Evan Lavender-Smith
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading, and why. One Note 003: Evan Lavender-Smith, Eric Chevillard, The Crab Nebula.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Evan Lavender-Smith.
I’m rereading The Crab Nebula by Eric Chevillard after having finished The Book of Frank by CAConrad (Frank’s paradoxicalness reminded me a bit of Crab’s and I felt compelled to spend some time with Crab again). I’m thinking about The Crab Nebula in relation to Brian McHale’s argument about the movement from modernism’s epistemological dominant to postmodernism’s ontological dominant: in Chevillard’s novel I perceive the indistinctness or irrelevance of the categories epistemological and ontological. Questions of knowledge and being are bizarrely and delightfully tangled up in this one.
Evan Lavender-Smith is the author of From Old Notebooks and Avatar.
