[Prestidigitweeze]

Strange to find one of my oldest and former best friends quoted in that article. I'm curious as to how Anders knows him, and whether Gawker is connected in some way to Boing Boing and therefore the old Mondo 2000 writers, whom the gentleman in question, having lived fairly close to San Francisco, still knows well.

Years ago, I remember mentioning the sense of motion in Gravity's Rainbow to my friend and saying it was a function of the style more than the narrative; I'd just read The Crying of Lot 49 and felt it was clearer structurally (given its Orphic underpinnings, Lot 49's the equivalent of Coltrane playing an old standard).

"Hand it over," he said, grabbing my paperback of GR. He read intently for a few pages, then closed the tome with a wince.

"Is the whole book in present tense?" he asked. "Present tense makes me tense!"

It took about a year for the taint of that memory to recede so that I could resume reading GR myself. I hate catchy phrases about books I haven't finished. They pull you out of the intricacies of the work; they're the prose equivalent of earworms.

About that io9 article:

The list-maker is either trying to be meta or incorporating literature deemed relevant regardless of genre, as certain publishers and critics like to do when they decide to blur the stratification of levels of culture and taste.

A few years back, I felt that genres were most usefully (and least confiningly) seen as lenses rather than forms, and that you could switch between them within a larger work if the structure justified the contrasts.

In that respect, Kill Bill's an example of what not to do when switching lenses. In music, however, we have Alfred Schnittke, who could have given Tarantino master classes in building solid forms out of pastiche (or polystyle, as Schnittke called it).

I always thought of Herbert as an old hippie who was determined to write like an Elizabethan.

I tend not to be concerned about lists -- I read Dhalgren when I was younger than certain teenaged characters in the book itself, but I've never made it through anything by Arthur C. Clarke. I do like certain of Stephenson's books, but if the writing itself doesn't establish the necessary music, I can't be arsed about the concepts (however intriguing). For me, writing has to have a groove.