Geoff > Recent Status Updates

Pages 126-136, where Jessica and Roger stop in at the church during Advent and listen to the army choir, and the narration pulls out to encompass the entire war and then back in... that right there is mind-bogglingly good writing... wow

The books I carry around with me in the world, my workday reading books, take such a beating. Yeesh, apologies little guys, for the bends and the scratches and the coffee spills and the rain and the occasional setting you down in mysterious public transportation funkiness...

"a couple three more..."

Aren't we over this fetishizing of bacon yet? It's so tiring. Americans' relationship to food is so monumentally weird.

This prose is at a higher level, sentence by sentence, than almost anything I've read, I do believe...

Makin' a cassoulet; readin' Pynchon - yep, it's a lazy Saturday in November.

One thing Pynchon understands that Peter Nadas does not - wallowing in shit is inherently funny...

Guys - this book is magic! Holy hell, did you all know it was this good?

A treasure trove will be waiting when I get home from work:

So- not to sound totally full of myself - ! - but where is the famous difficulty? The unreadababble book? This is just sentence after sentence of aesthetic bliss! Very very readable. (This Pynchon, he knows how to fold an egg white into a cake, yessir!)

"the relationship between the weight and price of Hershey chocolate bars: the company gradually reduced the weight of the product, then made it larger again (though not as large as it was originally) and raised the price, then again gradually diminished it, and so on - if we push this tendency to its conclusion, at some point which can be exactly calculated, the company will be selling a package with nothing in it...

"There is no need, then, to play the Gnostic ascetic and withdraw from fallen reality into the isolated space of Truth: while heterogeneous to reality, Truth can appear anywhere within it."

This shouldn't be verboten, because nothing in literature should be, however I'm almost tempted to say that unless it's Stephen Dedalus, a character should never be permitted to think in 'profound' philosophical thoughts. Ugh. Yuck. If it isn't Joyce, is it ever not awful? Tell me I'm wrong here, folks!

Don't vote; continue complaining.

Happy Halloween everybody! -- It's pumpkininny! http://youtu.be/O6fez3AHUzQ

Valeria Luiselli on Studio 360:

http://www.studio360.org/story/a-stor...

There still hasn't been a popular music achievement from 2015 that surpasses To Pimp A Butterfly. Still retains all its greatness here in late late October. Album of the year for sure, unless something crazy drops in the next two months.

"the market is the greatest ironist."

Big time late googlers regret this morning : randomly decided to google Slavoj Zizek DC, and turns out he was at the Slovenian embassy on October 8 giving a talk on cultural violence (charmingly called "More Alienation, Please!") and it was free with a wine reception afterward! I'm epically pissed I missed this! Ugh..

"The crowds in the slums constitute a huge reservoir for political motivation: if the Left does not act there, who will? Religious fundamentalists? Or will the slum-dwellers remain indefinitely outside civil space, as a politically unarticulated threat of violence?"

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Through the first section of early stories. So far, little microcosms of intense longing, desire for many kinds of escape, fulfillment ... Not all are great, but some were, and they all point somewhere interesting... As these are presented chronologically, I'm excited to see how her art develops.

Kids and cats in Baltimore - do yourselves a favor and go see The Ex & Ken Vandermark at the Ottobar tonight - saw them in DC last night and it was one of the best shows in ages ... As would be expected from these old Dutch masters... http://youtu.be/VVgTcPSccsI

Oh god, I think I'm sick. I just ordered all 5 volumes of Joseph Frank's bio of Dostoevsky. Halp.

It's funny how many people at work see the title of this and assume I'm reading a book of Christian eschatology. I wonder what they think of me now, after all this, to have suddenly become such an End Times Revivalist?

"...as experience teaches us (and as Walter Benjamin already warned us), whenever the sanctity of life is proclaimed, the smell of real blood being spilled is never far away."

"The standard idealist question 'Is there (eternal) life after death?' should be countered by the materialist question: 'Is there life before death?'"

"The paradox is thus that language reaches 'beyond itself' to the reality of objects and processes in the world, when it designates these objects and processes by means of clear denotative/discursive meanings; but when it refers to an ineffable transcendent X "beyond words," it is caught in itself... the truth of the relation to transcendent Otherness is self-relating."