AGAINST THE DAY

This has already been all over the net, but legendarily reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon has blurbed his own upcoming 992 page doorstop, titled 'Against the Day' (out December 5th) as follows:

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists,gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho
Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck."

--Thomas Pynchon

Between his recent appearance on the Simpsons and this, the ol' invisible man's becoming quite the exhibitionist, or it seems.

CLASH OF THE TITANS

I live in the little northern California college/hippie town of Arcata, but right across the Humboldt bay is the larger city of Eureka, a depressed former mill town. No artist captures the rubbery befuddlement, meth fueled insanity, and cloudy humor of the down and out residents of Eureka better than Jesse Wiedel. I first became aware of his work when he did a series of paintings set in local bars called "The Unbearable Ugliness of Being", and his work has just gotten better over the years. He creates a surreal world of random violence and black humor that is quite singular.

Check out more of his art here.