http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/. I do not even have to google “Blinky Morgan” myself…

“Back in the spring, Dr. Tesla was able to achieve readings on his transformer of up to a millions volts. It does not take a prophet to see where this is headed. He is already talking in private about something he calls a ‘World-System’, for producing huge amounts of electrical power that anyone can tap in for free, anywhere in the world, because it uses the planet as an element in a gigantic resonant circuit. He is naïve enough to think he can get financing for this, from Pierpont, or me, or one or two others. It has escaped his mighty intellect that no one can make any money off an invention like that. To put up money for research into a system of free power would be to throw it away, and violate – hell, betray – the essence of everything modern history is supposed to be.” (…) “If such a system is ever produced,” Scarsdale Vibe was saying, “it will mean the end of the world not just’ as we know it’ but as anyone knows it. It is a weapon Professor, surely you see that – the most terrible weapon the world has seen, designed to destroy not armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange, out Economy’s long struggle to evolve up out of the fish-market anarchy of all battling all to the rational systems of control we enjoy at present.”

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 33/34

Handy info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World’s_Columbian_Exposition.

Reading through the description it’s immediately clear that this is Pynchon-area…

Jeez… Against the Day is already included in the “See Also”.

I’m on page 31.

… I can join in the fun — it has arrived. IT has arrived. Against the Day. I’ve got it in my hands & can start reading….!

“An author who is writing specifically for a public is not really writing; it is the public that is writing, and for this reason the public can no longer be a reader; reading only appears to exist, actually it is nothing. This is why works created to be read are meaningless: no one reads them. This is why it is dangerous to write for other people, in order to evoke the speech of others and reveal them to themselves: the fact is that other people do not want to hear their own voices; they want to hear someone else’s voice, a voice that is real, profound, troubling like the truth.” p. 365

Maurice Blanchot, ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Barrytown, Station Hill, 1999, p. 359-399.

Sometimes I can read Blanchot, and what he writes I find beautiful and deeply true. Sometimes I cannot read Blanchot, and what he writes is to me as words from an ideal, transcendental realm, unconnected to lived reality.

… and then there are books that are very difficult to finish. Books about which you wonder, while reading if it is worth while at all. Books that strike you as weak, superfluous, boring, books of which you hardly understand what it’s about or what ‘the fuss’ is about, but that nevertheless carry you forth, page after page. Mark Z. Danielewski Only Revolutions falls into that category. I am reading it, still, sometimes, like 50 pages at a stretch. The text seems to me limited — however ‘beautifully’ the book is made –, limited as a celebration of the United States as the union or the love between both the protagonists, always (all ways) on the run. (Well, this is what the book seems to be — a celebration of “America”, that is at the same point a critique of America — a venerable tradition in American literature). Yet the ending (of both their narratives) has a tone that is reminiscent of the last pages of FW — which is another way of saying they are very very beautiful. Then again the connection between the story and the events in world history (the chronicle in the margin) is not really there — which makes the chronicle like a trick only. And I was very disappointed to see that Danielewski decided to not imagine what will happen in the future…

So, what is this book by Danielewski… Is it an example of what literature can be now (and in the future), or is it a mistake and a failure… a good one, for sure, but still a mistake & failure. (Adding here that I think FW is not a mistake and failure, nor is Infinite Jest, but that for instance the later novels of Arno Schmidt may be seen as mistakes & failures).

I’d love to read a good essay on this….

More books are written than you can read. Until you are, say 40, you read fully expecting you’ll get a chance to re-read. But will you? So many books to read and time will run out, eventually. One cannot read everything and so you begin to make decisions, conscious decision as to what not to read. Some of these decision are hardly decisions — I do not read thrillers, I do not read Indonesian or Bulgarian novels. More interesting are decisions against certain writers that do pop up in your ‘cultural’ environment. Books & authors that you tried reading, but that, repeatedly, did not strike a chord in you… Nabokov. Dostojevski. Pamuk. I tried reading their novels and I never finished one. Came halfway De Gebroeders Karamazov but was so put off by the christian/religious theme in the book that I could not stomach reading the rest. And now also, Nathan Safran Foer. Last monday (at last) started reading his much-discussed Incredible Loud and Extremely Close (sh*t, do I remember the title correctly?), and after 50 pages lost interest, read a few bits from middle and end, looked at all the ‘nice’ experimental pages (well, not so experimental at all) and decided that the book was too sentimental for my taste. Sorry.

Question: I can stand Richard Powers’ bordering on sentimentality. Why not Foer’s?

Since I try to read as much as I can — in a way that it sometimes feels as if my brains are not reading but just parsing the text — I often wonder what exactly makes me read, makes me read on, and remember.

I know what makes me pick up a book like Jared Diamond’s Collapse (about how civilizations collapse): wanting to know what is inside such a pop-science bestseller plus the fact that he writes extensively about the Viking settlements in Greenland and Iceland (an interest of mine ever since I read the Icelandic sagas). It’s a fat book. Even before picking up I know I will never read it completely. Starting to read it on the train to Maastricht I find out quickly that it is a book which lends itself very well to speed-reading: lots of anecdotes, digressions, personal bits, life stories, plus always these clear statements about what is to follow, or summaries and conclusions concerning what one has just read (well, or missed). It is the sort of book that one can skim through and still get the main message. Or so it seems — I am speed-reading. However gripping and accessible, such books leave me with an empty feeling. Speed reading always leaves one with an empty feeling, reading more closely will turn out to be tedious, too much repeating, too much what one already knows… Not condensed enough. (Btw: the books seems to be very well researched — and I guess it is a good book. It’s not one of those middle-of-the-road-quick-pay-off popscience books one sees for sale at airports).

Another example: I picked-up Simon Reynolds acclaimed history of post-punk Rip it Up and Start Again. Reynolds is a very, very good music journalist, and a good writer: http://blissout.blogspot.com/. I loved reading his earlier Energy Flash about the rave/dance-culture, (even though (or thanks to?) the fact that he reads the music completely through the lens of drug-use).

Post-punk was very much ‘in the air’ when I started listening to music, (Reynolds is three years my senior), but where for Reynolds this brings back excitement, I am time and time again confirmed in my dislike for this era. I listened to for instance Cabaret Voltaire, Pere Ubu, The Fall, Joy Division, Clock DVA, but I never really liked the music. (I mean, the tape-composers, or home-composers as they were called then, presented by Willem De Ridder on Dutch radio around the same time as Radionome and Spleen were presenting postpunk-bands, were much more important to me). I owned (well: own) copies of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, The Catherine Wheel, and Bowies Low and Heroes, but I never return to those. To be more exact: where I probably share some of the attitudes towards music of postpunk, I do not really like the music produced. Rip Rig & Panic might be the band that comes closest to my ‘taste’, but after 3 or 4 songs, I have had enough — on the other hand I can listen to the Minutemen, Firehose or even (early) The Jam over and over again.

So, reading through the first chapters of Reynolds postpunk-history I am confronted with a growing boredom. And no, I do not have any feelings for the British myth of popmusic. Boredom: please do not make me remember The Human League, not the early industrial bands. Skip, page after page, only reading the last page and a half of chapters. What a rotten book. Until Reynolds arrives at No Wave, New York style. Reynolds doens’t change writing style, but at once I’m full of attention…

Good writing is not enough — one needs an ‘interest’. Whatever that is, or where it comes from…

Now that I’ve finished reading Richard Powers The Echo Maker, I go through a few reviews. It was definitely ‘a good read’ — with all the good but also a few of the ‘bad’ connotations of ‘a good read’. Upon finishing the novel I had the feeling it was not as strong as Gain (my favorite Powers) or In Our Time of Singing (the one that moved me most); feeling it’s maybe too much of a good read, too sympathetic toward one’s warm feelings… Call me cynical. For instance, I think the ecological theme could’ve been treated in a stronger, more problematic, and harsher way. But, having finished it a few days ago, I still think about it…

Slate has a good review, by Stephen Burt, that had me nodding ‘yes’ upon reading this paragraph: “Powers’ insistence that we make one another up, that our personalities coalesce from clouds of floating information, practically requires reviewers to call him “Postmodern”; some would link him to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, even William Gibson. Yet Powers is less these Postmodernistas’ companion than he is their opposite: warm where they are cold, lyrical where they are clinical or satirical, most involved where they would be most distant. Powers wants to know not how and why we fall apart, amid paranoid systems, but how (with the help of the arts and the sciences) we might put one another together. His subject is not collapse but convalescence, and so reading Powers feels less like reading (say) Gravity’s Rainbow than it feels like reading Middlemarch.” See: http://www.slate.com/id/2151095/.

There was a blog-roundtable about Echo Maker going at: http://www.edrants.com/?p=4579.

An oh, I hope I’ll get the new Pynchon immediately… I understand the review copies will arrive on the desk of reviewers this week. I wish I was among them…

Arrived: Only Revolutions, Mark Z Danielewski’s new book. Looks fancy.

Comes with a fancy website, that I do not want to look at since I like to judge a book by the book — the paper tome –, not by the peripherals. (When buying a new book I try not to read the text on the cover/jacket, try not to read the reviews).

http://www.onlyrevolutions.com

Yet here I wonder if the reader is assumed to have some (what?) information before reading the book. The book, as an object, has no end, it starts on both sides, two stories that I guess will intertwine in the middle. You have to turn and keep turning the book. All “O’s are printed in green or brown (bit gimmicky?). There are two columns of text and neither is narrative in the classical sense (as House of Leaves was) — judging by the first 25 pages (Sam side). The text seems closer to poetry, even brings to mind FW — the (re)circulation-theme and well, whoever spells ‘alone’ als ‘allone’ as Danielewski does here, brings FW to mind.

I do not know of a text that ressembles this. Either Danielewski is a writer who points to a future for literature (as Joyce did), — and is ‘beyond’ Eggers, Safran Foer, even DFW — or it’s one big mistake.