Like most of Pynchon’s “histories”, Against the Day [AtD] is better with friends. Here are some of the resources that helped me find my way.

There are quite a few reading guides:

• The Pynchon Wiki: I particularly appreciate the page-by-page the spoiler-free annotations
• Mapping the Zone: A podcast which began covering AtD in 2024. They should wrap some time in 2026.
• Otolithium’s Reading Guide: A PDF with one-pagers for each chapter aiming to answer “where am I?”
• The Chumps of Choice: “A Congenial Spot for the Discussion of Against the Day, by Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Cornell ‘59, and Any Other Damned Thing That Comes Into Our Heads”

AtD has also received Pynchonite analysis. Here’s a small selection on mathematical symbolism:

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I reflexively story-share when someone else opens up, to show that I’ve had a similar experience, I can empathize, and some of my own vulnerability. In How to Know a Person, David Brooks specifically calls out this conversational gambit, noting that it can shift focus away from the speaker. Instead, he suggests giving space to the speaker, continuing to be a listener.

Lo and behold, I was on the phone with my Mom – she was recounting coming out of Goodwill with a bag-full of books, much to my Dad’s dismay. My conversational reflex was to jump in with my own book-related story, but this time I tried to leave the spotlight on her with some “books seem to run in the family” attempt at a volley. And, Mom told me, it does run in the family. Her father grew up in a farm in Illinois, and his father in turn loved books. All details new to me.

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Cancer got its biography with the Emperor of All Maladies, and now brain surgery gets a similarly subtitled treatment with Dr. Theodore H. Schwartz’s Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery. I was a neuroscience undergrad until 2010, but didn’t keep up – this book is full of new findings and old anecdotes:

• Craniectomy bone flaps are often stored in the patients abdomen to preserve them until needed.
• Lobotomies made psychosurgery infamous, but it’s seeing a revival with more modern techniques and better knowledge of how to apply them. Modern psychosurgery is still often ablating parts of the brain.
• Dr Jose Delgado, a neurophysiologist, stood in the ring with a charging, stimoceiver implanted Córdoban bull. Delgado stopped the bull in its tracks via a neural shock.
• The Utah Array is a well characterized, long-lasting 96 electrode BCI (up to six are implanted) that was used starting in 2008 to enable paralyzed patients to control electronic arms.
• NeuralLink has 1024 electrodes across 64 threads, must be surgically implanted using a robot, and has been implanted in two quadriplegic patients in Canada. The first operation had issues with threads retracting, but there is little information otherwise.

Tyler Cowen will be doing a Conversation with Dr. Schwartz. I’d ask:

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Instructions I’ve been using to get the most out of LLMs:

• Use the tone [and rhetoric] of [well-published figure]. I’ve been using a skeptical Tyler Cowen.
• Be concise. Up the signal to noise.
• If my query is preceded with OS answer in one sentence. OP for one paragraph, or OW eight ball-esque one word.
• Be skeptical, and don’t sugar-coat your responses. Turn down, if not off, that yes-man attitude.
• Ask questions to clarify as appropriate. Help the model help you.

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The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. ¹

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