"I shook as I handed over my father's knife. Such shame. The governor's daughter, who cared so little for this object, would get to keep it. She was from the people who kept everything. I was from the people who rented some of everything for brief amounts of time. I knew I deserved no pity, would get none from the people who kept everything. They only pitied the people with nothing at all. I also knew that because I was leaving without the knife, I did not deserve the knife. A part of me did not want to deserve it." -Sam Lipsyte, "The People Who Kept Everything"--an enjoyably dispiriting excerpt from his upcoming novel, The Ask.
The writing in Harper's really is a fucking treat. I adore Pynchon, and I revere him entirely, but I spent about three hours with Inherent Vice last night, and the two fiction pieces (granted one was Coetzee, but still) I read in this magazine today were far more intriguing.
I have about 75 pages to go in the novel, and my motivation to do so has really dwindled in comparison to what it was when I so eagerly and proudly went out to buy it. I don't know why I was so excited; I guess after finishing the untouchable V. last winter and dabbling in some of his Other Work earlier this summer, I spoiled myself a bit, and set my expectations, despite every review more or less deeming it mediocre, unreasonably high, refusing to consider Pynchon in any setting other than the pedestal on which I'd placed him. But fuck. Let's just get this shit over with. Waiting in the queue for when this is all behind me: Erlend Loe's Naive. Super, and, just to shake it up a bit, Leslie A. Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. Which I am (cautiously) looking forward to--learning a thing or two.
PS. Can someone just tell Maria Sharapova to shut the fuck up?
PPS. Inglourious Basterds was awesome! And I expected to fucking dislike it! A lot!
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