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Happy Birthday, Mr. Pynchon!
On the occasion of the American writer Thomas Pynchon's 80th birthday, Christian Hänggi organized a celebration of his work at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.
The celebration featured select readings by Jess Holl, Joshua Taylor, and Michelle Witen with a brief interlude by Philipp Schweighauser reciting flawlessly and without notes the first sentence of The Crying of Lot 49: “One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”
NYC-based poet and musician Tyler Burba flew in just for the event to interpret songs penned by Pynchon, Michelle Witen regaled the audience with a performance of Giacomo Puccini's "Nessun dorma" from Turandot, and DJ Lou Profile played songs referenced in Pynchon's oeuvre. There was a birthday cake with a marzipan V-2 rocket, bananas suspended from the ceiling, 45 kazooists humming "Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon," and free peanuts for all.
Christan’s Festrede
Good evening. I’m Christian and I’m your host tonight. As a host, Thomas Pynchon tells us, I’m “a trinity: (a) a receiver of guests”—ticking them off on his fingers—“(b) an enemy and (c) an outward manifestation, for them, of the divine body and blood.”
By virtue of this symbolism vested in me as a host—and I do know a thing or two about hospitality—I want to begin on a sombre note.
On May the 8th, 1945, the Second World War ended. Accounts vary, but it is estimated that some 60 million people perished. Imagine. That’s the entire population of Italy wiped out. Or Canada and Australia taken together. Or Tanzania. Tanzania, of course, is in Africa, far far away.
World War I was no walk in the park either. Some 18 million people are said to have died. That’s as much as Chile or the Netherlands. Or Switzerland and Austria taken together. Or the entire population of Malawi. But Malawi, again, is in Africa, and who has ever heard of Malawi?
I welcome you here at Cabaret Voltaire. Those of you from out of town may not be as sick and tired of the phrase “the birthplace of Dada” as is almost everyone who lives in Zurich. But it’s true. And as everyone knows, Dada was a response to the slaughter of the First World War. Some of Pynchon’s writing was a response to the slaughter of the Second World War. Both Dada and Pynchon were something of an artistic avant-garde, meaning they were trailblazers whose influence we are still reckoning with.
On 8 May 1937, eighty years ago to this day, and eight years before World War II ended, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., was born in Glen Cove, Long Island. Can you imagine a great writer as a little baby pooping his diapers? Well, that’s exactly what happened. His ancestors were among the first to sail to America. When little Thomas was four, the family moved to Oyster Bay, New York, where he went to high school and had his voice crack. He then enrolled at Cornell University and began to study physics and engineering. In 1955, the year Charlie Parker died, he left Cornell, but likely not because of Charlie Parker even though he greatly admired him. He then enlisted in the Navy and served in the Mediterranean. After two years, he returned to Cornell and majored in English. He also attended classes held by Vladimir Nabokov although it appears that only Nabokov’s wife dimly remembered young Pynchon’s handwriting. After graduating, he moved to Seattle to work for Boeing Aircraft as a technical writer and engineering aide in nuclear missile programs. Around that time, he probably started to write his first novel, V. He left Boeing in 1962 and spent time in California and Mexico. In 1963, V. was published to great acclaim. Anyone who has read it will surely agree with me that it is hard to believe that a man of merely 24 years would have written something like that book. In 1966 he followed up with the very short novel The Crying of Lot 49. In 1969 he lived in Manhattan Beach, outside of Los Angeles. It’s a nice town, as a matter of fact. I once had dinner there at the same Mexican place Pynchon used to eat at. In 1973, he published what is still considered his master piece, Gravity’s Rainbow. Although it was selected for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the advisory board declined to give it the award, considering it unreadable, overwritten, and obscene. What did it, I would think, was the Nazi brigadier dying from e.coli poisoning after eating his mistress’s poop. After Gravity’s Rainbow which catapulted him into the first ranks of twentieth century literature, he sort of disappeared, not that he was ever one to make public appearances. Except for a few essays and a collection of early short stories, he remained silent until 1990 when his next novel, Vineland, appeared. That same year he married his literary agent Melanie Jackson with whom he has a son – also named Jackson. Another couple of novels followed, Mason & Dixon in 1997, Against the Day in 2006, Inherent Vice in 2009, and Bleeding Edge in 2013. To this day, little is known about Pynchon’s life, but it appears that he is currently living in New York’s “Yupper West Side.” His only three ‘public’ appearances were on The Simpsons.
Only eight novels, making up about five thousand pages, along with his other miscellaneous writings, or roughly one million, seven-hundred and sixty-eight thousand, seven-hundred and thirteen words. And, oboy, these are some novels! Four of them might serve nicely in a protest to attack tear-gas wielding storm troopers, purely in self-defense, of course. They can also be used against sudden spouts of loneliness and melancholia, to raise a child to eye level at a dinner table, or to impress any number of people who have only heard that Pynchon is this supremely difficult author but have never opened a book of his for fear of feeling inadequate to what they may encounter inside. More than once did I meet someone who said that they loved Gravity’s Rainbow but had never gotten past the first hundred pages. Only once did I meet someone who claimed he had read it—get this—23 times. That was a couple of years ago. He may be on his 27th or 28th round now. Or in a psychiatric clinic. Another fun fact: one of the world’s leading Pynchon scholars is blind.
When Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge, appeared in German translation, there was a TV program called Literaturclub, where two white, or should I say gray, men and one much younger woman were invited to discuss the novel. Almost needless to say that the men hogged the airtime. One of the guests was a distinguished critic, and, as it turned out, blabbermouth, by the name of Rüdiger Safranski. He was irritated and simply didn’t get the novel. This is a man who has received a great number of literary awards. And this was one of Pynchon’s lightest reads. If a man of Safranski’s reputation doesn’t get it, who would? I can tell you who would. I have a friend who is a hairdresser in Georgia. The Deepest South, so to speak. She does not have a degree, except as a hairdresser, but she just loved Gravity’s Rainbow, Bleeding Edge, Against the Day and all the other novels of Pynchon’s she has read.
What does this tell us? I’m not sure. College education can still be a good thing. I think people who find Pynchon difficult are those who demand of themselves that they understand every word and every concept and that they always know where in the story they are and which character is speaking again. For those people, getting through some of Pynchon’s novels can, admittedly, be exasperating. But there are other people who just go with the flow. Who don’t worry too much about whether they get the fine points of rocket engineering, the hidden allusions to Broadway musicals, the historical background of the German atrocities in Namibia, or all the mathematical breakthroughs and dead-ends that happened around 1900, give or take a decade or two. These are people who can laugh their rear-ends off sailing through Pynchon’s prose but still witness with horror the abuses of colonialism and the military-industrial complex. These are people who don’t mind that a story firmly grounded in spatiotemporal history can suddenly take off into the fantastic. Mile-high hemp plants, a hollow earth, a mechanical duck, a sentient light bulb, a speaking dog. All of this can dwell between the same book covers as the Dora concentration camp, the Colorado mining wars, or slavery in Africa and North America. There’s room for Ivan Pavlov, David Hilbert, and Nikola Tesla. For Dizzy Gillespie, Britney Spears, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. For Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, Charles Manson and Richard Nixon, Benjamin Franklin, Wernher von Braun, and the fourth Earl of Sandwich. There’s pot aplenty, and heroin and mescalin and LSD too. Hand jobs and foot jobs and blow jobs, paedophilia, homophilia, coprophilia, entire orgies with whips and shiny boots of leather. Spotted dicks, eatable and otherwise, scum soufflé and acne à la mode, frozen chocolate-covered bananas. There are Nazis and anarchists, paranoids and adenoids. Zurich, Monaco, Venice. Paris, London, New York. Egypt, Mexico, Siberia, Mongolia, Japan, Argentina. Conspiracies real and imagined. It’s all there. It’s all there, and much more.
Encyclopedic. This is the word that is always used when trying to describe Pynchon’s work. And that is fine with me. I never aspired to know or understand everything written in an encyclopedia and I can still enjoy reading one.
What critics sometimes forget, but fans do not, is that Pynchon is a great humorist, like Kurt Vonnegut, who was his senior by fifteen years, and Mark Twain who was born more than a hundred years before Pynchon. All of them have known, and I think the dadaists did too, that life can be miserable, that people can be stupid and cruel, that there are inhuman and dehumanizing forces at work to keep the powerful powerful and the powerless powerless, and sometimes, all we can do is laugh in the face of these absurdities and atrocities. With Pynchon, as with Vonnegut and Twain, and of course with many other novelists and humans of all professions, there is an allegiance with the underdog, the disinherited, the passed-over. Pynchon calls them the preterite, as opposed to the elect who are those that execute this anonymous power for the sake of power, oftentimes of the technological and capitalist kind. This allegiance with the small cogs in the machine is, of course, the impulse in a lot of art, and not just political art. It is the refusal to speak the language of the elect, and for much of his career, Pynchon has done just that. Which may also be why many people have never heard of him.
But no matter if you have never heard of Pynchon and are only here for the free peanuts: Tonight we celebrate this unique figure in literary history, unique as any woman or man dead or alive. But more than celebrate the author of whom we know that he’s tall and may have protruding teeth and jug ears, we are here to celebrate his literary work. There’s more than enough material. We will have a number of readings from six of his novels and there will be live and canned music. I am particularly delighted that Tyler Burba flew in from New York to sing and play the guitar just for us. In the past, he accompanied a number of my talks in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, and Philadelphia. If we applaud nicely, he may even pull out a kazoo or a ukulele. You will be treated to readings by Jess Holl, Michelle Witen, and Joshua George Taylor. In between the readings, DJ Lou Profile of the sometimes controversial Breitzeit broadcast on Radio Stadtfilter will play music that is mentioned in and inspired by Pynchon’s work. If anyone else wants to read his or her favorite passage, don’t be shy or have another drink to combat your shyness.
Around here, approaching the end, a speech such as mine would go into a long list of institutions who sponsored the event and thank them profusely. Unfortunately, I can do no such thing. The only institution who accepted the opportunity to support tonight’s event is, in fact, Cabaret Voltaire. They waived the usual event fee of five hundred francs. Thank you, Adrian Notz, thank you Leandro Davies, and thank you Dada. I hope you will honor this by buying a lot of drinks—a lot of drinks—at the bar. As of yet, all other costs, among which an airplane ticket from JFK and back and music royalties to be collected by SUISA, are coming from my own meager bank account. Therefore, you shall be given the opportunity to leave a little cash in one of the donation boxes that will occasionally pass around or be strategically placed near the emergency exit. If you liked a reading or a song, you are welcome to buy a drink for the respective reader, musician, or disc-jockey. If you decide to step outside for a cigarette, legal or otherwise, keep in mind that there are neighbors who live here and may even have to go to work tomorrow morning, poor buggers.
And with these words of advice, I, by virtue of being your host tonight, declare this birthday party to be underway. [TOOOOT!]