Cuyler,

I have empathy with the Cornell model of normal. The finer renditions of 
such a world are the ones that occur more removed from the scene, toward 
the further edges of the light. Tompkins County is such an amazing place 
that if one has not lived there the oddities will not ring true. 
Everyone should live near or to there at least once. Even Nabakov 
managed it.

I like how books are out there waiting to be found and are found just 
when we most need them.

The blurbs & plot description for Discovery actually turned me off... it 
was your recommendation that kept me curious.
I was hooked before I got to the end of the first page.

Ada has just now told Onno that she has missed her period. It is 
slightly after she tries to shop lift the little wooden peasant woman 
with the pencil sharpener vagina.

In many respects Discovery reminds me of Flaubert's /*Bouvard et 
Pécuchet*/... which similarity may be a reason for the obscurity of 
Mulisch's novel. Not so new under the sun? But an incredible synthesis, 
a quality not particularly appreciated in the modern canon. The 
appreciation of sparse technology has overwhelmed style. There is also 
in Discovery a very strong current of Blake. In Blake's cosmology there 
are these ladies that weave the unborn spirit into the flesh.

The side trip into Gilgamesh, the Herbert Mason version (the story of 
his writing it is interesting as well) reverberates throughout 
Discovery. Herbert Mason it seems got so caught up in Gilgamesh that he 
almost nearly dropped out of Harvard, or wherever it was I can't check 
right now, with his fascination for the story in respect of his own 
experience of losing his father at an early age. He went into seclusion 
in order to fathom this one scenario of unfathomable sense of loss at death.

Business has been way too busy and I have not been able to take time to 
focus on my writing, plus, my novel-in-progress I keep finding myself 
blocked, though I should not say blocked as much as 'incubating'. I go 
through long periods of thinking about the story then write in vapid 
sessions that go on into the night accompanied by much laughing and 
giggling. Usually when I get into the writing it displaces me 
emotionally from the real world... I get hyper-sensitive and for 
practical purposes a bit screwed up. So it is not good for me to write 
when there is too much business in the daylight to attend.

I was going along just fine with the project and thought I knew where I 
was going. Then the protagonist ate a baloney sandwich and I was stumped 
-- dead stop. It has become a joke now that I should restrain my 
characters from eating baloney sandwiches. My technique is one of a 
post-modern baroque collagist asssembling disparate elements together in 
a manner that on the surface there is a simple to grasp plot, but 
underneath there are complexities of pattern and threads of meaning. 
Leastways that is what I suspect it is. Not unlike w/ Discovery. I enjoy 
the trickster motif. Then there are other things going on. I found 
beyond the baloney sandwich that I was writing about all of the 
interesting people that I have known who have died. I have been trying 
to figure out why I am doing that. I keep looking at these minor 
characters who are not minor when you put them all together and then I 
am perplexed by a blance of realism and allegory. Also perplexed by 
layers of the lives the characters are engaged with and the vicarious 
effect of media peripheral to their lives. Too many layers. Too many 
threads. Then I see that I am writing a war novel that is actually an 
anti-war novel because it is about a world in which war is some other 
place for the characters, like Iraq -- how do we live a life that has 
meaning without an experience of war? -- and yet people keep dying. I 
don't quite knock them off as capriciously as Twain would recommend. But 
between Discovery & Gilgamesh I am suddenly understanding something that 
I had not understood and felt a need to grasp. I feel a spark.

I have a web page for my creative work... but it has not been updated 
for a while -- www.orgrease.org <http://www.orgrease.org/>

Or try this:
http://www.friggmagazine.com/issueeight/poemsstories/fiction/orgrease/Chernobylbreathes.htm
I enjoy a pseudo-clinical approach to horror stories, piling on 
information to make us itch in our sleep. One problem to fall into the 
sentimental, another the didactic. Chronic, like w/ Francis Bacon... 
which is a direct reference to Blake's cosmology of single-sight. Or as 
Herbert Mason implies, the myth of the story carried him away. In our 
reading we look for kindred souls.

"To forget to breathe is not a translation, but then, history is a story 
made up by historians, as if they are a tribe of alchemical tricksters. 
We do not tame nature as much as we kill, broil, and are consumed by it. 
Radiation is invisible and pervades not only the air that we breathe, 
but all of our shelters and our essence and eats into the cores of our 
bones. We wear our unnatural environment as a demonic cloak, both within 
and without. It is our breath, each breath, and all breaths known and 
unknown, that poison us. The transmogrification of elements is a 
biological and genomic disaster that creates a mutated wilderness—if you 
look down to the streets tonight there is no sign to deny this."

http://www.friggmagazine.com/issueeight/splashpages/Orgrease.htm

Or this audio:
http://www.archive.org/details/GabrielOrgreaseSharingSpacesLifeSentences


I have not read Pamuk. For now I will stick with Mulisch. But it is nice 
to have a reading list.

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