The Long Thing

One of the pleasures of reading unfinished masterpieces is that there's no pressure on you. 'Oh, you still haven't finished The Man Without Qualities?' 'Neither did Robert Musil.' etcetera. Anyway, this is a series of thoughts about what makes unfinishable pieces unfinishable, other than simply running out of time. I love the feeling of a piece that isn't completely held together, isn't completely sealed and finished, I think because in the gaps (the aporia, for any Serious Thinkers out there) there is a lot of room for the reader to inflect the experience. The same way children, given a choice, play in building sites rather than finished houses. Not so many citations, mostly keeping my attention on the pieces themselves. Books Discussed: The Pale King, David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace The Cantos, Ezra Pound Megalopolis, dir. Francis Ford Coppola In a references so glancing (I took a lot of meanders out of the draft) that it feels almost insulting to them to mention: Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci Oblivion, David Foster Wallace Piers Plowman, William Langland? The Aeneid, Virgil I have a blog attached to the channel, now, and will post some further thoughts on this, so any questions or threads you'd be interested in seeing pulled further, please let me know. I know The Cantos is a lot tougher and less popular perhaps than other stuff I've spoken about here before, and I'm thinking about maybe doing a close-reading series, so it would be useful to gauge interest for that, or perhaps a reading group, also. The music is almost all Debussy, sort of chopped up bits of Debussy's Preludes, played on a Wurlitzer, beginning with the Cathedrale Engloutie, which I figured thematically was the best, then, Des Pas sur la Neige, and Terrasse des Audience de Clair de Lune, played much slower than their stated tempo. Mixed in is Brian Eno, The Big Ship. I wanted static harmonies and massive subjects, and think I found a good mix. Thanks a lot to ‪@t1mos‬ for letting me know about the first version's audio. Hopefully all fixed now.