first day

read a review of the road by cormac mccarthy (review by adam mars-jones) and against the day by thomas pynchon (review by david gale). is there anyone in england that can hold a light up to those 2? if there is i would seriously like you to tell me.

gale likes pynchon's new book. he says you have to dedicate time to it, as if it were a family. he says something like 2 hours a day for the next month and is a book that induces memory loss due to the scale of the book. but he also says the book brings a contented, wise recovery, like returning from a ballon trip or fever. (by the way, if david gale ever reads this, sorry for mangling up your words and paraphrasing. it must look like some hairy palmed oaf, wrecking your collection of deliberately placed porcelain birds.) and he also uses a physics metaphor (physics!) describing it like energy waves with interference patterns resulting in convergence.

mars-jones seems to indicate mccarthy has chosen a topic that is far too large in scope for even the most gifted writer to cover. except mccarthy brings it real close. real real close. had says that mccarthy has some lyrical sense of landscape and environment. the desolate-ness of the situation has sublime beauty. he uses quotation from the book itself to punctuate his points and the quotation make me sick. sick with jealous and envy.

both the reviews make me sick in some way. sick with desire and want. sick with awe and wonder. sick with visions of quivering lumps of fat on a frying pan; smoking away; sizzling as the lump of fat reduces itself, ever smaller. yes: very sick indeed.

i've never read any mccarthy or pynchon. would like to read blood meridian and the crying lot 49 if anyone happens to chance a copy. i'm trying to read my struggle by this austrian born german. it's a bit tiresome. he feels like he has to explain and justify everything. he's ignorant and arrogant in the same sentence. and there are over a thousand pages. it's not as shouty and angry as i thought it would be. i wonder how many of his neo followers have actually read it or if they just have it on their book shelves for display only.