I got myself deep into the sky-scraping mountainous ranges of Frog last night, leaping the 60-page 1-paragraph chapter 19 in a quick bit of bounds. I got myself somewhere into the mix of chapter 20, too; called "Frog Fragments". (You can either take fragments to be the noun with Frog as an adjective, or Frog as the noun with fragments being a verb. Either's appropriate.) Chapter 19 was overall brilliant and made me squirm a lot--this is a good thing--and chapter 20 is confirming for me that there is a structure to the book; while the chapters themselves all seem almost independent of each other, you can't just read them in any whichwhateverway order you want. There's order and purpose here, and it's subtle, and it's good. The book really picks up steam after chapter 18 (where I'd left off, halfway through, last time) though I guess steam is a relative term, perhaps.
I can't think of a book since Infinite Jest that I've felt justified in patting myself on the back for just getting through it. Hence the, ah, patting-myself-on-the-back tone of these posts. Also I don't know if I can think of any book I've ever read with such a potently odd yet insidiously natural (at least, it becomes natural once you've consumed 550+ pages worth of it) cadence to it, any book so strong in that department that I've found myself often replacing the usual tones of my internal-monologue with the rhythms and timbre of said (previously unexperienced by me) book. I don't think I could write it to save my soul but it's there, in my head, at odd moments, and, it feels kind of cool. Oddly.
I think I'm committing myself to reading The DaVinci Code next, which I might even say nice, intelligent things about. For a book that 25,000,000 people have bought, nobody in the lit-blog-osphere (that I've found, at least) does that. So maybe that can be the thing I do on the web that nobody else does. And maybe it will keep me from writing any more high-concept self-interview posts for a while. (Unless, you know, someone, say, requests them...)
Speaking of services: I've added an RSS feed of my del.icio.us "blogposts" category to the sidebar-with-the-evergrowing-brain-that-saved-the-world. (See also, The Flaming Lips.) Mostly because I remembered that, since this is a blog, I'm automatically subscribed to "Bring Down The Media Magazine" and I've got obligations to keep. So you know, if the very thought of someone saying nice things about The DaVinci Code sickens you so much that you feel like hurling your monitor through space-time at my head, you can now find additional links to get you off this site to the right. I'm sure if you keep clicking long enough, you'll find someone swearing that they'll never wear the color brown again, in protest. Also, to lull you into a false sense of security in regards to your conviction that you are currently visiting a blog generated by someone who knows what he's doing, I've touched up some colors across the site: no more faded, washed-out post headlines for you fine folks; only the biggest! baddest! brightest! boldest! greens for you. And there's some blues, too. Well, one blue. But it's a very pretty blue, I think.
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