the portals of great jaws

"After three years of ripe, Southern indulgence to come upon this ash plain impregnated with a killer sea may have needed a strength not really found in nature: sustained necessarily by illusion. Not even whales could skirt that strand with impunity: walking along what served for an esplanade you might see one of the rotting creatures, beached, covered by feeding gulls who with the coming of night would be relieved at the giant carrion by a pack of strand wolves. And in a matter of days there would be left only the portals of great jaws and a picked, architectural web of bone, mellowing eventually to false ivory in the sun and fog." Thomas Pynchon, V.

"but some of us do go nowhere and can con ourselves into believing it to be somewhere"

a cathouse in El Paso

"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!

everything dim, lurid and biblical

the same dull indifference

"Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist, white clouds stood motionless on the mountaintops. The leaves of the trees did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise of the sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. So it had sounded below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda were there, so it sounded now and would go on sounding with the same dull indifference when we are no longer here. And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection." -Chekhov, "The Lady With the Little Dog"

"It all comes down, tritely enough, to this: If I were stranded on a desert island and could only take two books with me, I'd take two copies of 'Gravity's Rainbow.'" -David Kipen, a big Pynchon fan.

drive a Rolls Royce 'cause it's good for my voice

It's 7:13 am. I've been up since 6 downloading T. Rex songs and eating cold leftover pizza and watching Wings and trying to decide which Masta Ace track to throw on JG's mix and every once and awhile just remembering and finding it pretty incredible that wow, I really haven't showered in that long. This jet lag is kicking my ass.

In the traildust now

"'Yes here,' continued the Professor, nodding down at the Yards as they began to flow by beneath, 'here's where the Trail comes to its end at last, along with the American Cowboy who used to live on it and by it. No matter how virtuous he's kept his name, how many evildoers he's managed to get by undamaged, how he's done by his horses, what girls he's chastely kissed, serenaded by guitar, or gone out and raised hallelujah with, it's all back there in the traildust now and none of it matters, for down there you'll find the wet convergence and finale of his drought-struck tale and thankless calling, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show stood on its head--spectators invisible and silent, nothing to be commemorated, the only weapons in view being Blitz Instruments and Wackett Punches to knock the animals out with, along with the blades everybody is packing, of course, and the rodeo clowns jabber on in some incomprehensible lingo not to distract the beast but rather to heighten and maintain its attention to the single task at hand, bringing it down to those last few gates, the stunning-devices waiting inside, the butchering and blood just beyond the last chute--and the cowboy with him. Here.' He handed Lew a pair of field-glasses. 'That little charabanc down there just making the turn off Forty-seventh?'

As the airship descended closer, Lew watched the open vehicle pull up inside the Halstead Street gate to discharge its passengers, and understood, with some perplexity, that it was an excursion group, in town for a tour amount the killing-floors and sausage rooms, and instructive hour of throat-slashing, decapitation, skinning, gutting, and dismemberment--'Say, Mother, come have a look at these poor bastards!' following the stock in their sombre passage from arrival in rail cars, into the smells of shit and chemicals, old fat and tissue diseased, dying, and dead, and a rising background choir of animal terror and shouting in human languages few of them had heard before, till the moving chain brought in stately parade the hook-hung carcasses at last to the chilling-rooms. At the exit the visitor would find a souvenir-shop, where they could purchase stereopticon slides, picture-postcards, and cans of 'Top Gourmet Grade' souvenir luncheon meat, known to include fingers and other body parts from incautious workmen.

'Don't think I'll give up steaks just yet, Lew said, 'but it does make a man wonder how disconnected those folks down there'd have to be.'" -Pynchon, Against The Day

'The house, which dated from the reign of Henri IV, was large but unimpressive, like most architecture of the period. She had always wanted to slide down the great mansard roof: begin at the top and skid down the first gentle slope. Her skirt would fly above her hips, her black-stockinged legs would writhe matte against a wilderness of chimneys, under the Norman sunlight. High over the elms and the hidden carp pools, up where Maman could only be a tiny blotch under a parasol, gazing at her. She imagined the sensation often: the feeling of roof-tiles rapidly sliding beneath the hard curve of her rump, the wind trapped under her blouse teasing the new breasts. An then the break: where the lower, steeper slope of the roof began, the point of no return, where the friction against her body would lessen and she would accelerate, flip over to twist the skirt--perhaps rip it off, be done with it, see it flutter away, like a dark kite!--to let the dovetailed tiles tense her nipple points to an angry red, see a pigeon clinging to the eaves just before flight, taste the long hair caught against her teeth and tongue, cry out...' -V.