Pynchon in Wisconsin
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Why I like Shadow Ticket - For a Wisconsin guy who lived in Milwaukee for
two years, the Wisconsin part of this book is a big treat. Been reading Thomas
Pynchon since V [actually, before that, the short story Entropy] and this
book is just a thrill. It starts with an explosion ["a pineapple" in the 20s dialect] near the Lake. Eventually,
a submarine is discovered in the Lake - an WWI Austro-Hungarian job that is running rum]. It’s always back to the Lake, the
beer, the cheese and the Mob. The Milwaukee Mob appears in the first words of this book. This mob was a Franchise Outlet for
the more prestigious Chicago operation…but if they got you, that distinguishment
on the pecking ladder of crime meant little difference. I like what I will call word flow, somewhat like stream of consciousness, most vividly represented by the Irish Modernist James Joyce. Thomas Pynchon is among few authors capable of such composition; in his manner, a novel can be a Marx Bros movie where anything can happen, and nonsense is a virtue. Nonsense, but full of actuality. The Secret Life of Accoutrements, or The Material World of Shadow Ticket - "Objects can have a living personality" is a folk saying and a Pynchonian meme. The array of objects that inhabit Shadow Ticket has as real a life as the books many characters. As Melville paints a
picture of the Whale Industry while chasing the production of a myth, so Pynchon pictures
Milwaukee in all assorted accoutrements of Milwaukee – Waukesha, and beyond -
while a noir mystery is occurring. How do the little bits in fine literature cause effect? The people in the white lab coats say the prefrontal cortex pulls fragments of multi-sensual data when you read a “word image,” and reassembles the bits, and a synapse sprouts an electrical spike in your noggin. That’s what I like about reading Thomas Pynchon. Bits and Pieces of the Place - The Milwaukee that Shadow Ticket enters is the Milwaukee of the 1930s, near the end of prohibition, a spectral city of far reaches where a Socialist mayor is in place, and Friends of New Germany share steins in bowling alleys of intrigues and in basements with Nazi flags. Much like that is familiar to a kid growing up with the great grandchildren of Germany's 19th Century forced emigration. The Nazi flag in the basement was the type of rumor shared when you were stranded on second base. The shortstop would say: "Did you here about Sheinheister's grandfather's rec room?" ~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~: It seems possible that Wisconsin's recent incarnation as the god-smacked hinge of American political theatre got Pynchon's attention. And, as some people suggest, he studied Wisconsin history with special interest. Somehow he amassed abounding details: In Pynchon's Milwaukee, we learn of the combination drug and hardware store with lunch counter known as Oriental Drugs [heart and soul of the East Side]; that shoe store Xray machines were invented there; that Danish pastry is essential to Racine; that joke shop object purveyor Johnson & Smith was located in Racine; on the state en toto: citing Wisconsin as "where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles.” On the road from Chicago to Milwaukee we ride the vaunted NorthShore Line - and electrical marvel that ran at over 100 mph. It is hard for me to imagine he didn’t go to Milwaukee and pick up bits and pieces of the place before or while writing this story. Because he has some lotta multicolored details down to a "T". Oooh, the Smells of Shadow Ticket! Smells of beer fumes … smells of lake
perch, smells like paint not yet dry, sawdust, solvents, joint compound,
soldering smoke, sanding, ozone from arc welding … smells of spaghetti sauce
and garlic frying and sfinciuni bagherese baking over an olive branch fire… . What a fascinating novel and novelist! In the recent years, as the Republicans
staged two conventions there, Did the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel send out a
reporter on the hunch reclusive author Pynchon was in town? I’d start that hunt at the
Milwaukee Public Library. Did some staff wonder who was that old weirdo in
the microfiche? True, he is a Man of Mystery – didn’t even show up to receive
the National Book Award in 1973 -
instead he sent in Prof Irwin Corey as receiver – but he might have
been the guy wearing the brown paper bag in Archives – as he did during cameo
appearance on the Simpsons. JV ~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~: To exemplify the composition character, I include this. Hicks meets Skeet and gang members under the Holton Street viaduct, where they gather in an abandoned lot for a brief respite at night. There, he finds a community of radio enthusiasts. This section will segue into discussion of the kid named Red on Bluemound Road…the Wizard of Waukesha….Les Paul. From Shadows Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press, 2025 [This copyrighted material is used for criticism, commentary, and transformative purposes under fair use provisions.] Hicks gets a note from Skeet. Come on down the Viaduct. “Somebody there you might want to talk to.” He finds Skeet and some fellow gang members waiting under the Holton street viaduct for the fog to lift, along with a few girls grown weary of the evening shift, looking for some daylight trade. Streetcars go banging overhead. “C’mon.” Skeet leads him into an abandoned lot surrounded by darkened walls, paint of old advertising weathered away, windows that could have anything just behind them. Or nothing for years. Civilians drift to and fro mostly idle, a few collecting lookout fees. “Welcome to the clubhouse.” Cobwebs of purple light from radio tubes with imperfect vacuums inside. ***. A dozen speakers going at once, cop traffic and shipping transmissions from out on the Lake, foreign voices from even further away, crackling in and out. Pieces of electrical gear, blinking and chirping at each other like a lab in a movie belonging to a scientist not entirely in his right mind – Type 19 dual modes from incompletely assembled Doerle Twinplex kits lying around every place, including where they're likely to be sat on. Radio equipment, some of it bright and new, as if just boosted. “Top-notch and 1929-compliant,” according to Skeet, “we steal only from the best.” All clear as daylight to an eye electrically fly, leaving the rest of us to squint, frown, try to make some sense out of it, while not looking too lost for among this pack of juvenile offenders, street corner musicians and policy runners can also be found a number of “hams” or amateur radio operators, either licensed or hoping to be, including a couple of young ladies just graduated from Mary Texanna Loomis’s Radio College in Washington, D.C., in touch with other enthusiasts around the world via waves the average citizen still has little idea of, waves they have learned, sometimes at a certain cost, to ride and respect. They lurk at the fringes of frequency bands public and private, listen in on and try to decipher secret messages, sell some of what they learn, use some of it themselves for purposes of mischief, or as the Hellraisers think of it, “practical joking.” Not surprisingly, interested parties can be found, usually after dark, prowling around the little panel trucks with rotating loop antennas on top, trying to get a fix on sources of transmission ... Everybody is smoking Camels and Luckies, Dutch Masters and El Productos stolen off the Milwaukee Road freights that come rolling through town. A back room with its own back room, “First workplace in my life that has a toilet” sez Skeet, “instead of is one. The mad scientist lab I always dreamed about.” ***The Physics of the "Glow"When a vacuum tube’s envelope is compromised, air molecules leak inside. As the stream of electrons travels from the cathode to the plate, they collide with these stray gas molecules. This collision knocks electrons off the gas atoms (ionization), which releases energy in the form of light.
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