Thomas Pynchon’s V.. (1st US edition, fourth printing.)

So, the last couple days I’ve been doing two things. One is rereading Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V., and the other is revisiting Thrice’s discography.

Thrice is an odd band, and one that, for me, is inextricably bound up with my undergraduate career, such as it was. Despite being avowedly Christian, somehow their music, and especially Vheissu and its follow-ups, The Alchemy Index, pts. I-IV, resonates for me as part of my classical studies. (For reference, I majored in classical languages, which basically boiled down to ancient Greek, Latin, and dick jokes. So goddamned many dick jokes.) Their song, “Burn the Fleet,” was my pre-exam fight song, and I’ve caught them live a few times — all of which were with La Dispute as an opener, which is another topic for another time. But I haven’t sat down with their music as much since I graduated, and certainly not with Vheissu, the album that got me in to them.

It was V. that brought me to them, actually, and not the other way around. I distinctly remember having read V. already, and then, not that long after, being in a Wal-Mart in Bedford, PA and seeing Vheissu, their then-most recent album. I was stunned to see such an obvious reference to a novel I had first heard about from my father, who basically only remembered chapter 3, in which a character named Stencil does several “impressions” of not-himself, with each section of the chapter narrated by the person he’s pretending to be at the time. Also there’s like, robot secret agents or something, and everyone’s in Cairo in the late 19th century. It may or may not also be the first appearance of the title character. In any case, seeing the distinctly hermetic album cover, with its many references to the lyrical content of the album, and that weird fucking eye, in a Wal-Mart of all places, was very subtly world-shattering for me. The teacup may not have broken on the floor, but it certain shivered.

I had first encountered Thrice as a general concept, though I hadn’t heard any of their music, in a knitting magazine, incidentally, but that too is another story for another time.

V., as mentioned, I first heard of from my father, as he told a 20-something acquaintance about how masterful the novel was. My father rarely reads novels, so to hear him sing the praises of one was unusual, to say the least. I begged — good god, i was fifteen, maybe — for a copy of this mysterious beast, and because my parents were inconsistent in their concerns for the moral uprightness of my reading, received one.

I’m still not totally sure how they expected me to straight or cis after that, but we’ve all got separate beetles in separate boxes, so really, who knows?

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Pynchon, as he appears in The Simpsons, actually voiced by the author.

I learned, not long ago, that Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was shortlisted for a Nebula, one of the biggest awards in genre fiction, and specifically science fiction and fantasy. Since learning that fact, I frequently wonder what genre fiction would look like, had it not been pulled it from the running, in my understanding by Pynchon himself (it was the ‘70s, after all, and being pigeon-holed as a genre writer was substantially worse than it is in the post-VanderMeer age). What kinds of adventures we might have had! What exercises in omniscient narrators; what alternative-historical delights might have been in store!

I like to hope that my work occupies that space, comes from that particular what-if. Whether or not I’m right, however, remains to be seen.

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Thrice puts on a damn good live show. Dustin Kensrue is a phenomenal frontman, and the band is musically not only proficient but magnetic. Even their acoustic songs, which for me are frequently a hard sell live, are fascinating, the force of performance holding not only my attention, but that of everyone in the audience. I do not recall crowd noise at a Thrice show, or if I do, it is through a red fog of being absolutely ready to throw down with its originators.

When Thrice performs, you pay attention. And it does not feel forced; no one has compelled you against your will. You — and by “you” I mean “I” — don’t want to look at or hear anything else.

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Rereading V. as an adult has been a distinctly rewarding experience, to which I will doubtless return later. When I initially read it, I was in my teens, absolutely distracted by hormones and the newness of things to my experience. Now, three months off 30, I am tired but I can focus better; I have also read more, other stuff, and I can appreciate Pynchon’s stylistic pyrotechnics better.

Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery. — *Liberation* by Brian Francis Slattery.

And what a fucking craftsman! His sentences, even the ridiculously long ones, gleam with consideration and inspiration. His vision in that novel is unparalleled until recently, with the work of Brian Francis Slattery, and specifically Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America, and even then I’m really only talking about the style. His construction of narrative, and his rapid-fire deployment and retirement of leitmotives, is really singular. All that from a buck-toothed ex-US Navy boy of only 23.

I cannot square it. I cannot hold the idea in my mind. 23 years old, and he can write like that. How?

Which is not to say that the novel is entirely without flaws or questions. The “siege party,” in chapter 9, is a difficult read, even more so now than it was when I was young. That chapter is set in the 1920s, in German South-West Africa. At the tender age of 15, it did not occur to me to to fucking Google Lothar von Trotha; having done so now, I see that the people I rightly was able to construe as monsters are not only monstrous, but possibly literally devils. The fact that the host of the “party” longs for the days of von Trotha now suggests not only that he is wedded to utter inhumanity, but also that he deserves a far worse fate than he receives in the novel.

And, of course, though on a much more mundane level of monstrosity than the wholesale slaughter of 60,000 people, there is the novel’s treatment of women, which is basically exactly what you’d expect from an edgy young literary man in 1963. At once point, a central character muses on the fact that he does not believe women are fully human, or some bullshit like that. While the character — Benny Profane, an early example of Pynchon’s facility with delightfully absurd naming conventions — is scarcely held up as unquestionably heroic, he is certainly positioned as sympathetic, a decision by which I am not sure Pynchon would stand, given his thoughts on rereading old writings as outlined in the introduction to Slow Learner.

The novel’s central concern, too, might have been grander than Pynchon or any not-Pynchon person would be interested in tackling at present. That concern is, of course, the line between the human and the unhuman or inhuman or nonhuman (which precisely is not quite clear). While the topic, in a time when The Singularity is a thing we discuss not only with title caps but in the indicative case, is even more prescient than it was in the 1960s, it has certainly become murkier. It would take the headstrong confidence of a 23-year-old guy to presume to have any answers.

Then again, Pynchon never offers answers. An analysis I read once of The Crying of Lot 49, his briefer and more accessible follow-up (We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire, after all), described the novels conclusion as leaving the characters in “anticipation on the brink of revelation,” and that is true of all the Pynchon works I’ve encountered. No one gets to know the truth — except the seeker after it, and that only off the page, past then endpapers, and beyond the scope of the novel.

They’re never about the answers. They’re about the many double-backs and betrayals on the way.

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In a Facebook group I’m in, someone suggested revisiting an album you loved once. I’ve written on this topic before, or a related one, of having once loved a band. I could not seem to find a good answer for the person who asked the question, and I’ve been thinking about it for a minute now.

But Thrice has been in heavy rotation for me lately, or as heavy a rotation as anyone who does not own a record player can be said to have. It been a while since they were, and to be quite frank, I have missed them.

Their use of post-hardcore musical tropes — they can be very “buildy,” as I’ve heard it described — and their thoughtful lyrical structures bespeak an attention to the underlying mechanism of popular music that is, in my experience, rare. And that interest in the mechanism, their diligent seeking after not just what works, but how and why, is a distinct similarity they have to Pynchon, and especially in V., a novel fundamentally driven by how and why we seek out certain things. The drive — any number of drives — have formed the meat of several of his novels.

Again, it’s not about the answers. It’s about how you get there, which excuses, for me, a lot of Thrice’s “buildier,” to coin and discard a terrible phrase, moments.

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Part of why I’ve been on a Thrice kick lately is because I have been involved in a Top Secret Translation Project. And part of what sparked a desire to reread V. was being involved in something that could be characterized as a Top Secret Translation Project. Everything, for me, is closing a circle: whether on fifteen years of absolute libidinal love for a work of art, or a five-year period of wandering in the wilderness , away from the world of academe and, for my particular interests, translation.

Richmond Lattimore, the deceased translator.

When you translate something from language to another, something is lost and something else is added. There is no static translation; no level of care can force one language to function exactly the same way another one does. (I do not like Lattimore’s translations of Homer, for example, but god love him, he tried.)

Essentially, Thrice’s musical project functions, for me, as a translation of Pynchon into musical form. Pace Radiohead, and their many references to Pynchon in the liner notes to Kid A, Thrice understand omniscience and stylistic trickery in a very particular way, producing something that simultaneously goes down easily and sticks in the craw. I don’t think they’d be on the soundtrack to a hypothetical film version of V., which I don’t think could be done in any case — they wouldn’t be on it, but they could do it.

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Confluences: The Nostalgia Trap, pt. 5