My last few stories didn't get hit: 30! A ridiculously low amount.
Someone, no, not him, yes, that guy, told me that tweeps won't visit sights they aren't familiar with.
Regardless, many stories on this blog have over 5000 hits, but what does it translate to?
I'm on repeat, living in a cabin, lying on a sofa, and watching the ceiling spin.
Part 2: Pynchon
Pynchon said in Gravity's Rainbows,
the object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it finds you under very weird circumstances.
He thinks you can choose how you die, weird or otherwise, other than suicide; how so?
Weird circumstances, now that's a good one; first-rate fuzzy.
The man's preeminent, Gravity's Rainbows, sold 3 million copies.
Pynchon's a schlemiel שלומיאל, first class.
If you walked Times Square asking the odd person here and there if they've heard of Pynchon, 9 out of 10 will say no, the dude's no stand out; he's uncircumcised, non-Kosher כשר, dicey, and full of holes.
On the way out of my apartment, I place a Pynchon Voodoo doll under the wheel of my Chevy and run over it, squishing the life out of it. It feels good.
Pynchon's no recluse all that's a folk tale. He reserves a booth every Friday night at the Spring Tavern in the Hamptons, where the silk-stocking set plays.
If you Google Pynchon, you'll find the same pic his agent made public 40 years ago, looking like a 12-year-old kid with acme.
Thomas, the literary god, writes opaquely; his novels are often punishingly soul-destroying; he gets kicks writing onerous; the exalted pleasure of squeezing on his reader's testicles.
Bon voyage Thomas Pynchon sitting at his basement bar in his Long Island flat, drinking Dewars straight and eyeballing the framed certificates of merit as he pats himself on his back, repeating over and over,
you've come a long way Tommy, you've come a long way, at a boy!
Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1918.
He was a Romantic who had no use for the Communist Manifesto.
Thomas is primarily known for his imaginative use of language and vivid imagery.
As a youth he struggled to find his identity; in a letter to a friend saying;
my own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived. I’m afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy.
Thomas published his first poem on Christmas day, December 1934;
The Almanac of Time Hangs in the Brain:
The seasons numbered by the inward sun,
The winter years, move in the pit of man;
His graph is measured as the page of pain
Shifts to the redwombed pen.
The calendar of age hangs in the heart,
A lover's thought tears down the dated sheet,
The inch of time's protracted to a foot By youth
and age, the mortal state and thought Ageing both
day and night. The word of time lies on the chaptered
bone, The seed of time is sheltered in the loin:
The grains of life must seethe beneath the sun,
The syllables be said and said again*
Derek Stanford noted traces of doubt, questioning, and despair in many of Thomas’s poems that's affirmed without sentimentalizing; expressing faith without theologizing.
While in New York, on a reading tour, Dylan Thomas drank 18 shots of rye at the Whitehorse Tavern and walked back to his hotel, taking the elevator to room 257, dying of cardiac arrest in bed sometime between 2 AM and 5, floating upwards in death; hitching a ride on a moonbeam.