I bought an ipod-nano — for all the train travelling I’ll have to do next year. I must say, it’s such a stylish & fashionable thing that I feel very tempted to cover it in ugly stickers.

“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…?

I bought my brother the dvd We Jam Econo as present; the story of the American punk-band The Minutemen – d. boon, mike watt & george hurley – plus three complete live sets: http://www.theminutemen.com/. I just came back from his house where we watched 2 of the live sets – I admit I already watched the documentary yesterday (and afterwards ran off to an Oorbeek-rehearsal – where the idea was to spend time with F.). Well, what shall I say… It’s fucking awesome? It is. And I get into such a good mood from watching & listening to the Minutemen.

Discussing it with my brother – how we both like this band, and why. I know them through him. He says he doesn’t really remember how he got into it then, around 1985, 1986 – how friends of his who were into punk and the Dead Kennedy’s didn’t ‘get’ the Minutemen. That he probably would not have liked it himself had he not gotten into listening to jazz (Coltrane, Ayler, Cecil Taylor) through me.

The Minutemen are ‘real’ punk – in the sense that punk is about doing it yourself, making your own thing, creating something which is real and you, not copying anything – so also not copying other punk bands. Discovering. And not wanting to be like somebody else. And it always sounds that such is the way the music of the Minutemen was made: this is us and we play bass, drums and guitar – and each of us plays in their own style and it magically comes together. This is how you play together.

& I love their songs – they are so bare-bones and ‘simple’. You hear what the building blocks are and how they click. It is simple, but well, complex in the interlocking and succession of simple elements – mike watt’s baselines, geoff hurley’s crazy drumming (not at all how a punk drummer ‘should’ drum), boon’s piercing & funky guitarbits.

& it is such a joy to see them perform live on a dvd & see d. boon jumping on stage. (Needless to say, I have never seen them live – yes, later on I say mike watt a few times with george hurley and I guess Eliott Sharpe, and also with dos – but never the Minutemen).

In the States the Minutemen seem to be sort of legendary by now, it seems. I have the feeling they’re not so big in Europe. Allright even 2 other Oorbeek-members knew the Minutemen (Maarten because he knows them all, Serge because of the Raymond Pettibon-connection), but generally you see people staring at you with a face like “who’re you talking about? – the Minutemen?”

mike watt btw is here: http://www.hootpage.com/.

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.

Today is a historic day for the Netherlands –– no not because the timetables of all the trains have changed (first time since 1970 they say). Since today the Dutch public television does not broadcast an analogue signal.

I guess nobody has noticed.

I mean, who has a television with an old-fashioned antenna? Do they actually still produce tevees with antenna’s in the West?

Well, I have such a tevee. About 10 years old now. And I was very happy with it this year. In Kanne I can receive ARD, La Deux, België 1, Canvas on antenna, I even get a scrambled pay-channel (!) — and well, I could receive Nederland 1, 2 and 3 till yesterday.

I wonder what will happen with those frequencies. Are they free to use? Could you set-up an illegal station… no public channel that can be bothered? Well, in the Netherlands pirate television has not been around since the early eighties. (And well, who has a tevee with an antenna? You could start a pirate channel, but no-one will be watching).

Progression of technology leaves many unused possibilities behind. There’s only snow now…

Natuurlijk het is prachtig weer, vandaag & gisteren ook. Ik heb geen enkele zin om te fietsen. Het seizoen is voorbij. Ik herinner me alle tochtjes & wegen.

Here’s a wonderful description of one reader (& Pynchonwiki-member) and his reading set-up, with laptop + paper notebook: http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/?p=47.

I am reading ATD at stretches of about 10 pages & then make notes in a simple text-editor, plus go through some googling for references.

“Suppose it were happen to us, in the civilized world. If ‘another form of life’ decided to use humans for similar purposes, and being out on a mission of comparable desperation, as its own resources dwindled, we human beasts would likewise simply be slaughtered one by one, and those still alive obliged to, in some sense, eat their flesh.”
(…)
“Sir, that is disgusting.”
“Not literally then … but we do use another, often mortally, with the same disablement of feeling, of conscience … each of us knowing that at some point it will be our own turn. Nowhere to run but into a hostile and lifeless waste.”
“You refer to present world conditions under capitalism and the Trusts.”
“There appears to be little difference. How else could we have come to it?”
“Evolution. Ape evolves to man, well, what’s the next step — human to what? Some compound organism, the American Corporation, for instance, in which even the Supreme Court has recognized legal personhood — a new living species, one that can out-perform most anything an individual can do by himself, no matter how smart or powerful he is.”