I haven’t written in a while so much of this comment pertains to parts of the book that I’m a little past at this point. And perhaps this observation is a little front door, but I can’t help being impressed, touched, and enchanted by a frequent comparison of the warm, fading natural light of the […]
I am finished with my first reading of the book. - Mark Plakias
I am back in. looks like the other posters here have been on break as well. I haven’t really been compelled to write, as i have not really had any open questions or unique experiences over the last 100 pages or so. I find i am inspired to post every time the Chums float […]
A rare glimpse of implied 1st person narrative voice amidst carnal bestiality
Like all recovering academics, I know how to write a thesis statement. Mercifully, I’ve forgotten why, or maybe when. So one month in, what is it I think I’m doing here? My New Year’s project: blogging my way through Against the Day, at a rate of about 3 pages a day, a blog every other […]
It being the time it is, Iceland Spar is commonly available on the good old
Internet. I bought a few “optical quality” specimens on Ebay.
Perhaps after the first read-through of the book i will go back and read it
again with my spar specks, and find wholly other pynchonian landscapes.
Perhaps i need a whole reading costume or […]
No grand vista (so much for my prediction), but we do get to Colorado, in “wind meaner than any he could remember since Chicago, full of ice crystals and hostile intent,” (p.75) and meet Webb Traverse.
In a moment of felicitous synchronicity Webb tells Merle of a job for a man who knows his way around […]
For a book that travels so far and wide, the traveling itself is strangely told. Places are not separated by the distances, at least not distances crossed. Vehicles, whose retinue includes airships, navy destroyers disguised as passenger ships, manned torpedoes that buzz Venetian canals like vespas sawing through water on two-stroke fashion engines (Ciao! Ciao!), […]
Pugnax, MilesB, trans-species communications, and a TOE in speculative waters
I was flipping through Deleuze’s books on cinema this morning, with cinema, not literature, on my mind. But this just leapt out at me. We know that there’s a connecting line between Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze. And Against The Day, like his previous novels, is at times incredibly cinematic (in a sort of impossible […]