I finished V. It is the 20th century in microcosm. People are on obsessive quests for something they don’t understand, and which may be nonexistent; who believe their personal meaning-making can somehow illuminate the wider, meaningless universe – indeed, that simply because they make a connection between two things, they come to think that the connection exists empirically. The Authorities (governments, churches, corporations, aka “Them”) who are obsessed with the clean, the polar, the binary, the unhuman: plastics, robotics; who praise the individual, then crush it.

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So, I finished GR last night. So much more beautiful and obscene than I could possibly have fathomed as a callow teenager. And I have glimpsed more finely now the roots for so many of the esthetic choices in my life. “Keep cool, but care.” The Shakedown is now between V. and resuming Sodom & Gomorrah a dozen or so pages on from where I left off. My mind is still reeling from GR, and there are more than a few overlapping characters and elements, so I may just have to dig in.

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GR is still going strong: Slothrop is about to ditch his pig suit, so Marvy’s castration and the bombing of Hiroshima are only hours away; it is so much richer than I ever appreciated when last I read it, in the late 80s. Amazing what a difference of 19 years can make. The collective cultural deathwish; dehumanization thru the industrialization of everything; apocalyptic obsession with polarities: themes that have only gotten more terrifyingly relevant since August 6th, 1945.

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Gilbert Sorrentino has died. As of 9:30 am EDT, however, I can only find the Wikipedia article as corroboration of this posting. The theologian Jaroslav Pelikan has also died. Obits here and here. I first encountered him while I was a student living in Aberdeen. I attended as many of his Gifford lectures as I could in the spring of 1992. The lectures I attended focussed on the Cappadocian fathers, Basil and the Gregs (good name for a band, no?

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So. The Proust has stalled. This is okay with me; I need time to digest all that has happened. I reached the end of Vol 3 at the end of January, and decided to take a few weeks off. I read Moby-Dick for what I think was the fifth time; then I finished The Master and Margarita, which had been an xmas present; then I drowsed thru Don Quixote; I put that down midway through while upstate last month, where I bought and read the incandescent Ginger Man by JP Donleavy.

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The trip to Florida was good, calm. We saw dolphins. We watched the Oscars. We developed an unhealthy taste for Sudoku. We returned and hit the ground running. The last two weeks have been an achronic blur. What month is this? We also finally admitted the obvious, and bought the DVD set of Wonderfalls. Last weekend, a good friend came over to help my wife with the dance piece she’ll be showing next month, and we listened to a lot of Beatles.

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For most of December, we had a trio of DVDs from Netflix in the house, holding up our queue. The complete Wonderfalls, a TV show that was cancelled for no reason whatsoever. It resided in a shadowland between Gilmore Girls and West Wing on the one hand, and vintage supernatural shows such as Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie on the other. It also learned valuable lessons from Raising Arizona and Sliding Doors.

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I finished The Guermantes Way a few days ago, after roughly ten weeks of reading. In Search of Lost Time is divided into seven parts, but because Parts 5 and 6 are fairly short, they are bound together. So in reaching the end of Volume 3, I think of myself as half way through. It is appropriate, therefore, that I take a moment and reflect on the book so far.

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I may go to a book (poems or prose or fiction) to read new evocations or descriptions of what I already know, believe, feel; or I may go in order to discover new perspectives, previously unkown or unfamiliar ways of thinking, feeling, belief. But if I am too eager for the one and encounter the other, I probably won’t like the work — it’ll have nothing to do with the quality of the writing or the value of the thinking, the depths of feeling and everything to do with my own expectations, needs, tastes of the moment.

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