It’s New Years Eve on a closing decade and we’re feeling a certain obligation, though not because of any clamoring demand to, to….. We’ve never liked top-ten lists,- year-end lists, best-of-the-decade lists, that sort of thing. And for all the usual reasons. Now, as the old song goes, everybody’s doin’ it.  (Matthew Yglesias,  discussing top-ten lists,  says “One of the pernicious impacts of the rise of the internet is how everyone gets to publish their own list.”) Pernicious? In the interest of helping drive the stake in this monster’s heart, here we go. What qualifies the Rabbit? Not much. Sure, we had a long publication history back when but our appetites have always trumped taste. And our tastes tend toward the strange and eclectic. Most of all, even with our ears and wiggly nose, we could never hear/read everything we wanted let alone things we never knew. Nor do we want to be held to release dates limited to the last 365 days (see March Hare) even though we cycle through a lot of the new and now.  But in the spirit of recognition, as a means of thanks (we couldn’t have done it without you), here are the books and recordings that helped us to get through it all. Because good books and good music make life worth living.

BOOKS

The Shaghai Gesture by Gary Indiana; Two Dollar Press. For the cleverness and laughs not to mention world-wide conspiracy.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon; Penguin Press. Genius confirmed. Did we mention world-wide conspiracy?

The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin; Copper Canyon Press. The natural world reminds an old poet what’s left to learn. Punctuation not included.

My Father’s Tears and Other Stories by John Updike; Knopf.  Mature themes (you know what I mean)  and grace from one of the great man of letters. He’ll be missed.

Report On Myself by Gregoire Bouillier; Mariner Books. And I thought I had problems.

What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems by Ruth Stone; Copper Canyon Press. The later poems in this volume make real and worthy connection to the natural world.

The Bear from Go Down Moses by William Faulkner; Random House. What we lose when we lose wild places.

The Undiscovered Self by C. G. Jung; Atlantic, Little Brown; and The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung; The Modern Library. To understand symbol, image and archetype and because I dream.

The Future of the Image by Jacques Ranciere; Verso. Image and politics. See above.

The Complete Crumb Comics: Volume 6 “On the Crest Of a Wave” by R. Crumb. Helps us to remember when.

The Right Mistake by Walter Mosley; Basic Civitas Books. A wise man seeks patience in a cruel world.

In Search of Small Gods by Jim Harrison; Copper Canyon Press. Poems in which the mundane becomes magnificent.

The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier; First Second. Part photo collection, part graphic novel…what makes us think our experience in Afghanistan will be different than the Soviets? 

MUSIC

Up Popped Two Lips by Henry Threadgill’s Zooid; Pi Recordings. A twisted puzzle, with oud. How does it all go together?

Cartography by Arve Henriksen; ECM. Poetic electronic and percussion landscapes from the speech-inflected trumpeter.

75 by Joe Zawinul; Heads Up. Sure, we like Brown Street better but as the last recording by a great innovator (with Wayne Shorter on a cut no less) and, well, we miss you, Joe…

Blood From the Stars by Joe Henry; Anti. The songwriter who sinks his faith in image and rhythm recalls Katrina with blues-inflected (natch) seriousness.

New York Days by Enrico Rava; ECM. Moody, intellectual, beautiful.

The Complete On the Corner Sessions by Miles Davis; Columbia. We have a weakness.

Set the Alarm For Monday by Bobby Previte; Palmetto. Keeps us in real time.

Bartok: The Six String Quartets by the Takacs Quartet; Hungaraton. Always. There’s no better way to start the day than to try and figure these out.

Radiolarians II by Medeski, Martin & Wood; Indirecto Records. Take away the groove…

The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu by Carla Bley; ECM. Jazz–now and then–and more. That’s Paolo on trumpet

The Essential Leonard Cohen; Columbia. Poetic nostalgia; don’t ask.

…and all the other life-sustaining words and sounds my addled mind has, for the moment, lost.–Cabbage Rabbit

It’s not too late to appreciate Chris Ware’s cover and story in The New Yorker‘s November 2  “Cartoon Issue.” Young trick-or-treaters stand at doorways, their faces hidden behind white masks, while their parents wait back on the sidewalk, their faces masked in illumination from their personal communication devices. What a great image! The story inside is equally clever and layered: generational,  revealing of interpersonal relationships and delusion, graced with beautiful imagery and designed , like a Pynchon novel,  in circular fashion. Who is that eyeless blond at the center of it all? Ware’s recent stories have been (mostly) focused on women–see The Acme Novelty Library Number 18–and it’s fair to ask what this Midwestern male can tell us about females. The answer is apparent in this latest story of mothers and daughters. They serve as a means to discuss the reoccurring foibles of men and the human condition at large.  The irony of the story’s last line–”Poor Mom…She was still naive in so many ways”–speaks to our own, unavoidable naivete.  See the Rabbit’s Chris Ware interview here.   –Cabbage Rabbit

The Rabbit’s  March Hare personae means he’s still waiting for his copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (tomorrow! tomorrow!).  In the meantime, we’re reading the reviews. As usual, novelist/reviewer Walter Kirn shines a light. He’s an admirer. Even Salon’s Laura Miller, who so hated Against the Day, finds the latest to her liking. Rereading her review of Against the Day made us recall how (to put it kindly) mixed the reviews were on that lengthy, wacky tome and how, to the Rabbit’s ears, many reviewers missed the point or just couldn’t handle so many unsecured plot lines (see the many letters that follow Miller’s Against the Day screed for perfect examples of die-hard Pynchon fan reaction, reviewer slurs and confused murmurings of the sort that Pynchon always seems to spawn). When the Rabbit was confronted with the assignment, he had–in perdictable March Hare style–the advantage of being late if not last. His sorely-missed editor at the I.E Weekly (we love you Rich!) asked for reaction to the notice. For no good reason, here’s that review. Please write in and tell us what we already know: that there’s little explanation of what goes on in the novel (and so much does!), that we give little space to its central characters (all 87 of them) and that, well, we just didn’t get it. But isn’t that the point with Pynchon novels?

Up To His Old Tricks

Why won’t critics let Pynchon be Pynchon?

Once a novelist is declared one of our best living writers are critics obliged to kill him off? Or does he do himself in? In the strange and stranger case of reclusive Thomas Pynchon both seem true.

Pynchon came screaming across the literary skies during a ten year period beginning in in 1963 with V, The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. Nothing in existence compared to these wild, expansive books and Pynchon’s place as god of his own comic universe seemed secure. He was buried in critical praise and awards. His esteem grew when the Pulitzer committee refused to consider Gravity’s Rainbow because of a few grossly risqué scenes (how well we remember the dominatrix who after consuming a piece of gristly meat squats over Brigader Pudding’s open mouth and delicately drops a turd).

Then, in a trajectory suggested by the German missiles celebrated in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon fell to earth. Over a decade passed before the short-story rehash Slow Learner was issued. Then came Vineland–Pynchon’s most forgettable novel–which revisits the 1960s, an era chronicled in The Crying of Lot 49. Mason & Dixon, published in 1997, marked a return to form but was so large and cumbersome with dialect that it defied casual reading.

Even as Pynchon’s work changed, it stayed the same. An endless cast of cleverly-named characters stumble through scenarios pulled from real and imagined history. Paranoia, singular and collective, is rampant. Destiny overpowers individuals, improbable science mixes with out-and-out fantasy, and drugs, no matter the period, are imbibed. Plots–several per novel–seem more comic book than high literature. And somewhere along the way, someone breaks into song.

Against The Day arrived late last year and marks a return to the Pynchon of old. It begins with the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience climbing aloft in 1893 with boy-book heroes the Chums of Chance bound for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It ends some time after the First World War with the skyship now a destination rather than a means to one. In between, there’s more action—and characters– than one can shake a stick of dynamite at, all of it centered on the contract killing of a blast-happy miner who’s accused of being an “anarchist.” Revenge, such as it is, comes slowly, oh so slowly.

Reviews of the thousand-page-plus tome were mixed but stirred with poison. Louis Menard of The New Yorker asks “What was he thinking?” and calls the novel “shapeless, just yards and yards of Pynchonian wallpaper.” In the Los Angeles Times, novelist Christopher Sorrentino also invoked the author’s name to damn it, calling the book “Pynchonesque.” Michiko Kakutani, currently The New York Times foremost critic, said the book read “like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes.” It was as if Pynchon had erred by writing as only he can.

In our humble view, Against the Day is a great book worthy of its author’s best. If it were a movie, it would be trumpeted as “colossal,” “epic” and “breath-taking.” That “wallpaper” Menard complains of is actually well-hung art, more foreground than background. And the trance like character of the tale–make that tales– is deeper than any downer might induce. Pynchon’s universe is an entwined, inexplicable place much like real life. Not every story we live has a neat ending. Pynchon’s go on and on.

The genius here lies in the parallels Pynchon draws with contemporary times. The promise of new technologies (in this case, electricity) become meaningless in the face of class struggle and war. Politicians are clueless and corrupt. Big business threatens individuality and hope springs from the promise of the impossible. Immigrants are the object of complaint and security is a booming business. Something frightening is gathering in the distance. The book’s title leaves no doubt how Pynchon feels about the 21^st century. It’s the same ol’, same ol’ all over again.

As always, Pynchon delivers this serious message with comedy, irony or both. The book bounces from Chicago, where the soon-to-be assassinated Austrian Archduke wants to take some sport in shooting Hungarians working the Windy City’s stock yards, to Colorado, Belgium, Mexico, Venice and Hollywood as well as the very center of the earth. A strange vessel cruises beneath the Middle Eastern sands looking for lost cities. There’s a race to build a time machine–the presence of stranded visitors from the future prove it’s possible–and a convention celebrating mayonnaise. Just when things threaten to turn dull, we meet a talking parrot named Joaquin who, since a run-in with a Corpus Christi housecat, expresses a preference for gringo pussy. How can you not love it?  –Cabbage Rabbit