I am reading, slowly, The Raw Shark Texts. Friend Dan, when I mentioned I'd just started it, warned me off in no uncertain terms, warned that it had no redeeming qualities what so ever, and actually apologized for not telling me sooner. This is a pretty harsh reaction to have to anything, and I was hesitant to continue reading for fear of suffering rotten brain syndrome (and also for fear of Dan's negative opinion of me). And I can see why he loathed it so. It is silly, and emulates to a fault earlier writers like Paul Auster, and has a boat called the Orpheus and a girl called Scout and twenty pages of flip-book-like blank pages with just a shark, made of letters, moving closer page by page, and trendy chapter titles like A Relic of Something Nine-tenths Collapsed and History Sinks Downward and The Crypto-Zoology of Purely Conceptual Sharks, Dictaphone Defence Systems and Light Bulb Code Cracking in Letters from the First Eric Sanderson. And yet.
I am reading this book, slowly, and feeling a little bit haunted by it after I turn off the light and curl up around Nova and try to sleep. There is something mesmerizing and desperately, achingly empty in the midst of its linguistic wordplay and overly clever ideas, something compelling enough to ignore much of its ridiculous plot, the copycat syndrome it suffers.
"It's hurtful and wonderful how our jokes survive us. Since I left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this -- how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery. It's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes. Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone."
I am reading this book, slowly, and feeling a little bit haunted by it after I turn off the light and curl up around Nova and try to sleep. There is something mesmerizing and desperately, achingly empty in the midst of its linguistic wordplay and overly clever ideas, something compelling enough to ignore much of its ridiculous plot, the copycat syndrome it suffers.
"It's hurtful and wonderful how our jokes survive us. Since I left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this -- how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery. It's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes. Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone."
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