Several days later Murray asked me about a story known as the most read passage in White Noise. We turned 12 pages into the book, around where Delillo’s developing Murray’s character. There were cereal boxes and corduroy.  Something had happened with a woman in Detroit. Soon the allusions started coming to mind. THE MOST READ PASSAGE IN WHITE NOISE. I remembered having read five separate analyses of this passage before we reached the passage. Even then, there were 40 grad students and a full professor of English peering over our shoulders. We shrugged and went along. All the people had hornrims; some had lattes, multicolor highlighters, and an air of smug hyperliteracy. A man near the front murmured symbols and referents — impressions of the passage taken from his elevated spot. We turned around and watched the readers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in the little book.

“No one reads the passage,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve read all the interpretations of the passage, it becomes impossible to read the passage.”

He fell silent once more. People with literature degrees left the elevated site, replaced by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every reading reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man near the front murmured symbols and referents.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We read only what the others read. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all great books.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are reading about reading,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the passage like before it was analyzed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other passages, how was it similar to other passages?”

I thought of the idea for this blog post a few summers ago, when I had graduated college and finally got around to reading White Noise. I’d heard a lot of praise for the book, so I picked it up from my school’s library while I still had borrowing privileges. As soon as I got to the break on the twelfth page, though, I got a sense of déjà vu — wheels might have turned subconsciously  when I’d been introduced to Jack and Murray in the opening pages of the book, but as soon as I read about their trip into the country, I knew I had read it before. Ah, yes, “the most photographed barn in America!” I had indeed already read this excerpt (from, I think, the same webpage I just linked), because after encountering several number of references to it in other contexts, I had had to see what all the fuss was about. Various invocations of The Barn Scene haunted my undergraduate career, and I don’t think I ever even took a proper English or Lit class. It’s a terrific scene in a book I enjoyed a lot; it’s just a little bit overanalyzed, you know?

I was reminded of this scene last night on my flight home for the holidays, as I read David Foster Wallace’s essay on television and irony, which quotes the passage at some length. I would have to excuse Wallace’s reference passage even if he had treated it superficially (you can be sure he didn’t!), since “E Unibus Pluram” itself was published only a few years after White Noise. Anyway, both the book and the essay are great reads, and for today’s reader they might elicit a feeling of intellectual and pop culture nostalgia. Which, I’m sure an abler critic than I could argue, is the idea.

Just to make this post topical, though, I do want to register my interest in the traces of international law scattered throughout the series. See, for instance, the citation of section 13 of the Statute of Secrecy of the International Confederation of Warlocks, seemingly a transnational regulative body with the authority to prosecute offenders (Ch. 2 in Chamber of Secrets). It’s probably easier to negotiate such a powerful regime, of course, when its stakeholders (witches and wizards, I’d presume, though I’m not sure yet whether warlocks might be their own distinct group) share such a wide cultural and normative base in common.

Really, though, I’m enjoying the books, and I’ve mostly been able to put my horn-rimmed side on hold for the duration.

EDIT: Oh, I should have known: the definitive, peer-reviewed (!) survey of the law of Harry Potter was written way back in 2005.

Oh yes, this is a novel with footnotes.

But it’s not like you might imagine! Never once did reading Icelander feel like slogging through Infinite Jest; never once did the writing feel affected or precious. In fact, it was more engaging than a  lot of the more straightforward fiction I’ve made time for  already this  summer. There’s a swordfight! There are Icelandic ninjas! At the heart of it all, there’s even a murder mystery! Icelander knows how to balance the literate with the pulpy, and it works so well precisely because of this balance.

If the book sounds good, I’m afraid you’re too late to catch it on sale at McSweeney’s, as I did. But I’ll forgo my usual Amazon affiliate link to link to McSweeney’s online store again, because, sale or not, they could still use your business. And you could use a good book, right?

“What an enchanted garden that would be for anybody lucky enough not to be able to read it!”

And if I ever find myself playing in the backup band for some pop chanteuse, you know I’m petitioning that we be called “The 100,000 Normal Deviates.”

“8.30 plane to Detroit. Drove to Ann Arbor for lunch with the President of the University of Michigan and about forty other people at about 12 o’clock. It was a ghastly luncheon, not a drop to drink at the long reception beforehand – I hadn’t expected anything at lunch – totally inedible food, and speeches, which again I hadn’t expected, after lunch. Then over to the theatre for the commencement and honorary degree ceremony and my address to an audience of about four thousand. To be honest, I don’t think the address went very well: it was a good speech, but too long, thirty-four minutes, and slightly too elaborately prepared, as well as trying to say too much. In any event I always find commencement addresses difficult, and the total absence of alcohol didn’t help either.”

For you following at home, that president would be Mr. Administration Building himself, Robben Wright Flemming.

Below, the email I received announcing the news, and including a bit more information:

“As of this morning, the University Library version of materials scanned through our partnership with Google has been released to the public. Both the MBook and Google versions are directly accessible from the records found in Mirlyn for particular books and journals.As you may know, works clearly in the public domain (that is, not or no longer copyright restricted) are fully accessible, while works still under copyright, or with rights remaining to be determined, are viewable either as snippets (Google, based on the first 3 occurrences of search terms in the book), or as a complete index to all occurrences of search terms (MBooks). The initial definition of “public domain” [*****] for this project has been conservative, and includes materials published before 1923 (US) or before 1909 (other countries). Over time, we can
expect restrictions on access to many more materials to be lifted.

The two different interfaces do differ in a variety of other ways. Printing from MBooks, for example, must currently be done one page at a time (We recommend switching to the pdf view), while Google is making entire works available for printing or download. I find that the MBooks version is particularly helpful when looking for a known item, or when trying to locate a particular journal volume.

I am not sure how many volumes are available in this initial release, but it is very large, and growing rapidly. A sample Mirlyn advanced search on keyword=history, format=electronic and dates of publication=1900-1910 just returned 1,480 titles — many of which are MBooks titles.

Both versions provide links on each page to send in comments. Please help us improve our electronic holdings by making use of the comment links, or contacting me directly (please see below).

Janet Crayne, Head
Slavic and East European Division
University of Michigan Library
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1205
(734) 936-2348 (phone)
(734) 763-6743 (fax)
jcrayne@umich.edu”

• The elevator table is built, and looks okay. You can see it there, and there’s another photo up on Flickr. For better or worse, I think it’s a good reflection of my abilities as a carpenter.
• Takeaway life lesson: glass table tops are really expensive. I priced out several glass options, along with Plexiglass (scratches too easily) and poured acrylic (too heavy). In the end, Jessica and I lucked out by finding the pictured sheet of 1/4″ glass, 2′x3′, at Owosso’s Goodwill, for two bucks. That’s obscenely fortunate, I realize.
• Also lucky: finding a decent pair of speakers (Marantz 900s) nearby. To be clear, the luck didn’t come from finding the speakers (like pianos, decent speaker sets from about twenty-five years ago turn up all the time for free on Craigslist), it came in finding the forty-pound pair of speakers two doors down from my apartment. They’re beat up, but they sound great!
• I finished Dave Eggers’ book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius a few days ago. It’s uneven, and the author’s right when he warns that you should really only read the first hundred-odd pages. Still, it was worth reading.

From “Entropy,” Pynchon’s character considers post-war iconography:

“…And the tango. Any tango, but more than any perhaps the sad sick dance in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. He thought back: what had tango music been for them after the war, what meanings had he missed in all the stately coupled automatons in the cafés-dansants, or in the metronomes which had ticked behind the eyes of his own partners? Not even the clean constant winds of Switzerland could cure the grippe espagnole: Stravinsky had had it; they all had had it. …”

And, from the author’s introduction:

“In the character of Callisto, I was trying for a sort of world-weary Middle European effect, and had put in the phrase grippe espagnole, which I had seen on some liner notes to a recording of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire Du Soldat. I must have thought this was some kind of post-World War I spiritual malaise or something. Come to find out it means what it says, Spanish influenza, and the reference I lifted was really to the worldwide flu epidemic that followed the war.”

The lesson? Even Thomas Pynhon was a pretentious faker once. Actually, editorially, I might add that he probably still is, but (crucially!) at some later point he mastered the art of letting someone else pick up after him. A great — and forthright! — author.

[The band] owed their new name to a sloppy rehearsal of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Unable to recall the French portions sung in the original (“qu’est-ce que c’est…”), they began shouting any foreign-language terms they could remember, when someone said “Husker Du”, a board game from Denmark that had been popular in the 1960s (the phrase means “do you remember?”). The group added heavy metal umlauts, and had their new name. [Bob] Mould reports that they liked Hüsker Dü’s somewhat mysterious qualities, which set them apart from other hardcore punk groups with names like “Social Red Youth Dynasty Brigade Distortion” (Azerrad, 162).

and

The newly-monikered group had their first official performance in early 1979. A short way into the show, one of [drummer Grant] Hart’s friends unplugged [erstwhile keyboard player Charlie] Pine’s keyboards and gave him the finger. The remaining musicians made no objection, and Hüsker Dü formally became a trio.

Finally, Greg Norton had a handlebar mustasche. For real.

(Oh, the “Azerrad” cited above and throughout the article is Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life. I read a review of it four and a half years ago in The Nation of all places, and since then I’ve seen the book referenced probably more than any other recent musical history. I’ve gotta pick it up one of these days.)