Three Weeks: A Table of Contents

Car Trouble..............Week 1
Bad Cold.................Week 2
Routine Shake-up.........Week 3
Afterword................Today

Week 1, in which I shared one car with my wife for approximately one week.

I'm not complaining. It just happens. You're a resident of one state, and you live in another. Renewal notices one way or another never get to you. Your license plate tags and vehicle registration expire. You don't notice. Your security pass for work expires. You notice. You can't get a new one because your registration is no good. You send for a new one. You wait. Meanwhile, the other car, which is a five-speed and which only one of you can drive, becomes your only car. One of you drives the other to work and from work. Mornings are shot. Afternoons are shot. Evenings are what they are: dinner and TV (O, God, the TV, the home invader...).

Week 2, in which I suffered from what I thought was a cold and then thought was the flu.

Again, it happens. It's winter. I don't need to explain this, do I?

Week 3, in which I struggle, unsuccessfully, to wrangle my routine back to normal.

Longer than normal workdays for both my wife and me resulted in a week much like the two proceeding.

Afterword.

Here I am, February 25, and I'm on page 314 of Gravity's Rainbow. I've fought feelings of failure all during the past three weeks: failure to read, failure to write. I'm not sure if these feelings are entirely healthy. It's good to feel some sort of drive, yes? But is it good to beat yourself up over an unavoidably overcrowded schedule? I'm typically awake for sixteen hours each day, and there, unfortunately, is only so much I can do with them.

I'm working on ways to juggle my routine that will perhaps free up some time for more reading, more writing. We'll see.

Out of the Debris Cloud

What makes Pynchon's work so difficult?

I find myself finally able to answer this question with some clarity now that I've reached Part 2 of Gravity's Rainbow. The first 177 pages of the novel is all set up.

Part 2 begins the action. The characters have all waited (not-so-patiently) in ranks behind the curtain as the audience has labored through the playbill, learning about their backgrounds, their situations/motivations, and now the curtain rises and out they come, streaming past the proscenium and into the crowd because the drama they begin to act out is too complex to be constrained to any stage.

Now finally Pynchon is liberated to do what he does best, which is to let his imagination go nuts. He's off immediately into the realm of the fantastic, and, with any luck, he'll stay there until the novel's conclusion. I don't know how he's managed to avoid the label of science fiction. Perhaps just by writing as well as he possibly can.

2 Feb. - Page 201 - Tyrone Slothrop is on the run.

Most wonderful element introduced thus far: a Pavlovian-conditioned octopus.