Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Lining up dominoes

I'm feeling particularly lacking in the ideas-to-blog-about-for-IJ department this week, but I'll try to make up for it with gratuitous comments on other peoples' blogs, I guess.
Only two scenes really interested me in this week's reading. The first is, ironically enough, the scene in which they're draining the pond (with the WYYY student engineer). At first it seems ridiculously slow-paced (which isn't the first scene that seems this way) with this excess of fragments of, often unnecessary, information (did I really need to know that the unconscious hobo with the shopping cart has only one, shoelace-less, ash-colored-sock-bearing shoe?), but as it moves on, in a literary show that makes me imagine DFW setting up dominoes, this overly detailed setting comes together for an action-packed (single-sentence) paragraph that ties into just about every one of those details. The second scene that interested me (it's actually a lot like the pond-draining scene in that narrator-building-up-the-setting sense) is the Don Gately fight scene. Again, the majority of the entire scene's action (the fight) takes place in a relatively short length of text (2 page fight -20 page scene). For what it's worth both scenes make me think of a line from William Gibson's Neuromancer: "The brown laminate of the table top was dull with a patina of tiny scratches. With the dex mounting through his spine he saw the countless random impacts required to create a surface like that." More so because we are looking at all the little "random impacts" that emerged collectively as the action in the scene, than the fact the the character was on drugs when he experienced the sensation (Although that old theory that DFW was on something when he wrote IJ comes to mind).

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