It's been an overwhelming week. Im going to take this week of from posting -- I'll be caught up by next week.

“It is not the ending we need but the beginning”

It worries me sometimes that we are going back in time, instead of forward. Because, for instance, I want to know about the relationship between Nick and Klara, and give that woman a chance of becoming interesting and smart, and get more information that allows me to put together the Nick of the first chapters and this new Nick that killed a man and stuff, but I also want to know what happens with ((Marian + Brian) + Nick) and we are already way too back in time for that, aren’t we?

I am not the only one obsessed with plastics. I can’t believe he used “polymerized hairpiece” for a toupee.

I love the episode with that woman, Donna. All the conversation about what sex is, and if it has to be kept secret and if it makes educated and uneducated people equal, poor and rich (like death). And Marian crying, that was sweet. T, do identify with Nick more or less than before? With the lontananza thing? With the “You withhold the deepest things from those who are closest and then talk to a stranger in a numbered room”? A stranger in a numbered room.

A part of a poem by San Juan de la Cruz, translated into English by someone

Upon an obscure night
Fevered with love in love's anxiety
(O hapless-happy plight!),
I went, none seeing me,
Forth from my house where all things be.

Much more beautiful in Spanish though. Con ansias en amores inflamada = fevered with love in love’s anxiety… it looses much of the musicality.

En una noche oscura,
con ansias en amores inflamada,
(¡oh dichosa ventura!)
salí sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada.

Read it anyway, here.

off topic: I will try to keep up with the reading but i am pretty sure that i won't be able to post next week because i am busy, busy, busy. I miss Eric. I hope that he is fine.

Thoughts from inside my private fort.

I guess I identify with Nick Shay, isn't that the point? Aren't we supposed to identify with the "main" character of the novel? That's not a rhetorical question. Really, are we supposed to identify with Shay? I feel like we are, but I'm rebelling against it, if only because I feel like that's what Delillo wants from me. He wants me and everybody else to feel Nick’s pain, reflect something in our lives that relates to his past relationship with Klara or his current one with Marian. I feel Delillo is trying to get everyone to identify with Nick through his relationship with the ball/Dodgers, his relationship with brother/mother/wife/co-workers, his thoughts on his father.

Maybe I ought to stop fighting this pervasive feeling that I’m being taken for a ride by Mr. Don. It’s not that I don’t want to be taken for a ride, on the contrary, I do, that’s why I read literature (at least I think). But I want to ride the Underworld ride the way I set it up for myself. I don’t want to ride the same one as everyone else. Reading this aloud, it sounds pretty vain, like I’m above the common man identifying with these petty characters, like I can see through the façade and get to the real depth of Underworld (a weak pun). But that’s not my objective, I guess I seek to know how others think. Case in point, I don't identify with Brian Glaser, in fact I despise Brian, think he's a real dick, and selfish. But is that how everyone else feels? Is that what Delillo wants us all to think in how he paints Brian's character? I’m clueless I really am. Maybe I need to stop looking for a “point” and just read and absorb and be entertained. I have a quirk with literature, in that I always feel I have to over-analyze everything I read. There are never things that I can read in the way that I would watch a stupid movie, mindless, enjoying, yet non-stimulating.

ps. All the women in this book are disgusting me.

This book is so weird. I change my opinion every two paragraphs. At the beginning of a chapter, I think the book is boring, infantile, misogynous, mushy, condescending and pretentious, a vulgar simplification; at the end of the same chapter I think that it is really intelligent, complex, deep, beautiful and revealing. On the one hand, I think that it is written with such an attention to the selection of words that it makes it cold and empty, and at the same time I think that words, sentences and paragraphs have been thrown into the page with no interest at all. There is only one thing I know for sure: I won’t know whether I like it or not until I finish it, and maybe not even then. I have just read that “our hero” is being betrayed by his wife and I love that.

cat with a q-tip

I haven't finished reading the second part (haven't read the last two chapters) but i want to post today anyway. I can't not read now because i have a terrible hangover. But i will catch up during the week. I promise (this is so american).

A sentence: "You don't usually call your wife over to the TV set. She has her programs, you have yours". I know it is still too early to say, but this might be my favorite sentence in the book. And i don't think that it is satiric. All the writing about the video tape is what i liked the most in this part of the book. A question: is it possible that they broadcast something like that? is it not prohibited to put real deaths in TV? I think it is. I have to admit that i felt sick reading about it, what is weird, because it is fiction, i mean, it is reality inside of a fiction, thus fiction, but i felt as if i were reading about something that had actually happened.

My answer to LD's question about what the book is nostalgic for is youth. "youth, divine treasure / you leave not to come again / when i want to cry i don't / and sometimes i cry without wanting to", that's an old spanish poem (translated by me...). "Strangers would come to wash his genitals", "he would forget how to eat, how to say simple words". Getting old and useless is one of the things humans are more scared of, more than dying. My girlfriend was telling me this week how one of her patients, a very old woman, (she is a psychologist treating old people) started having panic attacks when her son threw a "suicide pill" she had been keeping from the 2nd world war (in case you got caught by the enemy) in the garbage. Supposedly, there are a lot of those pills running around in this country. My friend says that old people's suffering when they realize they can not take care of themselves anymore is such that many would prefer to die, but of course we won't permit that, will we?

Ok, i have a problem with women in Underworld. I am still not completely sure why or how, but in general i am much more interested in men in the book. Hey, everybody using latex globes in the book... i had to think of the two american girls who where staying for a while at my place last autumn. They had some kind of hand cleaning lotion in their purses, so each time when we went out eating we could nicely clean our hands. I was fascinated. Even if they were aware that their fear to dirt and infection or whatever it is, was being used to make them consume, they couldn't stop it anymore.

Things I thought about while reading Part 2

*The first chapter is often anthologized as a short story....Interesting.
*DeLillo is kind of fascinated with video footage which relates both to issues of authenticity and of framing.
*I love the description of my hometown in chapter two
*With the introduction of Marvin I started paying a lot of attention to the way in which the individual characters speak. Marvin is always forgetting words and Brian fills them in for him. Later in the exchanges between Nick and Matt, Matt repeats nearly everything anyone says. The Texas Highway Killer has really awkward syntax.
*Keeping objects and understanding history through them is a death of sorts and yet possessing the past through objects wards off death. History serves a similar purpose in warding off death.
*The book is nostalgic. What is it nostalgic for?
*"He wants me to go to the zoo because the animals are real. I told him these are zoo animals. These are animals that live in the Bronx. On television I can see animals in the rain forest or the desert. So which is real and which is fake..." (207). Ha! Love it.
*All the discussion of time in chapter seven makes me think that history is also a way to defeat time. So is fiction.
*There is a lot of interesting gender stuff going on. Impotence seems to be a major theme, and fatherlessness. Women often play the role of savior.
*The Texas Highway Killer is obsessed with a fantasy of wholeness and only sees himself in terms of others and as a part of the history of others. Perfect for Lacanian analysis, using Zizek. Also interesting that he has trouble finishing his sentences. The copycat shooting is also a very complicated issue for the creation of his identity.

Sorry this is a pretty lazy post. Lots of unfinished thoughts.

how about this, from chapter 7, as a general thesis statement for the book:

"...he wondered what we'd learn by going deeper into structures beneath the standard model"

It's been a packed week for me and so I'll need to take this weekend off from posting. I'll read and comment and be caught up by the next round.

Some Notes on Baseball

I work with a bunch of baseball fanatics. Yankees fans mostly, along with a few outcast Mets fans and one REALLY outcast Red Sox fan. The Yankees fans always revert to a sort of historical justifcation for why the Yanks are so great. They tell me about whats its like to walk into Yankee Stadium, about how you can feel the history on your skin, about the "hollowed" ground. I recently want to my first game there and I find it amusing that everything I had been told about the team and the stadium were also talking points in a promotional video played over the jumbotron before the game began. The spectacle bends its shadow back in time and becomes history.

My English friend Helen came to the game as well and was sure that she was entering the heart of American culture. She found this prospect to be amusing to no end so she was cheering like a maniac (she also doesn't understand how the game works, but insists she has played a baseball-like game called "rounders"). I didn't quite know how to explain that baseball isn't really the type of sport where yelling and screaming are very common, or how to explain that the game is in the details and not the action, what it means to throw a change-up when the batter is ahead in the count, why somehow would sit for three hours with a scorecard documeting every occurance of the game in numbers and dashes.

I found a New York Times Magazine in my bathroom last night and stumbed across an article about simulated baseball. Computer generated games (and whole seasons) with teams comprised of players dating all the way back to 1885. Every action in the games is dictated by a purely mathematical calculation based on statistical record. Baseball is, afterall, probably is the sport which can be most fully accounted for statistically. So maybe the religous aura and tradition surrounding baseball are just that: religious, the mystery the hides the the fact that there is none.

Please excuse my son, AES, from this weeks assignment. He's been ill, and under family obligations. I assure you he's been keeping up with the readings, but has until this point been unable to contribute to the USFC discussions. Do not be burdened by this, its merely a temporary setback in his pursuit of external enlightenment. He'll be back next reading.

Sincerely,
Mother of Anthony Edward

The Political Reading

Initially, I was going to write something drawn out from some of the details of this section (the kid eating the pages out of his history textbook or the discrimination simulation), but while commenting I came across a topic which is more interesting for me – though I can only broach it now in the most cursory way. Namely, it is the too common critical perspective that DeLillo is a satirist with a grudge against the contemporary situation. White Noise especially is so often promoted or represented as a fierce and satirical indictment of an America operating in the sphere of hyper-modernity. I find this to be a limited reading, or rather, a very limited (and limiting) way to look at the world we live in. I think the portrayal of places like supermarkets, tourist attractions, and shopping malls was more enchanted and fascinated than anything else. In Underworld, waste management for Nick is not a calamity, nor is waste evil. Rather, it has an ordering effect, and also of allowing him to confront the modern world more fully.
Implicit in this reading of his work as “negative” is the desire for a return to some sort of natural or essential order. It’s a desire I don’t trust. I think there is a parallel experience in the introduction to theory. For the newcomer (and probably for myself, briefly) the initial reaction to Debord, Baudrilliard or even Derrida is feel that something is irreparably lost and to see things as lacking some sort of natural character or essential meaning. And this lack is always there of course, but it’s not the result of something recoverable being lost . And as long as the focus on some sort of recourse to a “natural” order is maintained, understanding and progress necessarily stagnate. As Zizek would say, we have to "assume the mistake" and move from there.
I was in Whole Foods grocery store the other day and a sign read “whole foods, whole people.” Disgusting. The final triumph of capitalism has been in its complete and utter cooption of the impulses and tendencies that would contradict it, and this mirage of “wholeness” “purity” or of “organic solutions” is precisely the Achilles heel of the left.
This is perhaps more elegantly explained in the publisher’s preface to Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology (which I read a few months ago). The book is part of a series, the manifesto of which is the following:

"There is today wide agreement that the left-wing project is in crisis. New antagonisms have emerged…that require the reformulation of the socialist ideal in terms of an extension and deepening of democracy. However, serious disagreements exist as to the theoretical strategy required to carry out such a task. There are those for whom the current critique of rationalism and universalism puts into jeopardy the very basis of the democratic project. Others argue that the critique of essentialism…is the necessary condition for understanding the widening field of social struggles characteristic of the present stage of democratic politics."

Of course, my sympathies are with the later.

Part One

I love this section of the book. The first time I read it, I was really enamoured with the Klara Sax chapter and the condom store chapter. After Brandon mentioned Benjamin in response to my last post, mechanical reproduction, art and its aura, and reification in general were really on my mind during this reading. The idea of reification is really important in White Noise as well, and as I read this section of the book by the pool in Las Vegas (trust me, the irony does not escape me), I was really keenly aware of DeLillo's obsession with artificiality and distance. What is strange, however, is that I'm not sure that the spetacularly mechanized world that DeLillo writes about is necessarily a negative world. I'm sure that it is much more complicated than the simple qualification of postive/negative, but the characters seem to take pleasure in the mechanical (the scene where Nick is watching television with his mother for instance). One of the most interesting moments for me is when Klara is talking about seeing a picture of herself at one of Truman Capote's parties. She says, "What is it about this picture that makes it so hard for me to remember myself? I though, I don't know who that person is," (79) and so on. I think that there is an interesting intersection here with the fact that I really think that this book is ABOUT h(H)istory (history v. History, how history becomes History or more than History). There is also the scene where the kid in Cotter's class eats his history book, which is fabulous as well. That is the part that really seemed to satirize the idea that the facts in that book are a more valid form of history than the game, which for Cotter is still small "h" personal history, but will become an important moment in American History: "He reads a few pages ahead in his world history book. They made history by the minute in those days. Every sentence there's another war or tremendous downfall. Memorize the dates. The downfall of the empire and the emergence of detergents."

This all comes back to the idea of mechanical reproduction and reproduction of an idea of self and personal history as well. For Klara Sax, the image in the picture is not her, but her artwork is. Nick Shay sees himself in the moment that his team loses the game, he only plays the role of a waste mangement official, his role. Idenity is wrapped up in this novel with how the characters see themselves as players in their own personal histories, but those histories are mediated by objects and language. Hmmm....To be continued.

I was enjoying it very much.

Well, chapter 1 was just ok. I wouldn’t say it was boring, but a little gray for me. I guess I don’t like that woman, Klara (I probably should start liking her). I don’t remember why because I read that chapter last Sunday and my memory is very very bad. The end of the chapter had some nice thoughts: ‘something so moving I know I am not supposed to linger’, ‘you can’t name a mountain badly’… (1h and 10 min, huh?).

Then it got really good. I really liked that game, mixing the topics, repeating sentences, shorter each time. Since I have this shitty memory, repetition is always fun.

My favorite part is that about “you pretending to be exactly who you are” (the people playing at being executives while holding an executive position). I wrote about that not long ago in an email. My thought was more that you learn from what you are playing, and eventually become what you pretended to be. Like me pretending to be a scientist, and, god, maybe I am becoming one. Or me pretending to be a good person. I also liked that with the bad smells, how they tell so much about people. They do. Well, smells in general, they go directly to the limbic system and for a moment there’s nothing you can do to control your face or your behavior. Then, the scene at the condom shop, which is really funny. It reminded me of the opening of a shop like that in my town, I think 1994. How exciting. Condoms used to smell worse that they do now? I don’t want to imagine. Plastic, plastic, plastic.

And then, chapter 7. I hated it. It was so boring to me. I don’t like how it is written. That dialogue is terrible. I felt like removing those pages from my book. The whole chapter, I wouldn’t save any part, I think. I would have to read it again to see if there is something worth my clemency, but that would be such a pain… feel absolutely free to tell me that I am totally wrong and that I don’t know anything about English literature. Please, change my mind. Defend Don!!

Luckily I read MM-1 afterwards and recovered my faith in uW.

here is a link to the wikipedia entry for the game for some background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_Heard_%27Round_the_World_%28baseball%29

check out this quote written by a sportswriter at the time:

"Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again."

with a slight delay and a significant headache, i've finally joined in the conversation for real.

i hate baseball. the only reason i would go to a game now is to spend sometime with someone i haven't seen much. i used to be into it when the AZ diamondbacks were first created, but it turned out i was just a fairweather fan and jumped off the bandwagon a season or two after the world series.

so 60 some pages of baseball should equal snoozefest for me, but given that i really had no idea where any of this was going or what the purpose was for this prolouge, i just tried to enjoy it, and it is pretty enjoyable, baseball or not (you coulda wrote about basketball, don!) (actually, that's just a joke, it really could only have been baseball, given the focus on american-ness and also with all those pauses tony pointed out, but seriously baseball annoys me).

so being as late to the party as i am to USFC, it means i get the sloppy seconds. but allow me to snack on the remaining sandwich rolls and li'l smokies that have been left behind:

i love love love that we just go ahead and get inside these people's minds, famous as the may be. i guess this shouldn't be a surprise from a dude who wrote a book about the JFK assination (right?) but i find it a bold and enjoyable choice anyways. the game is presented in numerous unique perspectives, and he uses that to slice open the culture(s) represented there.

my favorite little passage is on 39 of my book, where Frank is stuffing sheets of "Life" into Jackie's sick face, and DeLillo takes out a just a few sentences to highlight an interesting point, which seems reminiscent of the advertisement interjections in "White Noise" (although i read that a while ago so that might be a stupid parallel):

"In a country that's in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance. Johnson & Johnson and Quaker State and RCA Victor and Burlington Mills and Bristol-Myers and General Motors. These are the venerated emblems of the burgeoning economy, easier to identify than the names of battlefields or dead presidents."

i would add something to that, but what? he nailed it. and now this sick kid is going back to bed before he pulls a gleason-on-sinatra's-pants move on my keyboard.

My thoughts on a book club...

Is it true that two people may view colors differently? Are our reds both the same? Does it matter? I read for pleasure/enlightenment/calming. Just a disclaimer..

Thoughts on baseball/prologue...

This is the second time I've read the Prologue. Makes me think I should read everything twice, ah if only... It was soothing in the way I stopped focusing on the plot, trying to "get" the story, and instead relaxed and got to relish in the atmosphere created by Snr. Delillo. I grew up playing baseball, loved the game, collected baseball cards like a fiend, knew all the players/stats/positions, watched baseball on tv whenever I could, cried when the Phillies lost the World Series, etc. I heard something said awhile ago along the lines of "the beauty in baseball is that there is so much downtime between the actual action, in really allows for time to think" and it really struck me. Really baseball is the only "major" sport in which time is not an issue. As a result, you're allowed to contemplate the next pitch, to calculate stats, left vs. right hand, infinite complexities. Don't believe me? "http://youtube.com/watch?v=G7CCga0nbG8". Proof of the importance of a single action/call.

Anyways, I bring this up to illustrate how much I appreciate Don's description of the ballpark scene, and the way he paces his writing to flow in the way a real baseball game would. It's not only about the action, about the snarl in the pitcher's eye, but also about how Willy Mays can't get that jingle out of his head, and that he's thinking about how the game, and the season, is on his shoulders if Thompson can't drive the runs in. I appreciate that Delillo addresses that baseball is a game in which you are always thinking ahead. And isn't that what a prologue is for, a little action while you're thinking ahead to future events. American Pastime.

I have no clue how big this will show up... I don't think that i can post it bigger (help?), but you can check here.
In the upper part, the devastation caused by nature (fire); in the middle soldiers of the death killing people; in the lower part, the individualization of the different hierarchies of society made equal by the death.

Sorry I'm late. I have a cold and I am one of those really wimpy sick people that uses illness as an excuse not to do anything at all.

My first impulse with this book is to apply my theoretical interests to it (and it is so easy with DeLillo): The game itself as spectacle (Debord) or event (Badiou...maybe). There is also the Brueghel painting and the fantastic description of Hoover's fascination with wounds: "Dear germ-free Edgar, the man who has an air-filtration system in his house to vaporize specks of dust - he finds a fascination in cankers, lesions and rotting bodies so long as his connection to the source is strictly pictorial" (50). This section lends itself to analysis using any number of theorists of the abject (and of mediation through language): Mary Douglas, Kristeva, Lacan.

However, my impulse to haphazardly apply these theories to DeLillo is never very sucessful, because the writing is too sopisticated and the characterization/plotting too complex. This prologue is about time and place and, as a result, about history. There is something truly American about this novel, which is not something I would necessarily say about all of DeLillo's work. The prologue is nostalgic and lacks that scathing satirical quality of a novel like White Noise (even though there is still something critical happening). One of my major impulses while reading was to compare the descriptions of baseball in this novel to the descriptions of football in End Zone. In the latter novel, football serves the same purpose for Americans and the Triumph of Death serves for Hoover in the prologue: a mediated, yet violent, distraction that distracts from real violence. Baseball is something entirely different in this novel and I'm not sure what it is. A spectacle and distraction certainly, but again this game is a great event in American history, and the game itself is essentially American.

I don't know what to do with all this yet (even though I've read pretty far into the book in the past). I think that to apply a theoretical framework to DeLillo without considering the importance of history is a disservice. So, to analyze a passage like the one I quote from above, it seems really essential to acknowledge how it is Hoover's gaze that frames the painting, and how Hoover's historical position undermines a simple reading of that passage.

"This is the people's history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours."
And at the end of the prologue the whole of history of this moment that the narrative voice spends sixty pages revealing is reduced to a single snapshot (like the snapshot of the painting from the magazine in Hoover's pocket)and "[i]t is all falling indelibly into the past" (60).

Let’s see. The prologue…. in case I had any doubt of my role as a reader of this book, I was put in my place from the very first sentence: This is the story of the USA, non-American, and deep inside, this folk is full of hope. Ok. And it continues with a black kid feeling threatened by his distinguishability in the mass of white people, a baseball game, a bunch of characters some recognizable only by Americans. Is this true? Are the characters real people? Am I supposed to know them? Did that game really occur?

Do I exist? I admit that I was bothered at the beginning; I don’t like to be left out. There was also something weird about the writing, it sounded arrogant, disdainful to the reader. The feeling changed though after reading BK’s post because I started to think really that the author is speaking to himself. And that turns it around, he is not excluding me, he is allowing me to listen to his soliloquy. Is that it?

Anyway, I enjoyed the prologue despite my little knowledge on baseball games and all that I miss because of the language. But let me know if the rest of the book takes place in a baseball field because I will have to start studying the rules and history of that sport. I like the detail in the description of the moods and the significance given to weather as a reality and as a metaphor (and language, but that has already been pointed out by BK), “all these people formed by language and climate”, “What a year hey? This weather, I don’t know, it is bad for the trailing”, “the sun’s own heat that swallows the cities”, “you create the weather”, “It should have rained in the third or fourth inning. Great rain drenching down. It should have thundered and lightining’d.”…

I wonder how/whether this chapter, which is not a chapter but the prologue (and I suppose that there is a reason for that) has any continuity through the rest of the book. Although I got the impression that the catch of the baseball is the most remarkable episode, my favorite one is Edgar’s entrancement by Brueghel’s painting. I just saw it a week ago in el Prado in Madrid (I love these coincidences!). I guess I overlooked the title of the prologue the same way I overlooked BK’s instructions for the reading schedule (I apologize again although, where are you all?), so it was a pleasure to gradually find out that he was describing something I could recognize because I had just enjoyed it. The idea of a piece of art providing a new position for the understanding of the surrounding reality is something I adore, specially when it is accidental.

That’s it for today. I will start reading the first part right away… I mean, after partying…

Let’s start at the beginning:

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eyes that’s halfway hopeful.”

A really quite stunning section ensues and is closes before the first white space blank:

“Then you lose him in the crowd.”

The first time I read this, I assumed, that this was the voice of an narrator speaking to the reader. This reading is most consistent with the use of the second person direct address in fiction. But now it struck me as the author speaking to himself, as if jotting a note during a character sketch. I think this reading holds some weight given all DeLillo does in the Prologue. The concerns of language and how to frame the story in language are present in the story itself. The Russians don’t explode the bomb with ‘boldness’ or ‘bravado’, they do so “in plain unpretending language.”

Novels are often spoken of as "worlds" (i.e. the world that an author creates in a given novel). DeLillo does not create a world in his books so much as he creates a language in which things happen. In doing so, he becomes susceptible to the oft-repeated criticism that his fiction (dialogue especially) are not realistic – this will come up in my post on the next section probably. The author is aware, and alerts the reader to the fact that things always happen in language first.

The second person ‘you’ is only (I’m pretty sure) brought back at the very end of the novel (no peeking!). The effect is one of book ending the novel (somehow that isn’t a tautology) with a self-conscious author in the process of writing the book itself. In my own writing and thought I have a similar compulsion to call the language into question before using it, and often I never get beyond the questioning phase. I could talk about this in regard to experimental poetry forever but I won’t.

One using Lacan could say the book doesn’t assume some sort of alternate reality in which disbelief must be suspended, but rather consciously assumes the symbolic realm of language and moves out from there.

Here are some notes:

“Nobody has a vocabulary for what happened this year”

“The field seems to open outward into nouns and verbs”

The announcer, Russ used to fabricate games on the radio and fill in the details from only a statistics sheet.

And of course, bits of paper reigning down on Pafko in the outfield.


Rereading the book and gauging my response to it has reminded me how much I have changed or grown as a reader in the last couple years. When I first read the book, which was really at the time of my introduction to formal literary analysis, I was very much reading for themes, for what things mean. As a less mature reader at the time I found that the only way to approach such a large and intelligent novel was to try to figure out everything, uncover all meanings and symbols. On this read those concerns were hardly present and I find that I get so much more out of a brief passage than I do from grappling with the larger ideas of the book. I now care much more about prose than plot. The preoccupations with the minute, and the specific, and the sentence level are probably not shared by those for whom reading novels and academics were/are separate endeavors.