Back to our regularly scheduled novelist.

[Michael Bailey]

 Luara wrote:
> I'd be inclined to read VL first, since it's sort of a sequel to ATD (Traverse family-wise), followed by COL49, which seems closer to what IV promises to be about (am I the only one who thinks IV was written back in the  late 60s-early 70s, its title being a self-referential joke about
> poor-quality items prone to decay?).
>

tell ya what, I haven't thought it thru yet.
If he's got one in the vault from way back then, what else can we look
forward to?  Coolio!

I guess what I think maybe is that maybe he does maybe he doesn't have
papers full of words he wrote back then, but he certainly has
impressions and ideas formed back then.
and all the intervening time to redact or blue pencil them

Inherent Vice - could the rhythmic similarity to Infinite Jest be
indicative of anything?  (If DFW hadn't been suicided by the agents of
anti-post-modernism - c'mon, you know it was a plot - I would lay into
him for such a virulent anhedonia and hope that IV would be the
"blissful counterstroke" (Paige Browning's phrase, I think, quoted in
_The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_) to the gloom 'n' doom of IJ.
"Transcending the bullshit," as it were (Browning again)
But as it is, or since he was, I'll just raise the issue in a
self-referential aside and note that I'll probably be thinking about
IJ and its author with some respect and sadness while reading IV and
on other occasions for some time to come)


anyroad...what say you then to

Vineland - Crying of Lot 49 - Inherent Vice  sounds like a good
progression to me (with V. as a coda possibility)




-- 
--
...and then there's the one about the postmodern gangster who makes
you an offer you can't understand..."