« Five sci-fi scenarios | Main | May you live in interesting times » February 19, 2008Thomas Pynchon Wiki When it was first released, I bought and started reading Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, then stopped reading for almost a year (okay, I get distracted). I recently jumped in again, and at the rate I'm going, I expect to be through sometime before I move to a nursing home (in case you haven't looked, it's over a thousand pages long, and brilliant - you want to savor it along the way). Meanwhile I've just discovered the terrific Thomas Pynchon Wiki, which has a section dedicated to Against the Day. This is a huge relief. I've assumed I would have to read the novel at least twice, the second time researching as I go. Not as time consuming as the work you have to do around Joyce's Finnegans Wake, but still pretty challenging. Now I figure I can just refer to the wiki as I go. jon posted this at 6:30 AM |
read weblogsky! latest posts:
Austin350
Air Jelly Maker Faire on Twitter Call for creativity: communication systems and urban architecture “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most” Dad's groceries and the inevitability of death FringeWare history Twitter is useful Social enterprises Serious worldsaving play |
Comments
Enjoy. It took me nearly a year to finish it, and I made liberal use of the Wiki to try and sort out what bits were historic and which were Pynchonifications.
I thought that the "Anarchist threat" was surely something Pynchon had brushed into the US history ATD skates through. But then I happened upon my grandfather's immigration papers. Just as immigrants needed to declare they were not communists during the cold war, and need to declare they are not terroritst today, in 1919 the "don't even bother getting off the boat" question was Are you an Anarchist?
Proverbs for paranoids: not only do you think they´re out to get you, they think you're out to get them.
--b
Posted by: Brian | February 19, 2008 7:02 AM