Lang op gewacht: het literaire meesterwerk geboren uit en in de internetcultuur. Dit is het. Denk ik. (… een bladzijde of 20 gelezen.)

Nu hoeven we dus niet langer te ‘zeuren’ dat de literaire cultuur op het Internet geen Ulysses heeft voortgebracht.

(Nee, ik heb het niet over Kenneth Goldsmith’ New York), euh ik bedoel Capital).

Ik heb het over Anonymous’ Hypersphere. Briljant? Guess so. Ha.

Scribd.

(Via Monoskop).

PS – een halve dag later en 50 pagina’s meer gelezen (kriskras door de pdf) vind ik het nog steeds steengoed, een schop onder de kont van de literatuur, en om te bulderen van het lachen (als bij Rabelais – I suppose).

Word frequency in Pynchon – built with Processing: tinysubversions.com/pynchon/index.html

The most frequent words in GR are a poem:

Time
know
way
old, white, right
little long
night
light
face, day
inside, oh
black eyes
look, really man
good.

(Or maybe it should stop earlier, or later – ).

“They fly toward grace.”

Sunday November 16th, 11.00, finally I arrive at the last sentence of Against the Day. Somehow, many months ago, I abandoned the novel with 300 pages to read. After finishing Jahrestage I picked it up again. In many ways this is Pynchon’s most moving work (or, such is my experience of it).

Oftewel de terugkeer van de literaire SF – en nog wel in het Nederlands. Omar Munoz Cremers’ SF roman is verkrijgbaar via Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/content/674262. Zie ook http://omc-par-omc.blogspot.com/2007/02/46-droomstof.html.

Eerst nog 200 pagina’s ATD….

“Political space has its neutral ground. But does Time? is there such thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too much to hope?” (ATD, p. 577)

“But the mechanics understood each other. At the end of the summer, it would be these hardheaded tinkers with their lopsided-healed fractures, scars, and singed-off eyebrows, chronically short-tempered before Creation’s irreducible cussedness, who’d come out of these time-traveler’s clambakes with any practical kind of momentum, and when the professors had all gone back to their bookshelves and protégés and intriguings after this or that Latinate token of prestige, it’d be the engineers who’d figure out how to keep in touch, what telegraphers and motor expressmen to trust, not to mention sheriffs who wouldn’t ask too many questions, Italian firework artists who’d come in and cover for them when the townsfolk grew suspicious of night horizons, where to find the discontinued part, the exotic ore, the local utility somewhere on Earth able to generate them current with the exact phase or frequency or sometimes simple purity that would meet their increasingly inscrutable needs.” (ATD, p. 457/8)

[Roswell & Merle in front of a blackboard full of mathematical equations]

“Way I figure, all’s we need to do’s translate this here into hardware, then solder it all up, and we’re in business.”
“Or in trouble”
“By the way, who’s the practical one here and who’s the crazy dreamer, again? I keep forgetting.” (ATD 459)

“So”, the professor has gone on to explain, “if one acccepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Icelandic spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude.” (ATD p. 250).

“Wernfer, damn him, keen-witted but unheimlich, is obsessed with railway lines, history emerges from geography of course, but for him the primary geography of the planet is the rails, obeying their own necessity, interconnections, places chosen and bypassed, centers and radiations therefrom, grades possible and impossible, how linked by canals, crossed by tunnels and bridges either in place or someday to be, capital made material – and flows of power as well, expressed for example in massive troop movements, now and in futurity – he styles himself the prophet of Eisenbahntüchtigkei, or railworthiness, each and every accomodation to the matrix of meaningful points, each taken as a coefficient in the planet’s unwritten equation…” (ATD p. 242)

For more on this see for instance Matterarts The Invention of Communication…

“As if innocence were some sort of humorous disease , transmitted, in a stage farce, from one character to another, Lew soon found himself wondering if he had it, and if so who he’d caught it from. Not to mention how sick exactly it might be making him. The other way to ask the question being, who in this was playing him for a fish, and how deep was their game? If it was the T.W.I.T. itself using him for motives even more “occult” the they’d pretended to let him in on, then this was serious manure pile, and he’d best find a way out of it, soon as he could.” (ATD p. 223)

Hmmm, remember Slothrop, paranoia & anti-paranoia in GR…?

A typewritten letter by Thomas Pynchon, scanned, at the British Telegraph, concerning some plagiarism-allegations against Ian McEwan:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/12/05/nwriter06big.gif.