Geoff > Recent Status Updates

Can we just go ahead and settle this Great American Novel question once and for all? It's J R. There. Issue resolved. Now we can move on to more interesting questions, like the Great South American Novel. (And no! This isn't up for debate! J R is the answer.)

Been so busy, this is the first chance I've had to sit down and really lose myself in reading for days. (Hot cup of coffee, 45 minutes w/Pynchon, that's the good stuff right there..)

What shape is your bookish 2016 seeming to be taking? Mine is of these polygons : Clarice Lispector, Vanessa Place, Mary Caponegro, Christine Brooke-Rose, Miss Mac (finally!), Women & Men(?), 5 Volumes of Dostoevsky biography, Pynchon completionism, Vollmann (duh), CooverCooverCoover, Barth, Luiselli, Genji, Rabelais, Del Paso, Rios and maybe that Adam Buenosayres fella, etc. u.s.w. others I'm sure tbc

I awoke dead/The sky filled with bombs http://youtu.be/Wk2YhrGvqrk

This ain't gonna do much for my cred with you hammer-and-anvil music types, but GODDAMN I can't stop listening to that Grimes record Art Angels. It's perfect! Who says postpostmodernists don't wanna throw down on the dance floor too??

Welp, that Bianca scene, uhm, it kinda involuntarily made me into a Rocketman of my own, if ya know what I mean... inconveniently too as I was reading in public and all... gotta think that was somewhat Pynchon's intention... having a good laugh at me out there somewhere...

So I have 427 friends and 286 people following me and I'd say there's probably less than 10 people who actually talk to me regularly about books on here... just sayin'... things that make you go hmm...

This ain't a bad list, the 10 Best Weather Events in Fiction (What would you add??)

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

""Fickt nicht mit der Raketemensch!""

'Difficult' authors and their readers are not the 'gatekeepers' of literature - the ones manning the gates are the businessmen profiting off ensuring that the reading public never venture beyond mediocre, easily-sellable, easily-ingested mindless dreck - they keep you from finding the real emancipatory nature of great literature - for emancipated readers tend to be cautious consumers...

The section on Pökler, ending on page 433, was so masterfully done, unbelievably good writing - a perfect short story all on its own... My head's swimming

Anybody else out there into that footwork stuff coming out of Chicago, Indianapolis, etc. DJ Rashad, DJ Spinn, RP Boo, DJ Paypal, Jlin, etc.? Seems to me some of the best and most interesting music indigenous to the US these days - a natural extension from breakbeats and what Dilla and even Aphex Twin were doing into a new realm...

Here's how I'm passing insomnia this morning : Delillo's Paris Review thing : it's good : http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...

"Nubile young ladies and German dope salesmen are reason enough to send a man east in any period of history."

I'm facing the unpleasant task of drastically reducing my personal book collection (moving, less space, picnic, lightning) - it's gonna be a painful but I think in the end good honing down to the essentials... oh but what will I have to do away with??

MOVIE TALK - - Hail, Caesar!, The Hateful Eight, The Revenant, Star Wars - lookin' to be a killer next month or so for movies... what are you excited for??

"Just before dawn. A hundred feet below flows a pallid sheet of cloud, stretching west as far as they can see. Here are Slothrop and the apprentice witch Geli Tripping, standing on top of the Brocken, the very plexus of German evil, twenty miles north by northwest of the Mittelwerke, waiting for the sun to rise."

To be into the art of the Novel and not be paying attention to what Thomas Pynchon has achieved is a terrible mistake. Mason & Dixon, Against The Day, and Gravity's Rainbow - I would wager some of the great reading experiences available to the reader of English. It would be a pity to miss them. Just a quick beer-soaked tribute ... a-and that's all, folks!

Donald Trump, American fascist and serious contender for GOP Presidential nominee, supports registering Muslim Americans for a "Special ID". How does this moronic dickhead not realize he is reacting exactly the way the Parisian attackers wanted? http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/20...

In the Zone

Looking for strong representation of women, Feminism in the arts? Look toward experimental music... (And stay tuned for my B/O 2015 mix I'm putting together for the GR mix tape exchange - just in time for your Thanksgiving holiday travels!! - for proof of this ... // I was most wowed by musicians of the Feminine persuasion this year.......) [the notable exception being Kendrick Lamar]

"Turns out that some merrymaker has earlier put a hundred grams of hashish in the Hollandaise. Word of this has got around. There has been a big run on broccoli."

RIP Stravinsky amanuensis Robert Craft. Nice article from NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/art...

I wish I could have hair like Grimes http://youtu.be/N9XKLqGqwLA

Supported the local indie bookery this weekend with list price purchases of some pomo dandies:

"I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday..."

"In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?"

Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering

"You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?"

"It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home- only millions of last moments.. no more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments."