Transcendence Within > Recent Status Updates

So, I don't want to prioritize reading this at school because of my having to read a ton for class this semester. I'll keep GR on my desk, but it'll move to the back burner, and I'll instead focus on school books. And I'm going on a week-long vacation to Vermont, and I want to read something lighter that I can do fast... so this is goodbye, Tom... for now. I never even did the fucking Kenosha Kid fuck my chungus life

Eyes got watery as I was finishing 72 but that's because I was tired and finding it hard to concentrate. The horse's name was never. You think Pynchon has had a complicated relationship with his initials? I PREDICTED A JFK MENTION (but not a Malcolm X one!). Is Hitler gonna show up in this? It'd make sense, although it seems that Pynchon's more interested in the Allied powers. "...[H]awk, two" on p. 68 changed lives.

I don't really get what Pynchon is doing here yet. It's early, though. Um I don't really have too much to say, actually, but I've already started. Tyrone Slothrop is a chiller and a friend. Two cigarettes drooping from the mouth to look like fangs is tight, I'm gonna steal it. "'What?' - Richard M. Nixon" is funny because that's a meme with Joey B now. Complexity v. enTropy or Sloth. Hahaha. Do I have to buy a guide?

Started on the great feast of 7/11, which I think augurs well. Re-re-watched "One Battle After Another," and did the Leo in "Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood" when they mentioned banana pancakes. Josh loves this book, and I love Josh, and this is galvanizing him starting Infinite Jest: I better finish this. So far, this is a better Pynchon work than the intro to the program for the 10th anniversary of the Daily Show.

Page 87 or something. I'm also reading Lolita but that's taking me way, way longer. I think it's good, but it's totally draining the life out of me, and impossibly hard to work through. Let's see. I flew through a bunch of this last night because I couldn't sleep. This thing MOVES, and is consistently entertaining. It all feels so very tactile and realized, in the way that a good hard-boiled book should. Big Chungus.

FINALLY MAKING PROGRESS ON THIS AGAIN. Such a detail-oriented plot and I've forgotten all of the details so I am disoriented. Nazis are bad. Nazi cops are even worse. The way Kestrel constructs a scene is so damn interesting. Probably the most entertaining book I've read in a while. Something something themes of good people in bad situations and mapping it onto World War Two. Have to hide this book's cover when home.

It has, in fact, started to click a bit. There are so many layered thoughts, with the layers themselves being layered on top of each other. Kinda. Look, this book is so goddamn difficult to talk about. Everything feels murky and unnavigable... but weirdly also razor-sharp and crystal-clear? Aggressively so. When something hits, though, my god, does it hit. I guess I'm trying to get to a point where it'll *all* hit...

Proteus felt like slamming my head against a brick wall until I bled and exposed skull and gray matter. However much I have. Joking but I did have a nosebleed after I finished so kinda hawk true!!! I can't imagine any adaptation of this book working because so much of it is about what was happening at that moment. You would need to change things with the times, though obviously some things are intentionally difficult

This thing is written with such brutal starkness — every word feels like it's being chiseled into rock, or that Kestrel (the alias for crime novelist Jonathan Moore) is mining for every word. But the mining is fruitful: he finds jewels. Minimal effort is put in to give staggeringly complex portrayals of the men, what they do, and what is done to them. "A tall stack of fat-clad muscle with a buzz cut" is pretty great.

The hardest left from Sedaris imaginable. It's always a delight to see the Orthodox Faith represented so well and fully. The childbirth chapter is one of the most knife's-edge, brutal passages I've ever read. The mixing of vernaculars is inspired. I'm waiting for this book to get weird again: stuff like Cristofer witnessing the next six hundred years of history of his new home, Arseny seeing himself in the fire, etc.

Read some of Harold Bloom's thoughts. The idea of this as "the final western" is interesting, but calling it nonpolitical seems weird. The book's about history and warfare, two inherently political topics.

McCarthy's style is so pervasive — sometimes to his credit, occasionally to his detriment, especially when it makes important plot events difficult to grasp.

I need to read an easy book next. I literally have to.

He seems interested in undoing a kind of sanitization of the bloody and murderous history of America that would have bloomed in the Reagan years. His prose is as hostile and bleak as the desert wasteland the outlaws trudge through. Judge Holden gets a lot of attention from the internet, which makes sense — it's rare for a character so gimmicky to work so well. McCarthy was good at that though (Chigurh comes to mind).