Introduction to the Blog, and Against the Day

Starting off in a sea of uncertainty, this blog is mainly to keep track of some of the books I'm reading, starting off with Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon.  The uncertainty comes from whether I'll keep this up, and whether I'll finish the book this time.
I've started this book a few times before, and never made it more then two hundred pages in.  While you can skip pages and pages of most books, Pynchon has this style where every word is somehow intimately dependent on the previous word, so if your eyes glaze over for a second, you're completely lost.  My favorite example of this is on the first page of Gravity's Rainbow, where he goes from a character's dream to a character's daytime routine, and this transition happens in the middle of a paragraph with the key phrase "but it is already light".

But, on to Against the Day.  I've finished the first three chapters, and it does look like a fun book with neat ideas in a style both necessarily and unnecessarily complex.  We've met the 'Chums of Chance', Commander Randolph St Cosmo, Master-at-Arms and general unfun dad Lindsay Noseworth, klutz Miles Blundell, kid Darby Suckling, city tough Chick Counterfly, and Pugnax, the dog who can read.  Throughout these chapters, there's chaos and debauchery just under the surface.  Pugnax is reading 'The Princess Casamassima', which Lindsay says is about "The inexorably rising tide of World Anarchism" (p6), the Chums scare off a nude photo session as they land at the World's Fair (p13), and mainly the World's Fair itself is a thinly hidden red light district (p22-23)

Temptation, much to Lindsay's chagrin,lurked at every step. Pavilions here seemed almost to represent not nations of the world but Deadly Sins. Pitchmen in their efforts at persuasion all but seized the ambulant youths by their lapels.

"Exotic smoking practices around the world, of great anthropological value!"

"Scientific exhibit here boys, latest improvements to the hypodermic syringe and its many uses!"

Here Waziris from Waziristan exhibiting upon one another various techniques for waylaying travelers, which reckoned in that country as a major source of income... Tarahumara Indians from northern Mexico crouched, apparently in total nakedness, inside lath-and-plaster replicas of the caves of their native Sierra Madre, pretending to eat vision-producing cacti that sent them into dramatic convulsions scarcely distinguishable from those of the common "geek" long familiar to American carnival-goers... Tungus reindeer herders stood gesturing up at a sign reading SPECIAL REINDEER SHOW, and calling out in their native tongue to the tip gathered in front, while a pair of women in quite revealing costumes--who, being blonde and so forth, did not, actually, appear to share with the Tungus many racial characteristics--gyrated next to a very patient male reindeer, caressing him with scandalous intimacy, and accosting passersby with suggestive phrases in English, such as "Come in and learn dozens ways to have fun in Siberia!" and "See what really goes on during long winter nights!"

"This doesn't seem," Lindsay adrift between fascination and disbelief, "quite...authentic, somehow."

I just had to include that whole page, because gosh is it funny.

In other news, we have in this section the first example of, maybe, the mixing of metaphore and science.  (p9) Lindsay and Randolph are explaining to Chick that it gets colder as you go higher, Randolph likens going up to going north.  Chick observes that if you go north long enough, you pass the North Pole and go south, so maybe you're going down again?  It sounds like he's stumbled on something, and Randolph says you go toward another surface, but an earthly one.  Mysteries!

We've also met Penny and the Bindlestiffs of the Blue (p18).  Her story of the Garcons de `71 and the weird energy is something I don't know what to make of yet (p19)