Introduction

Well hi there, nobody. Welcome to this project I'm embarking on--at least, I think I am. If you're reading it, I certainly am. But given that you're nobody, I'm not sure whether you reading it actually means anything. Or...oh, forget it.

I read Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day when it was first published in 2006. I was in graduate school at the time, just deciding that this was the kind of thing I liked--long, postmodern novels. I'd read all of Pynchon, and it was an indescribable thrill to see more. A few years later, I wrote about it as part of my dissertation, but I haven't revisited it since then. So it's been a while.

For whatever reason, I've been thinking about this book a lot lately. Yeah, for "whatever" reason. Obviously, the reason is that the United States is broken and corrupted as never before. The book was definitely written in part as an implicit response to the George W Bush administration, and we really do all look laughably naive in retrospect: we imagined that there was no possible way a President could be any worse than him. O but we were young then, and full of love and light. So anyway. I've been thinking about the novel's politics, and particularly its treatment of what we can call utopian ideals, which seem to me--from my extremely imperfect memory of the book--to be possibly more valuable than ever. Also, I think I might be becoming an anarchist. I don't know that that's the case, but I'm interested in the book's treatment of the topic.

Back when I was first reading it, I made an abortive attempt to blog my reading experience. At a certain point it just petered out (something like halfway through, I see looking back; that's surprising--I didn't think I'd gotten that far), and I think that's okay: you want to keep up your momentum when reading, and blogging can really slow ya down. Nonetheless, I thought it would be interesting, maybe, to try that again, from my current viewpoint, which is possibly a bit more theoretically grounded and definitely informed by already having a general idea of the book's themes and ideas. I realize that this is kind of an intimidatingly massive project, so who knows if I'll get through it. But wouldn't it be cool if I did? I know there are several essay collections on the book by now, but I'm not consulting outside sources, or at least not in any systematic way; AtD is personal to me, and this is my personal response. Not that I won't do my favorite kind of undergrad research--Cursory Googling--but this isn't exactly trying to be super-scholarly. Also, I am not going to try to cover absolutely everything in the novel; that would quickly get out of hand. But hopefully I can provide a decent reading nonetheless. Maybe I'll get an academic paper out of it. Or maybe not! The uncertainty is part of the fun!

Why didn't I get againsttheblog.blogspot.com? Because it's already been taken, by the most insufferable man (somehow, I'm guessing "man") in the world, who wrote one entry way back in 2010 and fucked off. "What is a blog but a badly-written, self-satisfied attempt at celebrity?" he asks. Gotta say...my blogs may be badly written and self-satisfied, but if I were using them to try to achieve celebrity, I think I would be seriously reevaluating my strategy at this point. I'm absolutely certain this guy has at some point unironically declared that he doesn't even own a television.