Happy Birthday, Against the Day!

[Ian Livingston]

I ran down to Logo's Books and Records on Pacific Ave in Santa Cruz to
snag my copy off the shelf. I was all the way in to Kit's adventures
crossing the ocean when I realized that the 5 elements of Chinese
alchemy reckoned importantly and thus began my research into Eliade
and Jung on alchemy. A study that continues to yield fascination.

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 9:45 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.....
>



-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant