It's Horrible, I Can't Put it Down

Now on page 623 of the nerd tome I described in an earlier posting, I am getting increasingly perplexed by the paradox of genuinely detesting some of the writing and certain plot lines while at the same time being unable to stop reading it. I realized today, reporting on a religious parade in Williamsburg, that it has even infiltrated my writing, resulting in inane commentary on the miter worn by the Bishop of Brooklyn in an otherwise sound piece of reporting.

The book has also gotten very funny at points, with the theme of paranoia extending to car alarms in the form of Range Rovers that talk, descriptions of Gen. Macarthur in a pink sateen bathrobe and aviator sunglasses and something called the Ejaculation Control Conspiracy (ECC). A poor man's Pynchon I guess, and therefore infinitely more accessible, but of lesser quality, like fake Louis Vuitton.

There is also an imaginary country called Qwghlm, which I thought at first was some special way of referring to Wales (the word "Japanese" is never used, only the much more globalized and somehow Internet-y "Nipponese"). Then I realized it was sort of a Nabokovian hoax, (I didn't get it immediately in Ada or Ardor either), and Qwghlm, much like the Sultanate of Kinuktuka, (site of the "data haven") doesn't exist. And then (after thinking I probably ate a lot of lead paint chips at some point) I start to get a little paranoid myself, that given the skewed account of history, the long and mystifying passages that graph things like one protagonist's mental productivity in relation to self-imposed versus aided ejaculation as a differential equation are all bullshit as well.

If an author is going to be a smarty-pants and put in math equations that show off how much more clever he is than the mathematically challenged, I expect the work to be flawless. My mathematically inclined sibling, who naturally was the nerd who I noticed reading this book in the first place, claims that Infinite Jest, for one, contained mathematical errors. I bought him DFW's book about infinity for Christmas, only to see him throw it against the wall in annoyance well before the New Year. It was disheartening, although it serves as a lesson for those of us who quietly defer to writers who tell us they can do math, taking their word for it. Not that it matters particularly in this case. Not that I would understand how it was wrong even if it were. But I appreciate a soundness of facts, if I think someone is smart I want to be able to trust them as such, otherwise their intelligence is nothing more than my ignorance. I'm sorry I keep writing about this book. Nothing much is going on around here.