Against The Day

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 […]

I am up around pg 290, slowly savoring as i read. and got to the bit about
electric light in the cities of Colorado. The debate over AC or DC which
was a bitter fight in real life between Tesla And Edison, pynchon has
thrown in the possibility of Magnetism as well. Its all much like the real
historical […]

I have not posted since Dec 25, and tons of new content has apeared in my blogging absence. Adrian has taken up slack, and taken it upon himself to expand and create many areas of the site. Everyone should feel free to do the same. This is an experiment, and i am curious to see […]

At 700 pages in I’m beginning to think the book might be a single card game, and not several, and I’m suspecting that it’s Solitaire, though I don’t play the game myself, so I’m out on a limb. But reasons to suspect this include:
–the zero function (getting to zero cards left to play)
–the arrangement […]