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Friday, September 18th, 2009
So for a while I've been wondering about the obituary of Poe that Borges attributes to Whitman in his lecture on The Detective Story... Today I tracked it down. (Thanks for their invaluable assistance to Brett Barney and Ed Folsom of the Whitman Archive.) Borges is referring to Whitman's essay A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads, in which he says of Poe's poems that "beyond their limited range of melody (like perpetual chimes of music bells, ringing from lower b flat up to g) they were melodious expressions, and perhaps never excell'd ones, of certain pronounc'd phases of human morbidity." Also worth looking at Whitman's note on Edgar Poe's Significance -- Whitman's take on Poe seems to have been very much in line with Borges' own.
posted evening of September 18th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Bearing in from either Limb of Sight,
A-thrum, like peevish Dumbledores in flight
Timothy Tox, The Pennsylvaniad Could Pynchon have put a Harry Potter reference into Mason & Dixon? I don't even know if that's possible chronologically... Both books were published in 1997, so it seems unlikely, though I don't know the months... Aha! The name is according to Wikpædia an early Modern English word for "Bumblebee".
 Update: Looks like somebody else noticed this and asked the same question a while back... Mildly amusing synonym for "dumbledore" is "cockchafer".
posted evening of September 13th, 2009: Respond
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 Something I've gotten used to in reading novels, and that Pynchon really challenges, is a tendency to feel the connection between the scene I'm reading and the plot of the book at large, to read at least in part for the motive sense of of the book, to be borne along by the plot. Reading the Armand Allègre/Duck of Vaucanson sequence in the middle of Mason and Dixon I got thrown off momentarily by a spell of trying to figure out what was happening in the broader plot of the book before I got back on track... It is a hilarious and lovely story taken on its own (or with the rest of the book as background).
There is apparently a movie based loosely on Gravity's Rainbow that is screening now at the Las Vegas film festival -- from the trailer it seems cute but pretty amateurish, and yet I think I would go see it if it were in a theater. Even without much shape, the Pynchonian images are fun to watch, particularly seeing how they get modified passing through somebody else's imagination.
posted afternoon of September 13th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
This is kind of confusing: the New Yorker published a piece of fiction by Orhan Pamuk this week under the title, "Distant Relations" (translated by Maureen Freely) -- there is no sidebar to the effect that "Orhan Pamuk's new novel, Museum of Innocence, will be published in English next month; this piece is an exerpt" or something like that; but that is what the piece appears to be. It seems strange to publish it as a short story without any explanation of that; and it doesn't really work as a short story -- it does work pretty well as a teaser, though.
posted evening of September 10th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, September 6th, 2009
During a flashback to Mason's childhood, when he is apprenticing in his father's bakery:
"What happens to men sometimes," his Father wants to tell Charlie, "is that one day all at once they'll understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that,-- and it proves too much to bear, and they'll not want any of it, and back away in fear. And that's how these miserable situations arise,-- in particular between fathers and sons. The Father too afraid, the Child too innocent. Yet if he could but survive the first onrush of fear, and be bless'd with enough Time to think, he might find a way through..." Hoping Charlie might have look'd at him and ask'd, "Are you and I finding a way through?"
This passage really gets me -- the voice is just right, the sentiment is real. I'm kind of taken aback. This kind of unironic sentimentality is a bit uncommon in Pynchon's work -- not absent certainly but it is not what I expect to find.
posted evening of September 6th, 2009: Respond
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...And maybe the best thing yet about Inherent Vice: it appears to have cured me of the intimidation I've felt towards Mason & Dixon, allowed me to really start digging that book! (Backstory: I read M&D when it came out 12 years ago, participated in the pynchon-l's "Mass Discussion of Mason & Dixon", tried my hardest to understand it and to love it, and sort of dropped the ball (or whatever sporting analogy is appropriate) -- and ever since it has been sitting on my shelf beckoning me to reread it, to try again.) So on Friday night, with Inherent Vice fresh in mind, I picked it up and opened it -- and found myself transported! It is a work of beauty. I'm following the pair's peregrinations around South Africa and St. Helena with bated breath, where my memory of reading it before is that this section was something to be gotten through so I could read the story set in America... I'm a little annoyed with my younger self's pencilled annotations -- there are a whole lot of them throughout the book and they are pretty unbearably earnest -- looking at a scribbled cross-reference with question mark I can see myself at 27 reading the MDMD, trying to make a point in the discussion, hoping for praise from the other participants... (Some of the notes are useful of course but they do break into the flow of the text and they are difficult to ignore entirely.)
posted morning of September 6th, 2009: Respond
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Wednesday, September second, 2009
Saramago is hanging up his blogging hat for the time being. The good news is, he needs the time to work on a new novel he will be publishing this winter, Cain, about sibling rivalry in Genesis. And he leaves the option open -- "If sometime I should feel the need to comment or opine about something, I'll knock on the door of the Notebook, the place where I like best to express myself."
posted evening of September second, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, August 29th, 2009
I was able to find a lot of the titles from the soundtrack at YouTube. Not complete, but respectable... Index here.
 ...And I just noticed, these songs are in alpha order rather than in the order they appear in the book. That seems like something that ought to be corrected.
posted evening of August 29th, 2009: Respond
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Amazon is really doing some cool stuff with promoting Inherent Vice -- I'm not sure exactly what the business structure of this is, it looks like it is coming from Amazon rather than from the publisher, it looks like Pynchon is actively involved. Anyway, today I found a playlist of tunes featured in the book: Soundtrack to Inherent Vice. Not sure why they did not put multimedia players on the page, but there are links to mp3 files for a whole lot of the songs. (Alas, not for the fictional ones... Who's going to record "Just the Lasagna"?)
 (Something I ought to do: make a YouTube playlist containing the subset of songs on the list that are freely available... Update: here it is!)
posted morning of August 29th, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, August 28th, 2009
Hmm... today is seeming like a very comfortable day for not taking a long bike ride as I had been thinking -- instead I think I am going to lie in a hammock and read more Alice Munro stories -- these are really grabbing my imagination! Sort of a similar sound to Annie Proulx (enough so that I'm wondering how much of an influence she had on Proulx), but more self-consciously cultured and introspective, I think. Took a short ride to Norwell this morning -- the countryside around here is beautiful! I saw a flock of birds on the road that I think were wild turkeys -- here in southeastern MA, ground zero for the first Thanksgiving. Will take a short ride to North Scituate later on and get some vegetables at the farm stand there...
posted morning of August 28th, 2009: Respond
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