Finnegan's Wal-Mart

"Reading, say, Gravity's Rainbow or Moby Dick cover to cover allows one a certain sense of superiority over the average person in line ahead of you at Wal-Mart," explains blogger Matt, nailing the exact reading ethos Pynchon and Melville both had in mind. By contrast, he goes on, "Finnegan's Wake is a bizarre, comic, frustrating, beautiful enigma of a novel that ... begins to gradually assume a strange and marvelous elegance."

That gradual process ended rather abruptly for Matt last October, after 8 posts in about 3 weeks on his Finnegans Wake reading blog, having Finished Section 1. Then what?

A couple of weeks later, and Matt was instead finding "high adventure in the wal-mart bargain dvd bin ... rummaging through ... a haphazard collection of DVDs, mostly of dubious quality, which can be had for the modest sum of roughly five bucks." A good thing for his sense of superiority that he at least got a few of the film names right.