Ending the year in the desert

I'm back in the Mojave Desert, where I spent a month last year. Drove down here with my friend Christine; she's back home after three weeks in the city, and I came down just to be with her on the drive.

We talked and talked. The Central Valley was horribly smoggy, but you rise above it going through the Tehachapi pass, and then you're in the desert, where the sunset was beautiful, and the night is clear and the quarter moon casts a lovely light across the landscape.

Later we'll go to a New Year's party at Perry's house. And tomorrow I'll fly back to San Francisco.

A bow to all who accompanied me so far.

Be sure to check the newspaper

Among the now quaint touches in the mid-century work of writer Patricia Highsmith is that there are almost always newspaper reports of the crimes or disappearances involved in the story, and Highsmith uses these articles to keep both characters and readers up to speed on plot developments.

For example, take Those Who Walk Away, an unremembered but very representative work. In the novel, two classic Highsmith characters oppose each other: the protagonist, a man in his late 20s who is somewhat at loose ends, and the antagonist, a middle-aged, well-to-do American who is both a busybody and a bully. Early in the book, the middle-aged man, Edward Coleman, attempts to murder the protagonist, not once but twice, and the second time the protagonist lets him think he's gotten away with it. Not quite knowing what to do next, the protagonist, Ray Garrett, leaves his luggage and passport at the Venitian hotel he's staying in (that's another hallmark of classic Highsmith, Americans in swanky European locations; it's a wonder more of her books weren't turned into films on the order of "Charade") and hides out in a rooming house under an assumed name. The hotel notices after a few days that he's vanished and reports it to the American embassy, and like clockwork, there's a notice in the newspaper.

"Perhaps you should speak to the police, Edward," Inez said.

"Wait till I see the paper. I'll speak with them if I have to."

The paper and [breakfast] arrived.

Ray Garret's picture, probably his passport picture, was one-column wide on the front page, and the item below it some two inches long. It stated that Rayburn Cook Garrett, 27, American, had not returned to his room at the Pension Seguso, 779 Zattere, since last Thursday evening, November 11th. His passport and his personal effects were still in his room. Would anyone who had seen him that evening or since come forward...

A chapter or two later in the book, the disappeared man picks up the next day's newspaper:

Ray bought a Gazzetino, scanned the first page before tucking it under his arm, and was relieved to see there was nothing about him, at least not on the front page.

The author uses this trope in many books. Sometimes the protagonist has been accused of a crime, or questioned by the police in someone else's disappearance; in this case it's the protagonist himself who has disappeared, but it's still a news story.

It struck me as I was reading today how quaint this will seem to future readers, who will have no idea of the significance that the story appeared on "the front page" or not, and how many "inches" the story ran. But it's not just the anachronistic nature of the newspaper trope that struck me, because it's just as easy for an author today to say that a character subscribes to the tweet feed of a news organization and gets little updates on his phone. What struck me is the need for the story to have this whole external witness -- a news organization reporting the movements of characters, sometimes of the police. It's sort of a way to tell the reader that the characters have a certain level of substance, that they're capable of doing something that floats for a moment to the "front page" of the news, even though they are, for Highsmith's own purposes, deliberately obscure and anonymous people.

A little later in the book Highsmith introduces another familiar trope: a private detective, hired by the missing man's father, comes on the scene to investigate -- just as in The Talented Mr. Ripley. In fact, the farther I read in Those Who Walk Away, the more it seems like a by-the-numbers effort by Highsmith, a work consisting of no elements not found in her previous works, with the familiar elements re-arranged somewhat. Still, I like reading it. It's certainly better than some of her later efforts, such as People Who Knock On the Door, which is frankly dull.

Something else lost

Driving down 17th Street the other night, I passed this building on the corner of Florida Street, catty-corner from Project Artaud.

Project Artaud was one of the original factories converted to live-work spaces in the Mission District, a conversation which took place in the 1970s and which in addition to providing living spaces for dozens of painters, sculptors, dancers and actors, birthed several performance spaces and studios which are still lively places to go see art. And it's still a collectively-run building with many of the original artists -- now in their 60s and 70s -- still living and working there.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a performance artist and used to go to Project Artaud all the time for rehearsals and performances, a restaurant opened in this building. You can still see the sign -- Moxie Restaurant-Bar -- though the restaurant closed a long time ago, at least fifteen years ago, and some kind of architectural or design firm has been there ever since. Back when the restaurant was open, I not only could not afford to go to it, but I was too intimidated to do so. I felt bars and restaurants required a certain gravitas and adult presentation, and in many cases I was afraid to go into them, especially if a friend of mine hadn't brought me to them first.

So I never made it into this restaurant before it closed. And driving past it the other night, even though I drive past it several times a week (because 17th Street is a convenient cross-town route), it suddenly struck me as never before that the restaurant was not only closed, but closed long ago, so long that it belonged to the distant past when I was a performance artist and went by that corner several times a week not to go cross-town, but in order to do my art. And all that seemed very long ago suddenly, and it is: 20, 25, 30 years ago. It wasn't about the particular restaurant as the exact geographic spot that 17th and Florida represents, or more accurately, that it represented to me in the 1970s (even before I came to San Francisco) and 1980s and which is now so far in the past. More than anything else it represents my youth, my fresh, untrammeled notions and ambitions, my pure heart.

I remember going to Project Artaud during my first few days in the city, to the street address, because it was where Mangrove [8-minute video] had their studio, and Mangrove more or less encapsulated the whole reason I came to San Francisco: to do Contact Improv and perform. And even more before I went to the contact jam on Vancouver Island a week later, where I met the local contactors for the first time, I had that single piece of information: 499 Alabama, the address of Mangrove [Google Books page from the book "Sharing the dance: contact improvisation and American culture" by Cynthia Jean Novac]. The building turned out to be a large factory building that had been converted to studios and lofts: that was Project Artaud. And while the door at 499 Alabama was locked, other doors into the building were open, and I bravely went in and wandered the halls, looking at the bulletin boards outside studios and theaters where I would one day perform. And while I didn’t see any dancers and didn't actually run into a single soul, I was on a pilgrimage and just being there was enough. That’s what I mean by my untrammeled ambitions -- not careerist ambitions, but spiritual ones. My pilgrimage was not even about what I would one day do; it was about who I would one day be. And all of it -- all the performing I did, all the love affairs I had, all the adventures and rejection and ecstasy and pain -- was still in the future.

I've felt nostalgic pangs before, but they had never been as sharp as the pain I felt at the moment we drove past the former Moxie Restaurant. And my painful feelings were for a restaurant I'd never been to, but which represented, when it was still there, something I could aspire to. Back in my 20s, and really until my late 40s, my life was aspirational. I felt success and fulfillment were still in my future. I might, through a combination of talent and luck, become a more well-known performer or writer; I might, when I finally acquired sufficient gravitas, go to a cool jazzy-looking restaurant in an artsy neighborhood. By contrast, now my life is limited in other, more painful ways. I no longer think there's much chance I'll become a well-known writer, or even publish a novel. In fact, I measure out the rest of my life in the number of (probably unpublished) novels I can still finish before I die. Maybe four or five more.

This feeling of limited horizons and chances is, of course, a characteristic of middle age. Maybe the prime sign of middle age. And I'm probably lucky I didn't feel it this sharply before now.

Strangeness with Google maps: 'Original Daly City'

I stumbled across this strange notation tonight on Google maps: a place marked "Original Daly City" at the north edge of that municipality directly south of the border of San Francisco:

I suppose that is where the "original" Daly City was founded, though why that should be on a Google map I have no idea.

Speak softly and carry a big gun

Funny how you can boil down an entire movie to a few lines. Following is the entire dialogue from an advertisement for "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo":

FIRST MALE VOICE (v.o.): I need a research assistant.

SECOND MALE VOICE (v.o.): I know an excellent one.

(onscreen) But she's different.

FIRST MAN: All right. In what way?

SECOND VOICE (v.o.): In every way. She's had a rough life. Can we not make it any rougher?

DANIEL CRAIG: Lisbeth, I want you to help me catch a killer of women.

LISBETH (v.o.): They say I'm insane.

ANOTHER MALE VOICE (v.o.): Why would you want to know about such an awful murder?

LISBETH (holding a huge gun): It interests me.

I know this is my second post in a row about this movie. It's not that I'm a fan of the franchise one way or another. It's just that the marketing... (holding a big gun) interests me. Later:Sounds like a good example of the trope Small Girl, Big Gun.

Dept. of Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Cry: The "Dragon Tattoo" fashion line

I almost choked on my Wheaties this morning when I saw an ad pop up on the side of Gawker for a "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" fashion line. I guess it's supposed to be for young women who want to emulate the title character, who is a punked out Rooney Mara:

For the record, the fashion line is like this:

Somebody please help.

'The Emperor of Warm Nuts' sent to prison for 6 years

For a few years I've been following the amusing and sad case of Ausaf Umar Siddiqui, a former VP of purchasing for the West Coast electronics big-box store Fry's Electronics, who was caught embezzling and soliciting kickbacks from suppliers to fund a high roller gambler lifestyle. Among his preferences as a whale:

• Bowls of golden raisins and warmed mixed nuts, and bowls of certain kinds of peppermints, adorned "with a single rose"
• Dom Perignon champagne in the fridge, plus a long list of other spirits from sake to cognac
• A "badger hair" shaving brush

Siddiqui pleaded guilty earlier this year, and now, as an early Christmas present, has been sentenced to six years in federal prison.

He deserves some compassion for being an addict, but the list of requirements for casino visits pretty much cancels out any sympathy I have. Hope he enjoys his lodgings in the pen.

'How to write a novel with no dull parts'

A spiel in my email from some workshop-offering organization:

Ask any agent or editor what they're looking for in a novel and you'll hear the same thing: a story that grabs them and doesn't let go, long after they've read the last page. Easier said than done, right?

Wrong.

Regardless of the genre you write in or the length of your novel, you can learn and apply the techniques used by successful authors to reel in buyers (and readers!).

In Writing a Novel They Can't Put Down, writing teacher and bestselling thriller author James Scott Bell reveals the essentials you need to sell in today's competitive marketplace. Over the course of this 2 1/2-hour workshop, you'll learn:

• The secret to a high-stakes objective
• How to create the strongest confrontation possible
• What it means to knock out the reader at the end
• Crafting unforgettable characters and great scenes
• Exercises for coaxing out the extras in your characters
• How to write a novel with no dull parts
• And much more!

Ready to get your novel out of the slush pile and on to the bestseller charts? Sign up for Writing a Novel They Can’t Put Down today

So simple! You almost don't need to take the workshop at all, unless you need material for characters who are depressed, failed writers who attend workshops that tell them how to write a novel that can't miss.

A Charlie Brown Depression

I realized a few years ago that I'm subject to wintertime seasonal depression, and when I felt it coming on this year around Thanksgiving, I decided that exercising every day would help fight it. And sure enough, it is helping.

This evening on the treadmill, though, I was flipping channels as usual and happened upon the annual broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Several years ago I wrote about how I loved "Peanuts" when I was a kid, but later became repelled by its unrelenting pessimism, which all too well captured what life was like for me as a child. To that I can only add the opening words of the script, which echoed tonight like the prelude to a recurring bad dream:

CHARLIE BROWN: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel.

I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.

LINUS: Charlie Brown! You're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas, and turn it into a problem.

Breaks my heart every time.

Corporate financial guy: 'The West is finished'

Kind of a remarkable blatt from a corporate executive, saying something many eco and sustainability-minded people have been saying for a long time: The economies of the developed nations can't just keep expanding forever. In fact, he suggests we're at a sun-setting moment now.

"We suffer from no growth and we suffer from imported inflation -- that means we have negative real growth and societies fracture when you have negative real growth and quite simply our society faces fractures for trying to stick Europe back together again is not going to work with that underlying paradigm, unless you can create five percent growth to overcome that imported inflation," Murrin explained.

Murrin said that the East was depending less on the West and the rise of a consumer society was the first step in the expansion of an economic empire.

"If you look at the cycle of an empire system from regionalization to expansion to empire, the first phases of that catalyst are when you have a self fuelled consumer society and so actually that process of building your consumer base which is really what's going on in China, day by day their consumer base increases and the dependence on the West decreases," he said.

Murrin added that while China is by far the biggest emerging economy and would be at the center of a new economic order, other emerging nations were set to join the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and new political orders and alliances would come about as a result.

"This isn't just a BRIC story, this is the end of the Christian Western Empire versus the rise of the whole emerging world led by China as the foremost and most powerful," Murrin told CNBC.

Oh well! had to happen sometime!

And he's not even taking into account global warming and its catastrophic affects, which are in part the subject of this near-apocalyptic screed, on io9.com. So see, it's not just paranoid right-wingers who are sure the sky is falling. It's also depressed corporate types who see no chance for their 401Ks to recover, and futurist types, though that latter guy is probably a libertarian of the Scott Adams variety.

Jeff Bridges on making it new

Via @biblioklept: In an interview in which he compared the experience off seeing Pulp Fiction to the experience of hearing Talking Heads for the first time -- "like a splash of cold water" -- actor Jeff Bridges went on:

Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is almost like an Etch-A-Sketch -- whsssssstt! -- just takes everything and just cleans it all off, and you start fresh.

A grown man gets a hard-on at Taco Bell

From an interview on Forbes.com with Twitter Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey:

On Twitter, “all of that following, all of that interest expressed, is intent. It’s a signal that you like certain things,” Dorsey says. In “promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts… you actually see introductions to content, to accounts or to topics that are deeply meaningful to you, because you’ve already expressed interest, you’ve already curated your timeline. And it’s a delightful experience."

 
Seeing "Promoted" (i.e. bought and paid for by advertisers) tweets in your timeline is delightful? No. Personally I haven't clicked on a single "Promoted" tweet.

I got to that interview after reading this blog post on Percolate, the purpose of which I have not been able to figure out.

Dorsey talked about capturing intent, which has been a big buzzword around marketing Google’s search advertising was coined as an intent miner. As I wrote then:

Twitter’s value is not about intent, in the classic funnel definition, it’s much more about awareness and interest: About exposing you to new products and services you didn’t know you were interested in. 

So Twitter isn't about people communicating with each other, doing journalism, or providing them a platform for expression, according to these geeks. It's "about exposing you to new products and services you didn’t know you were interested in."

Oh really. Isn't that always what the advertising industry says? Commercials are educational because they teach consumers about new products and services? But that's what we have reviews for.

Here's how I inform myself about a new product or service, starting from the moment I become aware of it.

1. I hear about something while reading an article, usually in a print copy of a newspaper.
2. If I'm interested, I'll search for more information by searching for reviews of it.
3. If I'm approaching actually buying the thing, I will go to the company's website and look at the product specifications.

No advertising in it at all. And no tweets, either.

Just before the holiday, I spotted this jaw-dropping review of Taco Bell on a website usually devoted to survivalism and predictions of economic catastrophe. Is it possible that a rational adult could actually write something like:

Let's just start with the obvious thing: the food. It is, of course, wonderful and full of varied textures: crunchy shells, robust meat, cold and fresh lettuce, stringy cheese, and all the fatty stuff that we love because it both satisfies and gives us energy. It arrives quickly, and its ready to eat, mostly with your hands, which is really how we all want to eat.

... But there’s more going on than just fun food. The company obviously puts a great deal of thought into the ethos of the restaurants themselves. The decor gives us things to look at that we don't see anywhere else. The colors are all those we associate with the Southwest, but not in a conventional way. The shapes are geometric and modern, with a daring flare that delights the eye and fires up the imagination. 

The details around the place add to the sense of adventure, but you don’t take note of them individually unless you are looking closely. The backs of the chairs all have a bell shape cut out in the steel. The lighting is not mainly in the ceiling but rather comes from orange hanging glass lamps in the shape of cones, and I was trying to think where I had seen this before. Is it like the knave [sic] of a chapel in a monastery in a Spanish mission territory? Maybe that’s it. I’m unsure but it conjures up something different. 

Hold on here. Perhaps you have already realized this and I’m slow on the take, but the whole Taco Bell experience is suggestive of that Spanish mission sensibility. That’s why the buildings are shaped the way they are. And, obviously, that’s the whole meaning behind the bell, and why it adorns the front entrance of the place. It’s a church bell! It taps into something deep and lasting in our cultural sensibilities, something that shaped our ancestors and their communities, and presents it all anew in our times.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is like something a 16-year-old would write for English class, if he's really hopped up on Adderall that day. But the author is evidently an adult. And it's like three times as long as that!

Maybe that's the kind of person those advertisers are talking about. Wow.

Some cultural things just go on and on and on

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s -- 6, 7, 8 years old -- the hip electronic item for the home was the hi-fi. This was a large wooden cabinet six or seven feet long, containing a turntable, an amplifier and radio, and large cabinet speakers. (See this image, where an example sits in the center.) And to play on their hi-fis, middle-class people bought LPs. If they were educated, or just culturally aspiring, they might buy opera and symphony records; if they were only lightly-educated, and staid middle class people like my parents, they bought Broadway cast LPs and a series of curious recordings called Sing Along With Mitch.

(Just as a reference, while my parents bought those dubious pop records, my wife's parents, who were immigrants but understood what culture was in a way my own parents never did, bought opera and symphony records, and my wife sings arias around the house to this day.)

On each Mitch Miller recording was a dozen or so standards sung by a male chorus accompanied by a sprightly orchestra. Mostly folk songs or songs from the turn of the century, like "Peg O' My Heart," "The Sidewalks of New York," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Makin' Whoopie," and so on. I was a little kid and liked to sing, and the whole point of these records was that you were supposed to sing along, so they contained full lyric sheets, and that way I learned these moldy songs by heart. They struck me even then as utterly of the past, because even when I was 8 (C.E. 1964) I was listening almost literally religiously to Top 40 radio and memorizing those songs too ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Satisfaction," "House of the Rising Sun" and so on), and the difference was obvious, even to a little kid.

At that time "The Lawrence Welk Show" was not a syndicated museum piece as it is now, but still a regularly broadcast television program on a major network, ABC. My grandmother would simply not miss this show, with its happy-faced Barbie-and-Ken-doll cast singing mostly the same ancient songs (e.g. on YouTube: "The Beer Barrel Polka;" "Big Rock Candy Mountain"). This show, which drew from more or less the same songbook as Mitch Miller, seemed even stranger -- not just a similarly weird, old-fashioned indulgence, but an actively sinister force -- if you watched it, I felt, you would find yourself growing elderly by the minute.

Thirty-five years later, my wife's mother landed in an Alzheimer's care home, where one of the social activities was listening to live music. The music consisted of a person with an accordion playing those same old songs -- literally the same old songs, "Sidewalks of New York" and so on. Now if that was nostalgic music to my grandmother, who was maybe 10 years old in 1900, what was it supposed to represent to people 40 years younger than her, people who were, say, 70 in 2000? Why weren't they playing the Big Band music of the 1940s, which would be to those folks what the Lawrence Welk songbook would have been to my grandmother? Why, in fact, weren't they playing the classical music my wife's mother had chosen to buy and listen to when she had the choice?

Even more mind-bendingly, this year I visited the Assisted Living facility where my own mother was living. And they had a man playing accordion, and he still played the same songs, including "Sidewalks of New York" and "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." WTF. Is there like a Nursing Home Songbook, with the same 25 numbers in it? I am really concerned about this. When I wind up in a freaking Assisted Living Facility in 20 or 30 years, they still better not be playing those same fucking songs; they better be playing some Beatles and Rolling Stones, or some accordion player is going to get bopped by my walker. Of course by then the accordion player will be robotic.

All this came to mind when I saw this jaw-dropping bit on Mediaite: On his own television program on his own network, ancient Pat Robertson hosted Condaleeza Rice, and when she suggested that "mac and cheese" was a wonderful holiday food, Robertson blurted out:

What is this "Mac and Cheese," is that a black thing?

And I thought, how the hell does this thing that is the 700 Club, and the Trinity Broadcast Network, survive? It's not like it's in syndication like the Welk show. (And for the record, at least on the Welk show they sang numbers from the 1940s and 50s and even contemporary numbers like -- God help us, I'm not kidding -- "One Toke Over the Line.") Who in the hell is giving money to this ancient fraud Robertson and the desperately out-of-touch worldview espoused on his network?

Then I realized -- things that somehow contain and epitomize cultural moments and worldviews, even if they do it terribly, just go on and on. It's like the culture as a whole needs these things as ballast, to balance out emanations like "TMZ" and the CW. Not that I claim to know the mechanism of how that works.

How collapsitarians find safe zones

On my favorite collapsitarian blog, today's post is a typical piece of baseless fear-mongering, so pointless I won't even describe it. And then the comments start.

First comment:

Most rural areas within a tank's worth of gas will be inundated by the Golden Horde. The few that can make it on foot will find their way through your retreat area and beyond scavenging, pillaging, and looting anything they can find to try and survive. No matter where you are you may get contact from people fleeing those cesspits that are major metro areas. Remember maintain good fields of fire/killing fields around your retreat and keep those mags topped off.

In the paranoid collapsitarian mind, once the Collapse happens, cities will become utterly consumed with rioting, leading some ("the Golden Horde," which I think refers to the people who have enough resources to escape the cities) to flee and attempt to find a safe place, leading to the now-hackneyed scenario described by the commenter.

The interesting part is the 4th comment down, in which someone creates a how-to for calculating the range of that "horde."

You have to draw lines out along every major highway from every major city, out to about 350 miles (the average distance someone could get on a full tank of gas, assuming all they do is drive). Shade all areas on the map to about 5-10 miles of each side of those highways from the 350 mile point, back to the city. Now draw a line about 30 miles out from the outer suburbs, and shade the area that it covers. You can throttle the lines back a bit for things like rough terrain, rivers, mountain ranges, and the like.

The result is the first two days of full-on zombie migration in your area. The outer edges will be lightly populated, while the inner ones will be heavily so (as traffic snarls up, etc).

However, here's the trick: Not everyone will be moving at the same time, or at the same rate. Also, not all situations would result in a mass evacuation. ...

It goes on like that for a bit, but you get the idea. At least someone has attempted to quantify the effects of this supposed mass migration.

Also, note how the term "zombie" is used for any individual who is part of this so-called horde. Cute of him, because you know what you do with zombies: shoot them in the head (or hey-ud, because I can't imagine anyone with this mindset not possessing a Southern accent). In the minds of the collapsitarians, any non-rightous person who has not armed himself and his God-fearing family and stocked up for ten years of apocalypse, who in the event of a Collapse therefore needs charity, is identical to a zombie -- that is, deserves to be shot on sight.

In fact, this is what they would secretly like to do now, before any apocalypse: kill everyone who is poor, in need of charity, anyone who might rob them or use up their tax dollars, which they feel is equal to stealing. But of course you can't have whole websites and crypto-fascist movements that openly advocate killing the poor, the disabled, petty criminals and the like, because that would make you a Nazi. So you just call the targets of your wrath "zombies," and pretend it's all about preparing for some societal apocalypse, and then you can talk about it all you want.

If you have any doubt that the main audience this appeals to is neo-fascist, just read the rest of the comments on that blog post. Holy crap.

Question of the year

I know I'm entering my period of holiday-induced crabbiness when blog posts like this annoy me.

Are you blogging to the wrong audience?

There are two reasons I want to post more often. One is to expand my readership beyond other writers. Social media queen Kristen Lamb has written some great posts on this topic. One titled Solid Platform, Wrong Audience is my favorite and has links to her previous posts. My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan. My current WIP is a collection of humorous parenting essays. And my next project is something different altogether. As much as I love blogging about writing and social media, it's time for me to expand to also write about parenting and fashion and modeling and all the other topics I’m interested in, like rock climbing and geo-caching and Settlers of Catan. ...

Now, here's an exercise to determine whether you are blogging to the wrong audience: Profile your audience. Make a list of the different groups of people you imagine buying your book. Who are they? Are they teen girls? Middle-aged women? Men who like to read thrillers? How old are they? What do they do for a living? How do they spend their free time? What products do they buy? Make lists. Then, once you've got that down, think about what topics those people are interested in reading about. What concerns them? What are their thoughts preoccupied with? (Boys? Sex? Making money? Finding God? Decluttering their homes?) Make another list. And finally, ask yourself: Are you blogging about the topics on that last list? Why or why not?

When I saw this, my reaction was: Does Don DeLillo give a flying fuck what I blog about? And if not, why should I care what anyone else thinks? You think I'm trying to build some kind of "platform"? No, I'm talking to like five people here.

But I did really love that sentence:

My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan.

For some reason that just cracks me up.

L.A. Times really excited about novel concepts of book serialization, packaging

Yesterday on Twitter I mocked the hype about a new novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, a novel which will be -- shocking new idea!! -- serialized in 27 "volumes." Today there's more information about it in this L.A. Times column.

From this article I want to draw a single quote, emphasis mine:

It's possible that [our publishing] schedule could be accelerated. We're constantly open to new ideas -- where will we be in 2014? Maybe digital releases every week, every few months a trade paperback or hardcover. The novel is designed to accommodate, anticipate various platforms.

I take it that he means this particular novel has been designed to "accommodate" (not to mention "anticipate" -- wow!) "various platforms" -- not that The Novel generically is. Although that's an interesting idea to investigate, maybe a good topic for a master's thesis -- that the novel is, by its nature, flexible enough to accommodate changing media.

But what struck me was this. This is not just a long book that the publisher decided, hey, let's go back to that whole serialization thing that worked so well in the 19th century. After all, it's working for the Paris Review to serialize Roberto Bolaño's "The Third Reich" into four parts -- that's garnered lots of attention (and did, in fact, motivate me to subscribe to the Paris review for the first time ever) -- not to mention the multi-book franchises of Harry Potter and other fantasy creations.

No, according to the author, he designed the books to a) be super-ass long, and b) "accommodate various platforms," like so:

Danielewski was paid a reported $1 million for the first 10 volumes; he's thinking of them as two 5-volume seasons, like a television series.

Uh huh. Now I know why it's the L.A. Times that is the one getting excited about it. Seriously, is this really anything that the awful teen-novel book-packaging industry (cf. "Sweet Valley High," etc. etc.) hasn't already pioneered?

Limo driver and performance artist 'found her voice' on 'This American Life'

This story about a memoirist seems to me representative of several odd strains in our culture.

Writer-performance artist Jeanne Darst wrote lots of stories about her dysfunctional family, which she "performed in one-woman shows she performed in her living room to help pay the rent," according to the story. Reading this, I thought, Oh right. This is the same world Miranda July lives in. You make yourself into a twee storyteller in the David Sedaris mode, and sure enough: "This American Life" is "where Darst began to find her voice as a memoirist." This led directly to a book contract.

Well, that's nice! You get to find your voice on the premiere radio show for memoir, really? Take a giant step, eh?

Just sour grapes on my part. I think it was that bit, which the journalist wrote, not something that came from her, suggesting "This American Life" is like a stepping stone rather than being what it is right now, which is a pinnacle. She's just someone doing exactly what 10,000 other writers are doing, only doing it better, and oh by the way, being an attractive slender woman who lives in L.A. You go!

Having a body

It’s a real annoyance, this business of corporeality. The body needs attention, hygiene, clothing, footwear, space. That above all, space: to occupy, to piss, to shit, to sleep, to share with other bodies. A total pain in the ass, really. I would love to be able to toss it aside somewhere and continue my journey without it, but I can’t.

-- Johan Moya Ramis, writing in Words Without Borders

The first of November

Gawker helpfully brings everyone up to date on the official word from EOTW prophet Harold Camping, whose radio station has stopped talking about the EOTW (which didn't happen per his prediction) but also has not said anything about it not happening.

Having finished reading "Infinite Jest," I'm now going to finish reading a Simenon novel, "Strangers in the House," and then get to "The Death of the Adversary" by Hans Keilson.

Bank of America followed the lead of other banks and reversed its proposed fee of $5 monthly just to just its debit card. The fee, announced last month, generated loads of anger at banks in general and B of A in particular and led to a movement to transfer accounts from banks to credit unions. "Bank Transfer Day" is still Nov. 5.

Happy 10th anniversary of this blog

Just realized that today marks the 10th anniversary of this blog. Not that many people who started blogging in late 2001 are still doing it. I don't know what that makes me. But, well, huzzah.

Summer of Infinite Jest 15 -- the last 50 pages or so

I went today to the rooftop garden of the S.F. Museum of Modern Art, to which I am admitted free because we have a yearly membership, and sat with some coffee (which they sell there) and finished reading "Infinite Jest." 

The last 50 pages feature the last part of Hal's apparent breakdown in the video viewing room, a surreal scene showing what becomes of Orin, and finally an even more surreal scene, drawn out in pornographic detail, showing what becomes of Gately -- one of those endings which, because it is surreal (cf. Morrison's "Song of Solomon"), is annoying. Because it's surreal, and because it resembles the dreams Gately has been having for the last hundred and fifty pages, you don't know if it's another dream or not. I still don't know.

We never find out whether the competing spy agencies find the magically compelling videotape (or "cartridge"), and unless I missed something, we never find out exactly how Hal's tennis career ends, though what I gathered is that he manages to injure himself accidentally-on-purpose. So it seemed to me that the author ended by being more interested in the characters than the themes or the plot. Which is fine, but is inconsistent with the book as a whole.

As soon as I was done with the book, I found myself contrasting the way I felt with with the way I felt on finishing "2666," which is also a monumental novel that ends without the "story" being quite tied up. On finishing "2666" I wanted to go back to the beginning immediately and read it again now that I really knew who all the characters were and why various long episodes were even in the book. On finishing "Infinite Jest" I only had that annoyed feeling of "Did I miss something here?" and paged back through the last 50 pages a little -- but only for a minute. I didn't really care that much whether I had missed something. More than anything else I felt tired. Not even exhausted, just ready to be done with it.

My final conclusion is that it's a promisingly brilliant work by someone whose mental illness accounts for a certain amount -- perhaps most -- of the work's envelope-pushing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the same mental illness (and I wrote before about not being able to read without thinking about it) doomed the author, who never finished another novel. ("The Pale King" is notably unfinished, and not like "2666" is unfinished, but really only speculatively pulled together by an editor, according to reviews I've read.) By its length and complexity, it begs comparison with "2666," but it's unfair to put "I.J.," a second novel by a 30-year-old, up against the crowning achievement by a 53-year-old who had already written ten other novels and then "The Savage Detectives." Because if it begs comparison, it also pales in it.

I think "Infinite Jest" gained the aura of masterpiece because readers loved the way it captured, and thus validated, the voice of generation whatever-DFW-was-part-of ... X or Y, whatever. The slangy way of talking that accounts for most of the novel's length is the way that whole generation talks, and this novel perfectly captures it. Plus DFW's death has given rise to a kind of hagiography about him, similar to the aura around Kurt Cobain. One of the reasons I wanted to read "I.J." is to find out whether this attitude is justified. In my opinion, it isn't. There are probably fifty or a hundred novels from the last third of the 20th century that will endure longer.

Eugenides not pushing the envelope this time, maybe feels okay about it

Q: People are starting to notice that a generation of writers, which includes you and Jonathan Franzen, are wrestling with the question of how you create a novel after postmodernism.

Jeffrey Eugenides: Schoenberg said it's still possible to write music in C major, and that’s coming from Mister Experimental himself. That strikes a chord in me; I think with the novel, at a certain point you realize it's still possible to write in C major and have some kind of narrative content. And meaningful characters that readers can, you know it's an old-fashioned term, but people can fall in love with the characters and become caught up in their lives. If you don't have that, you cease to have the kind of novel that can be compelling.

--Interview with novelist Jeffrey Eugenides
in the L.A. Times

This is a real issue. I constantly struggle with the imperative to create new ways of seeing and story-telling, which is what the word "novel" implies, and this traditional approach. I've written before about how I love mid-century writers, and how Larry McMurtry's now obscure early novel "Moving On" was a model for me for many years. The roomy character-driven traditional narrative informed the writing of my first novel, "Make Nice." But in my current project I'm trying to get away from it.

It's a struggle, and not only because I love the mid-century novel (by which I mean the thoughtful character-driven novels of McMurtry, Heller, Highsmith, Roth, Mailer, Salter and others) but because this approach seems so natural to me. But I also love the mid-century departures from this model (Kerouac, Henry Miller) and post-modernists from DeLillo to Acker. (And DeLillo's accomplishment in the 1970s and 1980s is now awe-inspiring to me. He didn't have a model for what he was doing, he really was making up a new way of story-telling.) Not to mention the Latin Americans, including You Know Who.

Having never read a Jeffrey Eugenides novel, I can't say whether it's working for him. Maybe Eugenides is trying to fend off criticism in advance here. Maybe he feels a little bad for not pushing the envelope in his latest work. Without reading it and knowing his work, I can't say.

In which I ask myself the same questions they asked Joan Didion

Questions from L.A. Times interview by David Ulin.

Jacket Copy: Throughout [book title] you speak (or write) directly to your readers. How did you develop that device?

Me: Oh, I don't know. Our Town?

JC: Your language is very stripped down in the book: spare, declarative. That makes for a certain tension, given the emotional murkiness of the narrative.

Me: It's because I was in a big hurry. Can't bother with a lot of romantic foofaw.

JC: How much does that have to do with the difficulty of writing about a child? It's harder than writing about a spouse.

Me: You can say that again. Children can't get back at you, at least until they grow up and write novels in which you're the bad guy, but I'll be long gone by then.

JC: What was her reaction to being written about?

Me: Well, she thinks everything's about her anyway, so it was very natural to her.

JC: You write about her presence in your working life -- on assignment, in hotel rooms -- and the effect this may have had on her childhood.

Me: It's true, she had to watch a ton of TV. It's a good thing everything on TV is suitable for children. (Laughs.)

JC: Do you regret it?

Me: Well, there was a period in which she insisted I was Yogi Bear and she was Boo Boo. I had to call her Boo Boo for weeks.

JC: Part of the book deals with parental guilt, or parental failure. You write: "I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents."

Me: Yeah, I hate contractions. I had an editor at the student paper who was just nuts about contractions, would not allow a single one. Now when I use them, I feel dirty, but it's a good dirty. As for my failure as a parent, that's well known. I've pretty much failed at every human relationship. But we never expected to be successful as parents.

JC: When you say "successful as parents," what do you mean?

Me: The child goes on to be a very high-earning child star. I know how few of them there are; you have to have the right agent. But we acted as her agent, so we failed at that too.

JC: That's a tendency with all parents, I think. Not quite to see your children, to minimize their concerns ...

Me: Well, they're children, I mean really.

JC: In [book title] you say that writing no longer comes easily to you. But you've never given the impression that writing was the easiest act.

Me: Yes, it is hard to write using no adjectives and contractions. Harder still to talk that way.

JC: What about your novels? Do you find them easier or more difficult to write?

Me: The main problem is maintaining momentum. I go on a tear for a few months, but it takes longer than that to write a novel, for most people. I really admire Georges Simenon, who would write a whole novel in two weeks, though it exhausted him and made him a sex maniac.

JC: With a book like [other book title] it's as if you were building a structure, literally using narrative to stave off chaos and loss.

Me: That's the beauty -- I mean, that is the beauty of being able to talk anyone into anything.

JC: This book, too, attempts to use literature to work through something. You call it "maintaining momentum." But you also note that maintaining momentum ...

Me: Is so difficult when things are happening all around you. You know what Woody Allen said about how a relationship is like a shark: Unless it keeps moving, it dies. But so many things get in the way.

JC: Still, there's a cost, too, when we don't maintain momentum.

Me: It's really true of most things -- damned if you do and damned if you do not.

JC: So for you it's a matter of failing yourself, not other people?

Me: Like I say, what choice do I have?

JC: As if you haven't completed the task?

Me: One is never finished. Why should I finish?

The mob capturing Gaddafi

This video showing a mob of militiamen abusing and dragging around a bloodied, confused and terrified Gaddafi is awful to see -- though it's probably the way we'd like every evil dictator to wind up. Contrast it to the image of Slobodan Milosevic dying quietly in his cell at the Hague, or even worse, Francisco Franco dying an old and free man.

As a document, it's not very useful. It has edits, for one thing. And the camera is constantly jostled, spun around, and shoved into people's faces. Also, I didn't see anyone in a Yankees cap.

Summer of Infinite Jest 14 -- Things come to a head

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

-- Hal's internal monologue in Infinite Jest, page 900

I reached the long stretch recounting Gately's sojourn in the hospital, where he suffers a dark night of the soul as he bravely/stupidly refuses all narcotic painkillers for fear they will get in the way of his recovery. (I almost capitalized recovery. Must be careful not to let DFW's tics infect my own writing, which is something I'm sure all writers experience.) These scenes, at once comic and heroic, alternate with incidents back at the tennis academy where one of the secondary characters gets his face stuck on a cold window, and then protagonist Hal has a nervous breakdown. I'll let the English majors determine how the character Stice more or less literally losing face contributes to the breakdown, and how this is thematically beautiful; no connection occurs to me right away, but I'm probably not reading carefully enough.

Hal's nervous breakdown is accompanied by enhanced perceptions and a rush of thoughts, as if he were high on something, though he isn't -- unless I missed something. And the quotation above, which more than any single sentence in the book could serve as its epigram, comes amidst a slew of disconnected thoughts:

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me* that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -- the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.

* None of the sections about Hal were in the first person until a few dozen pages ago, when suddenly first-person sections started to appear. So "I" is Hal himself.

Here's the author, using the first-person perspective to bring more immediacy to the words, stating the book's theme as clearly as it's ever stated. The book is all about this quest to care deeply, to commit oneself totally. The tennis players commit their young lives to the sport ("games"); the addicts commit their lives to addiction ("needles"), then to recovery; the terrorists commit their lives to their cause.

Simple, and very clear once you're this far into the book. It takes your own commitment, as a reader, to get this far, though. Again, that's payoff enough for me. I don't need the plot to all wrap up nicely which (I've heard) it won't.

It also occurred to me today: the tennis academy sections of Infinite Jest are a Y.A. novel. Maybe the publisher should extract them -- the way Don DeLillo's publisher extracted the first, unbelievably brilliant baseball section of Underworld -- and publish it separately. Titled, maybe, "Dawn Drills."

Today in Collapse-obsessed foamer blogs

Everyone has heard the dictum "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." It means that when crime strikes you personally, you supposedly forget all your liberal pieties about race, gun ownership, non-violence and so on, and instead go out and buy a gun and start voting for Nixon.

How about this one: a real conservative is someone who goes through a natural disaster and, instead of forming compassion for others and realizing we all have to depend on each other in an emergency, comes away with a resolution to hoard, arm himself, and fortify his compound.

During a major disaster, food will quickly disappear. Living for over 3 decades on the Gulf Coast, I can tell you with absolute certainty that whenever disaster strikes (usually an approaching hurricane, for those folks), food and provisions at the store sell completely out in a matter of a few hours. People panic, and within hours, you cannot find food, bottled water, ice, generators, batteries, candles, etc. ... Furthermore, almost all disasters include a complete loss of electricity. The water supply is compromised. Bottled water becomes more valuable than bank accounts. Dehydration becomes a very real and present danger. I remember witnessing a man offer an ice vendor $100 for an extra bag of ice during Hurricane Ivan. My wife and I went 2 weeks (14 days) without electricity in the aftermath of that hurricane. Believe me, I got a taste of just how precious bottled water, ice, batteries, generators, fuel, etc., can become.

-- Far-right preacher-politician Chuck Baldwin

Okay, sure, preparedness. Good idea for everyone. But it's telling that the writer doesn't mention how he helped that man who wanted ice so badly, or his neighbors who were also suffering without electricity or water.

It's also telling that he doesn't mention how the National Guard was there within 48 hours to secure the area and then coordinate either evacuation or helping the survivors, including with water. Because for far-right conservatives, the government can never be seen in a positive role, it can only stand in your way (at least) or oppress and imprison you (more likely according to this worldview).

No, in Baldwin's world, there's only you and the free market against the elements and the devil. He probably wishes he was the ice vendor who anticipated there would be desperate people waving Franklins after a hurricane. (As for the man who offered $100 for ice, I have the feeling he needed it to keep his insulin cool, not his gin and tonic.)

Then in my favorite collapsitarian blog, the always-excitable Mac Slavo quotes someone predicting violence, death, dead cops, disaster in NYC.

According to the insider, the Obama White House and partisan organizations that support the President are now actively promoting chaos in New York and other cities as a form of punishment and intimidation against those on Wall Street (and elsewhere) who have spoken out against the administration. The chaos, he says, will lead to elevated levels of anger and the real possibility of nationwide violence and riots...

ZuccottiPark should have been cleared last week. ... Now if there is a move by law enforcement against the protesters, the dangers will be greatly increased than just a week ago. The violence will be much-much worse. Police will be harmed. Citizens will be harmed. Businesses harmed. ... I don't wish to be overly dramatic here -- but violence. Injury. Perhaps death. Most certainly destruction of property. It's getting dangerous. I can sense it. It's palpable. And you feel it too, don’t you? Something terrible is coming just around the turn. So for now, I'm getting out.

Oh well, it's a good thing he doesn't want to be overly dramatic. I guess if he were overly dramatic he would break out the exclamation marks. Then I'd really be terrified.

All supposedly because Obama somehow "promoted" this by not breaking the heads of protesters. I don't know if Occupy Wall Street is making the 1% afraid, but it's certainly successful in exciting the foamers.

Dear Matt Taibbi, don't be such a one-noter

The reality, of course, is that people like Rush, Romney and Obama are all becoming cognizant of the deep frustrations that exist across the political spectrum and are growing desperate to prevent the powder keg from blowing completely – hence the intense effort to describe OWS as a top-down manipulation.

-- Matt Taibbi, writing in his Rolling Stone blog today

Yeah, but. How can anyone who mentions how far-right foamers are responding to the Occupy protests, and especially who uses words and phrases like "the deep frustrations that exist across the political spectrum" and "desperate" and "powder keg," fail to mention last year's Tea Party protests? That's last year, when the same words were used to describe those people?

What's different this year is the concept of "the 99%." It's inclusive of those Tea Party idiots for the most part, isn't it? I mean, not including the Koch brothers and whoever else funded the whole Tea Party thing to begin with -- you can't deny that there really were a lot of pissed-off people who felt disenfranchised. And now this year we have a whole additional bunch of people who feel disenfranchised.

If these groups really were likely to unite, that truly would be the far-right's worst nightmare, as they have been working to divide the country into warring camps since the days of Nixon -- and succeeding beautifully. However, until the two groups -- who don't resemble each other and probably think the other group literally and figuratively stinks -- actually develop a common cause other than "chanting" and "funny signs," I don't see much real threat to Limbaugh, the Kochs, etc.

Nutty goodness: Collapsitarian foamer skips easy pun

The collapsitarian foamer Mac Slavo posted a scare piece (which he does almost every day -- see yesterday's link in my blog) today about peanut butter -- no, really. The price is set to spike, following epic drought in peanut-producing lands.

What's funny is that the Collapse is often referred to by collapsitarians as the Crunch* -- and Slavo made it through the entire peanut butter price spike piece without making a pun once. Come on, man, sharpen up your game. Really.

* Not to be confused with the Big Crunch, in which the universe collapses into a black hole the size of Newt Gingrich's heart.

Collapsitarian: Mad Max-like collapse 'has to happen'

Here's some collapsitarian getting a hard-on about his favorite subject:

You are going to see, in metro areas, the absolute worst in humanity, as the people that are most dependent upon a collectivist system, whether they're these Occupy Well Street [sic] people, or people who are loaded up with debt, they are totally unprepared for an economic reality where their paradigm does not function.

As a result they’re going to go through the absolute most disgusting inhumanity that I think any American has ever seen as they go through this anger phase -- and it's going to result in riots, and starvation and bloodshed.

It has to happen. You don't have people's life savings and people becoming desperate and not have that happen.

It has to happen. Sure -- even though it's never happened before on the grand scale he predicts. Scattered food riots, yes -- in which maybe a shop, or at most a row of shops, gets burned. Widespread panic and pants-shitting, no. But they sure love to fantasize about it.

If you want to get a glimpse of one of these people in the wild, check out the guy's website. The article is about the Collapse and how to prepare for it -- buy lots of silver, oh and also send him money! -- but also great is the collection of advertisements on the right side of the page. Just looking at them is like being dragged by a pickup truck through a segregated whites-only trailer park in the most depressed town in Florida.

Still Indian Summer

Courtesy blog MissionMission, a lovely photograph of Dolores Park, already starting to be shaded by the autumnal sun. That's a lovely construction/refurbishment project on the right side; ignore it, everyone else does.

Summer of Infinite Jest 13 -- up to page 800

Well, after all the mystery, many facts are revealed in an interrogation of the previously unpromising Molly Notkin, the film grad student and friend (and roommate? I forget) of Joelle, by secret agents. Not the same secret agents who are, creepily and comically, in wheelchairs. Among Molly's revelations:

• The title of the magically compelling videotape;
• A confirmation of the previously suggested fact that Joelle stars in it;
• A description of its actual contents;
• A possible explanation for its magical qualities (to wit: lenses)
• Joelle's backstory, including how she came to be among the "deformed."

(There's a whole trope about how the deformed are a special class, and go around wearing veils. Yeah okay sure.)

And then after this, several climactic events at the tennis academy. In other words, the plot is suddenly rocketing forward, at least in comparison to its progress up to page 740. I guess this would cause some readers to expect there is candy at the end, or something. But there's already plenty of plot for me. Really I don't care if the secret agents of various vague nationalities catch up to the magically compelling video. Isn't the whole book a coming-of-age story, or rather multiple coming-of-age stories? Yes, they're coming to a climax, but that's the thing about coming-of-age stories -- they never end satisfactorily, because they're just the beginning of someone's story.

Maybe that analysis would get me a C in English class, but that's how the book strikes me now.

Things I continue to miss

I hate crowds and I'm too old for such things, but in addition to Litquake, another huge event in San Francisco I missed this weekend was the Treasure Island Music Festival. I don't even know how all those people got to Treasure Island.

This is why I was eager to help my friend Catherine with her solo show in the Fringe Festival last month -- because I get out and participate in the life of the city less and less.

Haven't participated in the #OccupySF protests either, but then, neither are many others. Hasn't quite caught fire here the way it has in other cities. Added the next day: Here's a video from Sunday night's dust-up, shot by the notorious Josh Wolf, giving me a good reason not to go -- I couldn't stand listening to that strident white girl in dreadlocks.

(I'm exactly of the age such styles are supposed to annoy, but I didn't like the style 15 years ago when it started and I was only 40. White people in dreadlocks -- really??)

Summer of Infinite Jest 12.1 -- page 740

(The oeuvre of James Incandenza) was amateurish, she'd seen, when Orin had had his brother... lend them some of The Mad Stork's Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brillian optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow empty, no sense of dramatic towardness -- no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience.

Ha! I get it.

Of course DFW's work does not really meet that description at all. That's more a description of, say, Alain Robbe-Grillet. But this passage is the author saying "Yeah, I know all about your anxiety about narrative, and I can play with it, and I'll continue to do so." And also saying that he has this anxiety about his own work, that he's afraid his technical brilliance will keep people from enjoying it. And also that he knows something about alienation, the gulf between his mentally ill self and others, and anxiety about whether his novels can bridge that gulf where nothing else can.

Later on that page the expression narratively anticonfluential is coined with reference to Incandenza's work. Anticonfluential! I bow in admiration.

Summer of Infinite Jest 12 -- page 726

I'm not cheating. It's Indian Summer in San Francisco, temps in the 80s, a dry, calm and smoggy atmosphere. Street fairs abound.

Page 726 reveals what the reader has been suspecting for at least the last couple hundred pages, that Joelle Van Dyne, aka the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (PGOAT), aka Madame Psychosis of MIT's student radio station, is in fact the person who appears in the mysteriously compelling video. Aka The Entertainment.

We're in the middle of a long section in which the Wheelchair Assassins (whom I don't find nearly as compelling as I think the author did; in my opinion they're a minstrel show) zero in on a copy of the magically compelling videotape at a Boston-area video store. A bunch of bodies are piling up, it's not clear why, when their methodical search finally uncovers the McGuffin. And in a bit of indirect narration, the author explains the W.A.'s tactics of having various people under surveillance, including Hal the tennis prodigy.

In fact, several of the seemingly disparate plot threads are finally being drawn together. Joelle is in Ennet House, down the hill from the tennis academy; she appears in the videotape, which it is now clear is one of the works (perhaps the final work) of Hal's father James Incandenza; a menacing organization is on their trail. And she's in love with Don Gately, who just got royally beaten and shot in an extremely entertaining dust-up. ("Just" meaning a hundred pages ago.)

And I'm kind of sad that after 725 pages of free-ranging exposition a plot has started to raise its head. I was reading an essay on PopMatters, "The Collision of Roadside Picnic and Infinite Jest," where a critic says something I've read in other places, that there is no big payoff to the story in I.J., that the book just sort of stops, like the final episode of "The Sopranos."¹ And I've read that this failure to bring the book to a standard ending is regarded universally as simply one last joke on the part of the author.

Surely if you've read all the way to the end of "Infinite Jest," you're doing so for other reasons than wanting to know what happens at the end. That's why I find the somewhat obvious intrusion of narrative plot annoying. At this point I don't even care if there's a plot; it's like watching early seasons of "Big Brother" when all you're doing is watching the people in the house just being people in a house -- the quality of observation and language alone justify the time and expense of reading.

But I better get a move on, or I'll never finish before the end of Indian Summer.

1. See my comment on this sort of narrative frustration in a post I wrote on The Rumpus, The Limits of Narrative.

Things I had to look up: ludic

Once in a while I encounter a word that's new to me, and suddenly see it in more than one place, as if everyone had suddenly decided to start using it. Such was true of the word louche, which cropped up suddenly a few years ago and now I see it everywhere (and use it myself, because it's very useful). Now I encounter ludic:

The streak of sportiveness is there in Gosling's character, too, when he declares, "This is the big leagues. It's mean. When you make a mistake, you lose the right to play." Yet Myers is less ludic than his partners in the game, who've seen it all before; he behaves like someone seeing it for the first time, and his speech is larded with imperatives.

-- New Yorker review of "The Ideas of March"

In his Life: A User's Manual of 1978, [Georges] Perec showed how the contemporary novel might emulate the epic sweep of Ulysses, the nested stories of The Arabian Nights. Though never as ludic as Perec, Bolaño found, through the idea of multiple interviews in the middle section of The Savage Detectives, and through the twin foci or magnets of the Sonora Desert and the writer Benno Von Archimboldi in 2666, a means of licensing a similar kind of narrative proliferation.

-- Mark Ford, "Bolaño on the Edge of the Precipice," in the 13 Oct 2011 issue of the New York Review of Books

Ludic is said to simply mean "playful," but then why not just say "playful" in the above examples? What more does it mean? Is it significant, or just coincidence, that both examples use the word in the context of a comparison? Still hard to tell.

I'm still not sure what that last sentence means. "Licensing a kind of narrative proliferation"? What does it mean to license proliferation?

Today's fake: Indians imitate San Francisco 'school' real estate scam

In San Francisco, an institution known as the Academy of Art University is highly visible around town. Its advertisements are plastered on Muni buses, its own shuttle buses ferry students around the central city, and its logo appears on numerous buildings devoted to classes, workshops, dorms, or other, more vague purposes.

A tourist or newcomer might be excused for thinking the Academy of Art University is a thriving art institution in a town full of artists. But if you've been in town for a while, you start noticing that the AAU's presence constantly increases. More buildings, more shuttle buses -- impressive! You might wonder how they achieve such success.

In fact, the AAU is well known to San Franciscans as little more than a real estate scam. Yes, there are classes and workshops and dorms, and the shuttle buses ferry registered "students." But the quality of the art education offered by the institution is well known to be mediocre. How, then, is the organization apparently growing by leaps and bounds? Basically it works like this:

1. Government grants you status as non-profit educational institution. Under this status, you pay no real estate taxes.
2. Sign up students and help them get gobs of student loan money. The money goes straight to the institution for "tuition."
3. Hire mediocre instructors at low pay.
4. Use the extra money to buy San Francsico real estate. Pay no taxes on it.
5. Real estate appreciates, now worth 2x, 3x or more what you paid for it. Your "educational institution" now owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of prime real estate in a world city. Happy!
6. Award "graduating" students worthless degrees, which they don't care much about, because many of them are foreign students here on a lark. They go home, resume their lives, having had a year or two jaunt as "art students" in San Francisco. Happy!
7. Many students default on student loans -- government and lenders unhappy.
8. City of SF loses ability to collect tax on dozens of buildings. Recipients of city services unhappy.

It works like a charm, and now they're imitating it in India:

... Several new private "universities" have also opened up recently in Himachal. According to a local daily, the Tribune, one of these institutions enrolled students and started offering courses even before it came into legal existence. You might put down this haste to the high demand for quality education among India's overwhelmingly youthful population. But as the Tribune described in a series of reports, the universities not only lack faculties, laboratories and libraries; a few do not meet the criteria for acquiring property in the state.

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals. These sweetheart deals would be somewhat excusable if, unlike most Indian institutions of learning, the private universities offered an education rather than degrees. But they are only interested in extracting steep tuition fees from parents anxious for their children to join India's new economy. Not surprisingly, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates in India are unemployable.

Pretty standard, actually

People are still aflutter over a financier saying candidly in a BBC interview that "governments don't rule the world; Goldman Sachs rules the world." Some have suggested the interview was part of a series of pranks by The Yes Men, an anti-globalization activist group, but the BBC is standing by its source.

The thing is, the statement about Goldman Sachs is simply a part of the general paranoid's worldview. Google something like "Goldman Sachs conspiracy" or "Goldman Sachs +NWO" and you'll get an eyeful.

In fact, the notion that Goldman Sachs, like other mammoth global corporations, has more power than most governments in some spheres isn't even really a paranoid fantasy, but one of those notions whose half-truth makes it all the more believable, without actually being true. Put another way, it's like people who write Cris (who does tenants' rights counseling by email) "Can the landlord do this or that??" She usually answers, The landlord can do anything, but whether or not you can then object to it before the rent board, or sue the landlord, is another issue. Goldman Sachs can and will do anything it wants to, in certain spheres. The question is whether it is possible to hold anyone accountable for its decisions, or whether any government has the political will to do so.

Of course, there's also something anti-Semitic about saying "Goldman Sachs rules the world" without making a broader statement about banks and financial firms in general.

Watching the video, I thought that in the first half he did come across a little like a prankster. But by the end I thought no, he's just a young guy who is nervous about being so candid. I believe he's real. (And maybe not even anti-Semitic. He was speaking off the cuff; maybe "Goldman Sachs" is simply a way of saying "the largest, most powerful multi-national financial institutions.")

Update the next day: Apparently the fellow who made those statements isn't much of a financier or a trader at all, but an "attention seeker." Actually that doesn't make what he said any less true; it's what a lot of people believe. While I'm sure the BBC is embarrassed for giving air time to someone who turns out to be no more authoritative on the state of the world economy than any other idiot, that doesn't mean he wasn't right about a lot of things.

Conflicted about reading

I've been thinking lately about my reading and how it influences my writing. I don't know about other people, but I can think of three main ways I'm influenced:

1. Good: An author inspires me and makes me believe that I, too can accomplish something like that author achieved. For example, I was enormously inspired by The Savage Detectives, which was like a fresh breeze blowing through my soul. I immediately got a bunch of ideas for a book of my own and couldn't wait to start working on it.
2. Bad: A book is intimidatingly good; it confuses me, makes me feel like I could never come close to doing something like that, and makes me want to quit writing altogether. The work of Toni Morrison affects me like this.
3. Good and bad: I love reading mid-century authors like Greene, Highsmith, Roth, McMurtry, Salter, Updike and so on, and I'd like to write books like them, but mid-century realism is very out of style, and I can't quite do it well enough. For example, Larry McMurtry's huge novel Moving On contains everything I'd ever want to do in a novel. It's got humor, domestic complexity, a slew of distinctive characters, and best of all it's a genuine document of a time and place -- mostly the cosmopolitan part of Houston in the 1960s, though it also ventures to the Bay Area (where McMurtry was a Stegner fellow at Stanford). (Check out this review in the NYT, which criticizes the book for its length, but in light of totalistic books of 45 years later like Infinite Jest or 2666 makes it seem prophetic.)

So my problem is loving and wanting to imitate books like Moving On. And it's becoming a real problem with my own reading. I haven't read all of Graham Greene yet, or much of Salter, or a lot of Roth, etc. etc. -- so I'm really conflicted when I read an article like this one:

Bloomsbury venture to bring books "back from dead"

LONDON (Reuters) -- Bloomsbury Publishing, home to the Harry Potter books in Britain, launched its first purely digital imprint on Wednesday which it said would bring out-of-print titles "back from the dead."

Bloomsbury Reader has signed up a string of authors including Monica Dickens, great grand-daughter of Charles, politicians Alan Clark and Ted Heath, crime writer H.R.F. Keating and novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett.

The publisher is focusing on books which are out of print and where all English-language rights have reverted back to the author or the author's estate.... "In my experience, if people read a book by an author and they love that author, they suddenly want to read everything by that author and that's where this can fit in," said Stephanie Duncan, digital media director at Bloomsbury Publishing. "Once you've read every Inspector Ghote mystery then you think, well what else has H.R.F. Keating written, and that's where Bloomsbury Reader comes in ..."

Without knowing who any of those authors are, I think, wonderful! I could read everything by H.R.F. Keating -- whoever that is. But even if I had time, would it be a good idea?

Right now I'm reading (while still making my way through Infinite Jest) Martín Solares' The Black Minutes, which I've had on my shelves for several months. There isn't much I need to worry about copying in terms of the voice, as the translation is good and entertaining but not a bolt of lightning like the work of Bolaño translator Natasha Wimmer, but simply in order to enjoy the book I have to take time with it. I'm not a very slow reader, but if I speed up intentionally, I miss most of what I get out of reading in the first place. While I'm reading Solares, there's a ton of Bolaño and other authors on my shelves waiting, as I tend to buy first and find time to read later. Some things have been on my shelf for three or four years.

But then if I read only things written in the last, say, ten years -- so my work isn't influenced by mid-century realism -- then I miss out on a huge amount, especially works that transcend time and place. For example, the roman durs of Georges Simenon! They're a freaking touchstone! And they are available only because New York Review Books is doing the same thing as Bloomsbury has announced it will do, reprint classic out-of-print 20th century literature.

I have no solution to this problem, I write only to articulate it.

Have fun at the airport, Mark Alan Pritchard

One of the problems with having a not-uncommon name and a transparent email address (markpritchard@gmail.com) is that I often receive email intended for another Mark Pritchard. Today I even got a plane ticket!

Hope he gets to the airport early on Friday.

Dramatic conflict

Hanging out with Cris in the morning while she makes a cheesecake to take to a dinner she's invited to. She was talking about her aunt, who lives in the city and whom we used to take to Golden Gate Park every Sunday to feed the feral cats. (I was thinking about that period of our lives the other day. The period of taking Aunt Dora to the park lasted several years, and while it was going on it seemed as if it would never end. But it did end, when the feral cat population dropped below that which required a Sunday evening visit [though Dora still went in the mornings], and now I can't even remember when it ended -- at least two years ago.)

Cris began talking about the other cat ladies who also went to the park to feed the feral population. The cat ladies of the park don't form as close an alliance as you'd think. It takes a certain kind of person to be so invested in the welfare of feral cats that they go every day to the park and into the bushes to the protected places, behind fallen logs and such, where the cats like to be fed. Such a person is likely to be more comfortable around cats than people, and each has her own ideas about what each cat wants or needs, whether it is a candidate for adoption, and so on. Thus the relationship between the cat ladies is more like a détente than a friendship. They help each other sometimes, but other times have a beef with one another over territorial or tactical issues. One woman, whom I'll call Penny, befriended Dora for several years, but now they're on the outs.

Cris went on to tell me that Penny had a husband who hated cats. "Not allergic to cats, or indifferent to them, but someone who thinks that cats are a curse, are vermin. How could someone who loves cats marry someone like that?"

I said it was an interesting dramatic conflict, to marry someone who hates what you love. Is there some condition, I said, where music actually causes physical pain -- like something Oliver Sacks might write about. What if that person were to fall in love with a musician? That could make an interesting story.

Unless you're Patricia Highsmith, who published a whole book of short stories centering around pets (which sounds horrible unless you know that Highsmith never wrote sentimentally). Then you would definitely make it about cats.

Update: Just found an article from this spring about one of the people who feed feral cats in Golden Gate Park.

There are no real vampires, but you do have bedbugs

Scores were sickened and one person died over the past three years in amateur efforts to rid their homes of bedbugs, the CDC announced.

This review of the film Contagion discusses how vampires and body-snatching aliens are metaphors for contagion. And I've said before that the current obsession with zombies is pretty much the same thing as paranoid apocalyptic fantasies of an economic collapse. But it never occurred to me that we have blood-suckers in our midst that are causing similar fears.

I guess with bedbugs, "shoot 'em in the head" doesn't really work that well as a strategy.

Fashionista suffers to make an impression, scrambles epic rock song title

Courtesy a feed from @beatricks, a posting on the New York magazine website reporting on an article in the New Yorker. It's about some person named Daphne Guinness whose career seems to be mainly to attire herself, though in some official sense I guess she is what is still called a "fashion designer." (She seems to be something of an obsession for that particular NY Magazine blog; see all posts tagged with her name.)

I did a Google image search for her, and I have to say -- while some (and only some) of her outfits, for which she reportedly suffers so much, are striking, all her efforts make her look pretty much like every rich lady who's had a ton of work done.

But I guess I'm not her audience, am I. The main reason I'm blogging this person is to memorialize her brain-seizing quote:

I'll eat when I'm dead.

... which is a spooneristic take on the original bon mot "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," which was the title of a song on a 1975 Warren Zevon album.

She might want to look into adapting another famous rock 'n roll line, "Hope I eat before I get old."

Adventures in the 21st century: Amazon warehouse a hellhole

This summer, an un-air-conditioned Amazon.com warehouse in Pennsylvania was so hot that the company stationed ambulances onsite to take workers stricken by the high temperatures to a local hospital. The hospital, for its part, was so alarmed at all the Amazon workers being dumped there that it complained directly to OSHA. Meanwhile, it seems the majority of the workers were $12-an-hour temps, and when one collapsed, there were always more to take his or her place. (I almost said "its" place.)

According to the local paper, the Allentown Morning Call:

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn't quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an "unsafe environment" after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor's report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.

In a better economy, not as many people would line up for jobs that pay $11 or $12 an hour moving inventory through a hot warehouse. But with job openings scarce, Amazon and Integrity Staffing Solutions, the temporary employment firm that is hiring workers for Amazon, have found eager applicants in the swollen ranks of the unemployed.

That's life in George Bush's America. Oh, you say Bush isn't President anymore? Well, he is -- anywhere workers are exploited and treated like firewood in a non-union workplace, where they are subjected to speed-ups and feel they can't even report injuries -- Bush is the President there.

Summer of Infinite Jest 11 - Chow-22

Just finished the (comparatively short) twelve-page scene set in the tennis academy cafeteria -- and I almost said "mess hall," since more than any other scene in the book, this scene reminded me of "Catch-22." Heller did such an amazing job of handling two dozen characters and their individual foibles and issues and plot threads, nowhere as much as quotidian scenes like those in the mess hall or the briefing room -- say, Chapter 21, "General Dreedle." In the cafeteria scene in pages 627-638, DFW shows things we didn't know about ten or twelve major and minor E.T.A. characters -- hello, Mrs. Clarke, cafeteria manageress -- while very subtly, almost immeasurably, moving forward whatever it is we can still call the book's plot. Just another note to say how much I admire his mastery of this aspect of the novel.

I almost said that it was even more impressive given how little fiction DFW had published, but that's because I completely forgot about his first novel, "The Broom of the System," which no one talks about. I don't know why no one talks about it. I haven't read it, but I suppose it can only be because everything he achieved after that first novel dwarfs whatever he achieved with it.

Before the cafeteria scene was the weird farcical scene in Boston Commons in which the unnamed WYYY radio student engineer and fan of the vanished radio personality Madame Psychosis is literally scooped up and kidnapped by one of the Wheelchair Assassins, for no reason we can fathom. Didn't know what to make of that.

Summer of Infinite Jest 10 - the Randy Lenz episode

Pages 521-619 are almost wholly taken up by a series of events at and around Ennet House having to do with a particularly unctuous and recalcitrant resident named Randy Lenz, who in addition to having a seriously complicated past as a druggie/drug dealer is also personality-disordered. His foibles lead to a turning point in the Ennet House-related part of the book, as a street confrontation turns into a battle royale. In this tragicomic farce, the character who has emerged as the protagonist of the Ennet House-related parts, Don Gately, is injured.

In this sequence -- the whole 98 pages, not just the climactic battle -- the author once again demonstrates his mastery of the world of drug addiction and recovery. Not only the everyday doings of a halfway house and the endless AA meetings, but the mindset and behavior of an addict, and not just one addict but a whole range of mentalities and behaviors which various characters illustrate. It goes without saying that these 98 pages could have been -- would have been, by any other author -- compressed into 20 or 25 or at most 40. And if 40, then they would be the climax of an entire novel, not just one thread of a much larger novel where, in fact, they take place only 3/5 of the way through the book.

Think how many of the incidents in the book so far would have made up the ultimate climax of many lesser books: The conversation between the brothers in which Hal reveals to Orin the details of their father's suicide. The Eschaton match. Perhaps the sequence leading up to the suicide attempt of Joelle Van Dyne, although somehow it's not given as much weight as the others -- or maybe it is, because I had to skip several pages of that insufferable film grad student party. And finally the battle royale between Gately and three mysterious Canadian malefactors.

Of course, having so many momentous events and revelations so early in the book only raises the stakes for its ending. And I've heard that "Infinite Jest" doesn't necessarily pay off in the way readers expect a novel to, that like "The Sopranos" it just sort of ends. (See a post I wrote a couple years ago on theRumpus.net where I explored this phenomenon.) But I think just about anyone who has made it to this point in the book, except maybe the most narrow-minded, will be willing to grant the author his preference in doing whatever he wants, because that's how he's gotten us to this point.

I don't want to focus only on these technical aspects, except to say to those who will expect a neat ending: You know how hard this is? Not the neat ending, though that is hard in itself to pull off well, but the sheer aspect of juggling dozens of characters and at least three major plot lines over hundreds of pages?

In a perhaps unrelated note, I was thinking this morning about what books I would consider the best of the American 20th century's second half, and what immediately sprang to mind were "Revolutionary Road" and "Catch-22." Those are two books I would, if I had the time, read every year. Non-American books: "The Remains of the Day" and "The Savage Detectives," surely. But don't get me started.