would like to say about the crying of lot 49 you're so passionate

about it is there anything you would like to say to listeners in terms of reading it or getting into it uh yeah um i would say that it's very appropriate that i kept promising we would get to revelation and we didn't get to the revelation so uh the revelation the revelation will never come. But for those who would like a little bit more revelation, I do think that there are keys to what Pynchon is doing. And this may come as a surprise, but I would point out to people that the first word that is spoken in the novel is God. And that the last thing that happens is that Oedipus is waiting for the descent of the Holy Ghost. And that the last thing that happens is that Oedipus is waiting for the descent of the Holy Ghost. And if you want to understand the novel, in my opinion, you have to read Acts 2, which is the descent of revelation means and how it all relates to the search for meaning. And it's actually that we really have to scratch the surface of what I think he does here.

And then he makes it about America. So, I mean, he's really just the bomb. This book is just the bomb. You've made me feel very trivial. Good, then my job here is done, Sam. Thanks, everybody. Keep listening because there's a message from the guy who's the puppet master of everything you've heard today. So thanks, everyone.

Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Sarah. See you next time. Thank you, guys. Brilliant. Thank you. Bye. Bye So thanks, everyone. Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Sarah. See you next time. Thank you, guys. Brilliant. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, guys. Hey, over here. Have your picture taken with an inclusive author. Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph. But wait, there's more. Here's your quote. Thomas Pinchon loved this book almost as much as he loves cameras.