Category: Archived DMs

For the past week I’ve been moving Cecil over to a new server. The work is pretty much done and we’re in that interesting limbo where there are actually two different Cecil site’s out there and the web is in the process of sorting out which one to go to. I’m told it can take up to three days to fully resolve, but I think it’ll be clearer as early as tomorrow night. So I’m going to hold off on posting and opening the new thread up to comments for one more day, in hopes that by tomorrow night, there will be one cecilvortex.com to rule them all.
By the way, in case you’re curious, if you got to this version of Cecil, you’re looking at the new site.

Until two days ago I was 70 pages behind, but a pair of flights got me (finally) caught back up. If you’re one of the many good folks stuck a bit back on the trail, let me just tell ya, all you need is a stop over in Houston (real or metaphorical) and you’ll be right back in the game.
In general, I’m finding AtD‘s kind of like Chutes and Ladders. Sometimes I move slowly. Sometimes I’m zipping on ahead. Occasionally I’m fumbling backwards, trying to figure out just what it was that I must have missed somewhere, somewhere….
This week I used a way-back chute to revisit the attempted hustle in Chapter 3. “At times there were too many cards to count, at others none at all were visible, seeming to have vanished into some dimension well beyond the third, though this could have been a trick of what light there was.” (23) That seems a fair description of the way Pynchon uses throwaway characters — a blurred sleight of hand designed to force us into keeping our our eyes open a little wider than usual.
One of the kicks of the book, I think, is that every once in a rare while all this frenzy leaves us with that Blundellian feeling that we can sense “how everything fits together, connects.” Sure, as with Miles, it doesn’t always last long. And more often than not, we end up “just back to tripping over [our] feet again.” (24) But that’s OK. I’m happy to stick around to see if some T.W.I.T. is going to pass around another batch of brain explosives.
Hope you all stick around too. While I’m required by law to love all the ‘marches just the same, I’ll confess between us that the commentary this go-around has been particularly swell.
Speaking of which, the mighty, the mighty, the mighty Steve Evans has come through with another invaluable batch of madeleines — the perfect way to flash the previous week’s reading into your lizard brain before ambling back onto the trail. And speaking of that…
Tuesday 3/13: Let’s meet at the bottom of page 335 and the glory of a “mean, nervous, scheming servitude to an enfeebled conscience.”
(which is to say: please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 335. Aim to get near that target and add a comment by end o’ day next Monday)
Pugnax!
-Cecil

A few years ago, my daughter took part in what started out as an entirely unremarkable dance recital. She and maybe eight other 6-year-olds were bopping around on stage along with some familiar holiday tune. “Let It Snow”? “Jingle Bells”?
Midway through, the CD starts to skip. And it’s awful. One of those 15 second stretches of time that feels like the taste of melting tar. It’s not right. It’s not getting better. Somebody take this melting tar out of our mouths!
Then the music stops altogether and in the silence something lovely happens. The dancers just keep dancing. In silence. They finish the song with exceptional grace. And it was probably the best dancing I’ve ever seen.
This week reminded me a little of that. Not that we’re all a bunch of dancing 6-year-olds. Just that there was the lurch of the site. And then the silence. The silence. And then out of that silence, a graceful swirl of comments that began to spin out across the Week 4 stage almost as soon as the generators kicked back in. Lovely.
Which is all my longwinded way of saying, thanks to you all for bearing with this past week’s headaches. It’s fun to be back on the ‘march and great to see that, if need be, we can make do without a trail for a few days.
Of course, some of us faired better than others. Without the spur of daily posts, I my ownself fell about 20 pages shy of the target. But I’ve got some quality airport time coming up, and I’m leaving the old cylomite at home. So I’m hopeful I’ll be caught back up by next week. Speaking of which…
Tuesday 3/6: We have nothing to fear but page 280 itself, where the word on the street is, “we’d better get in some drinking…”
(in other words: please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 280. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
Oh, and don’t forget to check out Steve Evans rockin’ readin’ notes for last week right here.
Pugnax!
-Cecil

The trail is thick, I say thick! with boots. Great to have such a rich collection of folks to share the journey with. And nice to feel like we’re starting to make some real forward progress.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the way that Pynchon plays us. He’s got a great feel for when he can bring on the thick stuff, and when he should throw us some candy. I remember Part II of GR starting beautifully (was it the Casino and the Octopus mebbe?). Like a reward for getting past the first 100 pages or so. Similarly, the first big stretch of Iceland Spar was a great run of “yeah — that’s why I’m reading this book!” Around page 150, my head started to cave in. I was reading sentences three times. Felt a little bit like I was back in GR‘s London with the rockets falling. And then right as the pressure behind my eyes started to build, we’re off to Yale, meeting the various Vibes, humming along with Mischief in Mexico.
Another kind of manipulation: Around page 167, as Yitzhak Zilberfeld began to lapse into a stereotype, I wrote in the margin: “is he trying to make us uncomfortable?” And yeah, I’d have to guess he is.
Don’t forget to search for “Steve Evans” in the W3 comments to find his hugely helpful fly-over of last week’s reading. You can also jump straight to it right here.
Tuesday 2/27: Let’s dry our socks out on page 232, where someone’s “pretend(ing) to lament.”
(in other words: please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 232. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
Pugnax!
-Cecil

And just like that, we’re at the end of Part I…. Lots to like in this last stretch: The dual identities of Blinky Morgan. The Aetherists and their Asylum. That oily Zombini (“I don’t suppose you’d have a spare electrical coil around?” (68) — how could Merle not see trouble brewing?). “Skip” the ball of lightning, who seemed like a distant cousin to “Byron the Light Bulb” of Gravity’s Rainbow fame.
A foul-mouthed Finn. A talking Tesla. An attack on the current administration even? (“Why, you could write a whole foreign phrase book just on what Republicans have to say.” (93)) A slice of Scarsdale Vibe’s past, the Traverse clan, and a rising extrasensory shimmer from Foley and Miles. All that, plus The Chums of Chance and their turn toward the Center, wherein Rodney and I get an excerpt from that Chums novella we crave….
Also: How creepy would it be to get sneered at by a guy named Darby Suckling?
Also also: On page 112, a passage that could have been plucked from Gravity’s Grainbow — the description of the rocket’s ascent, followed by Darby shouting “Stop, stop! …it sounds like Chinese!” — as if TP’s promising that we won’t be going back down that road this time around.
My thanks to Steve E. for his summary notes in the comments. They’re a great condensed way to give us a quick-glance back over the last week’s reading. Steve, if you find the time, please keep ’em coming….. (and if anyone’s looking to review them, search “steve evans” on the W2 comments page.
Tuesday 2/20: We’ll plant our dynamite sticks at the bottom of page 170, right next to “the purity, the geometry, the cold.”
(in other words: use this thread to comment through page 170. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
Pugnax!
-Cecil

If I knew Tesla was coming, I might very well have baked a cake. Because, well, you know how much Tesla loves to eat cake.
Lots of fun this week — excellent comments from an international crew of ‘marchers, plus a promising start to the novel with all sorts of rich plot threads. It sounds like many of us, me included, are thinking “hey — that was actually kinda fun.” But we can’t rename this a “funmarch” can we? That would just be silly. And of course, who knows what lies ’round the bend….?
Like several of the commenters, I’ve been making lists of characters. I tend to write “intro so-and-so” in the margin when a new character makes their first appearance. Another habit I picked up when we read Gravity’s Rainbow is writing a quick summary of the action on the top of each page. So, for example, page 13 was “naked lady below,” page 42 was “Lew can notice things,” and page 48 was “a fight avoided.”
If the slew of references gets you dizzy, bookmark the AtD wiki. I’m mostly staying in the text and avoiding a ton of extra research, but I did drop by the wiki twice this week — once to find out what a “charabanc” was, and once to confirm my suspicion that “The Unsleeping Eye” referred to the dread Pinkerton’s.
All in all, a great start. I’m really surprised how downright excited I am to back in Pynchonville.
Next Tuesday: Let’s stretch our page count just a touch so we can get to the end of Part One. We’ll pull over for nuts and clementines at the bottom of page 118, “toward a fate…few would willingly have chosen.”
(which is to say: use this thread to comment through page 118. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o’ day next Monday)
Pugnax!
-Cecil

Welcome to The Against the Day Deathmarch — a mass-tackle of Pynchon’s latest tome. This is our fifth deathmarch, and I haven’t been this excited about an onine mass read of a challenging book since, well, since we tackled Gravity’s Rainbow back in January, 2005.
I’ve read the first few pages of AtD, and I can report from the trailhead that it doesn’t start out in nearly as dense a thicket as Gravity’s Rainbow. But it does appear to share at least three things with GR: (1) silly names packed with portent (“Darby Suckling”), (2) a new character every 7 sentences, and (3) something particularly startling or amusing on every page. “lavatorial assaults from the sky,” “the brighter star-shapes of exploded ballast-bags,” “The Great Bovine City of the World”? What’s not to like?
Um…OK, but how’s this whole deathmarch thing work again?
Here’s a quick recap for new folks….
Short version: read, comment, finish, get a prize.
Longer version: comment on every thread from this week till the end, and finish the book, and you qualify for your choice of either an AtDDM mug or magnet. (Capped at 30 winners to protect my children’s college fund.) Comments can range from erudite analysis to content-free exclamations. “I’ve fallen woefully behind” counts as a comment. Not a great comment. But a comment. Try not to get very far ahead. And if you have zipped ahead, be sure not to get past that week’s reading in your comments. Every Tuesday I’ll post a new thread, and it all starts up again.
Next Tuesday: Let’s meet up at the bottom of page 56, where “the temperature” is “headed down.”
(In other words, use this thread to comment on pages 0-56. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment here by end o’ day next Monday)
Merry ‘marching,
-Cecil

Got my book this week. I’m all excited, and who can blame me? I’m fighting the urge to dive in. I have read the quote that opens the book, and I have read the first line, and I can report that they are both excellent. The second sentence will have to wait till next Tuesday.
Today’s post is another spot for chiming in if you’re planning on joining the ‘march, or for just saying hey to other ‘march-types. Based on the response to the launch post, I’m guessing we’ll start with something like 20 folks on the trail. A nice number to tackle such a mighty tome.
In last week’s post, I mentioned prizes. A few folks are first-timers, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to explain how that works.
Tell me more about these so-called “prizes”
OK. Read and finish the book and comment every week (starting next week), and the AtDDM prize mechanism will release a deathmarch mug or a magnet, your choice, like a mother hen dropping a mug or magnet-shaped egg. (note: prizes capped at 30 winners.)
Here’s a look at a couple of past prizes (note: len flares not included):

The “I Survived the ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ Deathmarch” mug
As you can see, the molecular structure of the GRDM mug is solid enough that all these many months later it can still securely contain a beverage such as milk, or chocolate milk, or orange juice. It calls to you, yes?

The “I Survived the ‘To the Lighthouse’ Deathmarch” magnet
The TtLHDM prizes should be going out to lucky winners shortly. While you can’t tell this from the picture, please take my word when I say that the magnetic pull of these beauties is so powerful that I had to have them delivered to me in sealed lead boxes to avoid adversely impacting the local tides.
Alright then — I hope the stakes are clear now and your collective mouths are watering as much as mouths can water in response to non-edible objects like mugs and magnets. See you back here next week, when we “single up all lines” and let boots and dust collide….
-Cecil

Back in January aught 5 a hardy band of pioneer types set forth on what some say was the very first blog-based literary deathmarch — the so-called “Gravity’s Rainbow Deathmarch,” in which a crew of modern day Lewis and Clark types banded together and managed, over five months, to read an extremely difficult book.
Two years later, we’ve read Pale Fire by Nabokov At Swim Two Birds, by Flann O’Brien, Don Quixote by Cervantes, and To the Lighthouse by Woolf. And now it’s time for perhaps our greatest feat yet. Not only will we read a difficult book, but it will be a difficult book that was published in this century. Specifically: Against the Day, Pynchon’s recently released behemoth.
But when’s it start?
The spines crack Tuesday January 30th. All are welcome. We’ll probably need a thousand people to join this time to get three people through, which seems unlikely, but, ya know, tell a friend. If you’d like to join up, this would be a great time to pick up a copy. But try if you can to hold off on starting it till January 30th so we can all leap onto the trail in synch. The dust cloud’s purtier that way.
Dare I ask…prizes?
As ever, we’ll be tackling around 50 pages a week. And yep, there will be the nigh magical lure of mug prizes for up to 30 people who finish and comment every week.
So what now?
Well, right here on this very thread would be an excellent place for you to sound off if you plan on marching, with your excitement, your fear, your loathing, all your strongest emotions. We’ll need to put that behind us soon. For on the ‘march we can only afford ourselves steely resolve. And the occasional donut.
See you on the dirt,
-Cecil

Congrats to the many who’ve made it through or are on the verge of crossing the finish line! (oh math, from hell’s heart, we stab at thee. For hate’s sake, we spit our last breath at thee.)
If you haven’t already shouted out, or you have last thoughts to share that you were holding back for fear of spoiling endings and such, you’ve come to exactly the right spot. Thanks to all for an excellent ‘march and most especially thanks for your high patience with me, and my, well, let’s just say imprecise posting habits this time around. I should be much more on the dime when we tackle The Monster aka Thomas Pynchon’s brand-new book, Against the Day. Deathmarch to start in mid-January. And may God have mercy on our souls.
Next week: Can you hear it? That sound? The whirring of machines, the gathering of magnetism? Watch this spot for…a magnet preview….
-Cecil