First readings and Doing it Over

I like to do things again. Like when i play video games, i usually blunder about at the outset, running down every little alley and looking for hidden packages and good views. Then, after i've run it out, i start over and do it all efficient. Somewhere in there i go look up the FAQs people have written and go find the things i missed the first time.

So it is with books, sometimes. Usually, i feel like what's in the story i can pretty much get just reading it through the first time. At least, that's how standard narrative fiction works. Textbooks and poetry are precisely different: they i have to read paragraphs or even sentences over five, six times at the get-go. But narrative fiction mostly is pretty on the level.

When the narrative breaks down, or there isn't one to begin with, that's when it gets tricky. The prototypes are Joyce's Ulysses and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, neither of which i've gotten anywhere with. But my more moderate and topical example is Riddley Walker. Here is a book that one can read simply as a good story (assuming you can forget that the language is non-standard). Then Do It Over with a literary comb. Why does his journey over the wall, through to his meeting with Goodparley-- a solid 75-odd pages-- all occur in one night? And obviously everything's built on top of Canterbury, England, so there's all sorts to get from that. But don't tell me anything because i haven't even half finished the book.

But the whole idea is true everywhere else, too. It's why we make and cook the same meals over: to get better at it and try different things out. It applies everywhere. But what's troubling is the idea of the first attempt. There's some things that you can only do once, so you have to do them right the first time. Like a mission to the moon, or missile defense. You can practice similar things a lot, and run simulations, but the real run has to be right the first time, and every unique time afterwards, too. If we miss the moon, we could be off by hundreds of miles and left to drift, lost in space. If we miss the missile, well, there goes DC.

It's those right-the-first-time requirements that i think about when i restart the game for the twentieth time in half an hour. It's two fundamentally different ways of being. Planning and engineering, or trial and error. Each has it's place, i suppose.