The Crying of Lot 49 - a novel(la) by Thomas Pynchon

Again, my main reference point is the 'like life' (I'm thinking that that's what art is, and, a theory, the more successfully like life it is, the better a piece of art it is - and like life is a very personal thing, but in varying degrees between concepts, ideas, and how they are expressed). This point is important to me because I'm only now learning life.

The Crying of Lot 49 was insane and uncertain with questions and enigmas (and tautology) and (arbitrary?) pattern recognition and synchronicities you couldn't be sure meant something or were just imagined - or more correctly, you knew they meant something, but you weren't sure if there meaning was in the external world or only the internal of characters.

The mystery of it was exciting and intriguing; but at the same time you knew it wouldn't be solved, maybe that it couldn't be solved because it was too involved with the very personal perception of people so you couldn't ever know the truth and just when you thought you did something else would turn it all around and the author certainly was not going to help you out but the whole time, even at the end ti was ok because it made the story like life (if magnified and artified) - all personal and uncertain and really about the things you experience, ie feel as real.

Also about Corporate America.

I read it in a new way - learnt to read how you're supposed to read, dwelling internally on words, images, descriptions, ideas of the types I used to dismiss, until they became felt and I recognised them as actually (internally) sensually accurate to my experience.

I learnt that with words you just have to try to get as close to the experience as you can. Not everyone will understand all the time because they express felt experience, which differs.

Obvious points turning into lessons as they become experienced ie felt ie my whole point.

Also, noticeable knowledgeable use of 'into' versus 'in to'.

JR - a novel, by William Gaddis

Something that I think I will end up saying a lot: consuming it is like living life.

That is one of the things I liked most about JR. From the beginning I thought it was amazing, but also tiresome, strangely paced with almost all dialogue, scenes that seem to go on way too long, transitions across varying degrees of space and time that were easy to miss, things that could be called gimmicks that were entertaining at first but then kept going (such as frantic yet stagnant pages with all the words from one side of confusing phone conversations). It wasn't until half way through its 726 or so pages (and probably about a month of very occasional reading) that I finally actually got into it. It was at this point I began to realise how like life the novel is, like a microcosm of life, like living all of life compressed into 700 pages. The occasional bits of non dialogue seemed complete in a way even though they actually weren't, were more like poetry or something that only contained necessary fragments that you had to piece together yourself to figure out what was going on. This is what the whole thing was like, sometimes in individual sentences or scenes in themselves or scenes combined with a few other scenes or scenes combined with all the other scenes (I use the words scene because it is written very much like a film or something, just without the visual aid most of the time, which means to have to work hard all the time to create -- and, ending the brackets but also keeping in them because this is the follow on point to both before and now, the whole book, whether you try or not, forces some degree of active creation so that you become a better person, a smarter person, by the very act of reading it.

For the moment

going to start doing short posts on things I consume (maybe in terms of food, but more likely 'the arts' esp books, also movies, tv shows, music etc.) when I feel like it. It will begin with a little backtracking