USATODAY.com

WASHINGTON ó At least 8,000 members of the all-volunteer U.S. military have deserted since the Iraq war began, Pentagon records show, although the overall desertion rate has plunged since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Since fall 2003, 4,387 Army soldiers, 3,454 Navy sailors and 82 Air Force personnel have deserted. The Marine Corps does not track the number of desertions each year but listed 1,455 Marines in desertion status last September, the end of fiscal 2005, says Capt. Jay Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman.

Desertion records are kept by fiscal year, so there are no figures from the beginning of the war in March 2003 until that fall.

Some lawyers who represent deserters say the war in Iraq is driving more soldiers to question their service and that the Pentagon is cracking down on deserters to discourage anti-war sentiment.

ìThe last thing (Pentagon officials) want is for people to think Ö that this is like Vietnam,î says Tod Ensign, head of Citizen Soldier, an anti-war group that offers legal aid to deserters.

Desertion numbers have dropped since 9/11. The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in 2001, compared with 3,456 in 2005. The Marines showed 1,603 deserters in 2001. That declined by 148 in 2005.

The desertion rate was much higher during the Vietnam era. The Army saw a high of 33,094 deserters in 1971 ó 3.4% of the Army force. But there was a draft and the active-duty force was 2.7 million.

Desertions in 2005 represent 0.24% of the 1.4 million U.S. forces.

Opposition to the war prompts a small fraction of desertions, says Army spokeswoman Maj. Elizabeth Robbins. ìPeople always desert, and most do it because they don’t adapt well to the military,î she says. The majority of desertions happen inside the USA, Robbins says. There is only one known case of desertion in Iraq.

Most deserters return without coercion. Commander Randy Lescault, spokesman for the Naval Personnel Command, says that between 2001 and 2005, 58% of Navy deserters walked back in. Of the rest, most are apprehended during traffic stops.

Penalties range from other-than-honorable discharges to death for desertion during wartime.

The Crying of Lot 49 By Thomas Pynchon

May 1, 1966

Embattled Underground

By RICHARD POIRIER, New York Times

Thomas Pynchon’s second novel, “The Crying of Lot 49,” reads like an episode withheld from his first, the much-acclaimed “V.,” published three years ago. Pynchon’s technical virtuosity, his adaptations of the apocalyptic-satiric modes of Melville, Conrad, and Joyce, of Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Nabokov, the saturnalian inventiveness he shares with contemporaries like John Barth and Joseph Heller, his security with philosophical and psychological concepts, his anthropological intimacy with the off-beat–these evidences of extraordinary talent in the first novel continue to display themselves in the second. And the uses to which he puts them are very much the same.

The first novel, “V.” was a designed indictment of its own comic elaborateness. The various quests for “V.” all of them substitutes for the pursuit of love, are interwoven fantastically, and the coherence thus achieved is willfully fabricated and factitious. Pynchon’s intricacies are meant to testify to the waste–a key word in “The Crying of Lot 49”–of imagination that first creates and is then enslaved by its own plottings, its machines, the products of its technology.

Except for the heroin of “V.,” Rachel Owlglass (she who can see wisely without being a voyeur), and the heroine of this novel, Oedipa Maas–lovable, hapless, decent, eager girls–both novels are populated by self-mystified people running from the responsibilities of love and compelled by phantoms, puzzles, the power of Things. No plot, political, novelistic, or personal, can issue from the circumstances of love, from the simple human needs, say, of a Rachel or an Oedipa, and Pynchon implicitly mocks this situation by the Byzantine complications of plots which do evolve from circumstances devoid of love.

Gestures of warmth are the more touching in his novels for being terrifyingly intermittent, shy, and worried. The coda of the first novel, enunciated by the jazz player, McClintic Sphere, also serves the second: “Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it; keep cool but care.” This is the stoical resolve of an embattled underground in a world increasingly governed by Ionesco’s rhinoceri, to mention a vision markedly similar to Pynchon’s. Efforts at human communication are lost among Pynchon’s characters, nearly all of whom are obsessed with the presumed cryptography in the chance juxtaposition of Things, in the music and idiom of bars like the V-Note or The Scope, or merely in the “vast sprawl of houses” that Oedipa sees outside Los Angeles, reminding her of the printed circuit of a transistor radio, with its “intent to communicate.”

Even the title of “V.” was cryptographic. It was available to all interpretations and answerable to none. Though “V.” probably did not have Vietnam as one of its meanings in 1963, the novel so hauntingly evokes the preconditions of international disaster that Vietnam belongs in the long list of other V’s. Roughly half the novel is an international melodrama of spying in the years since the Fashoda incident of 1898. It shows how international, like personal, complications accumulate from an interplay of fantasies constructed by opposing sides, each sustaining the other’s dream of omnipotence, each justifying its excesses by evoking the cleverness of its opposition, each creating that opposition and, in some mysterious and crazy way, the moves and the successes of the other side as a provocation of its own further actions.

“Plots” are an expression in Pynchon of the mad belief that some plot can ultimately take over the world, can ultimately control life to the point where it is manageably inanimate. And the ascription of “plots” to an opposition is a way of explaining why one’s own have not achieved this ultimate control. Nearly from the outset, the people of Pynchon’s novels are the instruments of the “plots” they help create.

Their consequent dehumanization makes the prospect of an apocalypse and the destruction of self not a horror so much as the finally ecstasy of power. In international relations the ecstasy is war; in human relationships it can be sado-masochism, where skin itself is leather, leather a substitute for skin. The process is a party of daily news, and no other novelist predicts and records it with Pynchon’s imaginative and stylist grasp of contemporary materials.

In “V.” private life (the story of Benny Profane, his girl Rachel, and the Whole Sick Crew) and international politics (involving the various European and African manifestations of “V.” from the 1890’s to 1939) are related only metaphorically. The characters in one plot take no direct part in the other. Of much shorter length and narrower focus, “The Crying of Lot 49” is located between Berkeley and Los Angeles, and its events, historical as well as private, are filtered through the career of one person, Oedipa Maas. Oedipa is introduced as a good suburban housewife in Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, making “the twilight’s whiskey sours” against the arrival of her husband Wendell (“Mucho”) Maas.

At the outset her troubles are all manageable within the terms of ordinary daily living. She has a not always potent husband who suffers crises of conscience about his professions–formerly a used car salesman, he is now a disk jockey–and about his teen-age tastes and his taste for teen- agers. Also, she has a neurotic psychiatrist named Hilarius, who wants her to take LSD as an experiment, and a former lover, the tycoon Pierce Inverarity, who would sometimes call her, before his recent death, at one in the morning, using Slavic, comic Negro, or hostile Pachuco dialects.

As the novel opens, Oedipa learns, on her return from a party whose “hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue,” that she is an executor, along with a man named Metzger, formerly the child movie star known as Baby Igor, of Inverarity’s will. The will was discovered some months after his death, a period during which it was perhaps tampered with in order to hide from Oedipa the revelations which his network of holdings, her “inheritance,” seem to communicate: an America coded in Inverarity’s testament. Before the novel closes, Oedipa loses her husband to LSD, her psychiatrist to madness, her one extra-marital lover, Metzger, to a depraved 15-year-old, and her one guide through the mazes of her inheritance, a Ralph Driblette, to suicide. In the final scene, accompanied by the famed philatelist, Genghis Cohen, she enters the “cryingÔø? of Lot 49, a collection of Inverarity’s stamps.

The “crying of Lot 49” refers to an auction, but the phrase evokes the recurrent suspicion on Oedipa’s part that there is “revelation in progress all around her,” that the stamps, “thousands of little colored windows into deep vistas of space and time,” are themselves “crying” a message– not above Pierce Inverarity necessarily, or even about Oedipa, but about “their Republic,” about America, its inheritances and what we inherit from it, including things like used lots of stamps and used car lots. The “stamps” were often Inverarity’s substitute for Oedipa, just as Mucho sought communication less with her than with his used cars or in the dancing of his teen-agers.

Oedipa’s fascination with the possibilities of “revelation,” in inanimate things, and the curious patterns of connection among them, is induced, at least in party, by the fact that “things” have stolen from her the attention and love of both men. It is therefore possible that Inverarity became connected with the famous Tristero System, the central cryptograph of this novel as “V” was of the first, out of the impulse not to communicate with her, or to communicate with her only under cover of various disguises. It is also possible that the System, participation in which allows a “calculated withdrawal from the life of the Republic, from its machinery,” from its forms of public communication, is an elaborate hoax, a teaser arranged by Inverarity to tantalize her away from home, love, and the open community, to seduce her into such subsidiary organizations as the “Inamorati Anonymous,” an outfit she encounters in a queer bar in San Francisco.

Alternatively, the hints about a Tristero System could have been planted in the will by interests anxious to prevent Oedipa from discovering the whole network of Inverarity’s holdings, including those in Yoyodyne, an electronics and missile corporation, one executive of which, retired by automation, founded the Inamorati Anonymous. (Yo-yoing in “V.” was the pointless, repetitive passage and return on any convenient ferry or subway, usually the Times Square-Grand Central run, for Benny Profane and his friends, and it is characteristic of Pynchon’s metaphoric translations of personal into international idiosyncrasies that yo-yoing can also describe the horror of nuclear exchange.)

Finally, Tristero may only be Oedipa’s fantasy, an expression of her need to believe that there must be something to explain the drift of everyone she knows toward inhumanity. Otherwise she is either a paranoid or America is Tristero and she an alien.

Between the opening scenes of domesticity and the closing scenes of the “crying” of Lot 49, Oedipa is like the hero in a book of “The Faerie Queene,” tempted from her human virtues while on a quest that takes her through all manner of seemingly prearranged weirdness and monstrosity, all kinds of foreign “systems” thriving within an America which is itself “a grand and so intricate enigma.” Only the Tristero, imagined as an intricate network of underground organizations, can encapsulate what she would otherwise have to see as the drift of the Republic itself toward “the glamorous prospect of annihilation.”

This novel is a patriotic lamentation, an elaborate effort not to believe the worst about the Republic. Patriotism for an ideal of America explains the otherwise yawning gap in Pynchon’s comic shaping of his material. The Tristero System–it began in 1577 in Holland in opposition to the Thurn and Taxis Postal System and is active now in America trying to subvert the American postal system through an organization called W.A.S.T.E.–is a masterpiece of comic invention. It involves, among other things, one of the best parodies ever written of Jacobean drama, “The Courier’s Tragedy,” and a perhaps final parody of California right-wing organizations, Peter Pequid Society, named for the commanding officer of the Confederate man-of-war “Disgruntled” and opposed to industrial capitalism on the grounds that it has led inevitably to Marxism. Its leader, Mike Fallopian, speculates in California real estate.

The exuberance of such comedy softens the portents of national calamity, but at the same time it makes it nearly impossible for Pynchon to persuade the reader, as he anxiously wants to do, that the whole System and the whole book have more meaning than a practical joke. The same difficulty was apparent in “V.”, where the author’s style at points of sincerity about love and youth was, by contrast to the vitality of his comic writing, platitudinously limp and sloganeering.

In this second novel, the difficulty is if anything more acute. Pynchon chooses to have all the significance pass through the experience of only one comically named character, Oedipa Maas, as if he had chosen to have all of “V.” assembled and assimilated by Benny Profane or by Rachel Owlglass. In “V.” a structure of metaphor and cross-reference existed beyond the inquiry of many of the characters. The result was a dimension secured from comedy and within which the comedy could function as a form of what might be called local ignorance of the issues on which it was commenting. In “The Crying of Lot 49,” however, the role given Oedipa makes it impossible to divorce from her limitations the large rhetoric about America at the end of the novel. This is unfortunately simply because Oedipa has not been given character enough to bear the weight of this rhetoric:

“If San Narciso and the estate were really no different from any other town, any other estate, then by that continuity she might have found The Tristero anywhere in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she’d looked. She stopped a minute between the steel rails, raised her head as if to sniff the air. She became conscious of the hard, strung presence she stood on–knew as if maps had been flashed on her on the sky how these tracks ran on into others, and others, and others, knew they laced, deepened, authenticated the great American night, so wide and now so suddenly intense for her.”

What I think is happening at the end is that Pynchon desperately needs to magnify the consciousness of his heroine, if he is to validate her encounter with The Tristero System. Only by doing so can he maintain the possibility that the System is distinguishable from the mystery and enigma of America itself. To say that no distinction exists would be to sacrifice the very rationale of his comic reportage: that he is reporting not evidence about American so much as pockets of eccentricity in it, fragments dangerously close to forming a design but fragments nonetheless. Pynchon is reluctant to make all his people submit to the pervasive grotesqueness of American life, though he comes close to that, and he therefore exalts a character altogether too small for the large job given Oedipa at the end.

In fact, Pynchon’s best writing is often in his descriptions of American scenery, of objects rather than persons. He shows at such points a tenderness, largely missing from our literature since Dreiser, for the very physical waste of our yearnings, for the anonymous scrap heap of Things wherein our lives are finally joined. The Pynchon who can write with dashing metaphoric skill about the way humans have become Things, can also reveal a beautiful and heartbreaking reverence for the human penetration of the Thingness of this country, the signatures we make on the grossest evidences of our existence. Indeed we do leave codes and messages, seen by the likes of Mucho even in used cars:

“Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopeless of children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust–and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10Ôø?, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes–it nauseated him to look, but he had to look.”

Within this description is a haunting sequence of imagined human situations, typical and pathetic ones, fused with the particularized power that shows Pynchon’s own obsession with the encoded messages of the American landscape. What is also noticeable here, and throughout the novel, is that the major character is really Pynchon himself, Pynchon’s voice with its capacity to move from the elegy to the epic catalogue. The narrator sounds like a survivor looking through the massed wreckage of his civilization, “a salad of despair.” That image, to suggest but one of the puns in the word Tristero, is typically full of sadness, terror, love, and flamboyance. But then, how else should one imagine a tryst with America? And that is what this novel is.

Mr. Poirier is chairman of the English Department of Rutgers University and an editor of Partisan Review. His next book, “A World Elsewhere,” will be published in the fall.

At Least 75 Dead in String of Bombings in Baghdad – New York Times

“…The trial of Mr. Hussein unfolded on television as blast after blast rocked the capital, raining debris across entire blocks and flooding hospital wards with lacerated victims.

After one car bomb exploded at noon in a Shiite district of downtown Baghdad, firefighters and witnesses struggled to pry two blackened bodies from the front seats of a charred sedan. The wailing crowd lifted the bodies out, shouted “God is great!” and marched down the street bearing the corpses aloft.

Nuns from a nearby convent rushed toward the flaming wrecks of cars clutching metal buckets of water.

“I’m going to sell my restaurant because I want to leave Iraq,” said Nour Sabah, 52, as he watched from the sidewalk, standing atop shards of glass. “They just want to destroy the lives of people. They don’t want Iraqi people to live ordinary lives.”

An Interior Ministry official said that at least 4 people had been killed and 16 injured in that bombing. Earlier, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives at a gasoline station in the Shiite neighborhood of New Baghdad, killing at least 23 people and injuring 51. The deadliest attack took place in the evening, when a car bomb exploded by a marketplace in the northern Hurriyah neighborhood, killing at least 25 and wounding at least 43.”

The Nurture Channel
New York duo Growing creates music that embraces the environment

Date: Dec 01, 2004 – 03:43 PM
By Peter Relic
Cleveland Free Times

WISEACRE POETASTER Kenneth Koch once observed that birds don’t sing, they communicate, and that human beings are the only creatures that sing. What Koch suggests is that animals who are often attributed the power of song ‚Äî birds and whales, for example ‚Äî are making such sounds for an expressly utilitarian purpose, while human singing ‚Äî like all art ‚Äî is an indulgent, species-specific endeavor based upon nature’s example. This peculiar relationship is expanded upon in one of the year’s most rewarding albums: Growing’s The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light .

Growing is Joe DeNardo and Kevin Doria, two gentlemen in their mid-20s who met at college in Olympia, Washington. Their instrumental debut, The Sky’s Run Into the Sea , appeared in 2003, and its massive, guitar-centric sounds turned on legions of fringe music fans, from the doom metal set to the well-groomed frequenters of the sculpture garden at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (where Growing played this summer). Without drums or traditionally recognizable melodies, their music nonetheless projects a palpable pulse and a sense of harmony. And as a friend recently pointed out, when you bang your head to music this slow, you’re basically bowing.

‚ÄúThe nature thing comes up a lot,‚Äù says Kevin Doria, answering the line in the group’s live-in bunker in Brooklyn, New York. ‚ÄúI was working at a restaurant, and on my break I’d go out back where I’d hear the hum of the freeway, and the refrigerator vent vibrating, and I liked that enough to where I compositionally copied that, not replicating those sounds but replacing them with sounds on my guitar. That’s a big part of our concept.‚Äù

Of course, concepts mean nothing without execution. Growing’s got the goods. The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light contains four long pieces, including the impeccably titled laser-guided ‚ÄúOnement‚Äù and the exponentially expansive ‚ÄúAnaheim II,‚Äù whose heavy drone evokes the inside an MRI cone during a brain scan.

‚ÄúA drone is one of those sounds that can communicate a lot of subtlety,‚Äù Joe DeNardo says. ‚ÄúPare everything down to one note and there’s a lot of harmonic ephemera, and the longer you sustain the sound the more time the listener has to concentrate and pick up on the sound. Many traditional musics have a drone element. It’s always felt really nice and easy and pleasant even to play.‚Äù

The album’s moving fugue is ‚ÄúEpochal Reminiscence.‚Äù In 18 minutes it moves from the static to the ecstatic as a sonic undertow closes around the listener.

‚ÄúThat’s something we originally recorded for a home show,‚Äù DeNardo says. ‚ÄúA home show is where we design each room in the house to have a different sound environment, and people come over; they’re invited to partake and stay overnight.‚Äù

Sounds a bit like what happens at Lakewood’s fabled Recycled Rainbow.

‚ÄúYeah, anyone can do it in their house,‚Äù DeNardo continues. ‚ÄúIt’s a really pleasant way to hang out with friends. That piece was my bedroom’s soundscape, playing on a prerecorded tape, and then there were a couple guitars and amps set up, and people were allowed to pick them up and play along. All the effects were in a box that they couldn’t reach; they just had access to a guitar and a volume pedal.‚Äù

The pedal thing is crucial since, while it sometimes sounds like Growing are using synthesizers, they only play guitars. ‚ÄúThe Big Muff distortion pedal is a favorite, specifically the green ’90s-era model,‚Äù DeNardo says. ‚ÄúAnd I have a Superfuzz. When I first met Joe Preston [of grunge legends the Melvins] I learned how to combine multiple distortion pedals to get specific sounds. That’s kind of a trade secret, though.‚Äù

Further intriguing disclosures are available online at http://www.dustedmag.com, where Growing reveal a list of stuff that’s turned them on lately, including Village Music of Bulgaria’s album A Harvest, A Shepherd, A Bride , the large-scale horizon-obsessed paintings of mid-century New York painter Barnett Newman and the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s romantic horror film Nosferatu by pastoral German psychonauts Popol Vuh.

So, how much time do these deep dudes give the human race before extinction?

‚ÄúA couple thousand years,‚Äù DeNardo says, ‚Äúif we can deal with energy in an efficient way. Hopefully our brains will evolve, like a new species will come out of us. It’s awfully sad to think of the damage we’ve done in the past hundred years. But the best thing about the Earth is that it’ll just keep on truckin’.‚Äù

Doria takes the long view: ‚ÄúA couple hundred million years, and even then there’s going to be rogue factions hiding underground who will mutate. But if a giant asteroid hits the earth, I hope it falls on my head and obliterates me right away, instead of having to think of how a giant asteroid hit the earth 15 minutes ago and a wave of energy churning towards me is going to wipe me out.‚Äù

Until then, Growing has its name to live up to. ‚ÄúWe chose it because it seemed all-encompassing,‚Äù DeNardo says. ‚ÄúA lot of people didn’t like it at first because they thought it was a reference to marijuana or boners. Not so. It does seem to describe the process of living and dying without being heavy and ominous. Which is nice.‚Äù¬†

Tony Allen, Cargo, London

By Howard Male
Published: 22 February 2006
The Independent

A couple of songs into the show, the legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen mumbled: “I’ve gone there to bring it back here.” Fortunately some of the audience seemed to understand what this Confucius-like pronouncement meant, and a small cheer erupted. But actually it wasn’t 100 per cent accurate: although Allen went back to Nigeria to record his excellent new album Lagos No Shaking with Nigerian musicians, unfortunately only two of the musicians involved in the recording were allowed into the UK to perform at this concert. So expectations weren’t as high as they might have been for the makeshift band put together to try to recreate that unique Lagos alchemy.

However, after a rather low-key start with a trumpet-led instrumental, things started to warm up with the appearance on stage of the first of Allen’s Lagos team who managed to get through customs, Fatai Rolling Dollar. The 76-year-old palm wine singer was full of energy on the slow, tough funk of “Ise Nla”, comfortable and relaxed as he playfully mimed karate chops between vocal lines.

Next on was the second ace up Allen’s sleeve: the young Yoruba singer Yinka Davies. She has the easy grace and mile-wide smile of Diana Ross and managed to get some call-and-responses from the reserved London crowd on the anthemic “Lasun”.

But what of Allen himself? Well, expecting the firing-on-all-cylinders fierceness that drove Fela Kuti’s band between 1964 and 1978 to be repeated would, of course, be ridiculous – legend has it that when Allen left Kuti it took five replacement drummers to kick up a comparable racket. But Allen runs a different kind of outfit these days. Solo projects have leant towards a dubbier, more spacious vibe. And now this latest project – particularly in its live manifestation – is essentially an Afrobeat jazz band: songs effortlessly unwind; soloists get their spots, and Allen simply collapses the groove when he decides he’s had enough.

During the quieter moments his hands barely hold the sticks – sometimes merely tickling the snare or drawing a whisper from the ride cymbal. And then suddenly there’ll be a thunder of toms and we’re back into a chorus. The rest of the musicians relax into each groove, rather than being intent on chasing it, or driving it forward. This approach was reflected in this concert’s head-nodding audience, who seemed blissfully happy.

“Podcast Description: John and Tovah Olson, aka Dead Machines, play private press and psych records, interview noise musicians and have bands play live in their home studio in Ypsilanti, Michigan.”

link courtesy Oliver Hall!