Pynchon Watch Y2K6: The illustrated edition (well, it would be, if I owned a scanner)

Hey kids! When we last left our almost unexplainable fascination with Thomas Pynchon and his upcoming novel Against the Day, which we here at TDAOC HQ have nearly next to no intention of actually reading once it's released (as much as the idea of playing Internet Grad Student with all the other crazy bastards who have preemptively cleared off their calendars for the next eight months may appeal, from a certain sick and twisted and yet nonetheless entertainingly desirable standpoint), we'd noted that the release date had been bumped up to November. A look at the Amazon product page for the already less-understood-than-the-average-brick book also reveals that the page count has leapt from 900-odd pages to 1120 pages. For those of you who didn't wake up after four sordid college years with minors in mathematics, I can safely derive for you that that right there is an integrated shitload of pages. Personally, I hope the extra 200 pages contain nothing more than one long list of obscure, contextless references designed solely to keep True Pynchon Fanatics busy with their researching and referencing and thinking until the man publishes his next book in late 2018.

But while the future is soon to be now the past ain't even past yet and Gravity's Rainbow is about to get the pretty pretty picture treatment. No no, don't get your hopes up, it's not a Major Motion Picture starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: Garth Risk Hallberg, guest-blogging at The Millions, alerts us to the release of Gravity's Rainbow Illustrated, which features one picture drawn by Zak Smith for every single page of GR. You can see all 760 images online; much like the text of the book itself, I have no idea what the shit-hell to make of it. But the pictures are pretty neat anyway.

What's of interest about the book version for me--and for you fans of me and my impeccable taste in tasty things--is that the book has an intro penned by Steve Erickson, author of Our Ecstatic Days (one of my top two Books of 2005) and a bunch of other books which I read all at once last year causing semi-permanent self-brain-breaking. Can't say I'll need the book, but I'll be curious to see what Erickson has to say about all of it. Probably doubtlessly something totally awesome.

And so long as we're on the subject of Erickson and authors I profess to care little to nothing for or about and yet feel compelled to mention them with some regularity--remember that new post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy book I mentioned a while back? Yeah, well, who better to review it than Steve Erickson? So he did just that. And dammit if the review ("Apocalypse is personal. It's in the details.") doesn't further pique my interest. (Via Jeff at Syntax of Things, who certainly doesn't hurt the cause by calling The Road one of the best books he's ever read.)