***
Sapienza University of Rome was the main host of the four-day long conference, but was far from the only sponsor. To register for the event cost nothing (the social dinner was 30€, and was voluntary), and there was some gear that we were afforded in the process.
But that gear wasn't free for whomever put it together. The university supplied the flimsy style of rucksack that can loosely be called a "backpack," while the Cultural Attache for the US Embassy, the Center for American Studies, and the Irish-American Artistic Association all made other financial contributions that kept us in venues and supplied with plenty instant Keurig-style espresso, pastries, and the occasional food spread.
Everyone who'd registered had name-tags:
And our first venue was the Studieri Amricano Centrale, the Center for American Studies. This was a former palace from the late 18th century retrofitted onto a preexisting 2nd century building of some significance, found on an unassuming street in central Rome.
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| Enter under those flags on the right in the distance |
Used mainly now for its library, it's where Italian students can come to check out periodicals and books in English, and is one of the hubs of Americanist studies in Italy.
It was pretty spectacular for what it was worth. The following is a view from the inner courtyard looking up at our mustering point on that first day:
The couple visible on the right were Aussie, and I only know because the dude is the guy with whom I shared my panel.
From up there looking back down you get this view:
And, lastly, from the inside, we get a mix of the eras, 18th century busts and 21st century HDMI screens:
It was about this time when I began to realize what these events are all about, and why people kept saying things like, "I can't wait to hear your paper."
The vast majority of presentations were given by academics simply reading their dissertations off paper into the mic. More than one were monotone, and more than one were in difficult enoguh to understand accents that lead to the brain wandering.
I looked around at some point and realized a few things:
- Just about every single person present held at least one PhD, and most multiple PhDs, which meant---
- They all pretty much lived in academia, and for the Europeans with their vastly affordable university meant they were never likely to leave academia, which meant---
- Just about every single one of these people DID NOT live in the real world, and, in stark contrast---
- I was the only person who DID live in the real world.
I always mean these things in the nicest possible way.
There's a scene in the movie "Stripes" where one of Bill Murray's fellow grunts says to the drill sergeant, "Yes, sir!" to which the drill sergeant replies, "YOU DON'T CALL ME SIR; I WORK FOR A LIVING."
I work for a living. That was something on a constant loop in my head.
Nearly all of these folks had PhDs IN PYNCHON! They all had collected at least one, if not multiple, PhD degrees awarded on the merits of their Pynchonian dissertations.
Which they read into microphones for 20 minutes.
That's how the panels would go: The panel chair would introduce the first speaker---they then would read their paper. The chair would introduce the next speaker, and on it would go for however many speakers a panel would have (they all had two or three). Then the floor was opened for questions and discussions, which were always very spirited and informed. There were a few of these heads who took notes and would ask great probing questions of each and every speaker.
The nuance and probing depth of each person's dissertations blew me away. Out of all the Pynchonian heads out there, these were the tip-toppest of all.
I made other realizations as the days went on:
- These people all probably spent more time considering this man's art than the writer himself;
- None of these very fine and intelligent folks ever plan on writing fiction;
- I finally came to understand a remark my old friend Pat Yamamoto told me.
I went to high school with Pat Yamamoto, and after fifteen years of no contact, we reconnected on Facebook, and the discourse rounded to who we like to read, as he was an English major at Cal and I liked to read dense content.
When I met my good friend Ryan in the dorms for the first time and in that initial conversation our shared love of baseball became apparent, when he asked me my team, and I told him, he scornfully sneered, "The YANKEES?!?"
That's how I read Pat Yamamoto's response when I mentioned Pynchon. In my head I could hear his voice in his chat bubble, "PYNCHON?!? Only jerkoff academics like Pynchon."
That had been his response---only jerkoff academics like Pynchon. I misunderstood his comment. I thought he was lumping me into a category of reader that was into overly verbose and specifically dense material. What he was talking about was really just a breed of lifetime university student and/or professor.
One gentleman I talked to lived in Bern, Switzerland. He worked occasionally at the uni, and was paid enough for his work that he didn't stress having to work that often. Since school was essentially free, housing and a pensions were guaranteed, and their societal psyche was not cutthroat consumerist social-darwinism, he pretty much wanted for nothing. He and some buddies were working on compiling and conducting an album of Pynchonian music, he was working on his third PhD, he was thinking of starting an magazine or newspaper. That last part, though, may not work out, he said, because he was going to have to raise about a million Swiss-Francs (their currency), which is not insignificant.
But he didn't have any kids or a wife, so...and he kinda shrugged.
To me it sounded like he didn't have any real stakes, either, and without real stakes with heavy risks, how do you validate the accomplishments?
I came to know lots of these folks, through their papers and through conversation, and they were all very pleasant and supportive, and nobody was there to shit on anyone else. They all wanted to help each other see new things, or thank someone for opening their eyes to a new angle.
I told them I worked in education, but not like them. They liked my stories, or at least recognized that what I talked about was way more real and terrifying than anything their days brought them. Early on, they didn't quite know what to make of me.
One hindrance was that my working knowledge of the minutiae of Pynchon material was far below everyone else's, since I haven't read the first eight of nine books in ten years.
The second day was at the Marco Polo building in the San Lorenzo area of Rome, just about a mile from our place. Unlike the Center for American Studies, it was in a former postal depot, and kinda felt like it. This is where I was going to speak, on Day 3.
They had a neat full size recreation of an ancient library with local history translated into three local languages that was discovered in the 1920s, but eventually lost forever some time later because of shoddy management:
The first room we were in was massive with comfortable chairs, but the tech never worked properly, so moved next door. Here's the poster on the door for the cavernous room, Aula Magna:
When my turn finally came, I had to make peace with myself: I knew I wasn't as prepared as everyone else, and I had a totally different approach, with no quotes from pages, with no underlying point about hierarchical gothicism (or whatever other bullshit phrase I heard over the course of the week) I was trying to make and then defend---I was simply there to talk about which ladies reminded me of which other ladies.
The night before I even changed the ending of the PowerPoint, because I knew I needed to keep some dignity. I could swashbuckle my way through conversations, and even some underdeveloped slides, but I needed a better ending. I went with: in my position as an adult in a room full of minors, I need to look at every aspect of the things I like about an artist, and, with this artist, can we say anything about his true feelings on women based on his art? Do his true feelings even matter? That's an everyday reckoning someone in my position has to make.
And I figured that out about four seconds before I said it. The reckoning part, not the "true feelings based on art" part---that was the night before.
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| My panel, before I spoke |
Like the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, I, Sherweezy, speak for the heads. I speak for the heads to the scholars.
And that ultimately was what I realized: I was a Pynchon-head among Pynchon-scholars.
A good question was asked of me when the conversation came around, and I got to share a little of my own thoughts on this specific topic. The question was from a nice German kid who is both a math scholar and a Pynchon scholar (we talked for a while): he asked how come the girls always go for the bad-boys. My response was this: boys who get labeled as "bad" do so early enough in America that it happens to be before they are necessarily romantically invested in girls. It is also these confident and occasionally overzealous boys who actually have the courage to talk to girls, thereby giving the girls attention. The "nice" boys chill on the sidelines grumbling about 'how come she likes that jerk' without ever going over to talk to her. The "bad" boys are the only ones who talk to girls early on, and that builds confidence, which brings along more girls, and the feedback cycle has started.
On the last day, before multiple people came to talk to me about how much they liked my talk and to thank me for the work I do, I realized something else: I identify as a Pynchonian-author, while these fine and brilliant folks identify as Pynchonian-scholars, and that approach shades our very approach to the writer.
That last day saw the third one of us from Southern California talk, a young dark-skinned dude of Indian sub-continent descent who works as a professor at Concordia University, a Christian college in Irvine. His paper was on, essentially, "is Pynchon really a lefty-leaning guy, and lets's dive deep into his critique of American conservatism by repeatedly calling it fascism."
Readers of Pynchon would say YES to the first and If we must, to the second. He was engaging and interesting and had some neat things to say. I got the sense that he himself was conservative, and was trying to square his love for Pynchon with his personal politics.
A question was asked of him about the change in tone from Gravity's Rainbow to Vineland, and his response was that it was the specific focus on domesticity in Vineland as opposed to the global conflict in GR that gives us a different facet of Pynchon's beliefs about facism and American conservatism.
My response to that specific question, because I got asked a form of that question (GR to Vineland differences) was shared by very few people, but was more like this: the change in style, the change in tone, the change in respect towards women, all stem from an artist maturing, not from a convoluted rendering of a static POV on one thing.
That's what was tough for me near the end. My approach is, I guess, holistic, or humanist, but I look at the art and the artist in the context of them creating the art. Most of these folks most certainly never consider the context of the creator---they only focus on the creations and the details therein.
On the last day, after we had all mostly said our goodbyes, I left the building with the third guy from LA, a book critic writing for the LA Times (closer to the real world). He was older than me but younger than my dad, white with white hair, and tall, like 6'3". We'd talked on the first day after he read a piece he wrote about Pynchon and Death; we talked about LAUSD, the strike, Measure EE and its failure to gain the 2/3 required majority.
That last day, as we left together, he said that he was so angry that he'd missed my talk the previous day, and that he'd grown jealous by everyone gushing to him about how great it was. We joked that we may be hosting the next one. I told him I wasn't against it, but I don't have the ear of any local English department faculties in the Southland. He mentioned Jonathan Lethem works at Claremont, and if we could get him, maybe we could make it happen. Lethem is well-known author in his own right and has previously professed his, eh, admiration(?) for Pynchon, so, maybe I'll be WAY more involved next go around?
With that conversation ending abruptly as the dude had to cross the street to catch a metro back to his hotel and I was walking back to our apartment, the whirlwind seems to fade. Four days had weighed so heavily on my brain for months; from before Winter Break, from before the strike, from before the HoR shenanigans, my presentation had been a millstone. I never felt like I could carve enough time to put brain energy towards it, especially as it got closer and disallowed me the excitement that usually grows when a crazy trip is planned and the days get closer to departure.
I was finally excited for trip, but, like the day before we left, once my slides were done.
Anyway, it was awesome and stressful and a fat learning experience. Walking back to the apartment, getting ready to finish packing and getting ready to leave the next morning for points south, I really started to feel the "vacation" aspect of this trip.
***
That was kind of a rambling mess, I know. I may go back and change some of it later, after reading it.
Corrie and Cass and Lola had made their way to my talk, entered the room right as I started, and Corrie filmed as much as the Boy would allow. That was sweet, and meant a lot to me. They are my connection to the World of the Real.
People were very kind in their words to me in the two days after I went, more kind than I thought I'd earned, but, you know---we're hardest on ourselves...
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