📝 Garcia Marquez adopts the demeanor of Buster Keaton to tell his stories:

I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.

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📝 Sebald on narrative literature, from a 1999 profile in the Paris Review.

“I have an aversion to the standard novel: ‘She said, and walked across the room’ — there’s something trite about it. You can feel the wheels turning.”

I feel like others have expressed this sentiment, can’t remember who. But I recognize it fiercely.

I’m old enough to have some books in my tsundoku pile whose pages have turned yellow with age while waiting their turn to be read.

This week I took one of the oldest volumes off of that pile, Gravity’s Rainbow, in the first paperback edition from Viking Press. But to be fair, the yellowing started when it landed on my dad’s tsundoku pile way back in 1973. I took it to college with me and have moved it from dwelling to dwelling ever since.

I’m finally reading it for us, Dad.

So far so good, if a bit little-k kabbalistic for me. And I admire that Pynchon can take an idea which others might just, these days, make into a brief tweet — ”supersonic missiles seem to reverse time, explosion arriving before its engine noise does” — and elaborate on it endlessly, making every possible connection.

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