Coder. Writer. Gödel fetishist.
ANGEL: You’re dead.
ME: …
ANGEL: Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but yeah. As a door nail.
ME: So…
ANGEL: You have two choices. You can move into a higher plane of existence where all is energy and light, all paradoxes are collapsed, and all mysteries are resolved. Your true human potential—nay, the cosmic destiny of all humankind—will finally be within reach. Even the face of God Itself…
ME: What’s the other choice?
I just finished reading Infinite Jest for the third time, and this time I took notes. It helped. Keeping the dozen-plus storylines straight in the mist of the rhetorical glitter bombs Wallace throws in your face borders on the Herculean, which I get is on purpose, but I noticed (and more importantly retained) what felt like a good quarter of the story that I missed the last two times around.
I found it was easier to sort everything into mental piles, and towards the end the many mental piles coalesced into just two: the emergency room-level psychic pain of addiction, and Wallace’s overt and horrifying attempt to trap the reader into solving (and becoming addicted to) a deliciously unsolvable mess of a plot.
Continue reading “Converging Parallel Lines: Yet Another Reader’s Take On Infinite F**king Jest”
I read the first several miniature chapters of George Saunder’s Lincoln In The Bardo with some misgivings. I knew and loved Saunders from Tenth of December and was accustomed to his style, but the overbearing nature of epistolary literature has always rubbed me the wrong way. And this was a whole novel of that? Very hard to grab onto, yet the reviews glowed and gushed. So I pushed on. Continue reading “Lincoln In The Bardo & The Golden House”
I considered myself a science fiction writer all the way through my first novel, Pareidolia. With portals, time travel, impossible rooms, and recovered alien artifacts, there’s no way it could be anything else.
I figured I ought to have a glancing familiarity with my genre, so I assigned myself a long reading list, starting with Frankenstein and ending with the hottest new sci-fi novel of the moment. It didn’t go well.
I started reading Robert Bolaño’s formidable novel 2666 last month, and I’m sure it’ll take me another month to get through it. I don’t read nearly as much as I should, which sometimes makes long novels a pain in the ass to get through. But not this novel. I’m savoring every minute of it.
I just wrote a 70k word novel that started with a single idea, and I never want to forget that. It’s been an uphill climb to start my second novel, and I know I’m not the only writer who fights with this. What’s the point in writing anything at all without a fully-formed and explosively fantastic idea?
The events described in the last ten chapters of Pareidolia all occur on the same day. This wasn’t a plotting challenge as much as it was a technical nightmare. I was all for describing different events from different character perspectives earlier in the novel, even with a little overlapping thrown in, but this was a whole other level of insanity.
