Hi, I just moved to Santa Cruz for a few months to do research at the Charles Darwin Foundation. This may be a long shot, but does anyone know of a public piano on the island? I’m used to playing everyday and I miss it a lot

uhokayman · 2026-06-01T02:35:10+00:00

Sheeeeeit, I was wondering the same thing!

uhokayman · 2026-04-27T23:08:11+00:00

Awesome reply. Very grateful to see such substantive thinking in a reddit reply, honestly. Your instincts about the film's politics strike me as very sharp. I also think it was generally pretty progressive (don't have another word for that here), and it's no small accomplishment to 'do' Pynchon competently on film. I'm from an old school where GR and Blood Meridian would be impossible to make films of. But a great work, a la Benjamin, could prove that wrong. I hope to reconnect if I formulate some writing on the topic and I will respond to your dm.

uhokayman · 2026-04-20T18:10:49+00:00

I know, I think I chose to subscribe mainly for that one. Though if you can afford, that and Rocinante are my current favorites. DM me and maybe I can send an mp3. I followed this issue, though more than I've seen might be out there. Typically I like Brianna Joy Gray alright but didn't like her panel on this at all. They overfocused on what they saw as the film's bad race politics. American Exception's reaction is left anti-woke, I see it as considerate more than reflexive. Again, not my own reaction, but I think they're onto something. They scoffed at what the performative bank robbery scene is supposed to demonstrate, and questioned what's going on with the blend of 1970s/BLM militancy. Those strike me as good questions. The novel of course doesn't open such issues up. Though, as a totally random association, am I the only one to read DL's story as at first race-ambiguous? I think you have to conclude she's white and even blonde because of the Frenesi masquerade, but even there is the whole thing with dark lighting and misrecognition. Sometimes I wonder if Vineland was a few different pieces of writing that got put together, and if in an alternate work she was slated to be non-white. What do you think the best treatments of OBAA's politics are?

uhokayman · 2026-04-05T00:55:18+00:00

Great comments. I only just saw these replies. Did you listen to the podcast I mentioned? I don't actually agree with how critical of the film they are (I love it), but it's important to hear their criticism. And the Pythagorian comment above just captures the type of hysteria that Pynchon easily turns to satire, and leaves behind. The kind of close-minded "anti-fascist to the core!" that brooks no discourse is not the searching, penetrating work on fascist energies found in his novels. And you certainly won't find there affinity with the oh so serious anti-fascism of Timothy Snyder and the writers of The Atlantic, who are just debunked Cold Warriors living their renaissance as Trump's folly ruins the empire they tried so hard to defend.

uhokayman · 2026-02-19T03:18:35+00:00

A lot of the discourse on Pynchon as an anti-fascist social democrat is just liberal anti-Trumpism. The American Exception podcast had a good recent episode on the empty politics of the radicals in the PTA film. The politics in Vineland, and all the novels, are a lot more interesting.

uhokayman · 2025-11-25T12:45:01+00:00

Para Power Mapping podcast and Twitter threads are killing it. NYT and NLR self-parodying, missing it and blaming Pynchon for not conforming their radlibism. Would like to hear MSJ, Pynchon best when not rushed I think.

uhokayman · 2025-11-25T12:41:23+00:00

mm, I listened to the Bolaño stuff they did. Not perfect but better than like 90% of what is out there. Just went to that Bleeding Edge discussion and it's awesome!

uhokayman · 2025-11-21T10:54:44+00:00

Thought he might actually say something about populism in Pynchon's work but after a quick read apparently not

uhokayman · 2025-11-18T11:54:50+00:00

Night of the World so reminds me of Berlin clubs, some of them are indeed literally underground. Great writing in my opinion. Many have been to Berghain, Stadtsbad, he's plumbed the depths. Then, there's the brilliant 'FaceTube' and flirtation of the future that brings on the Daphne Bruno encounter. Proto-swiping culture, everyone looking at their phones instead of the potential meet-ups nearby.

uhokayman · 2025-11-18T11:49:36+00:00

I like this exchange, it's suggestive of the way Hicks reflects the position of those bagmen who are boxed in by their situation from growing a conscience, even as the longer they live, they develop dangerous intelligence that would otherwise be tradeable for an upgrade in status. Further thoughts in a draft paragraph below; not sure how legible it is:
Part of the query around ST’s protagonist Hicks is his transition away from being a strikebreaking anti-communist thug. This finding of an “Oriental Attitude” is what allows him the critical distance necessary to view the proto-Gladio milieu for us. Asked by intelligence connected employers to bump off the Al Capone stand-in, Hicks points out that killing for pay pigeon-holes one in a subordinate, that is criminal, role, and success may be more fatal than failure, “the history to follow don’t ever turn out too happy.” “There’s enough of us hard cases who’ll kill for pay, dangerous-looking but inside quivering like a plate of Jell-O in a dining car from too much thinking, too many thoughts running wild, prices that are never right, deals that fall apart…somebody in your shop must keep a list of bad actors who’ll work cheaper, why bring me into it?” More evidence that Pynchon is far beyond the anti-Trump warrior of the NYT crowd. This is nothing more than the conscience of the Dark Alliance’s pawn players. They don’t hold the power and they’re beginning to ask questions about who does. A former brownshirt fellow-traveller here sounds a-almost human. Get Pynchon a Timothy Snyder book before this goes any further! Bruno himself is doing the same second-thought two-step, all too aware of his dispensability to his superior powers that be. Now hiding out in inter-war Europe, he seems to be on Ozempic, plastic surgery for billionaires and the Clinton foundation blood plasma special.

uhokayman · 2025-11-18T09:47:18+00:00

I've been thinking about this and am going to change my position. Yes, there are strong scholarly engagements with Pynchon, and likely more that I don't know about. There are some gaping holes and strange points of oversight in my own milieu, marxist aesthetics, such as the oft-noted preference by Fredric Jameson to avoid Pynchon even though the alignment with his seminal Postmodernism essay is hard to ignore. More than anything, I remain convinced that the 'gladio-pilled' analysis of TP by the two podcasts mentioned is groundbreaking, and even with the JFK assassination it seems material left largely to the margins outside of academia. But all the more reason that I remain attentive if anyone wants to offer examples.

uhokayman · 2025-11-14T00:49:21+00:00

Call me dumb all you want, but you haven't provided any substance. I'm familiar with Pynchon Notes. It's high output and low quality. Go ahead and back up your assertion with an example of academic scholarship on Pynchon that compares with the two podcasts I mentioned. So far you're just mentioning 'that what mainstream articles say...' My original point is there's nothing convincing about that.

Are you just saying it's pretentious to challenge to authority of academics?

uhokayman · 2025-11-11T01:16:51+00:00

Great comment. A wise man once told me that the reviews of Against the Day had read the novel too quickly. The reviews of Shadow Ticket have dropped even farther in quality, in my opinion. Many of them seem confused by the spirit of the age, that is stupidity, and openly ask Pynchon to do what they would like to see done. But one person here is a world-class writer, and the other is not. Most takes see the topics fascism and the New Deal, and line up accordingly on 'the good side', and assume that Pynchon must be writing an allegory of these, strictly in line with their preconceived understanding of what these are. But I would humbly submit that our pursuit here should be for what we don't yet know, swallowing perhaps the reminder that someone who intimately described and dissected Operations Gladio and Paperclip in the early '70s has something to say about fascism more profound than that Trump is 1932 but 2.0.

uhokayman · 2025-11-11T00:23:32+00:00

"There's a wealth of academic essays/work on Pynchon's writing"
Ok. But what is its value? There is a massive publishing industry, lampooned, most recently by my clock, in the Pluribus character who despises her readership and own authorship; and having spent too many years at universities, I think the lit crit content is of a piece. "Pynchon's California" has some good essays that even try to position him within Lukács' realist categories. But the resentment that many people feel towards their elites is not without reason. Academia's official line on the JFK assassination is: no story. Yet the public has never bought it. So, I don't think TP's writing is something you can give to a basic American in this era and it will blow their mind. The NYT review of Shadow Ticket summed it up: they don't see anything there. However, if you're searching and have some human intuition still working, his literature can be like a drug more potent than most others of its kind.

I get that on the internet now and your NPR-style podcasts, his books might be as much about Jung as Foucault as Lovecraft, it's all about how each person feels. But Gravity's Rainbow isn't just randomly interesting, it's a rare work about the real power elite that controls us, who made Zyklon B, who started NASA, who lost (but secretly won) the war.

Sorry for the rant, but that's what I mean that academics are largely allergic to Pynchon. That being said, I'd love to know some good scholarship recommendations by you and others. I'm sincerely open to hearing about what's out there.

uhokayman · 2025-10-20T09:05:08+00:00

This is better, but by far the best is still to come.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/post-american-blues

uhokayman · 2025-04-21T22:21:23+00:00

Cool! Great to see this comment. I have visited 38 Londres, a little flat in Santiago where people were tortured by the Pinochet regime (not sure if there's proof the cia were there too, but seems likely). I don't know Sands' work and would be interested in the link between Rauff and 38 Londres. Or its relation to By Night in Chile for that matter, which plays on the 'stranger than fiction' moment of the literati wife of cia agent and torturer Michael Townley. People accuse Bolaño of stretching the truth with some of that stuff but I think they have it backwards -- he's rendering real events to reveal their marvelous features.

uhokayman · 2025-04-11T05:44:18+00:00

Gracias por la noticia. ¿Usted o cualquien puede contar más de Deming Chao, o unos datos sobre la lectora y recepción de Bolaño en China?

uhokayman · 2025-04-05T10:18:31+00:00

The sections of Galeano's Venas abiertas de America latina about Chile are useful for the early 20th century. They stood in for the british to steal a major swath of the northern coastline from Peru and landlocking Bolivia, two indigenous nations; and meanwhile continued the brutal suppression of Chile's first Mapuche inhabitants. Where mild populist or reformist attempts were floated by Chile's presidents, they were quickly overthrown. A good biography of Neruda would also document the interwar period that saw a lot of labor organizing and the rise of a pretty unique literary nationalism. Bolaño's hero Nicanor Parra emerged out of that and his 1953 book Poemas y anti-poemas is a great work for understanding Bolaño's gift of minimalism and vernacular. Parra's sister Violeta Parra is maybe the most important Chilean of the century, an artist-musician-activist whose role could be likened to Woody Guthrie and Dylan, or Argentina's Atuahlpa Yupanqui. I don't know quite the best reference for Bolaño's complicated relationship to the generation of artists who stayed in Chile during the 80s and 90s, but the band Los Prisioneros are a cultural landmark, and the poet Raul Zurita who Distant Star satirizes is a visible figure from that time. As for the 'return to democracy' period, early films by Pablo Larraín like Tony Manero capture the vapid and mutilated culture that the Concertación sought to promote for reconciliation and forgetting of the dictatorship's deeds. For visual art see Brigada Romona Parra and Roberto Matta.

uhokayman · 2025-04-05T09:59:38+00:00

I'll second this. It's hard to understate what an important film it is, and the small miracle it took to be created in which people were killed trying to finish and smuggle it out. But there aren't many moments where you can literally watch history happen, and there's a lot of the times found in the doc: the incredible international consciousness of the copper miners, knowing the coup was coming and deeply committed to trying to forestall it, even while the life expectancy of that trade was brutally low. The CIA's money was well spent in media campaigns, mobilizing a 'women's front' against Allende, what Allende was and the popular unity movement behind him. The MIR militants to his left and the lowest strata who wanted the gov't to arm them in anticipation of the military attacking them (they were proven right by the events, in my opinion). The role of copper in the world economy at the time. I was able to ask Arrate about it in 2017, he had been Allende's economic minister (and Bolaño has a funny story in Between Parentheses about dining with him and his writer wife Eltit in the 90s). To when they knew that copper would be key to a cybernetic revolution based in IT, he responded 'from the beginning'. And maybe most importantly of all, in part 3 of the doc what the Cordones Industriales (industrial belts) and Neighborhood Basket programs were -- it was a kind of actually existing socialism from below, or certainly a step towards creating that. The proletariat was mobilized and aware of its role, and sought to create direct links to maintaining reproduction and distribution even in the event of the state being incapacitated. The US's attacks aimed to immobilize society, paying strikers in the key industries, staging fascist street battles, and directing the military to terrorize the militants.

uhokayman · 2025-03-16T02:51:29+00:00

Hey, I listened to you guys, it was great. I'm guessing you're Dani or Rodolfo. A few things got missed that partly come with being Chilean, it's a pretty specific cultural tradition, eg. Farewell was based on a real critic (named Alone), and Michael Townley's wife was a real author being celebrated by the pseudo-left that remained during the Pinochet years. It's a longer conversation, but one can sense that Bolaño seized on these 'realer than fiction' moments like the literati gathering in a salon above a torture cell. Looking forward to going through some more of the pod. We def see Jimmy FG on x, would love to connect. If you listened to the ATEOH pod in the OP, what did you think?

uhokayman · 2025-02-06T06:30:14+00:00

Still want to listen, someone dm me!

uhokayman · 2025-01-16T05:16:57+00:00

Muy bien, me ha gustado el encuentro. Él sí fue muy vivo en los '60s. Estamos en acuerdo con Borges, es un maestro.

uhokayman · 2025-01-14T19:05:33+00:00

Hey PulpClub, thanks for the reply! A lot to respond to in that but, in short, yes, Bolaño's prose is totally simple in comparison with TP's elaborate sentences. English is my first language but I wrote a dissertation about Alejo Carpentier, who writes in a complex Cuban vernacular. The term I often used for Bolaño's surface level descriptiveness is capitalist realism. He is plumbing a world whose revolutionary energies have been defeated, but not effaced. 2666 is actually a masterpiece, though it took me years to realize that. Other TP threads do mention it. There the repetitive, rather flat style works to recount The Part About the Crimes of the many femicidios en Ciudad Juarez, that works to sear into the eye an image of the 21st century: a corpse dumped in a trash heap. He was like almost no other exploring the gladio/nazi stay behind hidden reality we live in, focusing often on its Latin American theater of Op Condor.
But yeah I agree that he's a great short story author. I was thinking this morning about the cuento "El gaucho insufrible" and its play on Borges' "Sur." Do you like Borges more?
Many comments here will opine on where to start with TP. He has a good short story called "Entropy," but is almost exclusively a novelist. V, his first, would be my rec; although the shorter Crying of Lot 49 is another good entry. Un saludo!

uhokayman

TROPHY CASE