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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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Saturday, September 5th, 2009
This is kind of exciting to hear about: Big Dance Theater is presenting a new show called "Comme Toujours Here I Stand" based on Cléo de 5 à 7, featuring an original title song by Robyn Hitchcock -- a confluence of two of my very favorite artists! (And of an art form I'm not familiar with at all...) It will be premiering next month at The Kitchen in NYC; I'll certainly be there.
Speaking of Hitchcock, here are a couple of things I've seen in the last few days and been meaning to link to:
posted morning of September 5th, 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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By way of the Wooster Collective I see that street artist Elbow-Toe has a new painting in Union Square, based on Rembrandt's drawing "Monk in a Cornfield" -- beautiful, I hope it is still there next time I am in the city! The Rembrandt drawing really captured my imagination when I saw it a few years ago at the Pierrepont-Morgan Library.
posted evening of September second, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, September first, 2009
A whole bunch of images from our vacation are up at the READIN Family Album -- here are a couple of my favorites:  This trip featured a bit of time on the water, which I really enjoyed -- this is me and Sylvia on the ferry to Provincetown on Tuesday.  And here we are swimming in the ocean, at Herring Cove beach on the north tip of Cape Cod; one of the most pleasant beaches I've ever visited.  Another really nice beach is the one at Hull, just a few miles from where we were staying in Scituate.  Ellen got this lovely photo of the sun setting over Hull.
posted evening of September first, 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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Rev. Patrick Desbois