I really shouldn't be doing this

I really shouldn't be doing this, given that today I start subbing again, in just a few hours -- with a middle school behavior disordered class, they were desperate -- and the other writing I have to do is again being shoved under the bed.  I swear, I am Jonah, seeking any excuse to do anything other than that which I am "supposed" to do.  But this Pynchon thing was too near to me, too close to home, too synchronicitous (no idea if that's a word) and felicitous and I had no choice.

The lecture/discussion combined all the elements and personalities that have preoccupied me for many months (plus the question of race), in particular the writing of 19th century authors Melville and Poe and the writing of Thomas Pynchon.  For the academics, seeking the true authorial voice was the quest.  Is everything we write autobiography?  Apparently so.  For myself, that's a part of it; I see the exercise of both writing and reading as a means of transcending one's self.  Of getting high by getting lost, to be blunt.  As Eminem sang, Lose yourself in the music in the moment.  Richard Powers explored questions of "ventriloquism" and "focal distance" (I lost count of the times he used that particular phrase) and Professor Gordon Hunter concluded that Pynchon's new book, in particular, achieved so many voices -- boyhood adventure novel, Raymond Chandler, James Bond, even the simulation of Pynchon's own "popular" literary voice -- that he actually eliminated himself, the writer's voice, from the book altogether, achieving an autobiography that consisted entirely of collections of other narratives and narrative styles, so like me, my life of film narratives and art, and my current writing project ("The Nineteenth Century") that I trembled a little bit.  The speaker's thought may have seemed profound at the time he said it to the assembled group of about thirty, except for the fact that one member of the audience pointed out that, in fact, hadn't it been the case for well over 100 years, that the unreliable narrator, the disappearing author, was already consciously part of literary effort well before modernism, easily visible in T.S. Eliot, and way before postmodernism.

Me, I just like making myself dizzy.

All those reclusive writers, I want to be like them, I want to turn down invitations to parties, although I want to be asked to parties and then apologize with my regrets, and I want to deny interviews to the News-Gazette when they come asking, and I do want them to ask.  Things I am doing instead of writing -- planning a free taxi service for local Latinos, legal or illegal, since they (or what is clearly just the tip of the platano) are always out there riding their bikes or walking in the wee hours to substandard working conditions in kitchens of cockroach infested restaurants.  I could speak Spanish with them and scrape away the English from my consciousness for a time, escape the understanding of my first language, the crossword puzzle multiplicity that forces a between the lines reading, it's all Freud's fault, or maybe it has something to do with body language, can one unlearn a language?, and I could again perhaps, or so I imagine, know the joy of the unvarnished word, where the streets have no name.  I also could avoid writing by substitute teaching, work that I can take or leave at my discretion, they can call me at dawn to offer me a classroom and I can say, Sorry, I have to write this morning, or rather, I have to procrastinate from my writing.

Is Thomas Pynchon paranoid?  I have fantasies of receiving a phone call from him.  I don't even bother to imagine why he might be calling.  Maybe just to ask me a question about computers.   I am so glad Against the Day is set at the turn of the Twentieth Century, so far at least, although I've only read about 100 pages (as much as had the one speaker at the lecture/discussion; the other two speakers clearly had not yet ordered their copies and were ashamed to admit so).  I don't know why that historical time is significant, but I sense it is. Sometimes I think it's all been downhill since the 19th century.  As Woody Allen says of Manhattan (in a sentiment that I entirely share about the city as well), "I have romanticized it all out of proportion."

I have to trick myself into writing.  I have to convince myself that I am not writing, that I'm only playing around, exercising, dreaming.  If I actually sit down to write the project planned, the subject at hand, something in me rebels and I choose to write a sonnet or haiku or a letter to the editor of the News-Gazette.  I procrastinate and flee, like Jonah.  Jonah, like Melville, ran away to sea.  I get the feeling of doing something, the feeling of writing, but not actually writing what I was supposed to be writing.  I am so anti-authoritarian that I even rebel against my own plans, my own self-imposed instructions.  This has been the state of things my entire life.

I would be more reclusive -- like Richard Powers or David Foster Wallace, both area boys, but neither in a league with Pynchon -- if it were possible, but I have family obligations, and church obligations, and "work" obligations.  This could become the third preface to the book I am writing.  All these little semi-retirement projects with which I fill my time placate (with simulation) my sense of creativity.  Having a vasectomy years ago also may have been a Jonah-like escape from the call to be a writer, because somewhere in my consciousness I recognized that it was the perfect excuse for failure.  How could I produce authentic work if I had been sterilized?  Didn't Norman Mailer make some claim to that effect?  (I have rationalized this away over the years by the fact that my body still manufactures sperm; it is only the delivery system that has been blocked.  Parallels between production and publication may be drawn at thee reader's whim.)

Where was I? 

Oh, yes.  The real thrill at the Pynchon lecture/discussion was when one of the speakers, I think it was the lecturer Luc Herman, a visiting professor from Belgium who gave the focal message on "Thomas Pynchon: Race and Unreliable Narrative," casually tossed out references to Benito Cereno and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (without naming authors Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe).  I'm not an academic by any means, but those two novels are so sly, so subversive about voice, about race, that even Pynchon really has nothing over them.  It's all recycled.  If I knew how to speak Academic and could have peppered my question with words like "extradiagetic" and "intradiagetic" and "homodiagetic," I'd have asked a question about The Confidence Man.  Where's the voice in that Melville boondoggle anyway?  Everybody's just trying to get high, by any verbal means necessary.

By the way, getting to the lecture/discussion was not easy.  First, I had to rush back to Urbana from delivering newspapers, leaving my sub on her first day to finish a third of the route on her own, hitting rush hour on campus in the rain, trying to find the unfamiliar building, parking three different places, putting my dwindling number of coins in the various meters and running up to see the numbers on the buildings, only to find out that I was blocks away, desperate to urinate from having been driving and drinking cold coffee for three hours while delivering bagged newspapers to rural farmhouses and watching the portable DVD player, The Wire, Season One, Disk Four, Episodes Ten and Eleven, fending off phone calls from Lee and Miles, who were squabbling over a fake ID Lee had found in the bedroom, trying to negotiate an anger-free resolution (which, in retrospect, turned out successfully), finally, taking out an old, empty generic V-8 plastic jar from the back seat to unzip myself and urinate into as I drove to the third and final parking place, traffic all around me, parking, worrying about whether I had put enough money in the meter or remembered to lock the car, so that somebody might steal the DVD player while I was in the lecture, and seeing that my sub tried to call just as I was leaving the car, but ignoring her, and so forth.

I don't think I was dressed properly for the lecture/discussion, since I was still wearing my delivery clothes, but no one seemed to mind.  There was no discernible dress code.  And I left before the discussion was entirely finished.  But I did enjoy it, especially the information about Pynchon's early writings, his references to race that reflected attitudes in 1957, the references to Kerouac and Norman Mailer's The White Negro, and then I came home, meditated, read a few pages, cancelled poker because of inclement weather, and scratched the heads of three kittens while watching Ugly Betty, Grey's Anatomy, Men in Trees, and -- at the same time -- watching the rest of the episode of The Wire on the portable DVD player on my lap during commercials and eating unearthly rich cookies that Lee made and the fresh-baked bread that I had baked upon arriving home from the lecture.  I had forgotten about the risen dough, but the loaf turned out perfectly regardless.  Lee knitted.