Human Geography US (Peter Blegvad & Anthony Moore)

Someone directed my attention today to this recording from a few years back, which had somehow escaped my notice. Human Geography US presents "spoken texts taken from the prose work of six 20th century American writers [Jack Black, Richard Brautigan, John Crowley, Edward Dorn, Thomas Pynchon, and Charles Willeford]; a booze-biased mapping of the US in a human geography of words, music and field recordings. The texts are recited by Peter Blegvad, poet, illustrator and musician. The guitar pieces, field recordings and concept are by Anthony Moore." The embedded version below is from a London radio station, Resonance FM; there was also a limited-edition LP version from Half-Cat Music, released in 2022 and presumably unavailable.



I find this project spooky and weird and beautiful (and calming), but given the current pathological state in which the "US" finds itself, it's hard to avoid the question of whether anything like this matters. (Presumably no more than a few hundred people have heard it, or ever will.) But if forced to make a choice of allegiance between the idiosyncratic vision of America that Human Geography US evokes and a disfunctional "republic" presided over by a sociopathic demagogue, I know which flag I'll be flying.

As it happens, I'm in the middle of reading Benjamin Nathans's To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, which recently won a Pulitzer. I'm reading it because the subject has always interested me, not because its depiction of the tyranny and moral squalor against which the dissidents struggled is somehow "useful" in our own situation. But in the end, all political lies are the same, regardless of the ostensible ideology they serve; they're all just tools to gain consent, masks for corruption and abuse of power.

Landscape (Thomas Pynchon)

Thomas Pynchon:

They took the North Spooner exit and got on River Drive. Once past the lights of Vineland, the river took back its older form, became what for the Yuroks it had always been, a river of ghosts. Everything had a name — fishing and snaring places, acorn grounds, rocks in the river, boulders on the banks, groves and single trees with their own names, springs, pools, meadows, all alive, each with its own spirit. Many of these were what the Yurok people called woge, creatures like humans but smaller, who had been living here when the first humans came. Before the influx, the woge withdrew. Some went away physically, forever, eastward, over the mountains, or nestled all together in giant redwood boats, singing unison chants of dispossession and exile, fading as they were taken further out to sea, desolate even to the ears of the newcomers, lost. Other woge who found it impossible to leave withdrew instead into the features of the landscape, remaining conscious, remembering better times, capable of sorrow and as seasons went on other emotions as well, as the generations of Yuroks sat on them, fished from them, rested in their shade, as they learned to love and grow deeper into the nuances of wind and light as well as the earthquakes and eclipses and the massive winter storms that roared in, one after another, from the Gulf of Alaska.

Vineland

I first read this novel in 1990, shortly after it was published. I thinned one copy out of my library a few years ago but kept this UK edition with cover art by Stephen Martin and jacket design by Peter Dyer. By the time I picked it up the other day to revisit it I remembered little about the book except that it was largely set in California, which makes little illuminations like the one above all the more refreshing.

Pynchon is said to have a new book, Shadow Ticket, scheduled for publication later this year.

News

Thomas Pynchon:

Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had risen and something curious too had happened; as if everyone in the city, simultaneously, had become sick of news of any kind; for thousands of newspaper pages blew through the small park on the way crosstown, blundered like pale bats against the trees, tangled themselves around the feet of Roony and Rachel, and of a bum sleeping across the way. Millions of unread and useless words had come to a kind of life in Sheridan Square; while the two on the bench wove cross-talk of their own, oblivious, among them.

V.