Saturday, May 19, 2007

I finished Demons today. Well, I finished my first reading. First of how many? I don't know. I know I'll likely need to go back more than once. Because, see, it's a curious thing, reaching the end of a book that I thoroughly enjoyed but understood only, at best, elliptically, in disconnected glimpses, through the corners of my eyes, of the rapidly passing textual landscape, one both aesthetically dense and continuously evolving. The interpolative process of extrapolating critical meaning and understanding of the book is one I hardly feel capable yet of undertaking in any vigorous manner, my brain littered with information and ideas the way your coffee table might be coated with jigsaw puzzle pieces, were you to buy your pieces via some Netflix-like subscription plan in a time of some plague-ridden Pony Express delivery system. The thrill of connection is strong, if momentary, and random.

Cough, cough. You're right, I pretty much blew the lit-crit wad on that last paragraph. I'll say here though that according to my records, I've somehow helped sell three of you beautiful people on this book. I have to admit this gives me a bad case of the quaking uh-oh feeling, the one that comes around when someone does something based on things I say, thus opening a portal through which the viscous black oozing mass of my own intellectual frauditude might be exposed to and unleashed upon the public. But if that selfsame portal might also let in some illumination, I'm willing to take the slight hit to my credibility rating, in service of the common cause. Your thoughts and reactions, I do eagerly await, in the steamy kitchen of my own overcooked-metaphors' making.