The insoluble pancake

I’ve just finished — a few weeks ago — Mr. Pynchon’s latest novel, “Against the day”. The book is a weighty 1100 pages long. The actual physical bulk of Mr. Pynchon’s text makes reading it even more challenging. Being in Paris, of course, one would like to spend some time on a nice terrace somewhere with the damn thing, but the book is so heavy that one thinks twice about taking it anywhere. My slim civil-service briefcase (honestly) bulged noticeably and I always knew I had it with me. On the crowded metro line four, everyone looked at me when I took it from my bag. On longer transatlantic voyages I thought twice about packing it with me as I am a checked-luggage only kind of guy and adding that book means subtracting socks for a week. The last book of considerable bulk that I read was David Foster Wallaces’ “Infinite Jest” which was also over the 1,000 page mark (but that was a paperback).

Yes, but what about the book? It’s of course impossible to distil it’s essence into a few words. There is the thinnest of plot lines to connect all the disparate threads of the book: it’s a cowboy revenge story set around the turn of the century which crosses many different continents, from the far American west to deep under the deserts of inner Asia. Mr Pynchon’s book teems with characters, most of which only appear once never to be seen again. Because the book is so long it can be difficult to keep track of everyone (a friend of mine kept an annotated Dramatis Personae to remind him who was who). Floating above the main action of the book are the ballonists “the Chums of Chance” a “Band of Boys” drawn in from the classic adventure-story mould. In the best metafictional tradition however, these boys are aware of the novels they appear in. They communicate back with (an ill-defined) base using an action-at-distance receiving apparatus which works thanks to one of Nicola Tesla’s lesser known discoveries in the physical sciences.

For me that’s what makes the book so enjoyable — it’s the geeky humour and scientific in-jokes. In Mr. Pynchon’s Universe, coyboys are au fait with the latest developments in experimental physics, such as Michelson and Morley’s famous interfermetric experiments. In our universe, those experiments demonstrated conclusively that the lumiferous ether didn’t exist but in Mr. Pynchon’s continuum this outcome is never so clearly stated. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was not apparent which path modern physics would go down, what things would be possible and what things would be impossible. Suppose there really was a lumiferous ether? And that Mr. Tesla’s inventions really did work as advertised? All sorts of things could become possible, including travelling in time. In one of my favourite scenes in the book, the Chums of Chance take a trip in a poorly-maintained time-machine operated underneath a stretch of New York’s elevated subway (where there is, of course, a plentiful supply of electricity). It’s not clear where the Chums are hurled, the distant past or the distant future, but they catch a terrifying glimpse of dark plain filled with unknown beasts and an overpowering stench of decay and excrement.

There are other brilliant scenes in the book — the Chums’ descent deep under the desert using a new form of propulsion — but they are embedded deep in several other threads of the story which are much less interesting. It’s not clear where Mr. Pynchon is going here; his last book, “Mason and Dixon” offered a slightly less opaque story, with characters one could care about (it’s still my favourite book of all time about astronomers) and many of the same themes of “Against the day”. It’s impossible not to admire the immense erudition and energy of this latest work but hey! Why not edit it just a little?

I’m just back from a week in Manhattan. I stayed in a small hotel in Chelsea, down near 17th street, near sixth avenue. My room was long and narrow, perhaps no more than a few metres in width and with high ceilings. Once my meeting was over, I spent the weekend wandering the streets of Manhattan, visiting the many chelsea art galleries, attempting random walks. Manhattan now seems much less full of strange and unusual people than it did when I was first there, back in 1992; the city has changed a lot.

Each morning I found myself at the Hollywood Diner (open 24 hours!) where I could order pancakes and watch New Yorkers hurry to work along the pavement (I mean sidewalk) outside. This was the nearest cafe to my hotel, and I reflected on the differences between that cafe and the nearest cafe to my apartment in Paris, the “Bouquet d’Alesia” where I have eaten many an “entrecote gratin daphinoise” (but perhaps not at 9AM in the morning). Certainly the menus in Alesia were not nearly as extensive as proposed by the Hollywood Diner – there must have been hundreds of items to choose from, all of which I suppose were prepared at the same lightning-fast speed with with my pancakes materialised each morning. Could they really make all this stuff?

I spent a morning wandering around Chelsea, and attempted to visit the galleries – but there were hundreds of them, and I gave up somewhere in the middle of the afternoon after perhaps having been through only three or four streets. The galleries are very densely packed down there, one door after another. Bizzarely enough, the galleries alternate with garages and auto repair shops, so it’s not uncommon to leave one exhibition space only to enter another and think “My gosh, this installation looks exactly like a partly disassembled Toyota! And all that machine oil on the floor is so realistic! And those men in overalls!” only to realise that in fact, it really is a garage, rather than just looking like one.

About the best thing I saw the galleries of Chelsea were some new photographs by Andreas Gursky (a snip at around $300,000 each), amongst them one of some technicians in the Superkamiokande mine in Japan. One sees serried ranks of photomultiplier tubes up to the ceiling, a million eyes. In the middle distance technicians are paddling across the inky black surface of the super-pure heavy water in a canoe. Scale and proportion are hard to grasp – surely this is image has been altered in some way? But no, this is actually reality…

Amongst other things I did in Manhattan was to make a visit to the Strand bookstore – but more on that in the next few days I hope…

Two weeks ago I found myself in the far North – Edinburgh. The last time I had walked the streets of Edinburgh it was the winter of 1998, the threshold of 1999. Just before I left for the south, for Marseille, so there is a certain symmetry to write about this trip now, just after my last entry about Marseille.

Well, up north, the shadows are even longer than in Paris, that’s for sure. In early summer the sun in Edinburgh doesn’t exactly set it more sort of fades away. Even at 10pm in the evening there is a weak watery blue light that fills the streets. One leaves one’s restaurant and is surprised by a lingering glow still present in the sky.

I had returned to the city for the usual no-good reason. Of course I took a lot of photographs as I wandered the streets with my colleagues or alone. On the last day before my departure I made an epic tour of the city, walking from my guest house in Morningside (excellent Scottish breakfasts each morning) all the way to the modern art galleries in Dean village and then back across the city to the new Scottish parliament and the foothills of Arthur’s seat, the extinct volcano in the centre of Edinburgh. But after traversing the city I had no energy left to make the ascent so I contented myself with watching people trudging forcefully across its slopes. I remembered the last and only time I had made the climb myself, with my friend Brendan. The soles of my shoes were worn thin and it was impossible to get any purchase on the smooth mossy slopes which had been worn flat by generations of hikers. I slid around like I was on an ice-skating rink. It was only with great difficulty that I managed to reach the summit.

I know Edinburgh quite well, despite the fact that I’ve never lived there. In the dark days towards the end of my time in England I made constant trips there to escape the tedium of life in Durham and to visit friends of mine who lived there. I was attracted by the cafes and galleries which were non-existent where I lived.

Now of course I see all this a bit differently. The city centre of Edinburgh, at least in the old town, appeared to me now as hollowed-out, empty. A facade, almost. I was constantly surprised at how quiet the streets were only a few short steps away from the main thoroughfares, after the frantic density of Paris. I didn’t remember this. I didn’t remember either that at 9AM on a Saturday morning that most shops were not yet open, that life had not yet started. In the evening, walking around, it was hard to see anyone who was neither a student or retired, at least in the places around the old town. A cold wind pursued me relentlessly throughout my week-long stay there. (A friend of mine told me that a colleague of his had remarked that more wind passed over Edinburgh in one year than in any other part of the UK.)Nevertheless, the rain only really began in earnest on the last day of my trip, and the sinister bulk of the castle looming over Princes street was partially neutralised by the presence of a blue sky containing only a few scattered clouds….

All the cafes and bars I remember from those distant winters in Edinburgh were still in the city; no changes, it seemed. On Saturday morning I found myself once again in Florentin’s, where I had spent many long hours at the end of the last century. But I found it strangely different than before, than the last time I was there which I remember very clearly as being January the 1st, 1999. What had changed? The wall between two halves of the cafe had been removed, making one large open space. It no longer felt so cramped as before, but perhaps just slightly less intimate. I think I wrote a lot of letters there, in the days when I still wrote letters. It is strange how these places continue to exist, even in our absence.
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