The Book ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is Based On

13:29Jeff:I did learn in my research that the first print run was 200 ,000 copies. That's a lot of copies. That's a lot.

13:34Rebecca:That's a really, God, you're good at this. Excellent data point.

13:38Jeff:That's a lot of copies, but it's rare for first editions, regardless of print run size, to end up in good condition 35 years later, no matter what. This isn't, he's not a Nobel Prize winner. It's not like top tier collector stuff, except I'm willing to believe that there is a corner of book collectordom that's like the pension dude. Like the diehard fans would probably pay a lot of money. I don't know, $3 ,500?

14:11Rebecca:No, wait,$56. You can get that right now on Thriftbooks before the movie's out. I think we should speculate. What if we bought this and tried to resell it? Let's do it. Because I will not name names, but I was in a bookstore that sells both new and used versions of books the other day as I was prepping for this to get my copy of Vineland. And they didn't have it. They were sold out.

14:34Jeff:I really wonder, do people not know because the movie is not sharing the title of the book? I don't know. And it's not really part of the marketing?

14:42Rebecca:Well, either this place was sold out or they weren't carrying them, but I'm not sure. but you can go find them in thrift books right now. The, the imprint version is$19 and 20 cents.

14:53Jeff:I look forward to receiving this first edition you're going to send me for Christmas.

14:57Rebecca:I'm trying to find the least. There's not that many inexpensive ones. It looks like even on thrift books right now, there aren't too many used copies to be had. So you can find a good condition of the original, the first paperback for$38. So you could go find yourself or you can find a new one there. Or, you know, set an alert, add to your wish list. And when one of these other copies crops up, you can see. Thrift Books also tells you about how many of these editions they get. So there's this one edition. It's a February 91 Penguin edition of Vineland. Vineland. I don't want to say Vineland because there's a little town in Kansas next to where I grew up called Vineland.

15:38Rebecca:So I keep wanting to say Vineland. It says about how many they receive per month. So this one, they receive about six copies per month. So you have some sense like, Is this an impossible situation or I can go with this sometime? So anyway.

15:48Jeff:I ordered my new copy of Vineland from Thrift Books.

15:51Rebecca:Very nice. And I got a little discount on it.

15:54Jeff:Free shipping. It was great. Yeah.

15:55Rebecca:Free shipping. It's$19.20. So if you live in the US, you'll get free shipping from Thrift Books right now. And you get towards the Reader's Reward Program. They got plenty in stock. They say 50 available. I think that might just mean they've got 50 and a bunch more. So thanks to them for sponsoring the show. But what's this thing about, Rebecca?

16:11Jeff:Okay. So it's written in 1990. It's an alternate history that takes place in 1984 in Thomas Pynchon's invented town of Vineland, California. And residents are hanging on to the last shreds of 1960s hippie culture because Reaganite politics and social conservatism are sweeping the country. The government is striding toward a police state. There's widespread surveillance, prosecution of radical objectors. There is a war on drugs that is serving as cover for all manner of civil rights violations. Stop me any time any of this starts sounding familiar.

16:46Rebecca:Kind of weird, right?

16:48Jeff:And the citizens are numbed out on the tube, which is what they call the TV. Our main character, Zoid Wheeler, and his teenage daughter Prairie are setting out to find Prairie's mother, Frenessi. She was a 60s radical who sold out and ran off with a Fed. And along the way, there are maybe aliens, there are definitely ninjas, there are government informers, there are shadowy forces galore. There is one landscaping company called the Marquis de Sade, S-O-D. And for that alone, Thomas Pynchon should have won awards for this book. And Paul Thomas Anderson isn't the only reason that the book is drawing attention right now.

17:27Jeff:I think the current political moment, as I was alluding to in what the book is about, has caused a mini resurgence in book coverage that's referring to Vineland and trying to refract current events through previous iterations of radical conservatism that have showed up in fiction.

17:45Rebecca:And yet, so the plot here is really, let's go find this woman. There's Hector, who is a former DEA agent who's been, And he's basically like addicted to TV. It's referred to as a tube. He's a tuber here.

18:04Jeff:He has to go to the tubal detox center.

18:06Rebecca:He's actually escaped from it. It seems like everyone here has escaped from some other institution. Everyone should be locked up somewhere. Or the day that we meet Zoid.

18:14Jeff:We know Zoid is like running free and living on like social welfare, basically, that he maintains by once a year going to do his annual transfenestration, which is jumping through a window, not out of it. and he has to do this on TV so that it's well documented that he has mental incapacity, I believe is what they call it. And then as long as he demonstrates in public once a year that he seems a little crazy, he will continue to get his checks and the feds will leave him alone until they decide not to leave him alone anymore.

18:44Rebecca:Yeah, that opening set piece is actually kind of amazing. That first year where we meet Zoid, we get a sense of what's going on because he wants to mix it up. So he goes to buy a dress. It's kind of, you know, there's kind of a reference to MASH, right? This idea or Catch-22, like to see him being nervous in the service, being crazy so that you can get out of service in this case, so he can continue to get, sounds like a disability check of some kind, but he wants to mix it up. You know, he wants to go take a chainsaw to a local bar, but there's not enough media there. Everyone's expecting him.

19:15Rebecca:Like that's part of it. Like everyone's expecting this to happen already.

19:18Jeff:Every year, Zoid's going to jump through a window and they're all going to show up and watch him.

19:22Rebecca:And yet it still qualifies, like it's an inverse of Catch-22 in which he's acting rationally, right? To perform insanity in this moment is rational for him to sort of stay on the government dole. The thing that's motivating a lot of the actors, because there's sort of a detente that exists in the background of this, is of a post-60s agreement between various parties. The DEA, the military, leftist radicals, radicals, you know, everyone that, okay, the 60s, we came out of that, but you're going to stay over here. You're going to stay over here. And we're going to fund everyone and everything's going to be fine.

19:58Rebecca:And then the Reagan administration comes in and they start cutting checks. So there's no funding for the DEA. There's less funding for the institution, for Zoid to get his. There's less funding for the witness protection program, which Frenessi and her paramour flash and their son, John are enjoying. So as that money dries up, it's kind of like the opposite of the worms coming out after a storm. As that money dries up, people start coming to the surface because they're no longer subsidized to say subaltern in a lot of different ways. And that is where they start coming together and trying to figure out what their relationships are to each other, what they could be going forward.

20:40Rebecca:I think from there, I'll say this, that the plot is, I don't know what your experience of this, but the plot is more of a coat rack to hang things on than the thing you're supposed to be following the most.

20:55Jeff:Yeah, it feels, I was listening to you describe it and even hearing myself describe what happens in this book really doesn't convey what it feels like to read it. It's like, oh, that's cute. It's about people coming together to figure out their relationships. But it feels to me like jazz in a lot of ways that riffs on itself that wanders away and then comes back to a main theme, like manic jazz, jazz on cocaine and acid at the same time. Kind of free.

21:24Rebecca:I mean, kind of Ornette Coleman, free jazz. I mean, maybe I think one of the frustrations and delights for me, and I'll say I have a, and maybe this is a feature, not a bug, is there are some moments, and I have an extraordinary long list of my favorite bits here, and I cannot get to all of them. But I did that both for you and for me. Like, there are moments that are just absolutely wonderful. There are. In this book. And I kept finding, can we just do, can we get more of the hits, play more of these hits? But like, I have to remind myself that that's part of the structure is to wander away, come back, alienate the reader, engender a feeling of strangeness of what's going on.

22:04Rebecca:Because one of the things postmodernism does, and this is inherited from modernism, is try to make you feel the feeling they're writing about, rather than just writing about the feeling, like in psychological, rather than just say, character X was feeling estranged and alienated from the world. Part of it is, can I, through the power of art and the incantation of QWERTY UEOP get the reader to feel this thing I want to try to engage with.

22:31Jeff:Yeah, it feels very noisy.

22:33Rebecca:Yeah.

22:33Jeff:And that you're in a moment where a thing happens and we know who we're with and what they're doing and what they're about. And then one of those characters is riffing on something and we're gone for like pages at a time into weird stories that really do sound like that friend who is on drugs, who is rambling forever and then has a moment of coherence. And if you zone out during the rambling, you're also going to miss the moments of coherence. Like, that was both the most frustrating and the most rewarding part of this reading experience was when you can stay tuned in and hang out for the ride that Pynchon is taking you on in the middle of a paragraph out of nowhere, something profound happens.

23:17Jeff:But if you're just there's you can't just scan the page, hoping to see like the next moment. It's not like scanning through the descriptions of wailing in Moby Dick. Like there's not an easy cue. Pension is forcing, if you're gonna know what's going on here, you're gonna be forced to stay in with the text and in with the characters. And then inside that feeling that he I think is very successful at creating of confusion and worked up and head spinning. There's a lot of noise.

23:49Jeff:Today's episode is brought to you by Flatiron Books, publisher of This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum. Introducing This Story Might Save Your Life, the highly anticipated debut novel from author Tiffany Crum. Best friends Benny and Joy like to say they've been saving each other's lives since the moment they met, until that is the day Joy disappears and Benny is suspected of murder. This is a story where secrets run deep, fame hides fractures, and some stories are more dangerous than they seem. It's available now wherever books are sold. Make sure to pick up This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crumb.

24:27Jeff:And thanks again to Flatiron Books for sponsoring this episode.

24:35Jeff:Hey folks, I'm here with a podcast recommendation for you. If you're enjoying what we're doing at Zero to Well Read, the deep dives, the context, the what's really going on here energy, we want to share some friends of our show who have a great podcast of their own. It's called The Secret Life of Books. It's a really smart and deeply engaging weekly podcast hosted by Princeton English professor Sophie G and former BBC Arts director Johnny Claypool. Each episode, they take on an iconic book to ask what's the story behind the story? Who shaped it? What were the stakes? And what meanings might we have missed?

25:07Jeff:Right now, they're in the middle of a special Toni Morrison miniseries. Y 'all know we love Toni Morrison here at Zero to Well Read. And they're taking four episodes to explore her work with the kind of close reading, literary history, and sharp insight that we know you'll appreciate. If you like taking great books seriously without taking yourself too seriously, which I assume is true for you because here you are, go check out The Secret Life of Books wherever you get your podcasts. You won't be sorry.

25:36Rebecca:they are not similar writers by any stretch of imagination but for many readers and i'll throw myself into the i'll throw myself into this ring with my hat on is there's an element to reading that's for me like reading shakespeare which is you can you can let your eyes slip over sections you know this happened to me i'm not going to lie in in in this in the reading of this i just sort of like didn't get it i zoned out i looked for the next dialogue break to sort of give myself a break But that is, I think, okay is not the word I'm looking for. That is normal. And this is not the kind of book where you should expect yourself to get almost the majority of it on first glance at a normal sort of reading pace.

26:19Rebecca:If you have trouble focusing on any kind of reading, this will be extraordinary tough sledding for you. And I don't want to sugarcoat that. There are rewards to be had there. But if you try Pinchin, any more difficult stuff, I would give yourself the grace to be like, I just kind of zoned out for two paragraphs there. Do I need to go back? Keep going. Take what you can. And if you want to go back, that's great. But these things are not meant to be single-serving. That's not the only way to engage with them is a single-serving reading experience.

26:53Jeff:I totally agree. I've been thinking a lot about this and how we talk about books and reading as if you're supposed to be able to read the book and then have gleaned everything from it in one reading, like, yes, I've read it, check it off the list, done, on to the next thing. But when people talk about art, that's antithetical to the way that we learn about how to see a work of art, how to see a painting. Teachers talk about, like, sit in front of it and look at the painting for 10 minutes. The New York Times has even been running pieces about this, like, let's all look at this piece of art together for 10 minutes and see what we notice, or stand in front of a sculpture and note five things that stand out to you and then change your angle and make five more observations and that you could do this on and on repeatedly, like day after day or year after year.

27:36Jeff:Certainly rereading is a reward for most types of books, but I can see how it's it would really, you're going to get more out of pension with each successive read because there just is so much language and there is so much detail that you don't need every last detail. You don't need every last word, I don't think. I don't think Pynchon even expects you to come away having processed 100 % of the words on the page. But if you did want to go back, and honestly, I probably won't. But if you did want to go back, it would become richer over time.

28:09Rebecca:And another strategy might be, if you do summon the temerity to tackle something like this, is when you do encounter a passage, a moment, a scene that speaks to you, that you have a moment of clarity with link rather than move linger on it reread it a couple times slow down um you know use that speed bump to smell the roses at that particular moment and then the other ones that don't come back i want to come back a little bit to this what what it feels like to read it because all these things are tangled i want to do a little bit of this or why it's important section that we have here um i am not of the opinion that you need to check off or get stamps on your great writers of all time.

28:53Rebecca:You know, that's not how I think about these things. I will say the genius of Pynchon, it's a unique reading experience. I think if you're someone that's read, say, David Foster Wallace and haven't read Pynchon, you will find it very interesting because, for example, Thanatoid, which is the zombie-like half-dead people that appear here, appears in The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, right? So like they're very much speaking to each other. I don't know my Foster well in terms of his biography as well. I can only imagine that he had a dog-eared copy of V or the crying of Lot 49 or Gravity's Rainbow in his rucksack somewhere.

29:32Rebecca:I think, and this is not my area of expertise, if you were to ask who the greatest literary postmodernist is, most people would say Pension. This post-war, this book is 1990, but really he He emerges in 1963 with V and then Gravity's Rainbow, which is sort of his Moby Dick. It won the National Book Award in 1974. It was the book he wrote previous to this. It took him 16 years to get from Gravity's Rainbow to Vineland. Those couple works are what made him the master. And so what is postmodernism? It is a slippery thing to talk about. In the word you can see, it's postmodernism. So it is after the Hemingways, the Wolves, the Ezra Pounds, the Gene Toomers, who were responding to a breakdown of tradition that was catalyzed by World War II, a loss of faith in the church, of institution, monarchies, patriarchy, sort of regular business operations as normal, came to a head.

30:38Rebecca:And in all the arts, there was a response. And they have some of their, you know, alienation, estrangement, fragmentations of points of view. I think the thing that's easiest for me to get my head around is that post-modernism is responding to modernism and also extending on it. It's not not modernism. It's sort of modernism plus. It's not anti-modernism. So it extends upon that. But there's a spiritual difference that I detect and some people have written about where modernism saw the end of that crumbling of the thing, right, that they were responding to as mournful, right? There's sort of a sadness in Gatsby, a sadness in A Farewell to Arms, a sadness in Virginia Woolf, a sadness in, you know, The Empty Cup by James Joyce, a sadness in some of these works that that thing is gone.

31:27Rebecca:So I have here, whereas modernism mourned, postmodernism dances. to that response.

31:33Jeff:There is like a kind of gleeful anarchy to the text.

31:37Rebecca:Look, you know, kind of a jester-like, you know, prancing through the remains. They're not the dauphin who sees the kingdom falling down. It is the jester that is left. And that means that a lot of, it opens up so many possibilities. So a lot, so here's just some characteristics, and it's not definitive, and not every work does any or all of these, but the integration of other art forms, references to other sources and genres that aren't typical of that art form, in this case literature. So in this one, you see there's a lot of TV and movie, right? So much TV and movie. Blending of high and low, like you're going to get the body, you're going to get the risque, and then you're going to get these elevated pieces at the same time.

32:21Rebecca:Popular culture advertising, the trappings of sort of post-World War II branding exercises. These giant capitalist brands and international branding is interesting. Engagement with mass media formats. It's hard to remember now that when Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot are sitting down to scribble some poems, like we barely have movies. We have the printed word radio and barely have movies. So internet and TV especially and then the multiplex and movies. This idea of these giant blaring horns of consumer culture didn't exist for moderns. And it's really important in this book here.

32:59Jeff:And like cable is becoming what cable TV was in the late 80s and early 90s as Pinchot is writing this.

33:06Rebecca:You will also see that these books, postmodern works often do not care about linearity. They don't care about coherence. You know, they're interested in coherence and how to talk about incoherence coherently is always one of the things that's at play here. Um, I don't use alternate history for this kind of postmodernism because it's sort of like slightly more slightly askew. This is not say Philip Roth's what if Charles Lindbergh became president. It's not quite that hardcore. It's a it's like, it's more of if you sort of turned your head real quick, and it was a slightly different version. That's often the case here.

33:44Rebecca:I was thinking about this in terms of mirrors, right? Realistic fiction was trying to hold a mirror up to nature, right? You're trying to like, that was really important. Modernism, like, what do we do with this cracked mirror? There are these fissures running through it. We're seeing these weird versions of ourselves. How do we do that? I think of postmodernism, funhouse mirror, where they're like, you know what? It was always just a mirror. It wasn't actually the genuine article. So look at these weird-ass things we can do with this mirror in different shapes or forms. So that's my two-minute mini lecture on what to expect from postmodernism.

34:15Rebecca:Rebecca, does that have any vibe with what you understand or even your reading experience here?

34:19Jeff:I really like this mirror metaphor that you reached for here. And I think Funhouse Mirror is right for this. Because if things feel real, but distorted, it felt to me like I would believe that characters like Zoid Wheeler exist in a weird little town in Northern California, going to bars with funny names, having strange drinks, tripping on their drugs on the weekends, telling stories about the good old days when everybody was radical. Like these kinds of people did and do exist, but that Pynchon runs them through his particular filter in order to, you know, play with it. Like some of it is just for fun.

34:58Jeff:Some of it is just for fun, yes. That is clear on the page. Like that Pynchon was just having a good time. And that image that you evoked earlier of a jester sort of like prancing through whatever a jester is prancing through.

35:12Rebecca:The ruined castle. I mean, I do think of it in some way that way.

35:15Jeff:And I think that really works here. Like he's gleeful about the fun you can have while the world is burning down. And there's a really different flavor to that than, you know, like, I don't know, the common flavor on social media right now. Or what I imagine mass media coverage looked like in the late 80s and early 90s about what was happening in Reaganite politics. So like that, there's an escape valve a little bit. Like it lets out some tension that you can have fun with it. It feels possible to have fun with it on the page in a way that probably didn't feel available in real life. Like it doesn't feel available.

35:56Jeff:This kind of glee, like glee in the anarchy does not feel available to me in today's real life political moment. but that an artist can do that and have this distortion, I think, intentional distortion that is supposed to reflect something very real back to us is really fun and strange and unsettling.

36:18Rebecca:Strangeness, I think, is if you were to pick one word, if you're limited to one, strange is not the worst way to go.

36:25Jeff:Yeah, I think if you gave this to someone who's like a casual reader, which that would be a very mean thing to do. But if you did that, you would get like a, what the hell did I just read?

36:34Rebecca:What the hell did I just read? Yeah. And I think, I mean, that makes the mystique of Pynchon even more interesting, right? Someone who himself has like chosen to not, like a vampire, he doesn't show up in mirrors. Like he's intentionally, you know, he doesn't want to be represented weirdly. Like he's like, can I opt out of this? What do we know about him? An extremely precocious kid. Graduated high school at age 16. he was writing short stories in high school. And some of the similar issues, drug use, paranoia, if Pynchon enjoys one thing, it's naming shit.

37:11Jeff:Oh my God. The names of things and places in this book are so delightful.

37:16Rebecca:It's so fun. A Lewis Carroll-like delight. Yes, that's a great comparison. Having fun with what things are called. He studied engineering at Cornell and served in the Navy. was a voracious reader from a young age, went to go work for Boeing after he was out of the service, and that he started writing V while in the service. And then Gravity's Rainbow, which is, again, if it's about anything, putative subject, let's put it this way, is V to the rockets. Gravity's Rainbow being the parabolic arc of the buzz bombs coming into London from Germany. He's got a math mind. And there is a certain chaotic precision to what he does that's kind of hard to fathom.

38:00Rebecca:I'll say this. I think the term genius is thrown around lightly. He is operating on, like, if 4D chess exists, he is playing it and then watching us watch him play it.

38:13Jeff:That he lands the plane at the end of this book is astonishing. and honestly like faith that this writer would be able to do that was the thing that got me through a lot of my eyes really want to glaze over right here yeah yeah and again just embrace that i mean

38:31Rebecca:i would encourage i'm going to keep saying that to people and i think rebecca's as good readers you're going to find and she is having that i have this that's chaos is um i talked to boris kachka for um a thing i did for first edition a little while ago and he did a kind of a looking for Thomas Pynchon piece, I think when Against the Day came out in 2006. And I sort of asked him, he's like, well, you know, as far as I can tell, he sort of lives up on the Upper West Side and goes and eats at Zabar's. And I'm like, you know what? I love that for him. Amazing. Amazing. So I think, you know, V itself is fascinating.

39:07Rebecca:There are these two, it's in search of this being character entity known as V that has different manifestations over time. And then there's two main narratives that go towards each other to form a sort of narrative V. Like that's what we're doing here, Rebecca. Like that's just, and then there's all stuff in between that immediately hailed as what the hell, like in the Oh Damn Factor of 1963, when V came out off the charts, off the charts, like what is it? It felt like a missive from a different planet. I wrote here, V is not a book that heralds much of anything but itself is my line, which I kind of like.

39:45Rebecca:It's a good line. It's about writing. It's about what Pynchon can do.

39:48Jeff:Yeah, I was proud of you when I read that in the notes this morning. That's a really good line. And I think that is also, it speaks to who will like and who might not like this kind of reading experience. You got to be down for a book that is mostly concerned with itself and with the experience it's trying to give you.

40:06Rebecca:I hope I didn't steal that. It's possible I cribbed that from someone, but I don't think I did. But if, zero to well read at bookride.com, if you know where it came from. So that's kind of it. Like he's been writing steadily. You know, he's written several books. Like apparently he's writing several things at the same time, but he's written, he wrote some other things as autobiography, like a little introduction. There's just not much, Rebecca. I'm just trying to say there's just, we don't have access to, which I find frankly, kind of freeing. I am really enjoying that I don't have a pension interview in the Paris Review Art of Fiction number 281 to like, go match up the answer key with the text with.

40:43Rebecca:I kind of like this.

40:44Jeff:It fits for what the book is. Yeah, it like it just really does. And whether it's a bit or he genuinely wants to stay out of the public eye, or maybe both, that's kind of the ideal right situation. It works for the kind of writing that he does.

40:59Rebecca:It just adds a layer of intrigue and possibility and curiosity that I think is pretty remarkable. We've talked a little bit about the reading experience. This is your first exposure. I have not read all Pynchon. I've read Gravity's Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49, V, and this. I think that's all. What's it like to read this, Rebecca? We've talked about what else do we want to say?

41:22Jeff:Yeah, I mean, it's noisy and chaotic, and I came

41:27Rebecca:into it with yeah what were you expecting we didn't talk about you know i i think i had some

41:34Jeff:like lit bro expectations and some of some of them were fulfilled but i think that what i've actually realized is that the like kinds of dudes that i was exposed to in my 20s who loved pension you can talk about pension as if you know what he's doing and he's so complex that you probably genuinely believe. I think these guys genuinely believed that they knew what Pynchon was doing. And having read it now, like the way that they talked about it, put me off of any interest to go find out what those books were about. Like, if that was the club, I did not want to be a member. But I now sincerely suspect that a lot of them had no idea what the hell was happening.

42:18Jeff:And it was impossible to tell that they didn't know what the hell was happening, because it's hard to know what's happening on the page of this book but yeah it was it was chaotic there were a lot of times that my eyes would glaze over and then i would realize we were back in action scenes it's like shit i gotta turn the i gotta you gotta go back a couple pages figure out where the action actually like where the jazz riffing turned into action and who we're talking to and what's about to happen now and there are like elements from a bunch of other genres that was like that's exciting and energizing where you're like, oh, there's ninjas now.

42:53Jeff:And these planes are hooking up to each other. Or is it aliens? Like, I have a note on one page.

42:59Rebecca:That's a tough scene to figure out. I'm still not sure what's going on.

43:02Jeff:I have a note that's like aliens or just air pirates. And like that air pirates is a thing that seems more reasonable. That's like the reasonable option of the two is also indicative of what it's like to read this. I think it's best broken up into chunks. Like the chapters are not consistent lengths. There are some chapters that are five pages. There's other chapters that are 60 pages. And the longer chapters were, they were more work, to be honest. And I was reading under the gun for, you know, my job. But I think if I had, if I had it to do over again, I would probably break the 300 pages of this book up over like 30 pages for 10 days or...

43:47Rebecca:And do like 20 minutes at a time. Yeah. Six or seven pages and try to linger and slow.

43:52Jeff:And it will take you like, I think it was about my reading pace was like half of what my usual reading pace is. It took me and that was I just

44:01Rebecca:didn't know going and I should have gotten slower or I could have slower. I thought, okay, it's about

44:05Jeff:400 pages. I probably need like seven or eight hours for this. It took about twice that long. There's just so much language.

44:14Rebecca:Yeah. His interest, it's hard to pin Pynchon down. And that's part of postmodern literature as well. But he himself would not be interested in someone making a cult of Pynchon, which I want to think is one of the ironies of being a Pynchon bro, right? Because even like we have a character here, Weed Altwin, who becomes an accidental shambling figure of something it's hard not to see Pynchon writing himself a little bit like sort of stumbles into being representative of something he himself doesn't quite understand yeah also the character's

44:43Jeff:first name is weed when like marijuana plays a huge role huge role I'm very interested in

44:51Rebecca:groups and subgroups there's like motorcycle gangs and nunneries and secret artistic cabals and the the lady ninjats like there's all these little pocket universes and these weird surf bands Yeah, bands and collectives, communes of all kinds he finds to be quite interesting. And then Vineland itself becomes a sort of decantment of hippie exiles and burnouts and those under the gun. He also, Brock Vond, who is the putative antagonist here, even the police state is subject to the police state, is one thing that he's interested in. Even these mechanisms of control and domination are not all powerful.

45:39They are mercurial.

45:42Rebecca:They get orders rescinded at a critical moment. Actually, maybe the denouement of the whole book, which we haven't talked about, basically the administration changes its mind and things sort of turn around and the helos go the opposite direction. the vicissitudes of even the authoritarian state is an interesting counterbalance to something as all-encompassing as, say, Big Brother in 1984.

46:06Jeff:Yeah, and it feels, to me, that felt a lot closer to being true to life. Yeah, it does never. For the moment we're in right now, where you're like, these are the fools that think they're going to take everything over? Like, look at them. They can't get their story straight. They can't make a plan. And when they've made a half-assed plan, they can't keep it. and that like there are reasons to be afraid and Pynchon has characters here who have real reasons to be afraid as well but that when you look really closely these guys are jackasses

46:37Rebecca:right and the winds may change and they don't even know what reasons they're operating in and they don't know if they know what they're doing is right and it may change tomorrow so there is a instability to the whole thing. Because one of the things about like a real dystopian, right? Like, you know, Handmaid's Tale or the Hunger Games, it feels like the oppressive regime or even Star Wars, right? To the Empire. It feels like bedrock.

47:05Jeff:Yes, that the institution is solid and it has always been solid.

47:08Rebecca:And so the rebellion or whatever has to go big up the big blue monolithic or the big gray monolithic thing or go to the fortress or do the thing or like, Like, oh, here it's just kind of, you know, go into the woods, smoke weed, and wait them out. There's an element of that, right? Like, you know, that's like, these people, they're not as good as you think. And they're kind of amazing.

47:27Jeff:Could we finance a reprint of Vineland and just put that blurb on the front and make a million dollars?

47:33Rebecca:Smoke weed. Well, tune in, turn on, and drop out. I mean, the 60s thing is still here a little bit.

47:38Jeff:There's been worse advice for getting through 2025 also.

47:41Rebecca:Yeah. Yeah. So I think I wrote here, it's a study in contradictions and contrasts. It can be ultimately extremely dense and then very light. It can be very funny and clear and you have character moments where you really feel like there's a connection happening and then being very abstruse. It can be quite bawdy. We talk about gender and actually pretty good on gender on the whole. That's one thing I hadn't, it feels more modern in that way. But we're cocks and hard-ons and having sex and all that kind of stuff. None of it is erotic. It's just like the body is part of the human.

48:14Jeff:Yeah, there's nothing erotic about this novel.

48:19Rebecca:I was trying to think of some way to metaphorize or use some other artistic example to sort of give some sense of people how it is. And I kept thinking of Pink Floyd's phrase, the wall of sound. Actually, I think that's maybe Pink Floyd's, one of their production managers. I don't know. Maybe it's not even Pink Floyd, but this wall of sound idea. There's just so much. And Pynchon's worlds are overwhelming in their detail and their vision and their comprehensiveness. He will describe to you not just that there's a pair of interesting buddy tow truck drivers who have their own backstory, but then the characters they meet in understanding their backstories have their own backstories.

49:02Jeff:Yeah, everybody's got a backstory.

49:03Rebecca:Like in a way, you feel like Pynchon has such a sense of the whole world that he's just telling you a part of what exists there.

49:11Jeff:And as a reader, then you don't know which of those backstories are important until later in the book. Like everybody in a scene gets a backstory and a couple of those characters might show up later. And you need to it helps you if you remember who they were. But in the moment, it's like, why am I learning this about this guy's sister? And some of it, I think, because he can.

49:33Rebecca:he wants to. It's like, I've got an idea or a little move. Sometimes he'll set you up just for a pun. Just like a long thing will be set up for your joke.

49:41Jeff:To go back to art a little bit, it made me think about Jackson Pollock and that image of just standing over a canvas splattering paint and it looks chaotic, but there's an intention and kind of an order to it. And so much of it is the guy who's making the thing being able to look at it and be like, just a little more there. That'll be fun. And just a little more over here. That'll be good. And that it is controlled. He's in control of it, even if we don't feel like we have control of our own experience of it. And that element of postmodernism, I think, really works here. So much of the book is about media and about mediated lives.

50:17Jeff:And there's even a quote at one, somebody says at one point, if mediated lives, why not mediated deaths? How we see ourselves and our world through the lens of all the media that we encounter. And someone even says about the only thing that'll get a fascist through is his charm. The news folks love it. Boy, does that seem, good Lord, just at our decade next time. Yeah, and that our politics are mediated through the media and managed by it and shaped by it.

50:48Rebecca:I was thinking about this as looking at a piece of art. I wasn't thinking about Pollock necessarily, but that one makes sense to me too, because there's a sense both in looking at Jackson Pollock and in reading Pynch, and in my experience at least of both, that if you stand far back, you get the whole thing. But then you sort of miss the details. And if you're real close, you get the details and not the whole thing. So it feels like you're always sort of looking at it the wrong way.

51:11Jeff:There's a way of being like, well, that's just messy.

51:14Rebecca:Yeah. That misses the point. There isn't a right way to look. You have to sort of think of them in both phrases. One thing that struck me here is that there is almost like the solidity of the empire to some degree. there is a um i don't know how to put a solace a weird solace in thinking that everything is a giant conspiracy yeah right because at least someone's in control like and we could then take the narrative back it's a bad narrative we can take it back oh but pension is sort of suggesting this was i think this is a modern sensibility to some people too that it's either it's either that or just a goddamn mess there isn't some one true storyline we should be on that we can get back to.

51:58Rebecca:People would rather have, like a religion, have some, the Illuminati be in control than know it's just us bozos here, you know, sort of messing it up as we go.

52:08Jeff:We're coming fresh off of a Dan Brown read. If you want to hear us talk about Dan Brown's latest, that's in the Book Riot podcast feed. And his whole career, and the reason that he is so popular is that those kinds of stories about like, look at the shadowy forces that actually control everything and you've never heard of it and now you're in on it. people love that. Our brains are really drawn to this sense that there is a narrative, there is somebody in control. There is a story that if we just tapped into it, and I think Pynchon is playing into usually the reaction to the suggestion that there's not something in control.

52:41Jeff:It's like, that's just terrifying. If there's nothing, he's like, it's terrifying, or maybe it's liberating. Maybe we should just have a party while the world likes to go out into the woods and smoke some weed and wait them out.

52:53Rebecca:You know, I think it's, I think one of the easier things to see, because it's some of the characters talk about this directly is like, what the hell happened to the 60s? Right? This is in 1990. So he's been writing it through the 80s. I can only imagine. We don't know. But it's clearly thinking about how do we get to Reagan from the summer of love from Woodstock? How did, and this is, I think a character says, how do we go from drugs being the answer to this is your brain on drugs? Right. There's some interesting theories, Winky. I'll save that for some of my quotes. I think California is interesting to think about here as a microcosm of America.

53:26Rebecca:It goes from the sort of pristine wilderness. Again, there are people living there, but seen as being in harmony with nature, to the place that they shot the speeder bike scene in Return of the Jedi. Like, that is, like, until the George Lucas folks showed up in Marin County, like, the direct imposition of media, money, and modernity. Ooh, that's the 3M. which is also a giant international conglomerate. Like, that's not the worst thing to do. So I think of this image of Vineland being this trailer park with a bunch of TVs amongst the sequoias, right? That's not the worst way to get a sense of what's going on here.

54:03Rebecca:The idea that everyone sort of gets everything as a put-on and there's nothing being hidden. So Zoid Wheeler's ritualized expected performance of stage madness to secure disability payments. It's all a put on, right? Everyone is in on the joke. That's not a joke. That is the real thing.

54:24Jeff:And he and the feds agree to this. Like this is just what you got. Like once a year, you just have to show up and do it. Everybody knows that it's a mess. Everybody knows that it's a performance. Yeah.

54:33Rebecca:Okay. This is pretty simple. Is it for you? It's for you if what, Rebecca? Did I write this? Did you? If I didn't write this, I might have written this. I think this is one of each of us.

54:42Jeff:It's for you if you like a challenge. and it's for you if you are willing to hang through the noise for the moments of clarity. On the flip, maybe not for you if reading that feels like work is going to turn you off.

54:56Rebecca:Can we trouble work that feels like effort? Because work, I don't know. Sure, you wrote that sentence. Okay, good. I'm glad. Reading is effortful, right? Because I think some people might hear reading is work as being like breaking rocks. I don't think I actually don't think it's quite like that I think it might be more like fishing in which you have to go through a lot for these you know moments of strikes you got to stand out in the river and you're getting bit by mosquitoes you're like what am I doing this yeah there's a patience element yeah yeah um yeah go ahead and also if you're looking for linearity

55:31Jeff:or if you want a book that you could clearly describe as being either plot driven or character driven it is neither of those things there are characters and there is plot and in a lot of ways they're not the point right immoral questions art asks which of these are primary here i'll go

55:49Rebecca:through them real quickly what is the good life what do i owe my neighbor how do i know what i know is this all there is how to deal with the certainty of death what else might there be what's

55:56Jeff:to deal with good and evil it's about all of them it's about all of them it really is i'm not i'm not kidding right to some degree it's about all if we had to pick two

56:08how do i know what i know i think is way up there and i think what's the deal with good and evil

56:14Jeff:is stealthily a central question here the chaos versus conspiracy it's like well it's

56:20Rebecca:nichian beyond good and evil to some degree but i think it's maybe a little less what else might there be i mean in a metaphysical way yeah we get these thanatoids but even that is like these half zombie people we get the sense on the other the other if they were to complete their journey to wherever they're halfway to is just oblivion there isn't sort of a little of like

56:41Jeff:what's the good life yeah um but largely how do i know what i know and there's a lot about how to

56:47Rebecca:deal with the certainty of death that's like overt discussions about like you know sort of distracting ourselves if we had to ever come face to face with it we'd have a different understanding of it are we sure this is about art and writing it's 100 million percent about art

57:00Jeff:in writing and it's a political novel and art is always political so in like a bunch of ways

57:05Rebecca:this book is about being a book my line here is post-modern post-modernism is always and sometimes primarily about itself yep uh okay best and worst i've got a bunch um where do you want to go let's

57:19Jeff:start with a few of yours yeah let's see um dangerous men with coarsened attitudes especially towards death were perched around lightly on designer bar stools sipping kiwi mimosas like whimsy and the seriousness of life and death altogether. Just a couple of sentences. I just liked the sound of Furnessi had written into his life, like a whole gang of outlaws. Like I can only aspire to be described in that way. And I will fall far short of it. I'll be lucky if someone ever is like, she was a hell of a broad, but to be described as having a whole gang of outlaws.

57:54Rebecca:That's pretty good.

57:56Jeff:It's pretty good.

57:57Rebecca:You're going to make me weak in the knees with one of those. One of the things that Pension, I think, is able to get away with here is sometimes just saying the thing directly in a way that in a more straightforward novel would rub me the wrong way of like, let me come around to these conclusions myself.

58:12Jeff:But so much of this is chaotic that when he stops and has a character just actually say the thing, it's like, oh, thank God. And so one of those is men had it so simple when it wasn't about sticking it in. It was about having a gun, a variation that allowed them to stick it in from a distance.

58:28Rebecca:it's almost like it's almost like just like oscar wilde could have said something like that like

58:33Jeff:you know a post-modern escrow oscar wilde uh one word just like really like he loves these little

58:39Rebecca:cults and groups and stuff he's so fascinated by the cult of like the cult of lady ninjas that have

58:45Jeff:their hideaway in the woods tell somebody we're notorious here for having the worst food in the seminar providing community and like i've gone to some meditation retreats and i have experienced the food of the seminar providing community basically in the woods of California. And that's a real thing. So this also makes me like, what experiences was Thomas Pynchon off having?

59:06Rebecca:I was thinking about that too. He must be out there doing stuff because it's so embedded in the world. Yeah.

59:11Jeff:And he can go do it because he's not like his face isn't plastered all over everything. He's probably pretty incognito most of the time.

59:19Rebecca:I've got I've kind of grouped these and I'll do a couple of examples in each because I could do this for literal hours. But he is also in a different world. You can see, I'm going to make a Shakespeare comparison because even on the level of just description and word creation, he just makes stuff up. We have to like stop and think about what he's talking about. So this is just one sentence. He and Hector exchanged the briefest of thumb grips and he's just talking about a handshake. And I was like, I never really thought about that before that a handshake is just, it's you put your hands next to each other and then wrap your thumb around the other person.

59:54Rebecca:And then so the other one is they're talking about kind of the standoff where you have with people where no one's talking and you're waiting for someone to talk. And sort of this silent thing happens that you sort of do between each other. So they were having one of those four-member eyeball permutations that finally nominated Blood as the one to talk to Zoid. I'm like, it's just in that little, like there's so much creativity in there. I just find so amazing. And so it can be really compact. And then I'll give one maximalist example, and this is a little bit long. And this is just an aside. This is Isaiah 2.4, who's named after Revivalverse, who is Prairie's boyfriend, who's the member of this rock band that also moonlights as an Italian wedding band.

1:00:35Jeff:And that is what reading this book feels like.

1:00:38Rebecca:Yeah. So he comes to Zoid with this business idea because he wants him to co-sign, and Zoid's like, no one's going to co-sign alone with me. Now I'm reading. Isaiah's business idea was to set up the first one, eventually a chain of violence centers, each on the scale perhaps of a small theme park, including automatic weapon firing ranges, paramilitary fantasy adventures, gift shops and food courts, and video game rooms for the kids, for Isaiah envisioned a family clientele. As part of the concept were a standardized floor plan and logo for franchising purposes. Isaiah sat at the cable spool table making diagrams with tortilla chips and pitching his dreams.

1:01:13Rebecca:Third world thrills, a jungle obstacle course where you got to swing on ropes, fall into the water, blast away at surprise pop-up targets shaped like indigenous gorilla elements, scum of the city, which would allow the visitor to wipe from the world images of assorted urban undesirables, including pimps, perverts, dope dealers, and muggards, all carefully multiracial so as to defend everybody in an environment of dark alleys, lurid neon, and piped in saxophone music for the agro connoisseur i mean what in the world rebecca that's unbelievable there's so much about like that feels so contemporary it's like you could like is it sort of like bass pro shops sponsored by cult 40 like i can see this you could like control f

1:02:00Jeff:a lot of this book and move it into present politics and the rise of trumpism and it would feel absolutely current. Yeah.

1:02:09Rebecca:Um, there are, there, you know, what's interesting, and this is maybe we get into spoiler territory. This is not exist. This is not Camus. It's existential because like so many, there is a, what is the thing worth preserving? What, what, what is it amongst all of this stuff? Uh, I'll spoil the very end for you all right now. I don't have the line here, but the very end Prairie, she's almost abducted by, um, by, uh, Brock, right? Yeah. Um, And so he gets his orders changed sort of mid-descent to sort of come grab her. And she sort of wakes up. Also, she starts fantasizing about him because there's a lot of psychosexual stuff with military stuff that happens throughout.

1:02:46Rebecca:But then she sort of wakes up and she realizes everything is okay when the descendant of her grandma's dog is licking her on the face. So it's like that. But there's this moment where Zoid is sort of trying to figure out how he's getting through stuff. right and his the love of his life for nancy's he says for nancy might be gone but there always be his love for prairie burning like a nightlight always nearby cool and low but all night long so it's there for you waiting that's like so tender and beautiful like he can do all this is

1:03:16Jeff:unbelievable yeah he's playing in a lot of different channels let me just do a couple more

1:03:21Rebecca:things he um this is a thread he loves to make up little songs oh yes just all over and you know your mileage may vary and some of them are like okay whatever but the one that got me was um when dl chastain who's like this lady vigilante ninja vigilante gets up to sing just randomly kind of i think at a karaoke bar or she maybe did she take the mic from someone i don't remember to be honest and she sings the song that goes just a floozy with an uzi just a girly with a gun when i could have been a model and i should have been a nun that's a good tattoo as well it is a good tattoo

1:03:56Jeff:too.

1:03:57Rebecca:Let's see. And it can be funny, too. Like the prairie going in to teach the nuns and like making them food and them having their mind blown. What were you going to serve them? She couldn't help asking. Dip chirped a myth.

1:04:09Jeff:Yeah, there's a great I don't think it made my notes. But in that same scene, she learns that you have to use enough of UBI, the universal binding ingredient, which is cream of mushrooms.

1:04:19Rebecca:Cream of mushrooms. Like that was very Midwestern. I'm Like, you're from Long Island, Pinch, and how do you know our dark secrets of church potlucks? Here's just another one where the pleasure of the line can be so intense. He felt like a basketball after a Lakers game. Alive, resilient, still pressurized with spirit, yet with the distinct memory of having been, for a few hours, expertly bounced.

1:04:41Jeff:Like, what the hell? That's just, you can't do that to me, man. That's a great line. I marked that one. Yeah, I had to go.

1:04:45Rebecca:I don't know what else to do. Where else do I want to go? Can we go on to my, I want to do my hit list.

1:04:49Jeff:This is an incomplete list of delightful weirdness. Yes, yes, yes.

1:04:53Rebecca:This is related very much so.

1:04:54Jeff:There's a band named Billy Barf and the Vomitones.

1:04:57Rebecca:Amazing.

1:04:58Jeff:As I said in the intro, there's a landscaping company called the Marquis de Sade. I have searched the internet. There is one of those companies in this country, and it does not make t-shirts, and I am very sad. Floozy with the Newsy is also great. There's a bar called the Lost Nugget. There's a bar called the Steam Donkey. There's a bar called the Cosmic Pineapple.

1:05:17Rebecca:I think he just kind of wants to name bars.

1:05:19Jeff:I want a Pynchon bar name generator on the internet. And then my favorite bit in the whole book is a tiny moment where one of the thanatoids, as you said, is like a half dead creature, is having trouble renting a tux. Because obviously a thanatoid needs to rent a tux to go to some event. And is explaining that thanatoids have trouble renting tuxes for all these things they have to go to. Because their credit situation is so complicated. Because they're not quite dead. And they're not quite alive. And that Pynchon had sat down somewhere and imagined that this idea occurred to him at all, that a half-dead thing has to rent a tux and their credit would be messed up.

1:05:57Jeff:Just I found to be totally delightful.

1:06:00Rebecca:It's amazing. Let's see. Hot takes. You've got the best one here, but you go.

1:06:05Jeff:I think the people that are most likely to read and enjoy this book are the ones that are least likely to need to hear Pynchon's argument. You're probably already pretty on board with what he's doing. And then also, the book is not difficult in language or its ideas. It's that Pynchon never lets up. And he doesn't give you -

1:06:23Rebecca:Yeah, it's a sentence by sentence. It's a great way to put it. Yeah, he doesn't let up.

1:06:27Jeff:He doesn't give you any cues when something important is about to happen. So it's an exercise in, it's kind of an exercise in like persistent attention paying, but also an exercise in always being willing to pop out of the haze you've been in and back into a piece of action.

1:06:42Rebecca:My hot take is a weird one. I went the other way. Pynchon's underrated. Because people feel like the hot take is Pynchon is overrated. Oh, no, I think that's such an established take. Yeah, it's a hot take that people think is hot, but it's actually room temperature. But Pynchon is underrated, is my take. Further recommendations. Yeah, I think it's not a read-alike, but it's a fascinating companion to high dystopian like Orwell. I have White Noise. I think Delillo's White Noise is a little more digestible, but operating on similar wavelengths for me.

1:07:16Jeff:And more overtly about what we do to avoid death and the fear of death. When we read that together, I remember being like, well, I'm terrified that I'm going to die someday, so let's go walk around the grocery store. Yeah, that's a good one. I think The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, or if you want to go like a little more OG Egan to look at me, her novel from 2001 gets into some of this surveillance, like tech, not quite dystopia, but weird speculative stuff. And then in looking around on the internet, I saw a lot of recommendations for Tropic of Orange. I don't know that book. I don't know what either.

1:07:48Jeff:Karen Tay Yamashita, also set in California, sounds like a similar kind of vibe. But I'm going to be looking into that one. I also want to recommend that you go read Salman Rushdie's review of this for the New York Times. Because first of all, when this book came out in 1990, they got Salman Rushdie to write the review of it. And it is a work of art in itself.

1:08:10Rebecca:I also was just thinking that something like Interior Chinatown or How Does It Live Safely in a Science... Oh, yeah. That's a great...

1:08:17Jeff:Charles Yu is a good recommendation. More accessible.

1:08:20Rebecca:Again, it's different, but you're going to see some homologous structures in those works. Three to five takeaways. Pynchon is funny and can be a lot of fun. I think that Pynchon is funny is not something people think of. I think often these big totemic works, like Melville's funny. Moby Dick can be funny. It's like everything. So one of those things is everything.

1:08:43Jeff:They acquire this halo of serious literature that really obscures what the author is trying to do.

1:08:51Rebecca:Pynchon makes Hunter S. Thompson look like a finger painting toddler. Take that one out. Almost all of Pynchon, and I've not read all of it, would still feel cutting edge today.

1:09:00Jeff:I totally agree with that. Yeah, I think also you could just toss in like you think this political moment is new. We've been doing this forever. Or at least we've been doing this since the 80s. It feels very...

1:09:10Rebecca:Which the one battle after another title becomes quite interesting. Because I was like, is that phrase in the book? I don't think it is.

1:09:16Jeff:I didn't come across it.

1:09:17Rebecca:We have here... Can you get most of this just from watching the Signal adaptation? There hasn't been one. But we're about to see someone... I don't know if it's going to be the Signal one. But someone's using this to do something on screen. Which is fascinating because I hadn't remembered how much of it is about film.

1:09:32Jeff:Yeah. So much of it is about... There's a lot of stuff about film. Movies and documentary making. And yeah, I mean, maybe we'll come back in here and have some thoughts about the film after we've seen it.

1:09:43Rebecca:All right, we're running a little long. Our final beat, zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. We have five parameters, historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read credit, and oh damn factor. Historical importance. I'll float a number for each of these. You can tell me what you think. If that makes sense, I'll do a first draft. I think six, because it's not a signal pinching. You go higher.

1:10:04Jeff:Oh, I would have gone a little lower. it's hard to i think i was sitting in the like four five range yeah so gravity's rainbow being the would be the highest would you give that uh eight sure we haven't read it so it's i haven't

1:10:20Rebecca:read it like just but even as mind share it's almost better to ask yes yeah like i had not

1:10:24Jeff:heard of the book vineland by thomas that's interesting until this came up with one battle after another readability okay this is a tricky one um four yeah it's not ulysses it's also not the wasteland we're like what the hell is this right yeah i think four four current relevance and central questions i'm tempted to do nine yeah i yeah i would give you can give this a 10 if this book came out in 2025 i would believe you book nerd read cred i think there's a difference here

1:10:58Rebecca:Pynchon I think is a nine himself if you've read a Pynchon. This one I think within that is is it one of the big three? Yeah, I think a six. But maybe an eight just for having one Pynchon under your belt. Just having one. Let's split the difference and call it a seven. Seven. Oh damn factor. Boy, that's a hard one too.

1:11:21Jeff:It's still tied to me. Yeah. There's just a lot and I feel like if I reread it my oh damn factor would be.

1:11:27Rebecca:Eight? Nine? Eight and a half?

1:11:29Jeff:Eight and a half. That's good.

1:11:32Rebecca:Yeah, so we have five, four, ten. So we're looking at 15 and a half, 25 and a half. 34 and a half out of 15. 34 and a half for that there. We had to end. Thank you so much. I'll put this in the show notes at some point. She made these graphs of the zero to well-read score things, which is pretty cool.

1:11:47Jeff:Awesome, thank you. Yeah, if you have a fun idea like that or other feedback for us, you can email us at zero to well-read at bookriot.com.

1:11:54Rebecca:Show notes are at bookriot.com slash listen. And thanks again to Thrift Books for sponsoring the first season of Zero to Well Read. Zero to Well Read is also a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. And Rebecca, until next time, go to the woods, smoke some weed.

1:12:12Jeff:Wait them out.