Joe Biden's prestige just rose inestimably in my eyes.

Joe Biden, at an event for Nuns on the Bus in Des Moines on Wednesday, quoted  from my favorite author's greatest novel, the most famous of the Proverbs for Paranoids that appear in Gravity's Rainbow -- number 3:

Proverbs for Paranoids:

1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

4. You hide, they seek.

5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

--The Proverbs never appear in one place in Gravity's Rainbow, so these are collected from pages 237, 241, 251, 262,and 292

If I hear that he has started quoting Proverb 1, I'll turn TrueBlueLiberal.Org into a full-time dedicated Ready For Joe 2016 website.

The Quote of the Day Is About Thomas Pynchon

There is a brilliant review by Michael Chabon of Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in the new issue of The New York Review of Books. There's a lot in his commentary on this book I finished reading a week ago that makes me want to drop what I'm reading now and go back and start reading Pynchon again immediately (and when you do read Bleeding Edge, I highly recommend turning around immediately and reading the first paragraphs as soon as you've let the final page sink in).

But here's Michael Chabon's sentence that caused me to drop The Review and fire up Blogger:

Everything means something, or nothing means anything, and as in every Pynchon novel what can be found is not solution but the grace of moments spent suspended between those certainties.

Pynchon's books are the only ones that I religiously buy and start reading on the day they appear, but I've never seen the appeal of these novels summed up as well in a single sentence.

And the Chabon review will give you a slightly better idea of what you're in for than the official Penguin promotional video...


And with Bleeding Edge shortlisted for this year's National Book Award, I'd love to see it win just to see who (if anyone) would accept this year. Would that person be able to match Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech in 1973 in place of Richard Python?

By the light of Gravity's Rainbow

A month ago I couldn't help quoting a passage from Moby Dick with eerie relevance to today. This morning I read this from another big encyclopedic American novel.

... Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. ... [note the interesting capitalization]

--Gravity's Rainbow
(p.122 in the 1973 Bantam mass market paperback)

Thomas Pynchon didn't know about Dick Cheney & Halliburton in 1973, but he certainly catches the current tone of war as business, and war as business that can only be understood by the ex-CEOs of Halliburton & sons of privilege. The rest of us are mere pawns in their games. But I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that the preceding passage represents the dominant tone of the novel. It's as lyrical as any novel written in some passages, dense in others, and stylistically (though never intellectually or morally) silly in places like this when it lapses into song or verse:

There once was a thing called a V-2,
To pilot which you did not need to---
You just pushed a button,
And it would leave nuttin'
But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.

--Gravity's Rainbow
(p.355 in the 1973 Bantam mass market paperback)

Which is the perfect description of George the First's bloodless Gulf War I with its made-for-CNN Smart Bombs® and Patriot Missiles®.

--True Blue Liberal