Now that Wallace is gone, I will need to redirect my enthusiasm for his writing onto another author. I’m sure there will be some sort of letters published or reprints of whatever he wrote, a 20th anniversary edition in leather of Inf. Jest. Fuck that. I only wanted the trade paperback, so that it could get all fucked up and worn in over the 3-4 months I read it in. Notes scribbled into the front and back of things that I needed paper for at the moment. Kind of like how when in the smoking days, I would always insist on having the soft pack over the hard pack, knowing full well that after 19 cigarettes were gone, that last soldier in the pack that had been passed over all those times was now ready to please me and make it alright and would have to be coaxed out of the pack like some drunken third date from a car. Its filter intact but the stem all twisted and wrong and ready to fight. I will choose dirty and scarred and used any day over clean and fresh and new.
The first copy I had I lent to a Potential in Chicago and she read it or some of it and then actually her apartment had a fire and all was lost except for her and her cat. Which is good and all but my original soiled and 1997-ed copy of it were then now ash and water. So now I find a new TP to ruin with a necessary second reading, at which time a lot of shit all of a sudden makes a lot more sense than it did the first time around. To the point that a few months ago I started telling the new young buck at work about IJ in some sense and how he might be like obsessed and into it and then we could vag-out and get all girly on it and so he says, hey yes, so let me borrow that copy you have there to which I say no way in hell it is like copy 2 of 2 and it is only what $20 maybe so go forth and good luck. As a matter of fact a little more dirt wouldn’t hurt, but it can not be another’s dirt, only my dirt will do and I just don’t really feel like reading it again at this juncture. Maybe in 10 years I will.
Ok, so this is rare and maybe the only time it will ever happen, but if I did offend anyone with my comments re suicide and politics just the other day I am here to say I am sorry and that these are my own personal views and was a bit of a rant anyway. This might go without saying, but still in all, it has been on my mind these last 24 hours.
So then the one author in particular who has eluded me in general is T. Pynchon and his god-damned Gravity’s Rainbow. If I ever run into this reclusive potlicker, I will mount him and make him deliver to me the secret. So I have to say right here that to anyone who has actually finished that sonnofabitch has my undying respect. This is the carrot that I will get a hold of and eat before I draw my last breath. I don’t need to necessarily understand it. Just the physical act of reading all of the words would be enough for a first run. Then I can go back and re-read it for real. (Dirty secret: I once did access a certain portion of the text that was I suppose fetishistic and dirty and rife with descriptive pornographic images and prone to support blood flow to the groin and did so then punish myself whilst reading it.) Which is like the first and last time I have ever done so (novel-wise) and may be why I have this certain obsession with this text that so eludes me.
In general I think this man is a talented writer no doubt but also I am sure relished in his own groin blood flow that he can write some obtuse shit that only a certain 1/x (where x is very fucking large) of us people on the planet will like get. So that is why I say that if I meet someone who has accomplished this feat, I say good day.
But I also am here to state that this book is going down. And just the other day I had an epiphany as to how to approach this task. And now I will share with you my idea. This goes back to the good and bastardly Physical Chemist/teacher of the early nineties, Bill Craft (rip) who was always beating into us that we must look at a problem from every angle in order to find the simplest and perhaps most elegant solution. His thing was to say upside down and inside out. Which is a very effective way to look at the world when trying to simplify something that seems impossible. So anyway, in honor of BC, I have decided to read Gravity’s Rainbow not in the standard English way of page one and then page 2, but to read it backwards by chapter and see what happens. And then very likely go ahead and read it forwards just for good measure. If it makes zero sense in the forward manner for me, it must then by pure logic make complete crystalline sense in the reverse. Even though that is not a logical argument for more than a few reasons, I am making it one for my purposes here. Which is why I think writing is so much fun: you can just make up whatever you want and it works. Once it is in black and white, it works.
I will be documenting my progress on this adventure of the mind as it unfolds. Please do not hold me to any sort of a timeline because I may choose another option which is to grab the pre election/post Wallace-suicide headlines by being the guy who tracked down, stalked even, and held captive for seven days one seriously reclusive 71 year old author until said author gave him a tutorial on his 1973 opus.
I smell something very much like breakthrough in the air.