I woke up this morning and my vacuum was full. My mother asked me on Skype which party I would have voted for, had I the right to vote in Germany, which I don’t, being Austrian. I’m not sure if I’m going to vote in Austria next week, given that I have been gone for 13 years and have no idea what’s going on. Another vacuum, the political. I went out to buy vacuum bags, which seems to be a bigger and more corrupt industry than printer ink and toner. Dust must be the greatest conqueror of them all, it occupies everything and will always be there, will always return. I made a mental note: research the history of the vacuum cleaner. I couldn’t find the right vacuum bag for my model, the Rowenta Power Space. That sucks, or doesn’t. Back home I found a package containing Thomas Pynchon’s new novel “Bleeding Edge”, as well as an email from Christopher, asking me to participate in the 60pages project, so naturally I decided that “Bleeding Edge” must be my first pick. It is set shortly before September 11th, 2001 and shortly after the collapse of the dotcom bubble, in another vacuum. There are covert FBI sting operations going on in the donut empires of the USA, a cruise ship carrying “AMBOPEDIA Frolix”, a yearly gathering of the American Borderline Personality Disorder Association, but also catering to people self-diagnosed with Generic Undiagnosed James Bond Syndrome (“Hasn’t made it into the DSM yet, but they’re lobbying, maybe the fifth edition…”), a video pirate whose strange method of zooming in and out of the cinema blockbusters he pirates is dubbed a “neo-Brechtian subversion of the diegesis” by an enthusiastic NYU professor, and all that before I reached page 15.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA0yAcfnuuI