“Another Quest for another damned Magic Crystal. Horsefeathers, I say. Wish I’d known before I signed on. Say, you aren’t one of these sentient Rocksters, are you?”

Mineral consciousness figured even back in that day as a source of jocularity – had they known what was waiting in that category … waiting to move against them, grins would have frozen and chuckles turned to dry-throated coughing.

About every search I ‘throw’ into Google since yesterday, will yield as its 7th or 8th result something with “plays an important role in Against the Day”… sure – I was searching for Icelandic Spar because I’m reading ATD… but still.

Should we imagine that ‘the internet’ reads ATD too?

Uh, well, anyhow, wikipedians read Pynchon — that much is sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcite.)

“But if you look at the history, modern chemistry only starts coming in to replace alchemy around the same time capitalism really gets going. Strange eh? What do you make of that?” Webb nodded agreeably. ” Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt was not meant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother, had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.” (ATD p.79)

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?