Gabriel Majeski

I too am reluctant to travel for longer stretches bc I'm a basket case if I'm away from my girls that long.

But last winter I just about lost it after the inauguration / lynch dying / dealing with the winter pnw rains.

So I'm going to sit on a beach in Puerto Rico for a week in february this year

been well over a decade since i've crossed this bridge. but it's spooky season and i'm all out of ideas.

The moment in Gravity's Rainbow where Pynchon straight up name drops Ishmael Reed- is my favorite "game recognize game" moment in, like, all literature. So this rules.

I dunno- it seems that after Against the Day he was like "well, I think I've given y'all enough sprawling pillers of creative expression to peck at for the next century- think I'll use my twilight years to write detective novels" which honestly? i can respect that.

the boy's still got it

critics may be calling it a minor work - believing everything from the man's pen should be the heir to Joyce that the one from 50 years ago was (and still is). the definition of unrealistic expectation

but even minor Pynchon is better than the major of just about anyone else

YouTube video by Film at Lincoln Center Sátántangó | Trailer

Laszlo Krasznahorkai just won the nobel for literature- and I am once again seeking the emotional support needed to make it through the 7hr film adaptation of his novel "Satantango"

this is admittedly a hard sell, but ya gotta admire my persistence

So how do you know it's fall?

Me:

it's a shame really that 90% of the novel's practitioners, would rather deny the forms revolutionary qualities at making meaning- and instead use the space to be a boring fucking lout.

if you take "Tristram..." along with Quixote, it becomes clear that the metafictional play and experimentation that propelled the novel to new heights in the 20th century (ie. modernism, post, and further) has in fact been baked into the form since the very beginning.

it's arguably never been a better time to be a Pynchon fan.

a film inspired by one of his novels is the #1 movie in all the land, both critically and commercially. and now his 9th novel drops.

I've been fucking giddy for weeks.

almost all of my literary heroes are dead and Pynchon is no spring chicken- meaning that i don't get "literary events" that often.

this is a special day- but we should be celebrating every day we still have him with us. one of the last truly original and monumental voices of postwar American lit.

it was even better than my EXTREMELY HIGH expectations could have hoped for. 10 fucking stars.

Fixing this is gonna need to start with some hard acknowledgment of who we are at a fundamental level.

Wringing your hands and waiting til the next event isn't doing the work.

Neither is watching "Nashville" granted, but you still should ✌️

Guess what- yes it does. And it always has and if you actually want it to end (you don't, but whatever this is just a thought experiment anyways) then repeating a false platitude is going to generate fuckall

Ok so spoiler alert I guess- after the assassination at the films end, when Henry Gibson's character is screaming at the crowd "this isn't Dallas, this is Nashville!!"

all I heard was the echo chamber I've heard for weeks (months, years, etc) that "political violence has no place in America"

criterion channel has an Altman retrospective going on for his 100th and I took the opportunity to revisit "Nashville" last night.

1st- holy shit I still looooove this movie.

2nd- it is exactly the statement on political violence in America we have been ignoring for (checks watch) 50 goddamn years

I swear to god it feels like it's been 6 months tops haha

I'm staring down the barrel of 7 years November 1st and what the fuck? That doesn't even feel like a real number lol

Holy shit yessssssss!!!! I'm so fucking proud of you! That is not nothing- every day is a gd gift and to make a whole year is nothing short of a miracle.

Thank you- more than anything, for choosing to stay in this world, nightmare that it may be. But you're already handling the hard part.

I'm still putting together the pieces of what I believe- but 18 year old me wouldn't recognize me now.

A relationship with faith is important- and it's a fucking tragedy that young outcasts so often have to abandon it to survive

I grew up in the Texas of the NW and left at 18 with a similar hardened atheism and indignation towards Christianity.

20 years of relationships with literature/storytelling and punx/queer folk of faith have nearly erased that toxicity that I left with (addiction recovery was also a huge factor)

YouTube video by Nick Cave - Topic Hollywood

If I don't go out to the coast at least once a year- to stare pensively at the pacific while listen to specifically THIS track; assume I'm dead.

this was a fantastic read- by someone with limited education who nevertheless felt an intense drive to engage with literature in a way that I feel is one of the core reasons that form of artistic expression exists...

namely to reconcile our relationship with death.

absolutely phenomenal

is "drunken desperation attempting to reveal something hidden about who we are as a people" a genre?

I caught this one at Portland Center Stage last spring, and as soon as I picked my jaw off the floor and quelled my rage at never being exposed to it before- i knew i had to read it.

and yeah. alongside "godot" and maybe "vanya" and some Tennessee Williams- it's one of the best fucking plays. ever.

this novel has been haunting me for my whole life. it was constructed from real pain. and yearning. and hope

pkd says the novel is him. it's me too. its journey is mine. so are its losses. and as I reached the final trembling word of phil's note, I once again cried

and did not stop for a long time

thank fucking christ that tommy p was at least one American taking notes when Nabokov told us there was no reason we couldn't paint with a language of dripping meaning

despite its silliness, Vineland is ultimately a tragedy. of the entropic, mean-spirited, Reagan-era death-trip payback against a counterculture that wanted nothing more than to find a peaceful corner of this world to dissappear into.

you'll weap and mourn- but laugh to grasp at an impossible hope..

is entropy a genre?

my joke for the longest time was that my cats have health insurance before i do lol

(don't worry- i have insurance now...)