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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
➳ More posts about Cléo from 5 to 7
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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
➳ More posts about Inherent Vice
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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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When we took the ferry out to Provincetown on Tuesday, among other fun things (Provincetown had me thoroughly charmed -- it seems like about the nicest beach town/resort town I can imagine, I am searching my brain for ways to make my future include living there some day...), we found Tim's Used Books -- funky little shop with a really interesting selection. We were in a hurry and on our bikes; under different circumstances I would have spent a few hours there and come away with a heavy bag of books. Other vacationing news... Sylvia and I went to sea yesterday afternoon on a whale-watching ship, we saw many humpback whales and a few minkes. Got some nice photos, I'll post them when we get back home. It was a beautiful day for it. (Weather has been really nice this week, though it looks like a stormy weekend.) I've been taking some moderately long bike rides around the countryside here, to places like Hingham and Hull; this afternoon I will try for Duxbury and Marshfield. Martha is coming over for dinner this evening.
posted morning of August 28th, 2009: Respond
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