🚀 go-pugleaf

Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> writes:

> On 2018-08-04, Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:
>
>> ma...@mail.com writes:
>>
>>> I also love Stephenson. He seems to have access to a lot of info
>>> that is not easily found.
>>
>> My feeling is that Stephenson is "monstrous" in the same way that
>> comets were once regarded as monstrous, something inexplicable in
>> the context of a straightforward and well-ordered world.  I can't
>> imagine the cogntive state that can produce _Cryptonomicon_ or _The
>> Baroque Cycle_.  I was and remain totally gobsmacked by anyone
>> being able to do that.
> 
> He needs a decent editor to say to him "Yes, Neil, excellent, now go
> away and make it half the length".

If his books were half the length, they would provide only half the
enjoyment from reading them.  Or perhaps less than half, depending on
how imbued that putatively "decent" editor were with the notions of
mass marketing to a public typified by ca. 5th grade reading skills.

I confess to having been unable to get through The Idiot, which I only
attempted in order to try to fill in the holes created by the studio
when they cut Kurosawa's movie version to shreds.  And I could never
finish Gravity's Rainbow.  OTOH, I had no trouble with Murakami's
_1Q84_.   But Pynchon and Dostoevsky just don't have whatever it is
that Stephenson has.  

I've read the whole Cryptonomicon/Baroque Cycle corpus (which I tend
to think of as a single stupendous opus) 10 times.  And you think it's
too long for once?

       What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley
       feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for
       there would be no one who wanted to read one.
                         -- Neil Postman,  Amusing Ourselves to Death

Well, maybe a nice, pithy short one, eh?


ObComputers [sort of]:

    Did you know that the Maunder Minimum matches the period covered
    by The Baroque Cycle almost exactly?

-- 
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada