Vaccination- Against the Day

[jporter]

Vaccination, or vaticiination? Perhaps a vatic vaccine...
But a prophesy can be a form of vaccination, no?
against some looming future evil- for those that are
willing and able to heed its call- before it's too late?

I'm no prophet,  but I'll share this with you. Not long after
the ATD cover shot appeared on the Amazon site, a frightening
premonition came to me in the middle of a dream. That red
thingy- blurry and indistinct, creeping into view- given the blurb,
my first dreadful thought was:  bird flu. Certainly it was not the
red spot of Jupiter, but at the scale of the picture, it reminded me
of an electron micrograph of our old foe, H1N1, the pandemic
that swept the globe at the end of WW I. There was no time for
sitting shivah, then. In NYC, bodies were stacked like cords
of wood. It swept away my great-grandmother and one of her
daughters. Follow the bouncing ball...into the grave. I shivered.

The cover, to my eye, is not a palimpsest- a parchment rubbed
out, and then, re-inscribed with something new. Or, if it is, it is a
very special class of palimpsest- i.e., an update. In this case, a
rude update. The lettering, for example- a modernization of the
antique- suggests the effects of time, or even progress, on
that which was before- a doubling that traces the effects of time.
Given my initial premonition, that would make the red thingy a
very update, or,  H5N1- today's version of that earlier horror. The
Wrath of Evolution- Viral Marketing, indeed.

Eventually, clearer versions of The Seal manifested themselves
on the web, and I heaved a sigh of relief. It seems the cover is
not a sign of an impending pandemic. Upon further reflection,
however, I was still uneasy. If the red ball is a seal, that means
ATD is a book under seal, or: das ist fur mich ein Buch mit
siegel, in German, where siegel = seal.

Not necessarily the  sieben siegel, but siegel all the same.
The problem being that this "siegel" is slipping off the side
of the cover. Being readers of Pynchon, we all know what
happens when Siegel cooly quits the scene. All hell breaks loose.

Not sure if I'm going to rush out and buy ATD, or just watch you
all react to it from the level 3 biohazard protection of the archives.
Time pressures me, too. But, differences aside, the P-List is a
most fascinating community (that includes you, too, John), at
least as much fun as reading Pynchon. Just feeling troubled by
reality these days, I guess, and the amount of time needed to
deal with it.

jody