ATDTDA fizzling out?

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

Dave Monroe apologized 
> I'll certainly take some blame for that. Keep in
> mind, I'm at this as often as not from work, where I
> can't quite keep books open in font of me. I can work
> around this easily enough with the older books, plus
> reserch material, with what I can get from "Search
> Inside" on amazon.com, Google Books, the Internet in
> general, and what I've been dumping into the archives
> all these years, but it's not been easy dealing with
> the new book this way. 

I, on the other hand, am the worst of surface readers, looking not for external references or philosophy, but for a ripping tale with rich chocolate-y goodness...and finding it in AtD...it's all I can do to restrain myself from thousands of words of irrevelant subjective commentary every day...claiming mind-meld with Pynchon...inventing back stories...recapping points others have made without giving any credit...reinventing the wheels of criticism...tying things to personal anecdotes
(not to say that I haven't indeed been doing all that already...)

My drone, my incremental repetition, my motif has been and will be...
this is a smashing book, even if like me you don't get all the references; such-&-such's what it made me think of...

finally gritted my teeth and looked up nunatak, saw the pictures in Wikipedia, noticed a caption referring to Shackleton's Endurance expedition (Endur-ance, Vorm-ance) and noticed the time frame, 1914-1916, smack dab in WWI, they had their adventure, probably somewhat oblivious as we are all quick to castigate the Chums for being, wrapped up in their own trip...but what a trip...just leads me to some speculation on what kind of person would keep going on those crazy expeditions - and being able to get support from Them; gives me some hope of Them being able to get behind something besides war and destruction - the morality of being somebody like, say, Rockefeller's art curator: well, at least while Rocky is buying paintings he isn't actively increasing his exploitation of the worker; or the phenomenon of explorers being able to get funding for their adventures, from governments or the wealthy or even sometimes from public fundraising drives - and as some have noted, there are some drivers in the text toward seeing the Chums as ourselves (in the role of readers) in that, reading, we are exercising elaborate and punctilious skillsets not of the common run, like the crew of the Inconvenience, or the Endurance, or the Malus, and in the service of a different vision than that which inspired world war or "hot gates", but just as exciting, and one in which we might even distract "Them" from destruction to cheer us on, as we run our dogsled race to the Pole...or, rather, ride our airship toward the southern entry point of the interior...
the Chums suspended in air as our disbelief is suspended in the text -- the Chums's tale not being a tragic one, like those on the ground, nor admittedly an angelic or totally pure one like that of the White Wings would be; their limitations are similar to ours as readers...

I could go on & on, but my meta-point is, I tend to ramble, and I think I'm doing as great a service by (believe it or not, in the aftermath of such effusiveness) restraining this flow as some others would be to post more...there are thousands of exciting things in the book, and every now and then I take a chance that my excitement will line up with the possibility of conveying it...