Another one of those “I know it’s quiet” updates. But mainly I didn’t want you to think that all my attention was on ALF, or that once that series ends the site will cease to publish anything.
I’ve been busy lately, which probably isn’t much of a surprise…but I’ve also been rereading Gravity’s Rainbow, my personal favorite novel…and it’s one that occupies one hell of a lot of mental bandwidth. In fact, I just finished it, and I’m still stuck thinking about it.
Each time I read the book I can hold the narrative thread a little longer than I did the previous time. It’s a complex tale, in which it’s rarely made explicit that you’re in the realm of fantasy, or hallucination, or a dream, or that the character you’re following now or hearing from is a ghost, or that you’re hearing from a character at all. It’s rarely clear when you drift backward into the past or lurch in the space between two commas into the future. In short, it takes a lot of attention to read…and it rewires your brain into a kind of functional paranoia.
It’s great.
This time I made it just about to the end, I think, before the thread started to fray on me. And because of that, I found myself being moved deeply by passages that never even registered with me before. Reading Gravity’s Rainbow is a new experience every time…a text that’s always appropriate to wherever I am in life…one which never changes, but which reveals different, important aspects of itself to me when — and not before — I need to find them.
That’s what’s been distracting me from writing.
BUT ANYWAY ALF.
Since we’re so close to the end here — just the stream, Project: ALF, and a handful of wrap-up features — I’m going to try my damnedest to keep those coming. Usually when it’s quiet here ALF suffers, too, but this time, since we’re essentially just saying goodbye at this point, I want to keep that going, and that may, for the next few weeks, be at the expense of other content.
One interesting thing is that Google Analytics reveals to me that my daily traffic has tripled in the past month. Since it’s been so quiet and since ALF is coming to a stop, I’d have honestly guessed it would have decreased, if anything. In fact, that’s why I haven’t been checking it. I thought it’d be depressing news.
So…welcome, new readers! And thanks to everybody for making this site a success. It goes a long way toward convincing me that I haven’t wasted all of my time on Earth.
More to come, stay tuned, u.s.w.
One disappointing discovery: I had read at some point that the fourth and final section of Gravity’s Rainbow had a different epigraph in early printings. Instead of the Richard Nixon quote, it featured a much longer one from Joni Mitchell. But I own a pre-release review copy, and it has the Nixon quote, as you’ll see above in a photo I just snapped to immortalize my disappointment.
I don’t know if the Mitchell thing is apocryphal or if there were two pre-release printings, but I can’t find any photographic evidence of it, and my empirical evidence runs contrary to it, so until I see otherwise I’ll assume it’s false.
Which is sad. I thought that would be a fun difference to be able to point to. NOW I CAN POINT AT NOTHING.