Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
December 26, 2016
Re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow — for the first time in decades — has been a remarkable experience. Among other things, I had forgotten how dark the book is and how interested in bizarre sexual practices. But if rereading his first two novels had already begun to reward my intuition that Pynchon was going to help me understand the...
December 24, 2016
A 15th-century copy of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis digitized (or digitised, to use the native term) by London’s Natural History Museum.
December 23, 2016
“As things developed, she [Oedipa Maas] was to have all manner of revelations,” we are told in the first chapter of The Crying of Lot 49, and as Edward Mendelson pointed out long ago in an essay I’ve already mentioned, the language of the novel is relentlessly religious. Here’s a passage from Chapter 2: She looked down a slope,...
December 22, 2016
My friends (and former colleagues) Jeremy Botts and Richard Gibson have sent me a lovely Christmas gift: the firstfruits of their Manibus Press. Feast your eyes: Note the subtle Hebrew lettering on the verso: Beautiful work, my friends! Many thanks to you, and the merriest of Christmases!
December 22, 2016
What is the real tragedy of the courier? That he should be the bearer, the transmitter, of messages which he neither initiates nor receives. This is the great danger for all of us who practice the disciplines of interpretation, as Hegel explained long ago in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: There is a type of theology that...
December 21, 2016
People who know almost nothing else about Pynchon know that The Crying of Lot 49 is concerned with the possible existence of a secret postal service, the Trystero, which is a kind of rival or shadow or doppelgänger of the Imperial Reichspost and its successor the Thurn und Taxis Post, the official postal services of the Holy Roman...
December 19, 2016
American Society for Cybernetics A great deal of learning underpins Pynchon’s fiction, and if you’re not careful, reading him can pique your curiosity about some of his references and riffs and send you down endless rabbit trails. (And it’s all on the internet now! And Pynchon wrote almost all these immensely learned...
December 16, 2016
From Louis Menand’s New Yorker essay on literary books banned for obscenity: “The term “obscene” is a conundrum. Is an expression obscene because it’s arousing or because it’s gross? Is the relevant affect lust (a pleasurable feeling) or disgust (an unpleasant one)? Brennan tried to split the difference with a new term....
December 16, 2016
I mentioned in a previous post Pynchon’s interest in The Education of Henry Adams, and I think that interest might profitably be linked with certain others. In his introduction to Slow Learner Pynchon describes his early reading of the novels of John Buchan and how from Buchan and other writers of thrillers he learned to be...
December 15, 2016
This post by Nick Carr features an excerpt from his 2008 book The Big Switch that seems even more relevant now than it did then. It’s a brief survey of the work of Thomas Schelling, who just died at the age of 95. Here’s a key passage: Just as it’s assumed that the Internet will create a rich and diverse culture, it’s also...