The Penguin

Hello, gentle and not-so-gentle readers. Welcome to a special edition/series of The Penguin blog. Spring has sprung, with all the squeaky metal contortions that implies, and even the sullen burg of Lansing Michigan is feeling the gentle rush of rising sap. Just last night we had the first real soaker of the season, it having been an oddly dry April up till that point, and the ornamental fruit trees have begun to erupt like volcanoes of frothy, perfumed meringue. There's bunches of those weird little starlike blue flowers with the grassy leaves on some of the lawns, as well as grape hyacinths and the ever-present daffodils. And of course the new grass and emerging leaves, which have a shocking neon-green effect against the smoky tomcat background of clouds and drizzly wet streets. These are what I like to think of as "Irish Days", when the breeze is indeed like the slightly damp paw of a sleepy cat batting gently at your face, warm rain purring against the windows. This ...

Greetings, Fiendish Readers. Yessir, we just got back up from Columbus after two days of debauchery in that decadent southern paradise we call Ohio...okay, maybe there was only one  orgy, and only five people showed up, and nobody was really into it...but still! Hedonism! The Downfall of Midwestern Civilization! The drive down was pretty harrowing, firstly because of the ice on the freeway (like driving over a glacier, damndest thing I've ever seen) and secondly because the Ohio freeway system is proudly, defiantly, exasperatingly committed to labeling every highway with three or four numbers, and interrupting their ostensibly free ways with traffic lights. We got turned around somewhere south of Findlay and ended up driving through cornfields for an hour before finally picking up 75 again. Honestly I don't think I've ever driven through Ohio without getting lost once; the state likes to suck in outsiders and funnel them into its empty interior, there to circle endlessl...

Well, yesterday was April Fool's Day...I did not get fooled. Or maybe I was. Perhaps there was some sort of meta-foolery going on, which I won't see until years later, and suddenly I'll wake up with a strange light in my eyes, the dawn of a new understanding of what They'd done, with profound regret and a sense of loss at the dialectic of my personal history, vis-a-vis the V2 Rocket. As you might have guessed, I just finished up Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow , and my brain is still recovering from the massive effort.  It took me a month to read the damn thing. I've read Russian novels in less time. I actually picked it up more on a personal dare than anything else;  Gravity's Rainbow  is considered  the  Quintessential Postmodern Novel (at least by  Wikipedia ) .  It's one of the "Big Three" of modern literature/college Lit courses, the other two being Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and Ulysses by James Joyce. Being a...