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busy week at work. new people turned up as expected. negotiating security framework with ray at ncsa. things seem to be working out.

worked the week as a "normal" week. weekend off and pauli here, currently asleep.

last night finished david markson's vanishing point. found it nowhere near as good as wittgenstein's mistress. spoilers follow.

those are the only two books of his i've read. are they all the same? wittgenstein felt like a breath of fresh air. vp less so, using a similar approach. lists of factoids.

but wittgenstein had a strong central character - the narrative voice was a smart, witty, curious artist. and the final denoument worked. made me empty inside. in contrast, vp is lifeless. there is less narrative, a weaker voice, and the last "twist" is predictable and uninteresting (unless, i suppose, the mansuscript was actually found by markson's deathbed - since the authorial voice is, i assume, largely his).

there are a few good jokes - i laughed out loud a couple of times - and it's short. the snippets themselves are interesting, in a thumbing-through-the-dictionary kind of way.

it's difficult to find much else that's good to say about it. the only "intellectual" conundrum revolves around anecdotes on the relative and arbitrary nature of artistic judgement which raise the question of whether the author himself was expecting criticism. but i'm not sure that reading "ha, i knew you'd think this rubbish" rates high in the way of entertainment.

one other disappointment is the lack of range. pi is quoted, to 5 decimal places, einstein appears a couple of times, and there are some jazz references (via a thread on racial persecution). but it's generally the standard canon. opera. museum art. writers. not that far removed from wittgenstein (which had the same themes with a little philosophicle - typo, or a thinking mans popsicle - icing).

now i'm a scientist. i missed some references. perhaps the important ones? but they were few, i believe. and i can't help wondering how much sense a humanist would make of a book in which things are reversed. gravity's rainbow is the closest example i can think of. and that is a poor approximation.

still, next on my pile is power's gold bug variations. maybe that will be the one.