Current year was 365 days. Non-leap year. AD 2023. Was it good? Bad? Dunno. My name is Octavia. I live in Kazakhstan on the 7th floor of a brutalist high-rise. These are some things that seemed to matter.
10. Europe After the Rain I by Max Ernst, 1933, oil and gypsum on plywood
9. Me discovering that I like Gaspar Noe
Vortex, his dementia and heart disease in simultaneity dying aging couple being taken care of by their son drama, made me fear the day it becomes a documentary. This is why I elect to give Dario Argento a lifetime achievement award for best European hand gesticulations while attempting to articulate in a language he doesn’t natively speak so when I have to deal with my elderly dad dying in hospital, I can remember he didn’t win that award. Sign the petition and should the Internet exist in about 50-60 more years, I can cope comfortably. The movie is filmed in splitscreen. When the mother does not remember the father, on her side, he is just out of frame. It is the same fucking shot, and yet a wedge is driven, and a ghost stalks. It is heartbreaking. Even more heartbreaking is when the father dies first, he fades to white. How am I fucking crying at the haute couture equivalent of the Obama ‘let me be clear’ meme? The very casual proceedings of cremation paperwork. The funeral, and then the flight of the camera into the Paris riverfront from an apartment now entirely empty of human presence. Fucking gutting.
Love (2015) - described as pornography. Not really pornography. Too much story. All of the sex scenes are shot like renaissance paintings. There is a lost European cool to the post-coital blowing of smoke rings from the mouth of a head laid perpendicularly on a partner’s stomach. The vast majority of the story is told in flashbacks and flashforwards. A meeting with a previous girlfriend, and she says ‘I love you.’ Cut to the protagonist in the exact same spot as the previous shot, but in a different setting, the apartment he shares with the Danish student he and his girlfriend decided to have a threesome with, which saddled him with a baby he now hates, and leads him to utter in internal monologue phrases like ‘living with a woman is like living with the CIA’. Only now removed from the scene of being told ‘I love you’, in his head he replies ‘Me too.’ If this is pornography, point me in the direction of heterosexual or homosexual pornography in which a violent verbal standoff in the back of a taxi in rainy Paris lights cuts directly to the most animalistic sex you have ever seen in stark red and yellow light set to the most pummeling French house in human existence, as well as a completely pathetic yet completely human scene of a man holding his newborn son while crying violently in the shower and telling him life is hard. Also, Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. Just kino.
These are my top 3 Gaspars. I consider all of them masterpieces, despite the fact that the baby son in Love is named ‘Gaspar’ and we get to see Noe himself getting it on and giving advice about a varied, stable sex life. If you watch any of these, watch Climax.
8. Imagine This is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities by James Holden
(As an aside regarding the ‘2nd Big Bang’ remark, not fond of Heat Death. Not because it makes me existential that the universe will end billions of years after the last archeological artifact of my bloodline comes to dust, but because it’s fucking lame. If you fear it, you’re a baby. Get real; stan the Big Crunch. The expansion of the universe reserves, et voila, a 2nd Big Bang. Eternal recursion. Get jiggy with it, get ouroboral with it.)
7. Picture of Bunny Rabbit by Arthur Russell
6. The return of SimCard StyleGAN
At its genesis in January 2021 with its first outing “Untested for Human Consumption”, it lead strangers on the Internet to produce such beautiful prose in reaction to the material such as this:
‘"Sex workers being deleted off social media platforms????? Nazis and the Alt-Right??? Where is the equality?????" NOTHING OF VALUE IS SAID HERE, ANYONE CAN MAKE THESE STATEMENTS DUDE, YOURE NOT WOKE If Kendrick Lamar released Good Kid, M.a.a.d City with lyrics like THIS, it would be called DOG SHIT ‘
It’s not that I disagree. I just think the objective fact is that it was said by a round jolly German man prone to incriminating innuendos, my friend Jens (‘just came to the acoustic guitar part’) and not Kendrick Lamar.
SimCard StyleGAN was set to release 12 albums in 2021 and go off the map, self-destructing. Many people lended their voices to read my word association postapocalyptic meta-naturalist (whatever that means) poetry and their stems and the permission to download their old albums onto my hard drive and sample them. It was largely dormant in 2022, producing a postmortem work and an attempt at a reunion with a new stylization, SIMcard styleGAN. This was retained into this year. This year it produced an impressive five albums, and the spark was lit by my friend Poliana Esperanca diving back into the old material and making it known by hitting .fm on fmbot within nuclear blast distance from me. Both of us were running long, long all nighters and idea flow was high. It was March and it already felt like a mild summer.
The work is indulgent, but what things that you actually enjoy doing aren’t? Perhaps it’s a little narcissistic as well, but what things that you actually enjoy doing aren’t? All that matters is that we were able to shit these out in under 2 weeks, plus minus waiting for people to have the life circumstances align in their favor so they could contribute their vocal parts. Much fell through, but much was salvaged too.
About a fuckton of different people participated this year. We all have silly aliases in the group, except some people who don’t. Here is a credits roll of everyone from Next Year’s Snow who has worked in the benefit of the project this year.
DJ Skinny Dick, lil media, RBL Blue SwagBaron, Aero Viper, SteamApps, Molly Mondegreene, MétéoMédia, PrismSec, Hailey, Valyri Sheffner Harris, HyperGAN Sadboy, ‘Ole Miss Numan, Jens Jejkal, SimsCardReader, Rose Replacer, Faraz, V0iD.B0t., Agate Flow (Pete of this publication), CRUETY, and that should about cover it. Plus minus Vocaloids, whose rights to crediting should probably be respected. But not here. I’m a traitorous skank. Presented below are the covers of the five records, “Nadeko Goes Belly Up” and “Preferential Treatment” (March 2023), “Massively Multiplayer” and "ÆTHERIST" (October 2023), ÆTHERIST DELUXE: "Ætherist Void" (November 2023). All covers designed by yours truly.
5. Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
So ends Ada or Ardor, with a blurb for itself, most of which is nearly true, but just so wrong that it’s bothersome. The book begins with a list of casualties or a misquotation of a literary classic. This begins with the end.
***
Vladimir Vladimirovich, whatever will we do with you?
Before we begin, dear reader, how do you pronounce "Nabokov"? If you're a non-anglophone, sit this one out and pardon my condescension that no doubt comes off as if I am talking to a dog. But for everybody in Burgerland playing along at home, it's na-BOH-kohv, not na-ba-KOV. The O's are O's, full-mouth ohs that compose the exclamations "oh christ" and "oh fuck", which I am doubtless exemplify some of the spectrum of reactions I had reading ‘Ada’.
I’ve never been much of a ‘reader’ per se, I have had flirts with literature as a medium before, and I envy professional authors deeply, since frankly I would rather be doing that with my life than being a musician, but alas! I would say I am an even worse reader of ‘Russian’ literature because look me in the eyes and tell me to lie and say I’ve read a Dostoyevsky novel and I’ll cry in righteous indignation. This year I’ve decided to change that. By reading a Russian author only whose English work really interests me. Big win for Russian culture, I’m sure. Nabokov’s work always struck me as quaint and old-fashioned when his plots actually made sense, or theatrical to the point of incomprehensibility. Last year and this year I’ve finally made literature a primary interest, and my newborn bibliophilia was the result of Pynchon, and Vonnegut, and DeLillo too. Pynchon is referential and webbed, and frankly my current golden standard or point of brain rot for what I want out of literature. If I wanted to go into Nabokov, I’d go into it balls deep. Enter Ada (not in that way!), the most ‘balls deep’ you can go. Before this I had only read King, Queen, Knave (in its revised 1968 form, which momentarily made me think the insinuation that main character becomes Nazi, ‘in his old age being guilty of crimes far worse than avunculicide [the act of killing’s one uncle]’ in a novel originally published in 1928 surely must have meant something else), a parody of the already beat horse of the love triangle, and indeed the prose conjured in my head flowy dreamt expressionist colors, scenes crossfading into each other, inanimate objects with faces or googly eyes having inner lives, but I needed something that was crucially massive, all-encompassing, puzzling, completely against anything that could have ever happened on this Earth and been viewed through a Proustian anti-nihilist semi-magical realist overanalytical lens. I needed something unearthly, Antiterran.
Ada is arduous. That’s not a lame pun, it's a restatement of leitmotifs. If you look askance at the ‘family chronicle’ part of the title while expecting it to be an indicator of scope, you are crossing your eyes wrong. Let’s shoot the elephant in the room and feed it to the pigs or let us find a Boeing and drop the elephant into the sea off the plane or let us lock the elephant in a dark warehouse until its skin pigmentation turns greenish, trusting the Process: this is a book that primarily concerns itself with incest, and maybe the history of literature, but primarily incest. It contains maybe the single greatest Hitler joke ever written which is immediately undercut by Nabokov supporting American interventionism in Vietnam.
Let us be impressed for a minute with the thought that went into it before we can examine the falsity of the thought and the fact that the narrator is a pathological liar and there is little reason to believe that any of the events depicted truly occurred.
“Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain, of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany, into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young.”
Athaulf the Future, Adolf the Fuhrer. At this point I would like to thank Ada Online at the University of Auckland without whose invaluable annotations I think I would’ve laughed almost exclusively at the stray ammo directed towards Edward the 8th (take that, Madonna!). The misspelling Athaulf evokes the chief of the Visigoths of nearly the same name, Ataulphus or Atalf, who intented to disestablish Rome and prop up in its stead a Gothic empire, but recognizing the “barbarity of his own people” he decided to restore Rome and attempt instead a cultural fusion of the Goths and the Italians, a Rome ruled by the scapegoated ‘barbars’, but this empire revitalization plan did not come to pass.
“Since Hitler invoked deep Germanic traditions, the fusion is particularly apt, especially as “Athaulf the Future” alludes also to Hitler’s dream of the Third Reich, as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire (“of the German nation” was sometimes added) from Otto I in 962 to 1806 (the first Reich) and the German Empire of 1871-1918 (the second Reich). Hitler declared his Third Reich would last a thousand years; VN emphasizes his poor futurology, since Germany lost World War II in 1945 and was still divided into West Germany and East Germany at the time he wrote Ada. Cf. “Thinkers, social thinkers, feel the Present as pointing beyond itself toward a not yet realized ‘future’—but that is topical utopia, progressive politics.”
(Ada Online)
Not worth spelling out the overlap between Atalf’s dream of a Germanic Italy and Adolf’s dream of the Eternal Lebensraum, I don’t think. Hitler as the platonic ideal of the Nordic-Aryan ultramasculine giant also rings patently untrue. Generously he was dirty blonde and objectively he was of average height. Crooked little foresightless unisacked man. Benevolence, Benito Mussolini, and the ‘Rome’ in ‘Rome and Rus’. The Rus is then the nonaggression pacts signed between Stalin and Hitler and their mutual taking of Poland in 1939, and Nabokov’s belief in their equivalence, which I believe to be true too, but hearing it from a White Russian necessitates as many eyerolls as shots in a ceremonial gun salute If you are tired of things being shot at, many automatic duels for honor take place in the narrative, so I am subconsciously acclimatizing you to the tempo of events. This book is obsessed with the history of literature, but primarily Pushkin.
(But to linger on Hitler: dear reader(s), if any of you have ever watched Madonna’s 2nd work in a directorial position, the revisionist 2011 biopic ‘W/E’, which paints Wallace and Edward as a tragic love story for the ages, and fervently and headstrongly ignores Wallace’s actual distaste for Edward as expressed in her letters to her actual husband, finding Edward a spoiled brat who had no sense of kingly duty and lived his entire life party to party, please write to bathys@ecarlate.company or to @gerogerigaygayg on Twitter. I am interested in hearing more details about the ‘rich bored housewife gawking at Wallace Simpson’s personal effects at museums and auctions and projecting herself onto said love story for the ages, which happens to conveniently ignore the fact that Edward loved him some Nazis and brushes it off as being unavoidable’ aspect of the entire ordeal.)
In keeping in line with the nested intellectualism of Ada, this next ‘onward’ will be in Italian.
Avanti!
There is a particularly funny two-part pun in Ada that I would like to highlight.
Please pardon the stylistic parody throughout.
The fictitious oak species, Quercus ruslan, discovered by a certain Chât. This, for everyone not Russified, is of course in reference to the Lukomorye prologue of Ruslan and Lyudmila, Lukomorye being a folkloric location similar to the 9 3/4th Kingdom and a snug fit in the plasticine chronology of ‘once upon a time’. In Lukomorye there grows an oak around which a learned cat (Chât being the French for our feline friends) walks, and talks, and narrates, and Ruslan the titular. Pushkin was a trilingual, and an aristocrat, and called himself ‘the African’ and wrote corny poetry about his ‘native Africa’ unlike the west, despite only being Black through his great-grandfather and never having set foot on the continent, and died after a mortal wounding in a duel on the Delta of the Neva River on the then-outskirts of St. Petersburg in 1837.
Who else is a trilingual aristocrat? Van Veen, who gives a speech about ‘Rack particles’ (after the surname of Herr Rack) existing forever in time as an influence on entropy to his sister’s delirious former music teacher in the same hospital where both were staying, where (I)van (don’t call him that, or Jean) intends to kill Rack, but reconsiders. I highlight this because I am thirteen years old at heart and ‘Rack particles’ suggests a mammary equivalent of Hitler particles. Again, we are haunted by Hitler. Is this my personal Hell? It’s someone’s personal Hell. His father is named Demon, and Ada means ‘of Hell’, and Edenisms abound, although in some oblique flight of feminism women are not temptresses but angels and men are demons. My definition of Eden would not include being trapped in a pastiche of Wildean excess for half the duration of a novel, drowning in Victorian fabrication and verbal vomit. Or so I thought. Vladimir Vlamidirovich concentrates on cunningly conniving convincingly. I loved translating blocks of untranslated French because every other occurrence would yield an off-hand quip implying that one great grandfather or another to the power of x in the princely Zemski line ancestral to the Veens, a proto-Mr Hands, was ‘crazy about one of his mares’ (raffolait d’une de ses juments). Splendid.
Van Veen isn’t Nabokov, even though his assumed initials are V.V. and to trust any V. or V.V. or V.N. in a Nabokov book is to practice wilful ignorance at the amplitudes of those who chose to remain maskless at the outset of the Coronavirus pandemic. Occasionally this overgrown blurb will be topical because it is already hell of an assumption that anybody within my orbit will even dare so much as to pick up a book. I must be 97 years old and in hospice if I am complaining about illiteracy in youth, but I am not thankfully dictating my memoir to my assistant who is mentioned exclusively in the first printed sentence of the book after the actual family tree but whose presence is reserved until the end.
With the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Oranger, a few incidental figures, and some non-American citizens, all the persons mentioned by name in this book are dead.
(The aforementioned is Mrs. Roland Oranger, aka Violet Knox, a character who does not appear until the last two or three chapters of the book.)
If you use hydroelectricity in your daily life, and you are on the mirror planet Demonia, get the fuck out of the Americas. Our world appears to Demonians (or Antiterrans, you knew this ws coming) as hallucinations and prophetic dreams to be recorded in case studies, and our 1930 is their 1880. Who’s from the real world and can’t wake up from the monarchic dream beside the pathologically titular and bloodrighted cast?
That’s right, Nabokov’s politics: born aristocrat, staunch anti-communist. Several bad things in the non-political personal tragic chronology of Ada are set to happen in 1905 and 1922, respectively the year of the February Revolution and the establishment of dual reign between the monarchy and an elected Duma-like council and the year of the Soviet Union’s founding. If a novel can get me to suspend my hatred for the rich to appreciate its craftsmanship despite its author’s innate pettiness present in the worldviews espoused, no matter how intentionally unlikable and solipsistic the narrator is (Nabokov himself said he detested Van Veen, primary quickly dying yarn-snipper of Ada or Ardor), perhaps it can get me not to flinch at acts of incest.
Right, let’s say you want to read Ada. Do you find the linguistic aspect of it challenging? Well, everybody has lied to you. The real truth of the matter is much more grave. It is not truly linearly trilingual, there are many substrata of those primary 3 languages and other situational European tongues.
Ada is written in Russian, English and French. I speak two of those. I don’t speak Russian crossed with French, nor phonetically mispronounced French. The word выражения (expressions) is Francified (gallified?) into ‘vyragences’, and whatever in the world could ‘antranou svadi’ be? As it turns out, ‘entre nous soi dit’ - between you and me. Komsi-komsa - comme ci, comme ca (so-so). Cootooriay - voozavay entendue?’ - couturier (dressmaker), vouz aves entendu (you’ve heard (about him)). Elsewhere, Italian, German and Ancient Greek litter the pages, with Ardis (ἄρδις, meaning point of an arrow) being spelled out in a Russian variant of Scrabble, and technically eligible in the Greek despite being the place name of Ardis Hall and Ardis Park, with place names forbidden in the ruleset. A heavily Americanized Canadian French appears as well, as ‘Canady French’. West Canada is Estotiland, East Canada Canady. America was discovered by African navigators and settled by Russians. Electricity is banned and hydroelectric power is the norm. The telephone is a dorophone and you can receive call and telegram via a network of sewers. Ada or Ardor is canon in the Skibidi Toilet universe, I’m sure. Cyrillic is also extinct, which further solidifies this, as the creator of Skibidi Toilet is from Georgia (country).
The fourth generation Irish amongst you and inve(r)terate jovial attendees of the green dress-coded St Patrick’s Day, worry not: the Veens are half-Irish. Vert (or verte) - green, inverterate = inveterate + vert. The book seems to insist on using the French name for the color, so I shall as well. If this were to appear as a separate article, please call it A Vibe Supplement to Ada or Ardor: A Verbal Tie-in Scented Candle.
‘Estoty’ or ‘Estotiland’, interchangeable, originates from the retroactive fraudulent voyage of the Zeno brothers, one of whose descendants, a Nicolo Zeno the Younger, published a map claiming his forefathers had reached America before Columbus or Vespucci, and that was the name of the continent, although a family of ‘Vinelanders’ becomes prominent as the narrative spirals further out of Van’s control and the widely accepted theory of the Vikings discovering America as on our Terra creeps into the walled gardens of Ardis Hall’s arbors.
What else can we find in these arbors of ardors?
Ada contains some of the funniest lesbophobia I have read in my life.
“I can quite understand her being mad at Dorothy (who meant well, poor stupid thing—stupid enough to warn me against possible ‘infections’ such as ‘labial lesbianitis.’ Labial lesbianitis!)”
Perhaps I have a terminal case of this disease, as a trans lesbian, despite my labialessness on anywhere but my (I’m sure) punchable visage.
Ada also contains this line. "On the contrary,” replied Van, bringing off a passable imitation of bawdy mirth. “Had I not been a heterosexual male, I would have been a Lesbian.”
Aucun commentaire (no comment.)
As dorophones again become telephones in official parlance (although it is unclear whether the technology resembles those of our Earth) and the “ectric” (sic!) power, once marginal, begins to come back, the little sister, Little Lucette (Lucinda Veen), of the apparently romanced titular sister kills herself by taking pills for seasickness, downing it with liquor and throwing herself overboard. Ada or Van or Vanada locked her in the closet, “and much, much, much more” as the self-congratulatory metanarrative blurb at the end of the book concludes.
I had to groan at this pun thanks to my own deduction, as the later parts of the book are the unannotated weeds of literary history. Groan along at home. With you (through me) and me having witnessed the phonetic aspects of the language in the book, I do not think it’s too far fetched to assume that the “electric” in the phrase “the ‘ectric’ power” is derived from a mishearing by a French speaker of electric as l’ectric, i.e. ‘the ectric’. Several editors exist within Ada or Ardor itself, Ada herself (or Van’s conception of Ada within his own personal Hell?), and a nameless editor who adds sic’s with exclamation marks, as demonstrated just now. Again, I am priming you to walk to the nearest bookstore or instance of L—-n or Z—-b and to clench this fucker in your virtual fist.
Curiously, Ada’s editorials fade out almost immediately after the idealized first incestuous summer rendered in pastiche of the literary stylings of the late 19th century and there is very little in the way of her oversight in part II of the novel. Ada is always doubted by Van, and untruthfulness makes the overaccomplished acrobat and hand-walker, published author of rambly theses on the nature of spacetime, psychologist specializing in delusions of our Earth or synesthesia (chromesthesia) in the blind depending on what point in the drifting narrative you see your eyes on, what else, whatever not, see red.
[A very lame joke about color association of red with the tr cluster in phrase ‘tribadism’ has been redacted before it could be written. Ed.]
He specializes in synesthesia of the blind after the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it (ha) detail of him removing the eyes of the kitchenboy at Ardis Hall Kim with an alpenstock after discovering a photoalbum of blackmail that Kim kept taking with his apparatus. Earlier in the narrative, it is stated that ‘Ada, our arbors and ardors’ is his only contribution to the corpus of English literature. This is never doubted nor mentioned again, despite it expanding to include the in-universe science-fiction work Letters from Terra, origin of the Hitler joke that opens this essay/listicle entry/diaristic recount of personal experience and aforementioned rambly thesis The Texture of Time. These coincidences and inconsistencies stack up. Freud is Froid, the colleague to a Sig Heiler. Borges catches strays, his name anagrammatically rendered as Osberg. Foreshadowing is a literary device where references to the Argentinian junta and exclusively references to Argentinian junta are meant to make the reader anticipate the appearance of an Argentinian.
The only other compliment was paid to poor Voltemand in a little Manhattan magazine (The Village Eyebrow) by the poet Max Mispel (another botanical name—“medlar” in English), member of the German Department at Goluba University. Herr Mispel, who liked to air his authors, discerned in Letters from Terra the influence of Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists.)
[Voltemand being a minor character in Hamlet, a courier, and the pseudonym under which Van Veen publishes his Letters from Terra. Ed.]
I could go on and on, but let us finish this arduous task with a reductive comparison, and a pitch to the reader:
Ada or Ardor is an incestuous “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”. If the parents’ random aging and the girlfriend’s name changing gave the game away too fast, Ada or Ardor makes you wait until the very end. Dava or Anda, Anda or Vanda in a personal Hell of strangers assuming roles in dreams, and butterflies, and networks of brothels designed by dead children, and Don Juan, and much, much, more.
4. The continued existence of Twitter
But as long as Twitter exists in its zombified state, please allow me the next list of slanderous remarks. You just read a three thousand word piece of literary analysis, perhaps something more down to Earth and more immediately upsetting will be a nice refresher.
Deep breath.
PS5 has no games, Bluesky has no culture and no history and no drama.
Cohost is for people who will never tell you that there is actually a piece of software that you drop Github code into, and believe in the apparent revolutionary potential of Geocities style webrings. If this speaks to you, let it be known that I don’t hate you, and I instead envy you. I installed four Linux distributions onto my grandpa’s computer permanently ruining the partitions. I used to code in Python. I made up fake vintage malware indexes with my friends on Minecraft. Then I experienced puberty and now I only know how to not get phished and to consider turning whatever I am having trouble with and off again before coming to conclusions.
Tumblr is for people who make fandom allegiance the #1 facet of their identity, because how else are you gonna be discovered if you’re not tagging every post 4 increasingly obscure variations of your ship name? I’m not also onboard with the aspect of everything being a long, drawn-out bit. It and playful hostility with strangers are two sides of the same coin, if not the same coin in four-dimensional space. How are you gonna ‘yes and’ somebody who has never even said ‘yes’ to you? How do you continue from a non-affirmative?
I have never set foot on the shores of North America. But I imagine the reactionary mass migrations from Twitter and one-day deactivations must elicit the same kind of eyeroll from me as it does from the American high school senior doing the obligatory lockdown drill.
Nothing’s happening. The threat is fake. Only implied. Dril has not been replaced, and @sabatonfan69 is still War Wolf. Life goes on. Enjoy the screaming into a void. Enjoy the impressionist dick-measuring contests. It’s not serious if you don’t make it serious.
If you wish to force me to learn and actively use Instagram, send 300$ via PayPal to unfutility@gmail.com. I hear it’s good for artistic career advancement and getting booked for live shows. I have no culinary talent, nor is my dick that big, neither am I a DJ, and I’m sure there will be no ensnarement in my thirst traps, and what the fuck are stories and Reels? But I’m sure I’ll make it work. Just pay me.
3. Network (1976)
2. Shook by Algiers
1. Gravity’s Rainbow
Recently one of my friends started reading Crying of Lot 49, also by Pynchon (in case you live under a mountain inside the core of the Earth), as chosen by a random selector wheel spin, as part of a book club. She told me to my face that ‘this would be hard to read if I didn’t already speak like this’. That’s the best thing that has happened to me this year.
Today, as I write this, December 1st, months after I finished Gravity’s Rainbow I was called an interesting specimen in so many words in this precise way. They asked me several questions about my musical pursuits. I answered. They said they had nothing to say. I said thanks for asking. Here’s how they profiled me: “youre too interesting not to youre like if someone raised a kid with gravity's rainbow instead of nursery rhymes and then left them alone for so long they turned their brain into a fractal”, which made me change my mind and decide that’s actually the best thing that has happened to me all year. This statement was made with no knowledge of me having read GR, and I promptly informed the individual that said it that I read it. They questioned if I read it in like a week or something ridiculous, seeing as it took them several months. I told them it was under a month. Presumably they were impressed. Both of these statements were made in simultaneity, but I did not see the former until I decided to tab into my own private server, where a notification was waiting. Perhaps these are just the two constituent parts of the same event: my coronation as the rightful heiress to Thomas Pynchon. Or something. I too think there is art in everything. I too think Looney Tunes deserve placements in high art literature. This is why I am thankful for Twitter, ultimately. And it’s that every day I am surrounded by loud, noisy, monumental, hysterical-historical trash. The pageboys flagellate themselves, and every day somebody on datura self-reports as a witch. And the only thing left to say is ‘Now everybody-’...
Although the last line of Gravity’s Rainbow omits a conclusion to William Slothrop’s hymn, were I the liberal, desecratory editor, I would make it say: ‘now everybody… stop touching grass and log on.’ Why, so you can look at the Door Gallery website and share the joys of the other writers at this fine publication, of course. Not for any other reason. I think.
And print just goes marching on without him. Copy boys go running down the rows of desks trailing smeared galleys in the air. Native printers get crash courses from experts airlifted in from Tiflis on how to set up that NTA. Printed posters go up in the cities, in Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent. On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs, the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!)
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