I haven’t really read any of his stuff since Underworld, but there’s a nice piece on Don Dellilo in today’s New York Times.

Doc got out his lens and gazed into each image till one by one they began to float apart into little blobs of color. It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of a limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn’t have to be. [...]

My first post on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day was November 13, 2006.  I can now report that I have, as of June 17, 2009, finished reading the book.  
My first impression of having finished the book is how much it feels like a last novel to me.  It is not his last book, as his [...]

Confession.  I have not read Ulysses.  For what it is worth, I have read “The Dead” and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I mention this only because not having read Ulyseses makes me feel somewhat upset at myself and the suggestion that I have read other Joyce might convince myself I [...]

And since we live permanently convinced that the past is past and it will be amended, and the future, even the immediate future, will certainly be better and with fewer errors, since we live permanently from and critical of our own past, permanently removed from and in the hope of our oncoming future, the present-time [...]

I am writing this from the lobby of the Palmer House. The hotel is the setting for the MPSA conference. The hotel is also the setting of an early scene of Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day.”. Industrialist Scarsdale Vibe meets Inventer Extrordinaire, Heino Vanderjuice and offers him a massive amount of money to eliminate [...]

I am taking the Volokh Conspiracy off of my feed.  This post is the reason.  It is NOT acceptable for a Professor to talk in such casually degrading terms about academic colleagues.  Professor Zywicki’s comments, if they were at a job talk, or at a dissertation defense, or were makng the comment in print during [...]

Happy Saint Crispin’s day.  Here’s what it means to Kenneth Branagh:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAvmLDkAgAM]

I’m now past where I have read before in Against the Day. Only 900 pages to go. Something I think I have noticed so far. I remember reviews saying that ATD is Pynchon’s “most accessible” book. I think I know why. Pynchon’s usual MO is to tell traditional stories in [...]

I’m on my third attempt at Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon.  I have never ventured much past page 100, but I blame my dissertatin on that.  Free of such bonds, I am making a new effort, and I am struck by the role that history and science plays in the novel.  I found this [...]