the writers must seize control of the means of book production!!
I’ve often thought this. Only I am not in the business of Delivering Office Solutions; and how to present a product that is not an Office Solution? I could disguise it as an Office Solution, or I could trumpet its uselessness; but something about mid-January is making it hard to concentrate.
I thought Against the Day had about 300 pages of Pynchon at his best, which made it worthwhile at least for fans. I didn’t understand the inclusion of all the halfhearted spy stories and halfhearted Westerns; they seemed (of all things) weirdly conventional, lacking his usual invention. But when he drops those threads and cranks up the old extended-analogy machine, the results are still wonderful. The best parts were the parts about math.
the worst parts were about math! (nb i like math)
i liked the cowboy stories
Well there you are. Maybe Michael Wood was right, and Pynchon is writing for a spectrum of taste broader than either I or my interlocutor(s) can conjure up? Because I was all about the complex plane and the parallel mystic world that Pynchon plots along the imaginary axis; sure he's done that sort of thing often enough before, but he does it awfully well. (Also, right before break I was reading the page in Finnegans Wake that mentioned Hamilton's quaternions; so maybe I was primed.)
