I am reading the 1085 page Against The Day by Thomas Pynchon. A rollicking turbulent incredible sense of movement and shifting and raucous adventure this book manifests immediately. An adventure story beginning at the World's Fair in Chicago. It's Pynchon, anything could happen.
"For dynamic is both the miners curse, the outward and audible sign of his enslavement to mineral extraction, and the American working man's equalizer, his agent of deliverance, if he would only dare to use it...Every time a stick goes off in the service of the owners, a blast convertable at the endof soem chain of accountancy to dollar sums no miner ever saw, there will have to be a corresponding entry on the other side of God's ledger, convertible to human freedom no owner is willing to grant." pg 87.
1973, NYT's
Against The Day
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Mathematics plays a starring role
5 comments:
Sounds like good reading - the paragraph you quoted alone is some thinking material - I found it an awesome statement, especially since some of my friends from Wyo were miners and I find the history of mining fascinating - and miners. It says a lot about more than one of our current conglomerates. From this paragraph alone, I assumed that Pynchon had some things political to say before I read your link to NY times article)- anyway, have fun reading!!!!
Yes, this section really hit me. I suspect late in the novel this is going to come around. Plus...this paragraph is surrounded by other very powerful concepts. I wish I had the chance to post them here...let's see...maybe later.
It is a very dense book with insane amounts of characters with Dickensian names...I am reading by pure faith and intuition that I will be able to keep up with this one. It would make a great movie so far...
Your next post sent me on a curious little hunt to all sorts of places, but I thought I'd answer your question here since this post is more book related. I get most of my books through bookmooch.com. It's wonderful. If I want something brand new, I generally rely on the library, but I can never finish books before they want them back.
came by to thank you for visiting my Sunday Serenity and to thank you for reminding me of the playful nature of the divine. I was familiar with the lila reference from my reading in comparative religion and mythology and most memorably in Pirzig's Lilith.
encountering your comment this morning then influenced my choice of which poem to use for my first ride on the Monday Poetry Train as its deepest level is about the playfulness of the divine.
I chose this post about Pynchon's book to leave my comment because the pic of the book cover made me want to pick it up off the screen. if only.
i was in queue for the library copy for months and got my turn in the last month the library was opened. but i didn't get to read it. i knew i would have to set aside everything else for at least two weeks and still risk not finishing before my time was up. my husband read it and shared tidbits throughout that made me drool after it.
i love the complexity of Pynchon's thought and the way his mind makes connections between things that are not obviously connected.
my mind connects things that way. for example, it wants to connect Web Traverse to Indira's Net and the World Wide Web. i've no idea whether pynchon intended those allusions. my husband refused to confirm or deny it for me.
if i show up here more in the coming days, you can thank my husband. i asked him to take a look at your source code to see if he could identify why loading your page crashed IE 7 three out of five tries and took five to fifteen minutes to load when it was successful. he suggested i try it in Firefox first. I did and it blinked on in under five seconds. is it majic or mozilla?
Dewey, hi, oh that sounds like an excellent source for books. I've only bought a few books online although I've ordered up a few rare ones lately. I wondered because Joy has alerted me to so many libraries closing. When I lived in small town Canada we had a bus that would come through town with new books and special orders. It was a huge thrill...and needed!
Joy, Oh yes, some blogs work and some are challenging. I often turn on the RSS to read a blog...if a blog has too many programs or images it can be slow. I am sorry you had a problem with mine all this time. I hope Firefox helps. While you're on Firefox, check out the websourcing site "stumble upon" it colllects the best sites and is addictive, lookout! AGAINST THE DAY is absolutely fascinating...it's challenging me speed wise...slow going, but I love the mood and it is turning out to have many layere dmeanings. The quote above I think the page of text will turn out to be a major theme for the rest of the novel. Pynchon frustrates many readers. I think his complexity is best enjoyed by "surrendering" to the work. Reading is a form of surrender, as is watching movies...but Pynchon demands complete surrender of one's ego to the novel...like Melville or Conrad or Shakespeare. It's so worth it once you get in the mood of his style and just let go. I've probably learned more bizarre technical stuff from Pynchon than any other novelist as a side benefit!
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