Chiles > Recent Status Updates

so far: bit of M. John Harrison, bit of Ballard, bit of Iain Sinclair, but somehow, despite characters that tend towards despicable about as much as theirs, warmer than all of them.

i knew that duck was coming; laughed anyway when it arrived.

Clute's prose thus far incredibly sustains a maniacal vitality - like PKD w/ an expanded vocab sans info dumps.

dammit Insort Geront arks sound v much like an idea i thought was my own that i could never get to work. it's Virtuosity* all over again. *you had to be there.

'Tongue Dance' - double yoo tee EFF

'The Bath' is one of the strangest things i have ever read.

started dipping into this; seemed luke a suitable companion read to Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, particularly ch.29.

two thirds in, enjoyable but, esp. for Pynchon, disappointingly straightforward.

have Pynchon's books always resembled William Gibson's? coz, this is putting off some serious Late Gibsonesque vibes.

had a terrible exp w/ Against the Day - utterly defeated me, & but now i can't stop thinking about rereading it - earlier this year, but Pynchon's gravity just pulls & pulls; so: this.

reading the Circe section, kinda like watching the parade in Paprika

oh, Joyce. now you're just showing off.

it took about a hundred pages for the weight of my ignorance to weigh down enough for me to feel the need to consult this edition's critical apparatus (errata, explanatory notes, annotations). now i wish i'd started consulting them from the beginning. but, either way: v. much enjoying this read like nothing else.

'...what the kids had been calling a sensory overload was really information deprivation.' this describes i think describes my own exp of reading this book.

heavenly portents, lost time, freaky sex...i dunno, but seems to me the Richardses are still the strangest or anyway most effectively strange thing in the book so far.

the Richardses are the first convincingly strange thing in the book so far for me

this book somehow felt necessary after Infinite Jest

'basically goo,' 'Wave Bye-Bye to the Bureaucat' sounds like it could be a Pixar thing. #SummerofJest

10 pages or so into this reading burst i started finally to feel fatigued by this book. best thing to do, i notice, is to just keep reading until it's all of a sudden exhilarating again. #summerofjest

'...an adventure in fucking pathos...' is kinda how i'd describe this book #summerofjest

pp.157-169-James Cromwell started reading this bit in my head, & i couldn't shake his face, his voice, reading, in my head #summerofjest

https://twitter.com/skinnybdink/statu...

pimple cream? what pimple cream?

Wardine. this is where IJ started to lose me the first couple-three times i tried to read it #summerofjest

'Rather swift and brutal rape scene.'

these last few pages, weirdly, feel both - BOTH - interminable AND rushed, as if maybe Pynchon were, after all, forcing a much much longer story to finally, impossibly, come to some kind of end.

& just like that, the deed is done. wait, there are 80 pages more of this?!? not complaining, 'cept, yeah i am. kinda.

'The _national idea_ depends on war.'