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#263: Syphilis Patients on Brochure Vacations (Patreon)

Published:
2025-11-28 11:00:07
Edited:
2025-11-29 21:19:27
Imported:
2025-11
Tags:

Content

ON THE DAY – stop – FUCK AMERICA – stop – THANKS FOR NOTHING – stop

This is the point: books are not made of "positions." They are not made of "arguments." Anyone can say they believe anything, in print, and the ostensible righteousness of their avowed beliefs does not make a book good. If it did, what glorious years for Democrats we would be living in, what a Belle Époque for every city council candidate who pretended to care about abolishing the police for 20 minutes 5 years ago.

A book is made of words. If the words aren't worthwhile, it doesn't matter what "argument" they "articulate," and it sure as FUCK doesn't matter what "story they tell." I will kill the next man who tries to talk to me about "telling stories." You sound like Kamala Harris.

Pynchon's novels from VINELAND onward are, without a doubt, better than 99% of other novels written in English during the same period. That is a pathetically low bar. The first time I picked up VINELAND, which is a solidly good book, after having read GR 3 times back-to-back-to-back, it felt like watching Kennedy's brain lurch out of his skull. If I know you're the man who wrote those first 3 books, and you want to publish VINELAND, do it under a fake fucking name. And if you want to write a book about AMERICA, now or any time, you better be ready to fucking die over it, and you better burn my fucking eyes out by the end of it.

William Burroughs never exactly wrote a book like GRAVITY'S RAINBOW – nobody has, and Burroughs wasn't trying to – but he knew whereof he fucking spoke until the day he died, and he died in shithole Kansas, a house I've been to half a dozen times, because Lawrence, KS is soaked with several hundred years of blood you'd better smell and taste before "America" occurs to you as subject matter, and because it was a day's drive from a fucking methadone clinic. And Burroughs did not supply anyone with Correct Ideas, and he did not do it from a brownstone he owned on the Upper East Side; he said

LOOK AT THE PRISON YOU ARE IN, WE ARE ALL IN. THIS IS A PENAL COLONY THAT IS NOW A DEATH CAMP. PLACE OF THE SECOND AND FINAL DEATH. ... NOTHING HERE NOW BUT THE RECORDINGS. SHUT THEM OFF, THEY ARE AS RADIOACTIVE AS AN OLD JOKE.

Ask some teenage boys in Afghanistan about the CIA retirement program. See what "stories" they've been told.

Files

Comments

Madra na Móna

Don't slight Padraic Colum, man. There's a generous sized roundabout named after him in Longford.

Gholson Lyon

agree with you big time on Quentin Tarantino! Also, I am visiting museums in Texas, and I have viewed many "revered" paintings by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell, which sadly very much whitewash the true history of the genocide of native Americans. I am also struck by the concrete natures of the downtown cities of Dallas and Houston, which help extinguish any possible spirituality from most people. Also, I am re-reading Crying of Lot 49 again, which I find to be an amazing book, so I was indeed mystified that Pynchon later on lambasted his own work in the introduction to Slow Learner. I agree that some artists do get more "secure" as they age, so that perhaps they end up moving away from the surreal, although I love what you had to say about David Bowie and Blackstar on one of your very early episodes! anyway, awesome work here.

Rytone Rothslope

What do you think of Vollmann, especially Europe Central?

MRSAful Fate

It's interesting you mention Portugal (aka diet Spain). Check out pictures of a public monument in Lisbon called Monument of the Discoveries. I was just there a few weeks ago and it's astonishing in many ways. First of all it's fucking huge, and like any sufficiently large structure, pictures won't capture how small you feel standing next to it. Secondly, on the back side of the monument, the rudimentary shape of a cross was integrated into the overall theme of the structure, which is that of a Caravel ship. Carved in relief on the surface of the cross is a massive sword with the blade pointed down toward the Earth. Finally, and perhaps most notably, flanking each side of the monument are sculptures of people associated with the "age of discovery", culminating with Henry the Navigator, one of the founders of the slave trade, standing boldly on the edge of the structure, facing the Tagus and out toward the Atlantic. The monument looks somewhat classical, but it was built... in the late 50's. Now, I don't know nearly as much about Portugal's rape and pillage of the world as I do about the Anglo-European's, but I've realized that not only can you view these monuments (in the US and elsewhere) through the lenses of normie patriotism or through what I'll just sloppily call here "liberal arts student first learning about all this shit" horror, you can view them as actual monument to genocide, actual monuments to extermination, and actual monuments to terror in all its varieties. And actually switching between the first lens of normie patriotism and the last lens of monuments to horror and realizing that they might even be the same lens, well, Mike, it's really something.

Lars

I hope I get cigarettes, Hersey's, and CUNT in my stocking this year. 🥺

Wrenn

Goofy and uncharitable episode. Yawn.

Heath Iverson

Finally saw One Battle After Another. I don’t like to say it, but PTA has turned Pynchon’s worst book into his own worst film.

Evan

great episode, thank you

Evan

it's like it's not a betrayal of a dream but a betrayal that dreams

MirrorOooMirror

Ohhhh, that was a just a different time…

Ian H

What is the key difference between the "American fate" passage in Inherent Vice and the Rosa Luxembourg fantasy in GR? Is it just that Luxembourg passage is presented in a kinda mawkish way by a ridiculous character, where in IV the author has become Leni Pökler himself?

Brendan Kelly

Was the General in question Bernie Trainor??!! Shoutout to my Holy Cross Jesuit-brained psychos! DMT blunt rotation: Bernie T, Clarence Thomas, Bill Simmons, and Pod Save Jon.

Ryan Fellhauer

I feel like this isn’t a great or in-depth read of the later books tbh, especially ATD. Yes, his books want to be movies, and yes, mid and late Pynchon adopt Henry James as the ultimate writing daddy, but I don’t buy that it all reduces down to “what if America went another way?” but rather “how can we use American fictions and its history (his love) to show what America actually is” Shadow Ticket is def with the read, even if you don’t cover it!

Byron’s Glowing Filament

Can’t agree at all on this one. Which is probably the first time I heavily disagree with your takes. I agree with some points (GR being far and away his best novel, M&D and AtD being entirely too long for what they’re doing and having unnecessary passages where GR never did). But they’re objectively not “alternative histories” any more than GR was. They fictionalize events sure, but that’s what every one of his books did. It’s not as if M&D glorified aspects of American history or that we saw history take an alternative path to where Washington or Jefferson were killed earlier, preventing some more evil path forward (like how Tarantino killed Hitler earlier in IB or prevented the Manson murders in Hollywood). All of Pynchon’s works show how America ended up where it is now. There may be motifs of “what ifs” but that’s not the crux of what any of his works have been about. Curious if you’ve revisited V. recently. I remember you not loving that one from a very early episode. I never have liked it but want to revisit it soon now that it’s been some time.

Kawaii Leonard

that glory hallelujah joint goes crazy

CT

Interesting anecdote to this episode: one of longest running and dearest of friends is the grand-daughter of the guy who DID get to be the marine on the Joint Chiefs. That guys daughter, aka my friends mother, was the personal assistant at varying points to Storm Thurman, Donald Rumsfeld AND Dick Cheney. Let’s just conclude by saying, her and her mother have cut all ties.

David

There's a certain conservatism I've long sensed in later Pynchon, and this elaborated what I've wondered about extremely well. I do wonder if pynchon believes any of it, or if this is why his later stuff is riddled with fantasy compounds or ephemeral places where the world briefly went better. Yet, like you get at, what sort of escape hatch can we really hope to find?

AP Clark

Every Thanksgiving I remember that the Puritans described their new home as "God's American Isreal." This is from Richard W. van Alstyne's THE RISING AMERICAN EMPIRE. Here's the full quote, which comes from a discussion of what would become the Monroe Doctrine: Expounded with particular force and clarity by the New England Puritans, who regarded themselves as founders of a new Israel in the North American wilderness, the doctrine of the two spheres became a fixation in the American mind prerequisite to the growth of nationalism. New England, which was "God's American Israel" according to its Calvinist divines, assumed from the outset an attitude of political independence toward the mother country. (p. 8)

Jesusgod

I love all the people pushing back. This is fun to read the counters. Great work all around.

Torgeir Tannenwald

I had a strange moment of synchronicity walking through my town this icy sunday morning. As Michael said "They didnt fall, they spread all over the world" I walked past a store sign that just said "all over the world". I dont live in the US, either. Very eerie.

Divad Kong

I haven't listened to the episode yet so I'm more than likely in the territory of dumb fuck commenting about what I know nothing of, but is the argument something about the question of writing fiction from the position of being a fucked in the ass loser and dreaming of how to reconcile this fact through loser narratives about what might have been or how to make our loser reality somehow ok? I liked one battle after another well enough but I couldn't help seeing it through this lens. A fantasy wherein we make caricatures of the winners that fuck us and play with our bones, saying haha, these guys, Huh? Imagine if being good meant anything and what if the real story is the friends we made along the way?

Daniel Estrella

Listening to you talk like that to Pynchon was like watching my father cry for the first and probably last time. Sad, cold, bitter, frigtening…. Anyways, thanks for the ep, much love!

Radio Free Carcosa

Loving all the Scott Walker music lately. “The Drift” and “Soused” are back in heavy rotation thanks to these recent episodes.

Byron’s Glowing Filament

Shit forgot to ask. and now I can’t even remember if this was mentioned this or last episode. Are those shitty imitations of Finnegans Wake that you’re talking about the books by Arno Schmidt, Julian Rios, etc? I read the Wake last year and it fucking rocked. I’ve have Schmidt and Rios on my list for years but don’t want to waste my time or money if they’re the bullshit imitations you’re talking about.

Joseph Sullivan

Great episode. It’s a small kind of courage maybe, but I appreciate you saying things that a lot of your audience won’t enjoy hearing.

Kyle Gross

As I see it, Pynchons late novel are the BLEAKEST of them all. After GR he developed nothing new as the culture was barely able to digest his earlier work. The reality is compromised in these late books. They are deliberately degraded, pastiche, and progressively detailing the impossibility of even any whiff of redemption. Shadow Ticket is a nightmare book, an AI slop book, there is a reason its about CHEESE. Hate to say it casuse nobody else seems to - pynchon is practically screaming at you that this is cheesy, it SUCKS, he is cataloging the deterioration of culture and the books get less fun, less deep, surface is drowing out the formerly rich subtexts. He has his moments in all of these books, you can see he isnt senile. Not even close. The late detective trilogy is him writing airport Pynchon. This is an idictment so bleak that we are deprived of anything but random blips of references and songs and ideas so corny they are late a fourth generation of copy of a pynchon tape. He is showing what depth is when all is beaurocracy - shadow ticket is like an animated dossier, unmoored from the even slight coherence the world GR was written in. It’s him saying: this is what America has become, and therefore this is what “a Pynchon novel” must now look like. This is not a new technique, but i think its honest. Its not great, it sucks, its bleak, its not fun to read. He is now writing from such a reduced world, such a compromised and corrupt place, pynchon novels of quality CANT exist. It is the death of his medium flailing in debilitating decline.

michael granat

What does one, disinclined to ruminating, do with the knowledge of residing in Lucifer's invisible jail house? Asking for a friend...

Xander Hughes

After catching up on this show for the last 2ish months (Thanks Mike for keeping me company on my jaunt to Wichita once a week) this episode makes me feel a little conflicted. I have to imagine old Tom knew the consequences of publishing a book like GR, even if only a select few would understand it's significance, and maybe this was just the price he had to pay, either for his own protection, or sanity. Either way, keep up the good shit.

Matthew Krueger

I don't know. You stretch yourself that thin for the better part of a decade, phasing in and out of reality as you wrestle with the muse in order to keep the circuit closed for hopefully long enough to get it all down. Before it slips away or destroys you. And by some miracle you actually do it. You wake up one morning with that giant pile of paper on your desk, that exhaustive how and whodunnit, so intellectually and metaphysically forensic that it reveals all of the necessary machinery and maps out all of the abstraction... And what does it get you? A slow and steady and never ending series of gilded invitations to join the rolling cocktail party thrown by the perpetrators and would-be perpetrators. And what can a poor boy do except sing in a rock n roll band? I can imagine it was all pretty brain-breaking. I can even imagine him needing to shit on it so as to be able to have ego enough to try and do it again (even if he knew he was never really going to try), because, what was he gonna do? Be a plumber? Go work for Dow or Rand? You might only have to look in the mirror for long enough to brush your teeth in the morning but still... Is the answer more that in order to compile all of the data necessary to write that monster into life, the relationships and connections in all of their glorious and dizzying overlaps, that he was already in too deep to ever get out? That the skin parchment you sign in your own blood at the forsaken crossroads and the still warm heart you bury there is always your own? No one throws a stone with more accuracy or panache than you do Mr. Judge, and I would not change a hair on your head (I'll never stop giving you my $5 a month either :) The list of 88 year old white guys who take up too much oxygen is sooooo fucking long though. It's not my job to decide for anyone else who gets a pass though so I'll just quietly hum Lay the Lily Low to myself. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm all for killing your idols - and even the occasional Buddha you might meet along the way - but it ends up being hard to listen to.

Maciek

This was the first song youve played in my memory where my brain was able to connect the music to the words you speak at the same base and profoundly moving level. I didnt need to have my brain actively ignore the lyrics and just let the static take me away. I sometimes wish I had the same ability you have to be moved or even understand music like you do. But than I just go back to listening the same beeep borp computer noises that is completely devoid of meaning and infusing my own into. Anyway great episode.

Jaime Christley

"Look, let's face it, you're probably a much more intelligent person than I am. In fact, I guarantee it. But even smart kids stick they're finger in electrical sockets sometimes." - Bruce Willis, MOONRISE KINGDOM

Wooobie

You ever have a nightmare that seems throughout the waking day like a place you are going to return to? That Scott Walker song opened a wound into some place like that. Maybe I'm not saying it right. I've been having mild nightmares the past few nights which linger into the daytime, like an open door into the next room, and the song opened a second door to somewhere else.

Combusken

Idk I think game of thrones is better than Vineland

K

I may have to quote you on this twin tower eden shit if I ever finish my novel…that was incredibly high bar insight poetry my friend

stephen tucker

as far as Gravity's Rainbow being perfect, I can live without the extended graphic lolicon sequence. not to be all Your Fave is Problematic about it. and to a lesser extent, I still thought it was rude when Pig Bodine called that nurse a cunt.

Kamran Husain

who knows invented the rape and pillage via knife, the anglo saxon types probably innovated the use of pointing a gun at someone’s family while you go about your business, but the americans thought larger with the nuclear bomb. this could make it so you don’t even need to defend yourself actively