In over the transom today:

Having looked through a few pages of “Gravity’s Rainbow”, I found to my shock and horror that it was almost as if I were reading the confessions of a sort of Moriarty-type criminal.  I believe that this evil man has links to Nazis, such as Nazi ‘scientists’ who were brought into the United States in 1946 under ‘Operation Paper Clip’ and the ‘Invisible Empire’ of the Ku Klux Klan, the militia groups, and possibly Illuminati.

This man is evil.  He has personally terrorized me.  He is extremely perverse and his evil quite unpredictable.  The beginning page and the end page of ‘the book’ seem to me, the confession of a twisted ‘fantasy’ to destroy ‘the Crystal Palace’—the fall of a crystal palace, but then the reference to breaking glass?—perhaps the ‘Crystal Palace’ being symbolically some sort of skyscraper, and reading the last page, the sort of limerick, “‘til the light that hath brought the towers low”—I thought of the ‘Twin Towers’, the World Trade Center, completed in 1972 and 1973.  Page 369 is a limerick about a drug-induced introduction to an Arab ‘jinni’?

I think he even tried to diabolis [sic] my own fate through this book—though how he came upon me is a mystery.  I’m from the Philippines.  What’s interesting is that on one page he writes about ‘something’ rolling about in Malabacat.  I don’t know if there is a Malabacat, but there is a Mabalacat in the Philippines near where the US military used to have an air base.  Of course, that ‘something’ isn’t me.

Pages 430 and 431—the most recent edition that costs $16.95 (and that I had to purchase twice, because of having dismissed his diabolicalness, both times, ripping up both copies) and has the rocket designs on the cover, the paragraph in between the pages seem to remind me of the American nazi terrorist threats of the late William Pierce who wrote “The Turner Diaries”.  “Depending on what didn’t come from where, you know which factories had been bombed, what railway connectioned severed(?) …”, etc.  and seems to be a diabolical promise of the neo-Nazi movement ‘avenging’ the allied bombing of Dresden.

There is a paragraph about ‘The Moss Creature stirs’ and I can’t remember the page that it is on.  Then there is a reference to ‘cherry red’.  Pynchon seems to be making a joke while at the same time contemplating a diabolical act of evil—‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’, The Rolling Stones, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ with the lyrics “we decided that we would have a soda, my favorite flavor cherry red”—with the end of the paragraph beginning with (Turn?  What is turn?), and seems to be a subliminal attempt to try to terrorize Ted Turner, the multi-billionaire.

Pages 413-414 or 414-415, after ‘Victim In A Vaccum’ have particular relevance to me.  The paragraph that reads about war starting as a depression.  Then the threat of through willful evil, the suffocating or strangulation of a man’s throat, perhaps in his sleep and then the numbers talking about ‘it is isotropically distributed’ and ‘no, this is not a conspiracy’ and ‘it is not aimed at me’.

2 summers ago, living in a different apartment in the Apartment Complex I am staying at now here in [name deleted] Apartments in [city and state deleted], I noticed on the air-conditioning unit, an Arcoaire air-conditioning unit (a company of Heil—obviously a Ku Klux Klan-neo-Nazi company), a metal sign that read CASE INDOOR COIL CONTAINS DCATAO24.  I could not find a listing on the EPA IRIS website, and indeed had to go to a dictionary and through educated guesswork, thinking of fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons, I decided to look up Dichloro– and found Dichloroacetic Acid.  I looked it up on the Internet and Dichloroacetic Acid freezes below 48 degrees Fahrenheit and I concluded that DCATAO24 must be Dichloroacetic Acid Oxidase 24? and that it might have been isotopic—‘isotropic’ ha ha ha, perhaps being a pun on TAO, and then of course, not a reference to the Tao Teh Ching, and is there a sick pun on Dow Chemicals?

Also, ‘tao’ means people in Filipino language.

Either way, I have concluded that Michigan Militia and Klan, if not escaped Nazis, were definitely a part of designing the air-conditioning units in the apartment complex I live in.

I am hoping that things are going good for you and your friends.  If you believe what I have told you about, please let them know.  Either way, please let them know about this e-mail that I have sent.

Consider yourselves warned.

Anybody who knows me (or who’s been bored enough to peruse the archives of obsolescence) knows that I’m a sucker for the book list.  Some of those same folks know that I’m teaching a class this semester on science fiction.

You can imagine my excitement, then, to discover this list of the Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years (a moniker then qualified by the years 1953-2002, which is good to know), put together by the good folks at the Science Fiction Book Club.  Note that the top ten seem to be, in fact, the Top Ten; 11-50 are in alphabetical order by title, which would be a mighty coincidence, if these were actual rankings.

Of these 50, however, I’ve read very, very few.  My interests run a bit more to the cyberpunk, on the one hand, and to the feminist/”minority”/queer, on the other, than do the interests of the SFBC.  But I’ve thus far this semester taught 6, 8, 30 and 43, and we just today finished up 20 (whew).  I suppose I’ll have to spend some of the summer filling in some of my listy gaps.  Any advice about the list from the more knowledgable—which books on the list are vastly overrated; which books have been criminally forgotten—would be greatly appreciated.  (Link via defective yeti.)

Whew… the posts just keep coming fast and furious this week.  Spring break began for me today (well, yesterday, given that it’s now after midnight) at 5 pm, and I’m just raring to go.

To go to D.C., that is, where I intend to lie around slothfully and read escapist fiction, thus protecting myself from the impending (and, there, surrounding) awfulness.

You’ll note that there’s been precious little here about said awfulness; I find the present state of affairs too depressing to contemplate.  Fortunately, someone’s managed to find that happy medium between political relevance and not making me want to hang myself with my dental floss:  if you’ve got a few minutes, check out Bang Zoom TV’s Hercubush.  These guys really have all the answers.

According to The Memory Hole, Thomas Pynchon’s lost-ish writings for Boeing, dating between early 1960 and mid-1962, may in fact resurface.  These technical articles, circulated internally among Boeing employees and clients, ran without attribution.  They still exist in the Boeing archives, however, and according to Michael J. Lombardi, Boeing’s historian (about which, who knew they had one), copies of these publications have recently been given to “a literary researcher” who hoped to divine which were products of the Pynchon pen.

In a particularly Pynchonesque twist, Lombardi cannot remember who the researcher was (or at least “no longer has that information”), but claims that “[t]he researcher was going to write a book—so you might want to keep watch for that.”

I am now imagining corporate plot, or mysterious auction, or author in disguise, capering away with the goods.  Is there any doubt among Pynchon readers that the true locus of the Boeing apocrypha, like the will of Pierce Inverarity, will never be wholly known?  (Via The Morning News.)

Book Magazine has released this list of “America’s Biggest Readers” (via Arts & Letters Daily).  Each member of this list of folks consumes up to 20 books a week, with a diet ranging from romances through mysteries to the classics.

Something about this article completely freaks me out.  Is it the sense one gets of a kind of impending textual obesity in these folks from the relentless reading-is-like-eating rhetoric (which I’ve of course reproduced above)?  Is it the embarrassingly American celebration of quantity over quality?  Is it that the nominees for Biggest Reading Writer and Biggest Reader in the White House are themselves such horrifying spokespersons for the literary impulse in this country?

Perhaps you’re a wholly reasonable person, with the potential to become an irrational fool?  Perhaps you’re a team player, with a potentially argumentative loner lurking about inside you?  Or perhaps you’re a dreamer, within whom lives a potentially disillusioned grouse, simply waiting to take flight on the wings of bitterness?

If so, this is the company for you.

The following exchange is available for your further perusal in the most recent issue of Harpers. 

TOTO RECALL?

From an October email exchange between Holger Turck and EMI Music in Germany.  Translated from the German by Ben Ewing.

***

Dear Sir or Madam,

Yesterday I purchased the copy-protected TOTO CD “Through the Looking Glass.” The reverse side reads: “It is designed to be compatible with audioplayers, DVD players and PC-OS, MS Windows 95, Pentium II 233 MHz 64MB RAM or higher.” This statement is definitely false.

- In reality, only tracks 1-8 are playable in my DVD player.  I don’t own an ordinary CD player anymore, making this CD worthless.

- In reality, my Macintosh plays only tracks 1-7.  Result: the CD is worthless.

- In reality, my PC would play the CD only if I were to use the software found on the CD itself.  I am very careful when selecting the software that I install on my computer, and I refuse to be coerced into using proprietary software. As a result, this CD is worthless.

This is all the more regrettable, as I am a dedicated fan of the group TOTO and own–among other items–all of their albums.  It’s a pity that YOU have prevented me from being able to add their most recent work to my collection.

You altogether ignore the simple fact that every purchaser is–by law–allowed to make a copy of his purchased CD.  Your behavior is altogether illegal.  As a result, I will not purchase another CD that is outfitted with copy-protection from your firm or from any other.

How do you plan to win me back as a customer in the future?

Sincerely,

Holger Turck

***

Dear Mr. Turck,

We will spare ourselves the trouble of addressing those observations in your email which are obviously uninformed.  Simply realize: more than 250 million blank, recordable discs and tapes were sold and used this year, in comparison to 213 million prerecorded albums.  Even without formal study in economics, it should be clear to anyone reading this that the music industry cannot continue to exist if the trend holds.  The widespread copying of prerecorded audio material via the burning of CD-Rs can only be countered one way: namely, copy protection.  We fear, however, that all these facts will not interest you in the slightest, as these measures will herald the end of free music, which surely won’t please you at all.

Should you legitimately have a playback problem with the CD that you complained about, we would ask that you specify the exact CD player model for us.  The scenario you put forth–multiple players failing to play the CD–can only be the stuff of fairy tales, given our experiences.

In the event that you plan to protest future releases of copy-protected CDs, we can assure you that it is only a matter of months until more or less every CD released worldwide will include copy protection.  To that end, we will do everything in our power, whether you like it or not.

Sincerely,

Your EMI Team

Had this been online, I’d have linked instead of reprinting.  I had a brief attack of scruples over this potential violation of copyright, blah blah blah, but it occurs to me that such anxieties about what amounts to fair use (moreover, in this case involving a magazine clearly in opposition to the alarmingly Germanic tactics of EMI) is precisely why fair use has eroded so disastrously in this country.  So fight the power, man.  Happily, this came to me today via e-mail, so I’m already redistributing a redistribution.

To top it off, I’d be thrilled to get a cease and desist letter—it would mean someone was still reading.