Thomas Pynchon’s glorious invisibility

Thomas Pynchon’s career as one of the 20th century’s most elusive celebrities began in 1963. The 26-year-old’s first novel, V, received a rave review in the New York Times, and Time magazine dispatched a photographer to Mexico City, where the author lived. According to legend, Pynchon jumped out of his apartment window to evade the snapper, and took a bus to the mountains. From then on, he systematically evaded the public eye, refusing to talk to journalists or be photographed; he did not even turn up at the ceremony where Gravity’s Rainbow was honoured with the National Book Award in 1974.

And so the literary genius became a near-mythical figure, a counter-cultural shadow who could never be tracked down. The stories of people who knew him, and people who wish they had, are collected in a new documentary film entitled Thomas Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of [P.], directed by Fosco and Donatello Dubini. The interviewees cannot even agree on what he looked like: some remember his eyes as green, others swear that they were blue.

One writer, Jules Siegel, tells how his wife ran off with Pynchon in the 1960s, and alleges, bizarrely, that Pynchon was involved with the US government’s LSD experiments on unwitting subjects. Others tell anecdotes of Pynchon haunting bookshops in disguise, or turning up incognito at Pynchon-lookalike parties. The man himself, of course, is nowhere to be seen. Continued →

Towers in imagination

To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers
by Philippe Petit
American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center
by William Langewiesche

These two books tell the before and after of a catastrophe. Philippe Petit narrates the almost unbelievable story of how, one morning in 1974, he walked back and forth for an hour across a tightrope illegally rigged between the summits of the World Trade Center. American Ground, meanwhile, is an account of the politics and logistics of the massive clean-up operation after the twin towers’ fall. From walking in the air holding conversations with birds, to tunnelling through the rubble finding charred body parts: such is the change wrought by a handful of fanatics.

The tower of Babel is the ghost that haunts all tall buildings. “Come, let us build ourselves a city,” say the leaders of men in the book of Genesis, “and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” If I let them do this, thinks God, there’s nothing they won’t stop at, and so the tower is struck down, and the confusion of language begins. Continued →

Exploring sound art

Browsing in a record shop one day, you might come across a CD called Ticker. It’s an album-length recording of a ticking clock. The tick is fed through an echo, and the echoes get faster or slower depending on the body temperature of the artist, Alvin Lucier. He made the recording with thermal sensors attached to his body. Sometimes, perhaps to avoid charges of anthropocentrism, he puts the sensors on a potted plant instead.

This is sound art. Normally, I prefer to listen to music. Shostakovich, Rage Against the Machine, Ibizan trance. Just listening to interesting sounds has struck me as the sort of thing an ultra-stoned hippy might do, pushing a door back and forth for hours and swaying in addled wonder to the melody of the creaks. Continued →

The definition game

Encarta Concise English Dictionary
eds Kathy Rooney et al

In the preface to his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson painted an arresting image of the lexicographer’s nightmare:

While our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, these words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained ina dictionary than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water.

Every dictionary since then has acknowledged, however surlily, the project’s impossibility: a snapshot of meanings at one historical moment must necessarily fail to account for the metamorphoses that a living language undergoes. This difficulty is exacerbated the more up-to-the-minute a dictionary attempts to be, and the new Encarta Concise attempts to be very modern indeed. Continued →

Biography of a tomb raider

It is Valentine’s day, 1968. In a hospital in Wimbledon, London, a baby daughter is born to Lord and Lady Henshingly-Croft. The girl has a drawerful of silver spoons in her little mouth. Between the ages of three and 11, she is privately tutored at home; she then attends Wimbledon High School for Girls and Gordonstoun. At the latter, she discovers a passion for rock-climbing in the mountains of Scotland. (She also takes up shooting, but is soon banned for showing “too keen an interest”.) By the time she is 18, everyone can see she has a wild streak, but her parents believe that she can be thoroughly civilised - and eventually married off to the Earl of Farringdon - after three years at a Swiss finishing school.

While in Switzerland, however, the young woman takes to extreme skiing, and spends a holiday pursuing the sport in the Himalayas. On the return journey, her plane crashes deep in the mountains, and she is the only passenger left alive. Somehow she manages to survive for two weeks until she staggers into a mountain village. By this time, the course of her life has changed. She has learned that she only feels truly alive when travelling alone. Lara Croft has decided to become an adventuress. Continued →

The visual aesthetics of videogames

Videogames have been around for more than 30 years, working their sensual, dynamic play of light on millions of children and adults around the world. Somehow they have snuck under the radar of most writers on art and culture, exerting a massive influence by stealth. But if for many people such games have become the primary form of visual entertainment - last year, videogame sales grossed 60 per cent more than the total cinema box-office in Britain - one might begin to wonder what kind of aesthetic traditions they are infiltrating into the mainstream.

In the last five years, the main innovation of games played on computers and home consoles has been the transition to solid-looking three-dimensional worlds. In building these worlds and the characters that inhabit them, videogames rely on a method of “polygonal” representation. Every image is built from millions of simple geometric figures such as triangles and squares - in general, polygons. Although this might seem an obscure trick of silicon, it is in one way nothing more than a high-speed extension of methods that were in use by painters hundreds of years ago. Continued →

On the culture of electronic imagery

In the 1950s, people imagined that by now we would all be floating around in flying cars and eating nutrient pills for lunch, but would still be communicating by radio telephone or by firing paper messages through a network of pneumatic tubes. One thing no one foresaw was the extraordinary omnipresence of the screen in modern life. Everywhere we look there is another glowing alphanumeric display pregnant with the promise of instantaneous oracular gratification. What has happened? Continued →

Why are there no great films of Nabokov’s novels?

Great literature has always been traduced and eviscerated on screen. Yet the peaks of imaginative writing seem to represent an irresistible challenge for film-makers. Now Dutch director Marleen Gorris, who previously adapted Mrs Dalloway with Vanessa Redgrave, has taken on a book by the 20th century’s greatest sorcerer in prose, Vladimir Nabokov. Many film-makers have tried to mine the wily Russian, and this new attempt revives the question: can Nabokov ever be filmed successfully? Continued →