Posted by
Steve Smith on
Mar 21, 2013; 5:24pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Twitches-tp7582180p7582194.html
I'll see your "King's Men" and raise
you a
"Stone Junction" by Jim Dodge
It is a novel I think Glen might have liked to have lived in (I
know I do), Rich may *be* living in, Doug might wish he had
written, and all the lab rats here (folks working for, with or
formerly so, the DOE Complex... self included) will cringe at.
Tory if she is listening might likely wish both to live in it and
have written it... She may have been living next door to Jim
Dodge in Berkeley *while* he was writing it, and Frank may have
had occasion to throw him out of the UCB Library along with Paul
Erdos and Phillip K. Dick at closing time. And Stephen Guerin? I
think he might *be* Jim Dodge!
While it is an outlaw epic of the magnitude of Abbey's Monkey
Wrench Gang, it verges on alchemical conceits roughly crossing
Carlos Castenada with the likes of William Gibson and Bruce
Sterling.
As an aside, I was shocked to notice deeper in the Google Books
information, a set of passages matched to other books? Google is
now indexing phrases in literature? Who knew? Creepy but cool?
Cool but Creepy?
e.g.
Page
130 -
The whole of art is one
long roll of revelation.' And it is revealed only to those
whose minds are
Appears
in 7 books from 1947-2003
When Glen writes his "great american novel" (surely to be also
an alchemical potboiler, a digital noir happening, an outlaw
epic?) all his (published on paper or internet, indexed by
Google) forgotten influences and sources will be exposed.
His Twitch will be a folding of the origami paper, or perhaps
a pull of the taffy.
Which tangents me (me, tangenting?) to Jiddu Krishnamurti's
line paraphrased roughly as: "your existence is like a piece
of paper, every experience you have is a fold, and your soul
is the sum of all the creases left". At the time, I was
feeling a bit like a crumpled ball of paper, but the metaphor
still held all too well.
- Steve
glen wrote at 03/21/2013 06:36 AM:
I forget when I read it, though. I still have my copy
somewhere; perhaps there are notes or something that will remind me when
I read it first. Thanks.
Yep. Sure enough I have page 314 starred:
"We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try
for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in
California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom
under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing.
Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred
to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if
the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all?
Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was
all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man's face
know about the twitch, and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how
did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I
decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is
what you have to go to Calfirnia to have a mystic vision to find out.
That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found
that uot, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one
with the Great Twitch."
My copy seems to have been printed in 1982. And I don't think I started
writing in the margins of books until my senior year in high school
(1985). So, this would definitely be one of the, if not the, earliest
influences for my awareness of the twitch ontology.
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