A while back, we did a group read of Moby-Dick, and artist Matt Kish was kind enough not only to endure an interview about his project to illustrate each page of the book but also to contribute several posts about his process. His project went on to be turned into a gorgeous book, and now he’s moving on to other projects. As part of that move, he’s looking to get shed of the remaining unsold pieces of Moby-Dick artwork. If you’re into Moby-Dick or are familiar with Matt’s work and think you might like to own a piece of it (I’ve bought several, and they’re among my most prized possessions), now’s a good time to buy. If you haven’t run across the work before, you at least owe it to yourself to see it online.
Author: Daryl L. L. Houston
Signs and Symptoms
I couldn’t help noticing in this week’s reading (1.19 – 2.3) that Pynchon writes a whole lot about things beneath the surface, including most notably the machinations leading to the theft of Slothrop’s identity so that, stuck, he can be manipulated and monitored as part of Pointman’s great experiment. Much has been choreographed with the intention — failed — of hoodwinking Slothrop without letting him know he’s being hoodwinked. Weisenburger points out that section 2.1 is very theatrical and that Katje pulls something of a magician’s stunt by covering Slothrop with a red cloth so that his identity can be made to disappear. And of course it’s worth noting that the epigraph that opens part 2 references a movie about an animal that captures a woman, much as the octopus Grigori somewhat comically captures Katje. Movies, of course, also attempt to dupe you into believing the stories they put before you, so the epigraph does more than simply prefigure the Grigori scene; it telegraphs something about the understanding that creeps along beneath the surface of at least the opening chapters of the section: that there’s the way things seem and there’s the manipulation being carried out to make them seem that way.
But it starts before we even get into part 2. Consider this exchange between Franz and Leni Pökler in 1.19:
She even tried, from what little calculus she’d picked up, to explain it to Franz as Δt approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of time growing thinner and thinner, a succession of rooms each with walls more silver, transparent, as the pure light of the zero comes nearer….
But he shook his head. “Not the same, Leni. The important thing is taking a function to its limit. Δt is just a convenience, so that it can happen.”
What Leni sees as a way of understanding something about the way the world works Franz brushes aside as a convenience. A scientist, he sees the way things operate under the surface, while Leni tries to use a mathematical metaphor to explain to him her outward perception of the world. In other words, it’s as if he sees what lies beneath while she sees only the surface; he seeks cause while she’s stuck with effect.
He was the cause-and-effect man: he kept at her astrology without mercy, telling her what she was supposed to believe, then denying it. “Tides, radio interference, damned little else. There is no way for changes out there to produce changes here.”
“Not produce,” she tried, “not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don’t know…” She didn’t know, all she was trying to do was reach.
We learn next that Franz can’t stay awake during films (and how filmlike that description of sliced time), and that he watches them “nodding in and out of sleep,” as if his experience of movies mimics the way moving pictures themselves worked, stills spliced together but always with gaps in between. Leni wonders how “did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open?” Moreover, he’s unable simply to enjoy films, picking at technical points because he’s more tuned in to the mechanisms of the films than the feelings they evoke. Yet we find him pasting up advertisements for a film and finally attempting to attend the film only to find the theater empty. This misadventure brings him to the rocket, which ignites in him a passion for the work, though at the cost of his partnership with Leni. The cause-and-effect man indeed.
This is all of course in the past. Jumping back to the present of the novel and all its obfuscations, we find the American Slothrop forced to go about confusingly in a British uniform, speaking with Dodson-Truck about signs and symbols and their hidden meanings, trying to grok schematics whose symbols are reversed as if to camouflage them, growing one of many possible types of mustache that could provide different cues about what type of person he might be. As he encounters the somewhat chameleonish Katje in the Himmler-Spielsaal room and ponders the roulette wheel, he thinks of “the game behind the game.” Within a page or so, we learn that Slothrop knows of some room in his past he doesn’t have access to, some horrible hidden thing that Katje seems to know about that he doesn’t. Later, as Dodson-Truck confides in Slothrop, we read again of this “terrible secret.”
Then we move into a séance and learn that the medium Eventyr, who channels the control Peter Sascha, doesn’t even have access to the very information he channeled, that he gets only the censored (read: manipulated) transcripts after the fact. He thinks of his “hidden life” and mentions “acrostics” — a sort of poetry but also a sort of crude code in which one message is buried within another. And this very notion of a person with access to some other plane hidden to most seems related to the concept of things being other than they seem.
It took delving into the chemistry of coal-tar to produce from an unlikely nasty substance a whole dye industry that made beautiful things.
And, finally, there is Slothrop’s unpleasant feeling that everybody around him seems to know something that he doesn’t. Is it paranoia if it’s true? He has access to the facts as they seem, but the machinery driving the great theater of his capture is a little off-kilter, a little bit too funhouse maybe, and he’s aware dimly that something fishy’s going on, though he lacks the hidden knowledge he’d need to have in order to understand just what.
Several times now, we’ve seen this funny little word “preterite,” which before reading Gravity’s Rainbow I had encountered only as it pertained to verb tense. Pynchon uses the word to mean something like “common people,” but there’s also the more specific meaning (rare according to the OED) “a person not elected to salvation by God.” In other words, the preterite are people denied access to certain knowledge/salvation/whatever that the elect do have access to, which would seem to apply pretty well to poor Slothrop, as, with less dire ramifications, to those of us consuming the shuddering frames a film is edited down to, or the jump-cut narrative of a book like Gravity’s Rainbow.
WTF for Gravity’s Rainbow, Week 2
We had two WTFs this week. Read and take a crack at them in the comments if you have any ideas or suggestions.
From Carol:
Are there underlying themes or histories, other than technical texts, that would be helpful in making sense of this? Herero language, European colonialism, the entire war in Britain…it all seems so vast and yet so specific. And I am saying this as a Joycean. Somehow I thought that this novel’s being set 40 years later than Ulysses would make the context easier. Not in the least, even with the companion text. And I am finding it difficult to just enjoy the ride for the beauty of it. But stay I will, if only to read again to see what hindsight might bring to the table! Any thoughts most appreciated!
And from edmondcb:
So at the end of 1.17, Pointsman recalls that Slothrop had been with Darlene, and later a rocket struck only a few blocks away (striking St. Veronica’s hospital). I had assumed that the rockets struck the EXACT location of Slothrop’s sexual encounters, but I tracked back through the book and couldn’t decipher if this was true or if they simply struck in close proximity. Helping justify the latter is the fact that Slothrop has been to Darlene/Ms. Quoad’s before, even tracked her on his map (p. 19), and that exact location was clearly not destroyed. So my assumption was probably just off, though it seems weird that exactitude is such a prominent measure in this book, as with the fact that Slothrop and Mexico’s maps have stickers on the exact same squares, etc.
To muddy the waters even more, the EXACT location the rocket struck is the ward that Slothrop was recently in, being given drugs that caused him to think of shit and history, not of sex. And as far as I know, there was no “hardon” to speak of, which we have been lead to believe would bring a rocket to that exact location.
Am I reading too much into this, or is this supposed to be a shift in the paradigm? I mean, Slothrop did get booted to France…
Difficulty
I keep my eye on tweets mentioning Gravity’s Rainbow and today saw one asking if GR was readable and worth it. The person also asked if his followers had read Infinite Jest, and which of the two books was better. Well, that judgment is awfully hard to make, but it sent me off to think about which was more difficult, since I tend to think Pynchon’s book is a lot harder to read than Wallace’s and so in some ways is less pleasurable and by extension not as good.
As evidence of GR‘s difficulty, I cite the fact that I read IJ for the first time in a 10-day marathon of 15-hour days over a Christmas holiday while in college. I pretty much couldn’t put the book down. As further evidence, I cite the probably half dozen times I read the first half dozen pages of GR before putting it aside. I believe I once read significantly more of the book but put it down again.
So, why was GR so much harder a book for me than IJ was? Part of it has to do, I suppose, with the fact that Pynchon writes about a lot of more or less factual things, and when confronted with so much real-world information that I didn’t know, or knew only very shallowly, I felt stupid and inadequate and didn’t want to feel that way anymore, so I quit. Wallace, on the other hand, writes less with history in mind and about experiences that aren’t so terribly different from my own. I never attended a tennis academy, but I have been a young man in locker rooms, and I’ve been to summer camps and eaten in cafeterias. I’ve never been addicted to drugs or spent time in a halfway house, but the experiences as Wallace presents them are very human experiences, whereas Pynchon so often writes at a greater distance from the people whose trials he’s documenting, and with a much greater emphasis (generally) on the technology and the argot of the fields and histories he writes about.
But there’s something else, too. (Well, there’s lots else, but one something else I’ll write about for now.) For all the guff Wallace took about writing a too-long book, being self-indulgent with the end notes, needing an editor, etc., it occurred to me tonight that IJ is actually very user friendly in a way that certain important books we’ve read here (or may yet read here) are not.
It all starts with Ulysses, of course. Joyce gave us pretty much unfettered access to the inside of Leopold Bloom’s head and wrote often without much in the way of transition or explicit stage direction. It’s really hard to get oriented within the book, and by the time you settle in to the style of one episode, Joyce goes off and changes the game on you by writing in another mode altogether. In 1973 and 1975 we got Gravity’s Rainbow and Gaddis’s JR. Gaddis too puts you inside the heads of his characters with precious little in the way of landmarks to help you navigate the prose. Written almost wholly in unattributed dialogue, JR requires that you learn how to read it before you can really begin to understand what it’s even saying. It’s fun, but capital-D Difficult. Pynchon’s not as freewheeling as Gaddis, since Pynchon at least breaks his book down into sections and provides exposition. But he also makes those crazy leaps. Miss a “. . . .” in the text as he jumps from one time or place to another and you’ll find yourself suddenly lost. Wait, when the fuck did I start reading about dodo birds? I thought this was a story about Hansel and Gretel.
Infinite Jest covers a lot of people over a period of time that’s kind of hard to pin down as you’re reading. Like Pynchon, Wallace provides landmarks in the form of clear section breaks. But unlike Pynchon, he tends to stay within the boundaries of a defined section. If he’s writing about Mario, you don’t suddenly find an unmarked leap over to Marathe and Steeply at another time and place within the same section. Further, Wallace conveniently puts a lot of the extra, technical, information in end notes. He’s been accused, on the basis of the 100 pages of notes, of being antagonistic to the reader, but it occurs to me that maybe putting the tangential information in end notes is his attempt at something like mercy. Where his forebears just dump the info on you inline, Wallace gives you a little break, slows down the information intake just a touch.
It’s as if Joyce came to the conclusion that he could lay on his readers everything in a character’s head and the postmodernists extended that idea, trying to give their readers not just the contents of their characters’ heads but everything under the sun and doing so in a way that sort of mimicked the awful burden of information-influx after the rise of radio and television and billboards. Wallace, then, says “too much,” or, if not “too much,” something like “slow down; let’s take this in pieces.”
And for me, I think that’s part of what makes Infinite Jest a much easier book than Gravity’s Rainbow. For all the information Wallace’s book contains, its information flow is more modulated than these earlier books, and it’s a relief. One reads that Wallace was also a proponent of a new sincerity, that he rejected the postmodern tendency toward irony as ultimately a non-productive (if not outright toxic) mode to write in. It’s interesting to me to suggest, then, that he sought to throttle information overload as he hoped to throttle irony, that he was pulling back from his smirking, hyper-intelligent forebears in a couple of ways, an après-garde all his own.
Slothrop and Orin
This isn’t likely to make too much sense if you haven’t read Infinite Jest, and it may also contain mild IJ spoilers. I offer it more as a set of idle observations than as any sort of thesis.
In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, we meet womanizer Orin Incandenza, about whom I wrote the following a few years ago:
A bit more on Orin. His name can be switched around to “iron,” “noir,” and “orni,” which, this last, makes me think of ornithology. He plays football for the Cardinals and is actually made to don fake wings (I think) and like a jetpack and fly down onto the field earlier in the book. Then a bird falls out of the sky into his apartment’s pool (oddly reminiscent of the end of Barton Fink, starring John Turturro, whom I peg as a shoo-in for playing JOI and/or JOI’s father in a movie adaptation of Infinite Jest). Then, on page 294, we have Orin engaging Joelle “entirely through stylized repetitive motions,” making me think of the mating dances of birds.
Orin has a habit of tracing the infinity sign with his finger on the flanks of the girls he has bedded. Like Orin, Slothrop traces a mathematical sign as he sows his oats, though in his case, it’s a Poisson distribution scrawled over a map of London.
And like Orin, Slothrop is frequently associated with birds, especially in the pastoral section 1.4, in which he appears in the company of an owl, girls called Wrens, peacocks, and hummingbirds and in which he sports an erection (his “cock,” if we want to stretch the bird motif a bit) as a rocket explodes. This section also happens to deal pretty heavily in the contrast between the earth and the sky, a dichotomy the sky-bound but (if I recall correctly) acrophobic Orin also contemplates.
Both men sport a very special appendage, and both are subject to paranoia. As Orin begins to fear that he’s being followed and ultimately has his fears confirmed and culminating in his being taken prisoner, so Slothrop begins to feel as if he’s being watched, and as if his cubicle is a trap (early in 1.15). Also probably not significant but certainly attention-getting for me was the reference early in 1.15 to “Enfields” — a name whose singular form will resonate with readers of Wallace’s novel.
Unlike Orin, Slothrop at least writes nice letters home to his mother.
And the WTFs Come Rolling In!
A couple of WTFs have come in today, which was nice, as I wasn’t sure the whole WTF thing would be of interest to anybody. I think what I’d like to try doing with these is maybe a weekly roundup in which I post or summarize the WTFs, provide any answers I may have, and of course let the conversation take its course in the comments. I’ll figure tentatively on posting these on Thursdays. This gives people time to wrap up the week’s reading if they’re a little behind, to digest any posts that come early in the week, and then to track any discussion through the end of the week. So, if you’ve got any WTFs, send ’em in and look for a roundup this Thursday.
Temptation
I may be dim, but both times I’ve read this far into Gravity’s Rainbow, I’ve been puzzled by the scene in which, chasing tail after his discharge from the abreaction ward, Slothrop lands himself in an old lady’s flat eating nasty candy. It’s a funny enough scene, but it always seemed sort of out of place amid the pretty serious stuff surrounding it.
It took a return to exercise after a lapse and the subsequent temptation of a box of Girl Scout cookies to open my eyes to what’s going on here. There it lay on the dresser, not even my favorite kind (Samoas win that title), but open, by gar, and all but leaping into my mouth as I dismounted the exercise machine and wiped away my sweat. Heart still pounding from exertion, I casually inspected the nutritional information printed on the box of cookies. Seven grams of fat and 170 calories in a serving; one cookie would cost me 2.3 grams of fat and 57 calories. As I did a little cost-benefit analysis, the connection struck me.
Blicero and Katje and Gottfried enact over and over again a fetishized game of Hansel and Gretel, and just a few pages later, Slothrop finds himself invited into an old crone’s house to feast on candy. Slothrop’s little confectionary adventure is a light-hearted callback to and dramatization of the folktale that Blicero appropriates. And the lesson in that folktale (bad parenting exemplum aside) and in Pynchon’s dual retelling of it has to do with temptation and its payoffs.
Blicero succumbs to the temptation of bedding a woman he suspects may be working for the British. Although he knows he’ll finally be given a push from behind into some oven or another, he’s certain it won’t come in the form of an air raid thanks to betrayal by Katje. But then she does leave, and he prepares for the worst, paying for his temptation in two, somewhat paradoxical, ways — he is, first, convinced that he was wrong to trust Katje after all and, second, denied the consummation of the betrayal he fears. Accustomed to controlling his playthings, he is now stripped altogether of control, and even of the illusion of making of his fate a sort of gift (a form of control in its own right, if what one reads about the rules in a sadomasochistic partnership is accurate — ie, that control of a situation is always just a single safe word away for the person being subjugated).
Slothrop’s temptation too comes at a cost, for we learn in 1.17 that the abreaction ward from which he has just been discharged has been bombed, and with it poor Spectro, who back in 1.8 shared a tense moment with Pointsman in which he tried to steer the behaviorist away from the temptation to try to experiment on Slothrop. Dipping his wick after entering that candy-strewn apartment costs lives, including that of a rare ally. (Of course, it’s not at all clear whether coitus is the cause or the effect here; still, I think the point is worth considering.)
Pointsman too confronts a great temptation. He’s tired of collecting the spit of dogs and isn’t terribly interested in studying the octopus Grigori, no matter how big and smart he is. He wants a man to poke and prod, and he wants in particular the man whose secret all the scientists paranormal and otherwise also covet. As 1.17 closes, we find Pointsman constructing rationalizations for designing an experiment around Slothrop, suffering be damned (“the man will suffer — perhaps, in some clinical way, be destroyed”), and he has his eye on the Nobel. It’s not just the shiny trophy he has his eye on, though; there’s something Faustian about Pointsman, and the connection Pynchon makes between his quest for knowledge and Theseus’s triumph in the labyrinth seems telling, for like Theseus, in order to win, Pointsman must destroy the creature that lies at the center of the labyrinth once he’s wended his way through it. Pointsman’s fall to temptation comes at the ultimate cost, in other words, of what scrap of humanity he may have left.
(It also occurs to me that like Theseus with his yarn, Hansel and Gretel leave breadcrumbs behind to help find their way out of their peril.)
Candy. Quim. Fame. Knowledge. Girl Scout cookies seem pretty insignificant as I ladder up that list, but it’s still hard not to feel a little satisfaction at having resisted.
The Kenosha Kid
As episode ten of part one of Gravity’s Rainbow opens, Tyrone Slothrop — injected with sodium amytal to induce a sort of trance wherein his psyche will be probed — is chewing on the line “Bet you never did the Kenosha Kid” in much the same way that I remember trying many years ago as a would-be poet to bend the repeating lines of a villanelle to my will by hanging on them different meanings and syntax. Is the Kenosha a dance? Or is the Kenosha Kid a person? If so, is he from the town Kenosha? And what does all this tomfoolery mean anyway? Weisenburger calls this interlude “one of the outstanding enigmas of GR,” and I certainly remember being baffled by it when I first read the book a few years ago.
But this time through, with the syntactic chicanery involved in the obsessive construction of a villanelle on my mind and tromping through the prose a bit better oriented than last time, I began to make a strange sort of sense of the Kenosha Kid bit.
Episode 1.10 is in some ways about discovering the pure. Consider for example Slothrop’s race anxiety, which certainly calls to mind period concerns with matters of miscegenation, race inequality, and so on. The appearance of Malcolm X (and particularly the fact that he appears pre-enlightenment) seems telling enough. The reference to the song “Cherokee” and Pynchon’s line “one more lie about white crimes” and several other references to Indians made me think of America’s treatment of its aborigines, which may resonate with certain other grisly race marginalization that World War II reeks of.
Weisenburger posits that this episode introduces some of the most important opposites in the novel (e.g. north/south, black/white). He also mentions the at first (to me) unintelligible pairing of “shit” and “the word.” Well, the episode is surely full of shit. But what’s this business about “the word?” Maybe it’s a typographical error in my older edition of the companion. Thinking of Slothrop’s descent into the sewer, I remembered that episode 1.4 dealt pretty extensively with another pairing: sky vs. earth. And flipping back, I reencountered the following: “Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to the country’s fate.”
That capital W makes a big difference. Slothrop’s turpitude generally and our trip through the sewer of his uncomfortably unfettered subsconscious looks back to his family’s history and its granite-chiseled concern for squaring matters with that hand reaching down from the sky. Near the end of 1.10, we even return briefly to a churchyard scene:
Then for another moment it seems that all the Christmas bells in the creation are about to join in chorus — that all their random pealing will be, tis one time, coordinated, in harmony, present with tidings of explicit comfort, feasible joy.
But then we go right back to Slothrop’s fantasy of the Roxbury slum, sine-waving from relief, hope, and redemption back to the gutter and his fear of all those black folk with their prying fingers, and back to those ehisshehwle Hahvaad boys who ought to know better than to think the sorts of things we encounter while rummaging through Slothrop’s mind. All this back and forth, from grime to righteousness and so on, begins to seem to correspond roughly with that pesky pairing that big books tend to touch on: right and wrong.
In 2005, a Pynchon reader discovered a pulp western story titled “The Kenosha Kid” that itself takes up moral ambiguities. The eponymous hero is described early on as a sort of Robin Hood. A gambler who makes his living taking other people’s money but who has a large capacity for both guilt and generosity, the Kenosha Kid struggles over the course of the story with how he can best reason which of the people he encounters are and are not scoundrels and how he should conduct himself. For example, he cheats at cards to beat a man he believes had pulled a prior stick-up, but then he begins to feel sympathy for the character. When the stick-up-artist lands in jail due to circumstances resulting directly from the loss of his money, the Kid endures something of a moral crisis. He feels bad for the bad guy. Published in 1931, the story is of about the right vintage for Slothrop to have read as a youngster. And of course we all know that we dredge up the weirdest things in dreams, presumably also when in drug-induced trances.
So to me, the Kenosha Kid bits that frame 1.10 begin to make sense as snatches from Slothrop’s memory that bubble up as he works through matters of judging people based not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character (reasoned judgment of character being something the Kid prides himself on). It’s especially relevant given the content of Slothrop’s hallucination and our discovery in 1.12 that the whole point of his participation in these experiments is “to help illuminate racial problems in his own country.” In other words, maybe all this poking at Slothrop ostensibly to get at racial issues in America is pushing buttons in his head that make him ping-pong back and forth between reprehensible racist thoughts and a more noble and enlightened impulse he’ll recall from having read “The Kenosha Kid.” None of this is to say that I think Pynchon is trying to show us a man fighting a morality war with himself; but it does seem as if he’s maybe showing us a way in which he thinks the brain might operate when left untended.
Slothrop’s wordplay, then, becomes for me a sort of emblem of his subconscious brain at work. In the same way that I twiddled lo these many years ago with the syntax and enjambment of my repeating lines of doggerel until I felt like I had worked out a scheme that felt right, Slothrop’s tranced-out brain here is trying to piece together a coherent sense of the moral right, and as so often happens in dreams, a minor detail becomes the focus of a riff, is imbued with greater significance than it really merits on its own.
Your Intrepid Bloggers
During the Gravity’s Rainbow group read, you’ll be hearing with some regularity from three bloggers, all probably familiar voices if you’ve been following since the original Infinite Summer program a few years ago. Others may (or may not) peek in from time to time. The core cast will run as follows:
JEFF ANDERSON is a writer and copy editor; he’s also a quilter, an incessant reader, a sometime musical ambassador to Cuba, and a member of that very exclusive elite: the 150 Jeopardy! contestants who lost to Ken Jennings. He’s excited to once again join the shambling horde of Zombies for a big tough book. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband.
CHRISTINE HARKIN is an editor, writer, branding consultant, and former English professor who has avoided Gravity’s Rainbow long enough. She can’t promise to be insightful or erudite during this group blog, but she’s grateful for the opportunity to move her literary ramblings off the sidelines of http://naptimewriting.com (where she spent Infinite Jest and 2666) to a classy joint like Infinite Zombies.
DARYL L.L. HOUSTON signed on to blog Infinite Jest for the original installment of Infinite Summer and had so much fun doing it that he decided to stick around and blog Dracula and 2666 as well. He later kicked off a group read one of his all-time favorites, Moby Dick, and went on to subject IZ followers to his frequent confusion about and frustration with Ulysses. He has worked as a pig farmer, roller coaster driver, and copy editor and now pulls levers and knobs as a computer programmer in Knoxville, Tenn.
Paul Debraski has also faithfully blogged about all the Infinite Summer line of books, sometimes here and sometimes at his own site, where he’ll be writing his not-to-be-missed impressions of Gravity’s Rainbow.
If you’re going to be writing about your read, leave a link in the comments!
WTF?
I’ve begun reading Gravity’s Rainbow and am sort of paralyzed by how much there is going to be to write about. It’s a problem with any of the books of the sort we tend to cover here, but this one seems so much more complex in some ways, and so much more in need of very deep dives on many topics (e.g. WWII history, psychology, the paranormal, narrative approach) than some of our other books have seemed to me. The book covers such wide ground in the first week’s sections that there’s going to be lots left undiscussed here. I don’t think I can do anything resembling justice to the book in my posts and still keep my day job and my family. Even with a couple of bloggers joining me (more on that soon), there’ll be huge gaps.
So I’m trying something a little different for this read. I’ve added a WTF page that you can use to propose ideas for the bloggers here to cover or to ask questions about things that baffle you in the book that you think may merit some attention. If anybody even fills the form out, it’s entirely possible that we’ll have neither expertise nor inclination to address the questions, but we’ll at least consider them. This is basically a way to have a chance at starting a new topic without derailing the comment threads on another post.
If we get a fair number of questions/requests and no bloggers pick up the topics, maybe I’ll do an occasional roundup that includes a listing of untouched topics with an invitation to take them up in the comments. If the thing just generates spam, I’ll turn it off.
So, throughout this read, if you want to ask a question or suggest a topic, head on over to the WTF page and get in touch.
Infinite Zombies 