Secret Society

Expecting a whisper

The new, as-yet untitled Pynchon novel is available for preorder from Amazon.

Here is Pynchon's own description of the work:

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

David Foster Wallace @ The Strand

Tonight at 6:30 PM.

From his story "Girl With Curious Hair" (set in early 1980's California and narrated by a sociopathic Young Republican):

Cheese leaned across me and told Gimlet she was a real trouper for trading seats so the coughing woman could enjoy the performance, because Keith Jarrett was an outstanding Negro performer whom everyone should get to see for their own musical good, and he asked me to agree. I was happy to agree with Cheese and calm down Gimlet so she would not be a pain in the neck, and Cheese was indeed correct when the Negro Keith Jarrett appeared on stage in slacks and shoes and a velour shirt which hung loose because it was too large for him, and sat on his bench at his piano. Like many Negroes, Keith Jarrett had an afro of hair; from where our six seats were located in the back of the Irvine Concert Hall all I could see of Keith Jarrett was the back of him and his hair's afro while he played.

But he played awfully well! I told Gimlet I thought this performer was swell for a performer who was not a punkrocker like Gimlet and Big and Mr. Wonderful, who together comprise an excellent and skillful punkrock band known far and wide as Mighty Sphincter, and Gimlet who was very affected from the LSD at this juncture looked at me as if there was something extremely interesting behind me. She licked my cheek with her tongue for over thirty seconds but soon stopped and directed my attention to a small and young blond girl in a lower row, and stated that the girl's hair was a fascinating and curious thing to observe. She stared at the small girl below us with great intensity while Keith Jarrett played some of his concert.