Huh. That 'but' should be read as: and check out this less awesome but still awesome thing.

This entire essay by Greg Tate, on the state of improvisation in relation to various kinds of black music, is nearly breathtaking. But check this from his review of Encore:

'It has also found him scribed on the covers of hiphop magazines as the greatest living rapper, which always makes me laugh and think of how predisposed white supremacy has made even colored journalists crown any white man who takes a Black art form to the bank, to mo' money than Shine ever seen, as the greatest who ever lived. Fred Astaire, Benny Goodman, Elvis, Eric Clapton, Larry Bird, take your pick. As if any of them understood the kind of casual fatalism I overheard on 116th and Adam Clayton Powell the other day, where one brother say to another, straight-faced and not a hint of irony, "He'll be out soon, he didn't get much time, he only got 10 more years." All that August Wilson sheet in other words. That real Black Angst. The kind of angst that only the burdensome, belaboring crucible of white supremacy could twist into those bizarre, contorted, and comforting expressions of Black Pleasure and Irony known as bebop and hiphop and the blues.'

'In the name of Anem this carl on the kopje in pelted thongs a parth a lone who the joebiggar be he? Forshapen his pigmaid hoagshead, shroonk his plodsfoot. He hath locktoes, this shortshins, and, Obeold that's pectoral, his mammamuscles most mousterious. It is slaking nuncheon out of some thing's brain pan. Me seemeth a dragon man  He is almonthst on the kiep fief by here, is Comestipple Sacksoun, be it junipery or febrewery, marracks or alebrill or the ramping riots of pouriose and froriose. What a quhare soort of a mahan. It is evident the michindaddy. Lets we overstep his fire defences and these kraals of slitsucked marrogbones. (Cave!) He can prapsposterus the pillory way to Hirculos pillar. Come on, fool porterfull, hosiered women blown monk sewer? Scuse us, chorley guy! You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute. Let us swop hats and excheck a few strong verbs weak oach eather yapyazzard abast the blooty creeks.'

Yarrr. I think I've been wanting this for years! I don't know what it sounds like, though. Basically all I have to go by are years of pirate jokes on The Simpsons.

Und Geeta mit, er, photoen? I'm not looking that word up.

Geeta mit Michael Mayer.

(It occurred to me while hunting down comic citations that it would probably be pretty easy to find one particular flavor of Bakhtin's number ten, er 'felix/oscar' like I said, in the alternation of the comic mode with the horrible, in most every chapter, meaning that most every chapter has something in some place or some time unspeakable (which is probably also a genre characteristic): but without more careful search I've decided that maybe only half of them do - Esther's nose job, Fina's gang rape, the extended debauch of Foppl's party, the disassembly of the bad priest, disfigured Godolphin - and that these serve as contrasts, extensions of the field of the inanimate and its encroachment on the human (welcome adoption by the human) laid out elsewhere in the books. They lend the more cerebral or jokey figures - like early on, Rachel in love with her MG - some of their visceral reaction, and in the retrograde, too: come upon the pages-long description of Esther's nose job (not just nose job but sadomasochistic, the S for him, the M for her, in the least feminist way possible: 'this delicious loss of Estherhood'), and think, this is more of the same, and realize that only then were you thinking of all the earlier talk of inanimate this and inanimate that in quite this way, uncomfortably shifting, queasy.)

Bakhtin's basic characteristics for ancient menippean satire more or less apply to V.

1. Examples of the comic chosen mostly at random from each chapter:

1: 'Out in the street a chief yeoman was trying to urinate in the gas tank of a '54 Packard Patrician and five or six seamen apprentice were standing around giving encouragement.' 2: '"Eve was the first Jewish mother, the one who set the pattern. The words she said to Adam have been repeated ever since by her daughters: 'Adam,' she said, 'come inside, have a piece fruit.'"' 3: plotting anarchist punchbowl attendant. 4: Capping the horrific nosejob scene, Schoenmaker's song, the blackest, most appalling comedy - and at the end 'For the last eight bars she chanted "No" on one and three.'. 5: Alligators! 6: Sfacim. 7: Mantissa and Cesare's scheme to cart the 'Birth of Venus' out of the museum in a hollowed-out Judas tree. 8: Pig transmits pornographic stories over the teletype on his ship ('LUCKY PIERRE RUNS AMOK' e.g.). 9: Hard going in this chapter, Mondaugen's story, but Weissmann's finding proposition 1 of the Tractatus in Mondaugen's sferics does amuse me, me being me; better though to look to the tango with which Foppl's party serenades Mondaugen as he finally leaves: 'Why are you leaving the party so early, / just when it was getting good?' 10: Profane has a confrontation with SHROUD, synthetic human, radiation output determined, which he guards as a night watchman. Charisma sings a logical positivist lovesong to Mafia (though it looks like in doing so he falsifies the textual details of the Tractatus to get it to scan!). 11: Mondaugen gets some twisted irony I suppose because that sort of thing always makes twisted things more twisted; but in Fausto's confession it's hard to find anything I'm happy to call 'comic' as opposed to 'ironic', the latter sapped by its place in Fausto's confession and person of anything humorous. 12: Roony's wife, he thinks everyone should know, is a fucking Fascist. Word is she's the Ayn Rand parody character in the book. Har. 13: The story of Pig's abortive effort to make himself temporarily sterile by means of the radar antenna. 14: What clarified for me that this chapter is indeed Stencilized was the information that V. told a great deal of her story to the composer, who told it later to Stencil. The composer's name, tee hee, is 'Porcèpic'. But if that doesn't do it for you, then: 'Porcèpic, to the amusement of all, produced at L'Ouganda one evening a chart of the possible combinations the two could be practicing. It came out to 64 different sets of roles, using the subheadings "dressed as," "social role," "sexual role." They could both for example be dressed as males, both have dominant social roles and strive for dominance sexually. They could be dressed different-sexed and both be entirely passive, the game then being to trick the other into making an aggressive move. Or any of 62 other combinations. Perhaps, Satin suggested, there were also inanimate mechanical aids. This, it was agreed, would confuse the picture. At one point someone suggested that the woman might actually be a transvestive to begin with, which made things even more amusing.'. 15: The list played more for weirdness than laughs that does though include: 'who had the distinction of being the only Manx monoglot in the world and consequently spoke to no one'. 16: The Kilroy-band-pass filter gag, if you want. Though Pig's reappropriated Mickey Mouse Club theme tickles more (though not as much as hearing that he watched the show religiously). 17: Mostly serious, but the antagonism between Stencil and Father Avalanche is good for some grins.

My. That was tiring.

I first finished my first reading of V. a little over seven years ago, on the twelfth according to the list I kept then. I should start writing down starting dates - or, I should have, when the way I read them still made it significant when I started them. I don't know where this memory comes from, but I remember being stuck in Mondaugen's story forever, making little progress for weeks or months, and I remember it being hot; it being Iowa, it could have been hot as late as October, or I could just be fusing the delirium of that chapter (part in-frame, part out, just my reaction to the sluggish struggle through it) with the way I imagined its setting, hottest desert (hardly even accurate to all the outdoor scenes - and much of the chapter is spent under siege at Foppl's). I think I started reading in the summer of '97, became mired in chapter nine and distracted from important things like reading by school, and then finished in some desultory way probably over my overly long Christmas break: my memory of events, sensations, revelations after Fausto's confession in chapter eleven (of which, even, I remembered little) seems to be almost nil. I suppose an incomplete recollection of the plot has hindered me somewhat, and also a poor grasp (I'm sure I got it, some, at the time, but it apparently didn't stick) of the structure, let's say narratively and epistemically. Last week I sat down with great pleasure to map out some of the basic features.

Along the way I didn't find what I thought I would find. I had wanted first of all to think about the connections between the chapters, not so much the connections as far as Stencil would be concerned, or if there is some difference, as far as a disinterested historian would be concerned (Stencil is certainly not disinterested, but they would deal with the same matters of concern, I would think), but the connections that might pull the reader through, maintain their interest in the time that I had begun to feel as kind of parallax. Instead, when the narrative seemed much more linear to me, once I had noticed the most prominent clues in each Stencilized story that motivated their placement in his V.-narrative, and more importantly, when I noticed the occasions for their telling, I lost my interest in relating the stories to the 'present' timeline in which the Whole Sick Crew story moved. But I noticed:

Chapter 1. 33 pages (5 sections)
Ch. 2. 16 pp. (2 s.)
* Ch. 3. 33 pp. (8 s.)
Ch. 4. 16 pp. (3 s.)
Ch. 5. 22 pp. (2 s.)
Ch. 6. 17 pp. (2 s.)
* Ch. 7. 59 pp. (11 s.)
Ch. 8. 15 pp. (4 s.)
* Ch. 9. 51 pp. (4 s.)
Ch. 10. 23 pp. (5 s.)
* Ch. 11. 41 pp. (1 s.)
Ch. 12. 19 pp. (6 s.)
Ch. 13. 25 pp. (2 s.)
* Ch. 14. 22 pp. (2 s.)
Ch. 15. 8 pp. (3 s.)
Ch. 16. 30 pp. (3 s.)
Epilogue. 34 pp. (3 s.)

- that the sense of the historical seemed pretty plainly to involve, as a matter of rhetorical technique, or of calling on certain experiences of reading from the reader, more immersive writing than in the 'present' scenes, simply on the basis of sheer length. Look at the way any chapter is divided up, too: the section breaks are generally along the divisions of scene, or time, or perspective, in a way that is exploited by the different forms of the Stencilized chapters to emphasize their difference from the more straightforward form of the Sick Crew chapters (more, but not completely). The asterisked chapters above are Stencilized, though I'm still reading 'V. in love' and haven't decided if it's appropriate to regard it as such yet (there are signs of it being so, but for this chapter, I think these signs might come only as commentary from a narrator with more epistemic authority than Stencil - though it's hard to tell since the narrator refers to Stencil in the third person just like Stencil does) - and I have yet to reread the Epilogue, set in 1919, yet either.

Chapter 3 is called 'In which Stencil, a quick-change artist, does eight impersonations', and the eight sections (the figures I gave are slightly off, I suppose, in the few chapters that contain material that starts before the first section break for section 'I') are each pieces of a story about V., each part advancing the story from the perspective of a different third party narrator who crosses paths with the story's main figures. It's implied that each section is one of these 'impersonations' performed by Stencil not in person but imagination, with the means provided by the evidence in his dossiers - though it's interesting that each one is from the perspective of, if not a person actually impersonating someone or other, then at least a person with a certain inwardness, the kind that contrasts to the outward appearance that renders them, in each particular set of circumstances from section to section, able to overhear or observe the interactions between Porpentine-Goodfellow-Victoria. Together with the remark that Stencil has only veiled references to Porpentine in his father's journals, the positioning of the narrators of the sub-stories make it clear that Stencil can hardly have known (through historical investigation) all that he imagines in his impersonations.

In glancing back at Chapter 7 - 'She hangs on the western wall' - I realize that I don't even have a ready answer to the mode in which we're receiving the historical material there. The introduction to the chapter suggests that it's a Stencilized version - from the bottom of a fold, instead of a crest - of what the narrator says that Stencil relays to the psychodontist (= dentist + psychiatrist, or mebbe dentist x psychiatrist) Dudley Eigenvalue about V. in Florence. But it doesn't make that explicit, just enters into the story in the next section. (The fact that this story would be relevant to Eigenvalue because it concerns the young Evan Godolphin, and that Stencil knows this, is also not mentioned, though of course if the story we read is enough of a representation of what transpires in the conversation between Eigenvalue and Stencil, then Godolphin would have been mentioned and Eigenvalue would have known that Stencil at least suspected his connection, whether Eigenvalue would confirm it or not.) The sectioning here I am less clear about; on the surface it seems like usual time/scene formal marking, which at least sets up the crisscrossing-paths feel that the story has (some); I don't know whether to say that it's probably also due to, or caused by, the sheer number of tertiary characters and events mentioned, and the demands of ordering them in the story. This would not be to lose the epistemic coloring that would make this chapter an example of various modes of historical access (would it sound frightening here to say 'historical consciousness'?) - think of the way a plot ('one of those grand conspiracies or foretastes of Armageddon which seemed to have captivated all diplomatic sensibilities in the years preceding the Great War') would be relayed, captured, by a party like a diplomat interested in such things as plots, conspiracies, history made out of confluences of events and actors.

There is much to say about the other Stencilized chapters, but for now, a note for later: the time is out of whack, fucked up as the kids and also me say, in Mondaugen's story, and so the sectioning relative to the page count is especially effective (note also the remark in the introduction to this story, at the end of the preceding chapter: Stencil gets the story from Mondaugen, in person, over beer, in about thirty minutes or so, which I reckon would be a pretty explicit way of saying, even if it hadn't been said in the subsequent narratorial remarks on Eigenvalue's behalf about Stencil's retelling of the story to Eigenvalue, that the story Stencil gives us could not have been the story given to him by Mondaugen - and this is to say nothing yet about the disorienting representation of mixed consciousness between persons and across time that Mondaugen experiences and then apparently cannot separate from the telling, or that Stencil cannot). I am so far too impatient to read my Thomas Mann and adequately suss out some likely antecedents for this kind of technique. As for Fausto's confession in chapter eleven, it is a single section presumably because what we are getting is not Stencilized at all but merely a look at the same thing he is reading - introduced as such in the previous chapter and then framed as such in the little coda paragraph to the chapter (after the date Fausto places on the confession, which is written as a letter to his daughter Paola: 27 August 1956, which by my reckoning makes it current in the Sick Crew timeline, and hardly having spent any time at all in Paola's hands before she brings it to Stencil). The form here is confession, by letter, but more importantly by commentary on Fausto's old journal entries, selectively rather than representatively chosen (to the ends of: his confession to Paola of how he treated her, raised her, and the sources of and reasons for his actions; his theorizing about time and the self; and?), and though written in response to lived experience and thus potentially the best means in the novel yet to history, positivist style, dazzlingly, bewilderingly inventive, varied, catholic in its language and form, suiting the Fausto that we know from the chapter. Which is to say, history has the fuck mediated out of it.

The jury's still out on 'V. in love'.