Archived DMs

Pale Fire Peoples! Welcome to Week 4! A nice long flight yesterday and some quality Father’s Day reading time has me nearly caught up. It seems like once I hit the King’s escape, things really started to move. I was struck this week by two stylistic features this book has in common with Gravity’s Rainbow … Read more

Pale Fire Peoples! Welcome to Week 3. It’s very special week for me, because this is the first week when I’m officially a little bit behind, which means we’re really rollin’ now. I’ve been savouring it a bit too much methinks. But enough about me — how are you doing out there? And more to … Read more

Pale Fire Peoples! Looks like we’re off to an excellent start. Lotsa folks on the march, with fully 20 posts so far on last week’s thread, including an excellent bit o’ background on the Zemlya of it all, filed just last night by so-called “Cort.” Good stuff! This week is a bit of a paradox. … Read more

Welcome Pale Fire Peoples! Today is the first day of the rest of your Deathmarch. By my (very rough) count, we have around 20-30 folks on board — this should be fun. For them what’re new to Deathmarching, here’s how it works: we’ll tackle the book in 40-50 pages/week chunks. Don’t sweat it too much … Read more

One week from today, the PFDM kicks off. Job one for this week: make sure you have yourself a copy of so-called “Pale Fire.” Job two: don’t read Pale Fire! Oh, you can read the cover copy. And you can read the spine. Please, read the spine. But as we learned with the GRDM, one … Read more

A few weeks back, we wrapped “The Gravity’s Rainbow Deathmarch,” in which some 13 or 14 of us went screaming across Pynchon’s notoriously challenging uber-book. Mark yer calendars. Two weeks from today — on May 31st — tanned, rested, and ready, we’ll be starting up Deathmarch 2. This time out, we’re tackling something a wee … Read more

In which our journey ends…. Congratulations and my thanks to everyone who took to the trail, you 35 or so who started this journey and enabled us achieve launch velocity, and you 13 or 14 who will make it through to the other side, 750 pages and 350+ comments later. A survival rate to be … Read more

Well this is it — the last stop before the final push! Just 7 days till we receive Ultimate Wisdom! Woo! I enjoyed the last week’s reading, packed with taffy bits, although I’ll confess to getting pretty lost during the FF sequence. I’ll hafta go back and give that another read. One recent passage I … Read more

At So-Called Bill’s excellent suggestion, last week turned into one final rest, reflect, and reread week before the grand finale. Now here we are, tanned and ready, primed for the big wrap and just — jinkies! — two more weeks to go. I really like the word “jinkies.” Next week: Page 706 (p/v), once more … Read more

So here we are at Week 14, and now it’s all right there, all right there within reach. Me myself, I’m about 8 pages off target, which is the closest I’ve been in a long while. The most recent stretch has been one of my favorites. In particular, the story of Byron the Bulb, which … Read more