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The ultimate straggler! Found ultimate summer on July 15th, in the aftermath of the French national holiday. I didn't know anything about DFW before yesterday, and it feels a little strange to have to confess to that! But I'm sure I'm not alone.
so I'm waiting for IJ to arrive here, before I depart for two weeks vacation in a city called Tregastel in Brittany. the only thing I keep telling myself is that it's important to remember the initial situation, the arrival of the "green shoots" of a decision to hop on board to read this book, described by many as a monster. I say to myself: there can't be that many Americans or English-speaking people who have never heard of this promising American writer! Then I say to myself: it doesn't make any difference at all: who cares where you're coming from, the only important thing is to get into the game, and to play by the rules, and perhaps, to invent a few as we go along!
Has too much water already gone under the bridge, or can I seize the nature of the decision to hop onto this shuttle? I don't think I can answer the question in one fell swoop, but I can begin anyway. I discovered infinite summer on Salon.com, rather accidentally, but everything in the daily news is accidental. I was impressed by the harmony between the title "infinite summer" and the layout of the site. Such an infinite summer ought to look something like what the site actually looks like. Something tells me that the idea of an infinite summer goes back a long long way, and that summer loves are always stretching themselves beyond what they can give to something like infinity, but I have no way of pinning down something concrete, either in my life or the life of the countries I know, that would prove or disprove this. Let it stay as it is: infinite summer is one way of describing recurring human desire.
One last "general" consideration: Maniatis made one hell of a promise. He said that after you had ploughed though the first 25O pages of the book, you would have access to payoffs hitting in droves. I don't want to be a smartypants here, but that is pretty much what Obama is saying these days: hang in there, and you'll see, it'll get better and better! I've always been among those who are willing to give this kind of person the benefit of the doubt. I'm interested, really interested, in questions of access. How much is required? What kinds of things make you decide that it's not worth it? How much preparation is enough, even through the beginning stage when, according to what everyone who has left the book on a shelf until this summer, there are 1001 occasions to say to hell with that! To what extent can we say, later on, that the author has met us half-way, and that the halfway house is, for us, more gentle and more complacent than the one in the book?
I've already spent the time available to me "reading up" on "our" author. He seems to have felt that he went out of his way to meet us half-way on the journey to a kind of enlightenment. Here I've gone way too far. Perhaps a pomo author no longer gives a damn about enlightenment. I'm sure I'm in for quite a few surprises on this score.
To tell you the truth, I feel I've said way too much before even having begun the journey!
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