Against The Day

[Monte Davis]

Jill:

> Somewhere between the La Blanca and the Mescaline, Frank(?i 
> think) and his new anarchist friends are out on the range and 
> someone's thinking back to how sweet it would be to have an 
> obscure brand name. Beer, they don't just think of beer. The 
> pure flow of reading kinks for a moment.

One of P's greatest strengths is his eye as reader-researcher's eye for the
arcane, absurdly specific, but verifiable detail. And of course the P-list
or P-wiki context makes us value that disproportionately, more because we
get to play at scholarship: "I found the source, stroke me!" 

Much more often than not, it makes 1945 London or 1760 Philadelphia or 1904
Colorado *realer* for me, and makes most other writers' imagination of
remote times and places seem flabby and generic.

But you're absolutely right that sometimes a detail strikes me as a tic or
compulsion at work. Maybe he's failed to make (or I'm missing) enough
connection between the detail and his themes. Maybe the detail is left over
from an earlier draft, and he has too strong a memory of how perfectly cool
it was in that context to edit it from the revision. But I know the feeling,
and wish Prof. Nabokov were still around to red-line it.