so the reading tonight was cancelled. due to flight delays, the author was stuck in st. louis. as a result, i stayed home and made a warm dinner with my wife, and am now settling in to my warm house to enjoy a movie. no complaints here.
If you haven't been there yet, then get on over. issue 6.5 is out and wants you to read it. seriously, get over there now.
this is only one of the many books i came home with from thanksgiving. my bro-in-law was trying to condense his collection to a sort of greatest hits, or in other words, books that he would actually read. i am trying to expand my collection to include books precisely like this one. while he had to admit that he had not read it and probably never would and was thus getting rid of it, i have not yet admitted this to myself though i have failed thus far to finish ulysses. next semester though, i will have another shot at it.
also included in the box: delillo, elie weisel, d.h. lawrence, proust, allende, ford maddox ford, lesssing, kafka and more. i know. the man has an amazing library. don't know how he does it. my modest collection, which is expanding and overflowing the bookshelves at a ever-increasing rate, has really begun to alarm my wife. she is leery of the book purchases i make, no matter how thrifty they make me appear with their prices in the under a dollar range. and yes, i still have to pay shipping. what can i say? will i ever read them all? why do i need more books when i already have so many? i refer you to the calvino quote in the sidebar. he goes on with many other categories, but this is a nice excerpt. you get the idea. you can never have too many books. here's to massive and ridiculous libraries!
to think that someone thought they saw me and had a mix of emotion is surprising. i tend to think that the emotions i evoke in people range from insignificant to nonexistent. strange how some parts of me are so past high school melodrama and others are caught in catchphrases like self-esteem.
recently recieved an email from a friend. the relationship never really got started, but we'll call it friends anyway. i don't have so many of those that i can discount those lurking in the pre- and post- stages of friendship.
not sure how things are here. with the semester coming to an end and me wondering whether i have accomplished anything. papers due and tests looming. stories unfinished and finishing. revisions waiting, waiting. and me wondering if i have accomplished anything.
why am i here? do i really think i can write? why am i even asking these questions?
the touchpad on my laptop failed inexplicably today. when i try to go into the settings to fix it, the settings application fails and closes. perhaps this is only the beginning of a long slow stage of shutdown. let's hope people don't start mimicking computers anytime soon. although perhaps they already have, since computers have begun mimicking people, so if people mimicked computers then they would really be mimicking a mimic of themselves... echoes of baudrillard.
this is a long way to say that thanksgiving was great in philly, and i am sad to be back facing the same set of scholastic problems that i was when i left.
Pynchon gets mashed in a NY Times book review here.
Publisher's weekly has a few better things to say, and Pynchon weighs in with his own, now official, blurb at amazon.
A bit of history, mixed with myth, about the man himself.
If you really want to dig in to the past, read the wikipedia entry.
But what do i think? Don't know. Haven't read the thing yet. Whether he has put out a book that reads like an imitation of himself, as the times review alleges, or whether he has forged a bright new piece of steel from a heap of slag is neither here nor there. the truth is, his time has passed. the day he has been piling up silence and public avoidances against is the day that he will be no longer relevant to the written world. That day has come and gone, but he doesn't seem to realize it yet, and still lives in fear for that note to sound. If he hasn't heard it, perhaps the response to his new book will make it reverberate in his tone-deaf ears.
As much as i would have liked to re-immerse myself in his oeuvre in preparation for the new novel, i found that i couldn't bear to do it. Whether this is a reflection of a possible maturity i have reached since my undergrad days, or whether i am simply not in the mood, i don't know. What is clear is that his work is not useful to me and my own writing at this point in time. He was, once, something i aspired to become. Now he represents particular pitfalls that i wish to avoid in my own writing. Why the shift? I realized that his work shows several aspects that hamstring me in my own work, namely: indulgence, ridiculous wit, bizarre and implausible plot, underdeveloped characters, and the big one, a sense of mystery that is largely unfounded and which will never pay off in the course of the narrative. So the question of whether or not the new Pynchon novel is a good one is the wrong question to ask. The real question is, why should i read the novel at all? If you can solve that one for me, and justify the massive amounts of time it would take to finish the beast (all 1120 pages of it), then maybe we will have something to talk about.
how is it i have no control over my muse? how is it that one morning, in a matter of scant hours i can turn out five pages and the next i fail to string together a sentence? why can't i control the thing that so hauntingly dictates the steps of my own life? though i press on in spite of her abscene (and have done so occasionally, not entirely without benefit) i find myself struggling to understand the caprice that governs my ability to conceive language, to generate it as it drops fresh from the mouth of the oracle. mysticism seems to be so apt, but is, i suspect, the wrong approach entirely; the muse is perhaps better ignored, so as to prick her curiousity and entice her to return. and should she fail to return as she has not yet done (for more than several weeks at a time, that is)? then i will be utterly destroyed.
finishing a draft has a certain pleasure to it. knowing that you have gone as far as you intend to go in pursuing the thread of a particular character's life is sad, but also wonderful, in the same way that losing a friend who you have spent too much time with and knows to much about you is both bitter and freeing because of the weight of the bitterness. being without that person gives you the freedom to alter their meaning in your life. the same holds true for fictional characters. before the point of departure has been reached, they extend their particular jargon and traits deep into me, their fingers rooting into my synapses and they seem like young saplings rapidly maturing into a network of redwoods, unable to be knocked over.
but when i decide to leave them, they have to finish their lives offstage, and whether they have resolved their particular dillemas is of no concern to me. it was, but is no longer. knowing that they now have to enact their dramas on a different stage gives me the freedom to revise, to come back and bore holes in the base of the trunks to run roads through, to cut roots that were reaching outside the limits, to trim branches heavy and shaggy with unnecessary weight. coming free from the spell of a given piece is an awakening that leaves space for only one possible thing: the opporunity to be entranced by another newer, more enticing piece.
this is how i feel on the evening of finishing a draft. in the morning i will probably say upon reading this post, as i have so many times before, "delete this post. delete this drivel. rewrite."
i have yet to come up with a name for the piece.
there is the impulse to post (write) though there is nothing to say. there is a disembodied voice that cannot be owned. in time reasons and events murky will become even more so. the passage of time does not clarify but further dirties the waters of memory.
There are no exits. The doors are flat matte metal under my fingers. They are sealed from the outside. I have no recollection of how I got here. The doors were locked when I found them. When I first put my fingers out in the dark, all I could remember was cold. I felt it for the first time, again. The sensation of being out in the world. Like a birth, the expulsion from the womb’s warmth into the cold dark. Now I am blank, black, mapped out on the concrete floor, which is smooth and seamless. The doors have seams. One splitting them from each other, one reaming the edges. The edge seam feels like two but runs along the floor and must rejoin the opposite seam at the top somewhere to make a complete circuit. I put my eyes to the seam and strain for a sense of light. If the doors join, then they must allow some light in. But there is nothing, just the seam of the smooth metal under my naked eyeball. And then a sudden phototropic swirl of spots swimming in my eyes after I rub them, press them with my fingers. At this moment, the pressure I put on my eyes brings me to recall the moment of entry, a sharp pitching forward. The simple mechanics of my arms catching my body and doing so without my insistence. They reached out until they made contact, and settled the weight of my falling torso into them like useful pistons that have been worn too far. For, they did not stop me completely but let me down hard onto the floor. My cheekbone feels like the skin has split around it. I haven’t run my fingers up to check but the skin is swollen and tight and is making my left eye hard to close. I am lying on the floor. The space of the room is short and dark. I am swallowed in a finite space, bounded by walls. They are rough and blocky to my touch. I rub my limbs against the walls until they are slick with blood. It seems that the space around me is shrinking, drawing in. I no longer have to move to reach the walls. They are closing on me until there is no difference between my body and the wall. I am a function of the wall; I exist as a barrier to motion. I am pure and superior in my finite state, held in a granite density in eternal motionlessness.
The exits are many; they exist all around me. I am held in a space where the light is so bright that it has ceased to exists as a stimulus. I keep my eyes closed because opening them hurts too much. I am standing, but I am not standing. I see through a process of sensing the lack of obstruction, indicating and opening. There is no weight settling on my spine. I do not feel the ache in the ruptured disc in my lower back. I remember a vague statement once made about this condition, that it would be with me permanently. It appears that statement is incorrect. I do not feel the disc. There is no pressure being exerted on my vertebrae. I feel suspended, as though all directions are open to me and I could proceed at any moment through a flapping doorframe. I do so and feel the presence of the door only as a slight breath of air moving across my face. There are no moments of hesitation, no space between the want of a thing and its occurrence; there is only the present state of being. I am moving at will now through doors placed at every angle in the space of cubed walls. That is, there are no walls, only doors at sharp angles to each other. I proceed from cube to cube until a certain turn leads me to a room that is more than a cube. It has several more doors than the previous room. This room is a cube with an extra side, a fifth side, a fifth door. And then it seems that door is a remembered term, one with implications that are now lost—these are not doors but opportunities for motion. Room also seems a false construct. They are really moments in space. I move through the opportunities to more complex moments. These hold me in the bright vacuum of their light until I am accelerating, flipping through the moments in a scattered zag of sharp-cornered turns. The speed is incomprehensible until the moment I reach is so complex that it is simple in its complexity. I understand this all at once and my speed disappears. I am moving at such a high rate of speed that it seems that I am not moving at all. Every facet of the moment is held out to me in a glittering array. The opportunities are limitless. There is no choosing. I cannot enter even one of them. It is impossible to proceed further into infinity than infinity itself. As I begin to ponder this I understand everything, and all is present to me, there is no past, no future, nothing but the moment I am in, which is endless and eternally encompassing in its capacity.
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