(no subject)
I've been trying to read, read, read.
The problem is that the book I'm reading -- or at least trying to read -- at the moment: Richard Powers' the Goldbug Variations -- which comes highly recommended by more than one person who knows me well, and which (I might add) would indeed seem to be a perfect fit for my science-in-fiction mania -- is, in point of fact, interminably boring. Thing is, I can't quite decide yet if it's just poorly executed (too much hard science, not enough story -- not enough faith in the reader's ability to decipher the metaphor for himself without being hit over the head with explanatory formulae he doesn't understand)... or if it's just slow in getting started. And I mean slow -- as in 200 pages slow, in a book somewhere over 600 pages long. I'm trying to give it a fair shot. But I'm bored off my ears.
I thought it might help if I actually listened to the Goldberg Variations -- the ones by Bach, that is, which play such a heavy-handed part in Powers' book. So I went and found a website with a playable version of the whole score. But I can't say that the music interests me any more than the book does. I try so hard to appreciate classical music -- really, I do. But with very few exceptions (a riff here, a charming little ditty there), it leaves me cold. And I have to admit that I can't hear the theme in Bach's Goldbergs -- try as I may to count measures, listen as I might for patterns, all I hear is aimless, meandering noise. I'm not that musical, I guess -- actually, I suppose what I mean is that I'm not that mathematical. I'm musical enough to know when two... dozen Green Day songs are based on exactly the same three-chord progression; I'm more knowledgeable than most when it comes to popular music -- knowledgeable enough to know that it's not just a generational thing, either. I can get off on music that my great-grandparents probably enjoyed in their youth -- so why not this stuff of a couple hundred years before?
Being such a word-matician, you say, perhaps it's the absence of a lyric that leaves you cold? A sensible guess, but no -- because I don't get opera, either. I'm not sure what it is, really, but I've tried enough times to think that I probably had better just stop trying. De gustibus and all that -- there's no rule that says I have to dig Bach to be cultured. And perhaps I should pursue that particular bit of logic into my letters, as well: there's no rule that says I have to dig Richard Powers just because I dig Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo and Steve Erickson -- just because I dig the idea of the meta-scientific metaphor. I am reminded of Alice Warren-Gregory, senior year in Craig Dworkin's class, critiquing some sort of avant-garde experimental writing that she found particularly distasteful: "I don't really care whether her formula succeeded or not," she said -- "I'm not looking for a successful formula; I'm looking for a modicum of talent." Alice was right. Your Good Idea is well and good... but without the chops to pull it off, it's just an idea, nothing more.
That having been said, I'm going to give Richard Powers one more chance.