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multiple authors
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Book of Numbers
Book of Numbers
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Book of Numbers
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] In America, even the smallest portions were too big for him, except with “frozey yozey.” His favorite places were always selfserve and charged flatrates for small and large cupsizes, regardless of the amount of yogurt and toppings. Moe would stagger in vast crockery to fill, and the staff was unequipped to charge in excess of the maximum. It was not as like anything was returnable, melting probiotics crammed back into dispenser, the carob chunks replaced. It was because of this that all the places switched to retailing by weight. [...]
vast crockery is fantastic
Some tech obsolesces, some has been engineered to obsolesce, all is basically nonrecyclable. Moe was manic about that recursion, the tech afterlife, the device eschatology. When products die, they are exported back to where they were made, to the nativity of the East, to India. This being the true cosmic cycle, the pdas and comps and printers illegal to dump in the West instead leaching their mercury, lead, cadmium, beryllium, barium, into the foreign groundwaters, and rewarding the same populations that manufactured them with silicosis and neurotoxicity, just enough to numb against irony. Meantime corporate atrocities are offset by quarterly donations. 10% of gross to related causes.
Knock knock? Who’s there? Aaron. Aaron who? Why Aaron you replying to email? Though the other punchline is Aaron the side of caution. Dear, dear—this is your personal assistant again. Your Lisabeth. Telling you that your mother’s been ringing nonstop. She’s worried. You haven’t been answering her emails, and she’s been telling Lisabeth that the only reason she got involved with paying Verizon $54/month, and she can’t understand why her first month’s bill should be $88, incidentally, was to be in touch with her son! and then Lisabeth went through explaining her plan, the Quantum, 15/5 Mbps, 10 MB of hosting! I told her you were off on an investigative project, something about unfair wage labor practices in telecom manufacturing because that’s what was in the NY Review under my latte (rhetorical latte), which was how I found out you’d told her you were doing something about scandals between donors and museums relating to deaccession policies and I apologized and agreed, you were overcommitted and overdue on both without an alibi, and she wondered how I held my soap, which was faintly erotic, and already today the answer’s on my desk (your mother made me a soapdish).
i really like the aaron emails
Here, unlike on the Boardwalk, everything is real. Here everything is both ghostly and real. Vacant houses. Apartments boarded up to protect against squatters. Eviction and foreclosure papers flap from the doors like tongues. NOTICE TO CEASE, NOTICE TO QUIT, papers keeping the sun out of the windows. The apartment houses rubble away into empty lots pierced by wind and drowned in the shadows cast by shuttered penthouses. Empty lots spontaneously converted for parking, a sign in the windshield of a Saturn: PLEESE DONT TAKE ME. Walking between the Boardwalk and the Professional Arts Building, walking between the Professional Arts Building and my car spontaneously parked in a dirt and, after the rain, mud lot, meant passing the porn store, which, especially if I was making the trip after sunset, meant getting accosted. By men who slept on the beach and spent their waking lives on the street, where there were fewer police and more chances to hustle. Corner of Pacific and MLK Jr. Boulevard. Guy trying to bum cigarettes. Guy trying to bum a dollar for booze. Guy trying to deal to me. “Yo, got coke, yo.” “Molly, molly.” “Got syrup.” Taking my money and not coming back. Trying it all over again the next day unabashed, and then when I told him I’d rather just talk, he got in my face, called me gay, called me a cop. A woman telling me how the check-cashing place would only cash checks made out to people with addresses in Atlantic County by people or businesses with addresses in Atlantic County. Telling me she lived in Georgia, or had once lived in Georgia, and her only hope of returning was this check from her cousin in Camden. “Ain’t Camden Atlantic County?” “No.” “What Camden then?” “Camden County.” “Goddamn.”
i just like this
The earliest modern “circi” were glorified riding demonstrations, single-ring answers to that most ancient of questions: What do you do with your soldiers in peacetime? In 1768, on the eve of what the British call the American War of Independence, Philip Astley and his fellow cavalrymen of the Fifteenth Light Dragoons opened an outdoor “riding school” at a track outside London. What made their presentation a circus, in the sense that we’d know it, was that it combined the displays of equestrian prowess—including trick-riding, jumping, and military maneuvers in the styles of the Prussians and Hessian hussars—with interludes of clowning that allowed the riders and horses to rest, and were thought to appeal to women and children. [...]
And to a large degree the cynical side of me goes, Yeah yeah, America doesn’t deserve a Ringling Bros. It really doesn’t. Because for 146 years we’ve been teaching you. Yeah. How we can all live together, how we can all work together, to make something beautiful. How every person matters, every job, and this is what we’re mourning. Not a show but a society. Lots of shows close down but this is a society. Black, white, woman, man, performer, or crew, everyone’s equal here, everyone’s important. You know, since I’ve been here I’ve developed a great affection for animals, but seriously, I’m from New York City, I’m from Harlem; before the circus the most exotic animal I’d ever been around was a squirrel, so I’m not going to get into that cage with the cats, I’m not going to get up on that trapeze bar, but we each have our own role, which gives us dignity. My first dressing roommate, Mark, was as white as day and he wouldn’t go on to perform unless this one member of the floor crew, Rafael Suarez, who’s Mexican, had rigged his apparatus, and they didn’t even speak the same language; they just talked with their hands. But they had this mutual respect. This sense of responsibility for each other. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in the circus, about humanity, about being an artist, about making art and how to sell art, which is also an art, which the circus did a lot to invent, this was the most profound. That you’re responsible. I am. We are. For each other. You understand? And that’s what the circus is. Just what its name says it is. What does it mean? From the Latin. From the Greek. It’s a circle.
quoting JOHNATHAN LEE IVERSON, RINGMASTER
i do like this lol
HE GOVERNMENTS THAT GET THEMED into casino-hotel-resort properties tend not to be democracies, but oligarchies, aristocracies, monarchies, Africa-and-Asia-devouring empires. Pharaonic Egypt, Doge-age Venice, imperial Rome, Mughal India. Atlantic City has incarnations of the latter two—Caesars Atlantic City and the Trump Taj Mahal—with the Taj being the last property in the city to bear the Republican candidate’s name, though it’s owned by distressed-asset czar Carl Icahn, who also owns the Tropicana, a crumbling heap styled after the Casa de Justicia of some amorphous banana republic. The worse the regime, the better the chance of its simulacrum’s survival. Atlantic City’s Revel, a hulking fin-like erection of concrete, steel, and glass that cost in the neighborhood of $2.4 billion, opened in 2012 only to close in 2014, which just goes to show that an abstract noun, verb, or imperative in search of punctuation (Revel!) doesn’t have quite the same cachet as a lost homicidal culture.
I FOUND MYSELF—AMERICA finds itself now—at the very end of the Boardwalk. The very end of this immigrant’s midway lined with cheap thrills and junk concessions, pulsating with tawdry neon and clamoring moronically. The end of this corny, schmaltzy Trumpian thoroughfare that entertains us with its patter and enthralls us with its lies.
lol
It was the web that educated me about contemporary literature, not through any primary or even secondary texts that were published there, but through its use. To go online was to experience in life what Pynchon—and his heirs closer to my own generation, like William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace—were working toward in fiction: a plot that proceeded not by the relationships developed by the characters (“people”) but by the relationships to be discerned among institutions (businesses, governments), objects (missiles, erections), and concepts (hippie-dippie Free Love and the German Liebestod). I read about Modernism—big “M”—and postmodernism—small “p”—thanks to links sent to me by strange anagrammatic screen names, and if I couldn’t get through Fredric Jameson yet, I could get through a GeoCities site that summarized his work. Modernism was something made by and intended for a limited but discerning audience; postmodernism, by contrast, had popular or populist aspirations—it wanted to be famous, and complex! It wanted money, and respect! The two movements connected in the “systems novel,” a phrase minted by the critic Tom LeClair to describe the complicative methods of John Barth, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, Ursula Le Guin, Joseph McElroy—and Pynchon.
“Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting edge”—so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor scooters, and Jennifer Aniston still in Rachel mode alongside a presidency just stolen and a tech bubble just burst. Downtown, the towers of the World Trade Center throw their foreshadows over Wall Street. A stretch farther north, between TriBeCa and the Flatiron, lies Silicon Alley, a New York tech district that actually existed, or that was actually hyped to have existed—a real estate figment like NoHo or SoHa or even the West and East Villages (originally the Village and the Lower East Side).
Here, in Pynchon’s telling, two types prevailed. One consisted of generic deracinated White People who’d gone out West like the prospectors of yore, but who when they bottomed out amid the Bay’s Zen gardens and organic-smoothie chains found themselves yearning for real urban grit—or at least for the really yuppified grit of gentrifying Giulianiville. The other was made up of city lifers, the ethnically identifying—or not yet postidentity—strivers who’ve always served as New York’s color: the wise black bike messenger, the Irish cop and fireman, the social-club Italian, the backroom-fixer Jew; the “genuine,” the “authentic,” the huddled masses yearning for cash.