It was the U.S.A., after all, and fear was in the air.

- from Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon

JANICE Galloway is wearing a high-cinched 1950s floral dress and black stilettos, with lace gloves, which she takes off before she begins to read.

It's official: Janice Galloway wears clothing.

Here's another profile of Janice Galloway and her upcoming memoir This is Not About Me, which I'm also bookmarking for later reading, likely in spite of rather than due to the following sentence, right up there at the beginning of paragraph two:

We are in a Glasgow café, and Janice Galloway is in killer boots.

Not that I have anything against a gal wearing killer boots, mind you. I mean, really. But.

(I'm not sure what the U.S. publication plans are but I think it might not matter since I'll probably wind up importing the book long before it reaches these shores, unless of course I'm still reading Against the Day around that point, which is of course entirely likely.)

A lengthy profile of Janice Galloway and her upcoming memoir This is Not About Me that I'm bookmarking for later reading based solely on the closing paragraph:

Two women. They're there on the cover of this book. One who asked too much from life, another who asked too little. In the middle, a young girl, growing up. Growing up to be a writer who would write the best, one of the most moving, yet completely unsentimental, accounts of growing up that you will ever read.

"Intel cuts electric cords with wireless power system."

Meanwhile, in Against the Day...

Up in his penthouse suite, Scarsdale had moved on to the business at hand. "Back in the spring, Dr. Tesla was able to achieve readings on his transformer of up to a million volts. It does not take a prophet to see where this is headed. He is already talking in private about something he calls a 'World-System,' for producing huge amounts of electrical power that anyone can tap in to for free, anywhere in the world, because it uses the planet as an element in a gigantic resonant circuit. He is naïve enough to think he can get financing for this, from Pierpoint, or me, or one or two others. It has escaped his mighty intellect that no one can make any money off an invention like that. To put up money for research into a system of free power would be to throw it away, and violate--hell, betray--the essence of everything modern history is supposed to be....

"If such a thing is ever produced...it will mean the end of the world, not just 'as we know it' but as anyone knows it. It is a weapon, Professor, surely you see that--the most terrible weapon the world has seen, designed to destroy not armies or matériel, but the very nature of exchange, our Economy's long struggle to evolve up out of the fish-market anarchy of all battling all to the rational systems of control whose blessings we enjoy at present."

- from Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon

Two questions I keep batting around in my head about Against the Day:

1. The title. What's up with that?


2. Is this book better than Infinite Jest?

(The third question, were I to have one, being, "Will I ever finish?", being not altogether worth asking, at least, right now.)

The first question, I didn't consciously realize I was asking it until I hit this line, tonight:

Even without theatrical shoes on, Erlys was taller than Luca Zombini, and kept her fair hair in a Psyche knot, out of which the less governable tresses continued, with the day, to escape.

- from Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon

Which, okay, I'm retarded, but, duh, right? If you can be with the passage of time, you can go against it, as well. Against the day, resisting the day, defying the natural order of things...nope, still not sure what it's all about.*

Next question! It's not a question of whether this book is better than Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's own best book ever, though I might posit the question is worth asking. At least, hypothetically. What I'm wondering is what, by comparison, this book brings to the table that one of the contemporary literature's most recognized descendants of Gravity's Rainbow does or does not and how differently and what have you. Hypothetically speaking. Of course, having not read Infinite Jest since '01 or '02, and being only one-third of the way through Against the Day, I'm hardly qualified to answer that question, in my current state. But I can ask, though.

Oh, but anyways, that quote, it's like, perfect meta-commentary about the book itself, and how it functions. But then, I tend to think that about just about any piece of description the book offers up, that in some way the book wants to teach me how to read it, or how to read into the idea of reading into it. Which if that makes your head hurt, fab, mine too.

-

* - To thee amongst you who might be tempted to say, "Uh, moron, the answer's on, like, page 2," please note that I have a near-miraculous ability to defer inquiry into fundamental mysteries, until absolutely required by law or hammering common sense. Like, while my friends were all, "Dead," after frame four, I never for a second questioned the honesty of the movie The Sixth Sense until it announced, wide-armed and whole-lunged, "I am a liar!" Which gets me looked down on in some quarters, but in most all quarters actually means I'm having a lot more fun than the observant folks in the crowd. It's weird.

"Blimpin' Ain't Easy."

(A-and right after that English Channel it's off to the Telluric Interior for our intrepid adventurer!)