BOOKS: Merely using the word "Thanatoid" tells you which novel I'm reading.

Reading may lead to an adjustment in brain chemistry. At least I hope it does. The current selection reposing atop the nightstand is Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, more about which in a moment.

A brief digression: I actually do believe in ghosts, just not the supernatural spirit sort. Rather, I believe in the ghosts inhabiting my own head space. At the present time, while scanning and annotating 30-year-old slides, these ghosts are proliferating. 

Up until the spring of 2017 little of this would have occurred to me. But my mother died in 2017, and during the weeks that followed her passing a book I was struggling mightily to comprehend at the time suddenly began speaking to me: Alan Moore's gargantuan novel Jerusalem.

Each of Jerusalem’s chapters offers a vignette centering on one of the Boroughs’ many diverse inhabitants, including humans, angels, demons, and time-traveling ghosts; the characters’ lives intersect in space and time (and other higher dimensions), forming an intricate web of narrative interconnections.

Later that summer, fulfilling a promise I'd made to a friend, I somewhat unwillingly undertook to read Lincoln in the Bardo, a novel by George Saunders. I found it oddly compelling. Saunders provides insight:

Without giving anything away, let me say this: I made a bunch of ghosts. They were sort of cynical; they were stuck in this realm, called the bardo (from the Tibetan notion of a sort of transitional purgatory between rebirths), stuck because they'd been unhappy or unsatisfied in life. The greatest part of their penance is that they feel utterly inessential – incapable of influencing the living.

Now it's Pynchon and the characteristic oddity of the Thanatoids, who appear in Vineland. "Thanat" is the Greek word for death, and "-oid" suggests an imperfect resemblance: deathlike.

Thanatoids are ambiguous beings, creatures of entropy. They “watch a lot of Tube,” living in ghostly communities like Shade Creek, where DL and Takeshi (the “Karmic Adjuster” almost accidentally killed by DL thinking she was killing Brock Vond with the ninjic “Vibrating Palm” — is anything harder to summarize than a Pynchon plot?) meet Ortho Bob Dulang, their first Thanatoid. They “limit themselves… to emotions helpful in setting right whatever was keeping them from advancing further into the condition of death… the most common by far was resentment…”

Thanatoids seem more zombie-like than ghostly, and in typical Pynchon fashion it's all kept quite confusing.

Moore's ghosts are ghosts; they cannot interact or be heard by humans ... except in certain cases, when they can influence the living. Saunders takes it from there by means of his bardo (with reciprocity in the case of Lincoln, who enhances the self-esteem of the dead). Thanatoids apparently cannot completely die until their resentments are abated.

Literature is neither real life, nor real death. The ghosts I've created remain inside my own head. They seem slightly more unreal than before, although only a wee bit.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Time for bedlam.

Ideas can come together in mysterious, serendipitous ways. Earlier in 2017, Deep Purple released a new album called inFinite, of which there'll be more to say when I get around to it, some day.

In advance of the album came a single, "Time for Bedlam."

When we write the songs, we steep ourselves in the atmosphere of the song and try and figure out what it's about. And this one sounded vicious. Especially the keyboard solo. It was bedlam."

I thought to myself at the time: Hmm, bedlam; interesting choice of words, and from a group seldom noted for lyrical heft.

Weeks passed, and I concurred with my friend Jon's choice of massive summer novels for shared reading, this being a long tradition of our literary partnership.

Alan Moore’s Time-Traveling Tribute to His Gritty Hometown, by Douglas Wolk (NYT)

Brilliant and sometimes maddening, “Jerusalem” is Alan Moore’s monumentally ambitious attempt to save his hometown, Northampton, England — not to rescue it from the slow economic catastrophe that’s been gnawing at it for centuries, but to save it “the way that you save ships in bottles,” by preserving its contours and details in art. The book is, itself, roughly the size of a schooner: a 1,266-page behemoth composed in several dozen shades of the deepest, richest purple prose, fusing social realism, high fantasy and sparkling literary showoffishness. And it’s a vehicle for nothing less than Moore’s personal cosmology of space, time and life after death.

The novel is nothing short of incredible, certainly the finest book ever written about New Albany, and I'm hooked even if it will quite literally occupy the entire summer. However, my point at present is this single sentence at the very end of book one, chapter one.

In 1868 Ern's wife and mother for the first time in their lives agreed on something and allowed him to be placed in Bedlam.

Having slipped into insanity, the Londoner named Ernest was sent to Bedlam, and accordingly, bedlam as it comes to us today is "a scene of madness, chaos or great confusion."

bedlam

Bedlam is a scene of madness, chaos or great confusion. If you allow football fans onto the field after the big game, it will be pure bedlam.

The term bedlam comes from the name of a hospital in London, “Saint Mary of Bethlehem,” which was devoted to treating the mentally ill in the 1400's. Over time, the pronunciation of “Bethlehem” morphed into bedlam and the term came to be applied to any situation where pandemonium prevails.

The Encyclopedia of Trivia adds:

Bethlehem Royal Hospital became a tourist attraction, where sightseers paying an entrance fee of twopence each, could amuse themselves at the patients' antics. Often the patients were teased and provoked by the general public into a raving frenzy.

From the fourteenth century, Bethlehem had been referred to colloquially as "Bedlam." The word "bedlam", meaning uproar and confusion, is derived from the hospital's nickname. Although the Bethlehem Royal Hospital became a modern psychiatric facility, historically it was representative of the worst excesses of asylums in the era of lunacy reform.

Bedlam for the beak-wetting set?

Why, that's no hospital -- it's the Redevelopment Commission.