| Books and errata |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|02:31 am] |
| [ | music |
| | saigo ni warachau no wa atashi no hazu | ] |
Heard a guy looking at manga describe the infamous Pizza Hut Revolution anime as Code Geese. Think I prefer it that way.
Whenever I use that trick where you boil pasta and then in the last couple minutes throw in some broccoli florets, so you drain them together and they're both done at the same time, I feel like the smartest person in the world.
In the Watchmen game, some of the NPCs taunt Nite Owl about "your little girlfriend Rorschach." Elsewhere, others tell Rorschach that "your girlfriend the Owl is next."
Seem a little fixated on this idea.
There's a certain class of people who consider possible salmonella an actual deterrent from eating cookie dough.
Wrongest Watchmen merchandise seen: refrigerator magnets, including one that says 'behind you.' Second place: Rorschach-mask-style ski mask sort of thingy. I know there's some awful adult costumes, but I really hope there's some for kids by the time Halloween comes around. If I don't get to hand a fun size Snickers to an adorable eight year old Comedian, I will be deeply disappointed in the apparatus of capitalism.
Anyway, I've just finished reading Infinite Jest.
A stray ooh or aah here is expected, but really, the length wasn't offputting to me. I can't stand to wait for more than four seconds without something to do - my god, the wonders public transportation does for compulsory literacy. I always have to be reading something, so just to have it be the same something for a pretty long time isn't onerous. Especially when you consider that the book is, believe it or not, a lot of fun. You kind of don't want to stop reading it. You may not know where it's going or have any idea how it's getting there, but there's not a lot of confusion about what's going on at any particular moment. You're just not sure what it has to do with anything else, or where it'll end up. Most of the time, whatever that is is entertaining enough on its own merits.
It's not exactly a cheerful story. I've heard somewhere that David Foster Wallace's intention was to write a terribly sad book, and it takes a while for it to sink in that he's succeeded. Instead of being an angstfest, it takes an unflinching and unapologetic look at what drives people who are coping (or, more often, failing to cope) with addiction, abuse, and, terribly tellingly, suicide.
I liked it a lot, and understand completely why somebody else might not.
It's funny in the way terribly sad things can be. Not really pretentious, either. There's something very honest about it. There's very prominent strands of weird throughout, slipping towards the nightmarishness toward the end so inexorably that it seems like there's no other way it could be.
There should be a word for fiction set in the near future and written just long enough ago that the discrepancies between invention and reality bring a special sort of surreal disorientation. A certain kind of anachronism. The book was written in 1996, and is set around 2008 (or, since the calendar has been subsidized a la football games, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment). There's a lot about a system of what they call entertainment cartridges, which is funny, because the way you choose what you want and get it disseminated to you (though I never caught exactly how) is eerily reminiscent of Torrenting, but they seem to be big, clunky things like VHS tapes.
I like the chaotic, flip-back-and-forth style of footnotes, though I can see how it might seem gimmicky. I fond of that sort of thing because, instead of trying to force you to read in a straight line, it acknowledges that that's not how your brain works. You bounce around. Of course, having to flip back to the end of the tome constantly was sort of annoying. That's one thing House of Leaves did really well, handling the shifts back and forth, though it sort of broke the efficacy by assuming that I cared who Johnny Truant slept with.
Be warned, this isn't one of those things where the end is the end. See, what you have to do is flip back to the beginning and read it over again, and you get all the bits that passed you by the first time, and it fills in a little. You have to do a lot of turning around and looking back, and pick out the moments of oooh.
Still, we're talking sub-Evangelion-series-ending levels of closure here.
Maybe that's what makes it stick in your head so much. You keep going back to see what you missed. And finding things, though not necessarily what you were looking for.
Just cause I feel like tossing them somewhere, some spoilery theories and opinions are
( under here )
God help me. I'm going to be one of those people who likes Pynchon, aren't I. |
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