Happy Birthday, Against the Day!

[Mark Kohut]

Five years ago today, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, also the 22nd of November, I think. (and hope, but am not checking, 'cause
then it wouldn't be the EXACT birthday day) "Against the Day" was published---and went on sale.
 
Where were YOU that day? When did you get your copy?  I bought mine at a Borders in Chicago, from a big display, (called a dump)--never expected this--- and took one to my oldest college buddy with whose family I spent Thanksgiving that year. Thrills started with Pugnax & the Henry James Princess C. allusion, quiet laughter with Pugnax pissing over the side (and the joke about messages from the sky) and the depth charge of meaning started with me at the trip down the slaughterhouse chute and Ferdinand playing the dozens at the Stockyards.  
 
But I would have been as superficial a reader as your average movie-goer without the plist readers, very nice to have met you, AND the wiki..... 
 
Tim Ware's wonderful wiki started accepting contirbutors that day as well, I guess, (although as in most terrif projects, hours
of prep work had already gone into it) so, I salute him at five years too, remembering his optimistic remark given at the following
Pynchon conference that "it would take us at least ten years" to begin to get the book, which is easily true, so, as Janeites keep rereading
her work, we all oughta keep rereading Against the Day---about equal in words to Jane's six novels, I would guess---and the rest
of pynchon's works.....
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