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.

Milagrito, the last day

Our cat Milagrito will be put to sleep today. For the past six months he has been suffering from a fast-growing tumor. In the last several days he has become weak, and eats almost nothing, so it's time for him to go.

I'm finding myself a little speechless when I attempt to pay him tribute or commemorate him somehow; he's so important to us, but in ways that are little different from the ways all cats are wonderful. So I'll just say what we did this morning. I took him downstairs to the garden, where in the dawn light he walked around and sniffed a little. He's always gone down to the garden in the mornings to smell what he can smell of the night's visitors; this morning his tour was desultory.

I brought him back upstairs, and he drank a ton of water, as he's been doing for the last few months of his illness -- I guess it's all he can think to do to ease whatever he perceives is happening inside him. Then he ate a little fresh red tuna, his favorite, which we've been giving him as much as he wants. He's also been eating a lot of soft-boiled egg yolk in the last month or two, giving him calories and strength, but he's stopped wanting the eggs.

Then I carried him in my arms around the house, and he purred. I'm glad he can still purr -- one of his talents. His fearsomely loud rumble has diminished, but it's still there, and as long as I walked with him back and forth, he gave out with it, until he fell asleep on my shoulder.

Milagrito's page on Catster and "his blog"
Pictures on Flickr (Corrected link)

Cultural heroine, c. early 21st century

I ran across this image in the RSS feed of a young woman's blog. It isn't a picture of the blog owner, just a picture she posted, apparently one she likes, as she mainly posts arresting pictures of young women, many of them models:

Click the image to see it as posted. I think this picture pretty much sums up the current zeitgeist, everything popular culture is fascinated with or uses: Extreme youth and attractiveness plus anonymity (the goggles, wig and pose obscuring the model's real features) contrasted with exhibitionism (the underwear) plus narcissism (she's ostensibly taking her own picture) plus voyeurism (we can see much more of her than she "intends" with the picture she is "taking").

This image reminds me of the pictures posted on a rich young Mexican girl's blog I stumbled on many years ago (and which has long since vanished). She posted pictures she'd taken of herself on the toilet. In the pictures she was nude, but had arranged her arms and legs to hide her nipples and her pussy, thus controlling the extent of her exhibitionism. No name, and the postings were clearly just for her friends, whom she addressed through nicknames.

But the image above really piles on the memes. In addition to exhibitionism, narcissism and so on, we can even add nostalgia, if that is the right term for including the 20th century camera she is holding.

Worst-ever strategy for meeting new people: attend a demonstration 'to get on TV'

As the protesters milled inside the police circle, Benson Ferguson stood by himself. The 60-year-old, who lives in an SRO hotel and is on disability, said he had come to the protest to get on television. "I'm by myself," he said. "I feel terrible."

-- Bay Citizen story

Maybe he imagines looking on the "Missed Connections" section of Craigslist the next day and seeing an ad for someone who wants to get in touch with "that shy bearded fellow at the BART protest who stood by the side looking thoughtful, yet desirable."

Be afraid, be very afraid

It's Expanded Terror Threat Day, informally (yet officially) declared every year around this time. As the L.A. Times story says:

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials scrambled Friday to identify and find as many as three men who supposedly planned to travel from Afghanistan to detonate car bombs on bridges or in tunnels this weekend in New York and Washington. Officials said they obtained specific but uncorroborated intelligence this week that two or three individuals with close ties to Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan had entered the United States in a plot to disrupt events planned to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Vice President Joe Biden told morning TV shows that the intelligence came from a "credible source." ...

The men -- possibly including a U.S. citizen -- were said to have crossed by land from Pakistan to Afghanistan and then to have boarded a series of flights bound for the United States, possibly connecting through Dubai International Airport. ... The warning came from a single trusted source who has given correct information in the past, said a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak to the media. Intelligence officials do not have specific names or fragments of names of any suspects, the official added.

Really? With all the terrorist watch lists, several people crossed on foot from Pakistan to Afghanistan, flew blithely out of Kabul through Dubai and thence to the U.S.? Great. Meanwhile hundreds of innocent people can't fly on a plane at all for reasons they aren't even allowed to know.

While:

Traffic backed up at Manhattan's bridges and tunnels Friday as the New York Police Department set up vehicle checkpoints on nearby streets. Police searched parking garages and stepped up towing of illegally parked cars, and some officers wore portable monitors set to vibrate in the presence of unusual radiation. National Guard troops carrying assault rifles patrolled at Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station, the city's railroad hubs, and police officers increased checks of subway riders' bags. In Washington, police and federal law enforcement increased security around government buildings and monuments. Extra air marshals will fly on domestic flights this weekend, and foreign air carriers have been asked to step up screening of passengers bound for the U.S. In addition, the Transportation Security Administration will deploy more than 600 teams of bomb-sniffing dogs and bag inspectors on train platforms and subway systems around the country.

I feel so safe I could fly. Just not on a plane.

Today's fake: @NBCNews twitter feed hacked

Needless to say, it is a hoax.

Name of the day: Storm Ogle

From the website of the radio station KCDZ of Joshua Tree, CA, this news item:

YUCCA VALLEY MAN ARRESTED AGAIN FOR DRUGS

A Twentynine Palms man who was arrested a week ago for being under the influence of drugs, was arrested again Saturday for possession of methamphetamine. Quinton Umphress, 21, was arrested August 27 when his landlord reported him to the Sheriff's Department for doing drugs in his rental house in the 5400 block of Encelia Avenue in Twentynine Palms. Saturday, Umphress, along with a companion, Storm Ogle, 29, also of Twentynine Palms, was arrested again, this time in the 6800 block of Alpine Avenue in Twentynine Palms for investigation of possession of dangerous drugs. Quinton Umphress and Storm Ogle were booked into the Morongo Basin Jail with bail set at $25,000 each.

Actually both names are pretty good -- Quinton Umphress and Storm Ogle. Both sound like residents of Ennet House.

Foamer: problem with modern culture is not enough killing of small animals

Haven't had a laugh at Dave Daubenmire recently. But no problem! He's just posted They Are Afraid of Real Men, in which he suggests that the problem with America today is that we don't train boys to kill things. An excerpt:

I am just going to say it. We have allowed the young men in this nation to be emasculated by women. No offense to women... But, I don't want my son acting like them. I want him to kill bugs, and shoot varmints, and tell men off. I want him to open doors for women, to protect and defend his sisters, to learn to handle a gun in order to protect his family. Our children understand that the Father is the head of the house and that his job is to guide, guard and govern those God has entrusted to him. ...

If you don't teach him now, some 23 year old recent college graduate who minored in Women's Studies at the University will. ... In America we are teaching our young boys how to get in touch with their feelings, how to recycle paper, and how to speak without offending. I read somewhere that one of the first things Muslim children are taught in some of their schools around the Middle East is how to kill and dissect young animals. It teaches them to get over their natural revulsion to blood.

Or we could just make sure our children's first sexual experiences are with women who are menstruating. Unless killing is the important part. I have the feeling it is.

Marines think Twentynine Palms base is worst possible assignment

Conveniently located in the middle of nowhere -- halfway to hell, if you ask most Marines -- Twentynine Palms is possibly the worst place on earth to get stationed.

From "Hesitation Kills," by Maj. Jane Blair,
quoted in a San Diego Union Tribune article

For your perusal, here's a map of the base's location, and here's a picture I took last summer on the base's boundary fence.

Yep, pretty desolate -- but I have the feeling it looks pretty good after you've actually been to Iraq where, after summer temperatures of 120+ degrees, the mere 100+ temps of Twentynine Palms probably feel refreshing.

(Last year I spent a month in the region while researching a novel.)

English rioters disappointed leftists by having no political agenda

This blog post analyzes a few think pieces on the English riots, more or less agreeing that the problem with the riots was not that they attacked symbols of capitalism but that they did so ignorantly and without any political agenda.

One wishes there were something to celebrate about the riots, but sadly there is not. Just a sense of depression, of loss, and of disgust: "And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution."

I think that's why the Bolsheviks distrusted the peasants, isn't it? They felt the peasants didn't really understand the situation and needed guidance. How'd that work out?

I think the urge to simply destroy things, rather than replace them with something better, is a much stronger urge in society these days, as seen by the scorched-earth political tactics of many political parties. I was talking about this with a group at church a few months ago. In politics we admire the desire to win, we call it "fire in the belly" and so on. It's also a quality admired in athletes. But the difference between, say, the World Series champion Giants and the Democrats under Obama is that all the Giants had to do was win. They don't have to govern.

It's much easier to tear things down than to build something up -- a banal truism, but one we see proved over and over again. Again, how's that nation-building thing in Afghanistan going -- or Iraq?

Today's fake: The alleged popularity of 'The Crock-Pot Girls'

A Facebook page for three suburban women offering recipes and calling themselves "The Crock-Pot Girls" blew up in popularity so quickly that readers are suspicious. Not sure (and don't care) whether there really are three such women, but their sudden popularity on Facebook is evidently the work of an SEO hacker. It's not even clear whether the SEO hacker in in league with the women or simply selected them as the vehicle for his artistry; I like to think it's the latter, because then a whole range of slapstick-comedy plots are suggested.

Previously:
The Lonely 'Brinks Stockroom man'
The Desert 'Lost-Love Lawyer'

Summer of Infinite Jest 9 - Pleasure and addiction; my inability to separate the author from the work

One of the main themes of "Infinite Jest" becomes quite clear by the end (at least I hope it's the end) of the drawn-out conversation between the two secret agents, who have for no particular reason stayed up all night on a ridge overlooking Tucson discussing the philosophical reasons behind "the Entertainment." And that theme is simply the trade-offs between pleasure and addiction and the moral implications of choosing, or shall we say acceding to, an addiction.

"The Entertainment" is what they call the weaponized video "cartridge," prepared by an unknown agency, which is so compellingly pleasurable to watch that it puts all who view it into a spell they cannot break. Anyone who watches even one second of the video is instantly bewitched, such that they want only to keep their eyes glued to the video, forsaking everything else in life. They do not -- seemingly cannot -- break away even for a moment, not to eat or drink or (the author makes quite clear) to use the toilet; and they stay in that state, enraptured by the video, until they die. The mechanism by which this happens, whether it is magical or has some scientific basis, is not explained; neither do we have a clue as to what is on the video, at least not at this point around page 530. The mechanism is unimportant; what's important is that this literary conceit allows the characters to explore questions about pleasure, selfhood, addiction, free will, and other philosophical issues.

I can't pretend to be able to really understand, or even follow, the philosophical questions. I never took a philosophy course, and it's hard enough for me even to follow the discussions on the radio show "Philosophy Talk." If there's anything I'm going to understand about this important part of the book, it's by approaching it from a literary angle, as one of the book's themes. And understood that way, in the context of the rest of the book, it seems simple: If seeking pleasure leads swiftly to addiction, as it did for all the characters in the AA-related scenes, then is pleasure-seeking advisable at all? And if not, what does that imply about Western culture, given that so many people live their lives in pursuit of pleasure?

Worthwhile questions in a great book, but the author's own death makes it impossible to leave it there. My friend who is a literature scholar will object, but I'm going to say that no matter how convincingly the author explicates these themes, in this and other works (such as the tour de force essay on pleasure cruises, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" [pdf]), whatever he has to say about the pursuit of pleasure is, for me, undercut by his suicide. Whatever he had to say about pleasure, responsibility, caution, personal growth or duty is, for me, drowned out by that act of violence.

So while it's possible for me to suspend disbelief when I consider the literary conceit of the magically compelling "Entertainment" cartridge, and it's possible for me to put aside my knowledge of the author's ultimate statement while I'm reading this book, when I close the book I am thrown back on what I know about the author. It doesn't spoil the book for me, but it taints it.

A little later: I just found this passage in DFW's introduction, reprinted on the NYT's website, to the non-fiction collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." -- a passage which says, in 100 words, a great deal about the themes of his novel:

... we (tennis players in the middle of a long session of drills) were both in the fugue-state that exhaustion through repetition brings on, a fugue-state I've decided that my whole time playing tennis was spent chasing, a fugue-state I associated too with plowing and seeding and detasseling and spreading herbicides back and forth in sentry duty along perfect lines, up and back, or military marching on flat blacktop, hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush, numbing and yet exquisitely felt. We were young, we didn't know when to stop.

There it all is -- addiction, a hypnotic state with paradoxical effects, and the pursuit of it.

Summer of Infinite Jest 8 -- Waiting for the other shoe to drop

I'm about a hundred pages on in "Infinite Jest," page 526 exactly. Hal Incandenza has been sitting outside the office of the tennis academy's headmaster, or whatever title they use for him, along with a few other seniors, waiting to hear how much trouble they will get into for not stopping the Eschaton match, a holiday entertainment which ended in chaos, injuring several younger academicians. (At the end of it, it seemed as if one or two might have actually been killed, but since no one has mentioned it, I guess not.) Hal and the others wait, and we wait along with them, subjected to one of the author's now-familiar tactics of inflating a scene by describing the setting, the background noises and movements, the physical and mental state of various characters, one or two side trips into backstory, and so on. That's not counting the footnotes, which I have been pretty roundly ignoring, though I looked at a recent one to see what "Coatlicue Complex" (sic) meant, and was rewarded with this footnote: "No clue." Ha.

My friend who roped me into reading "Infinite Jest" with her has long since quit, a choice I respect, though I tend to stick with great big books to the end. Maybe there's a little bit of so-I-can-truly-say-I-read-it feeling behind this, and maybe a bit of Stockholm Syndrome as it applies to the reading of large novels. But mainly I stick with the long novels I've decided to start out of respect for the author's own tenacity and the author's own achievement. If it would be a sad world if we all felt condemned to finish everything we started, it would also be a sad world in which no one actually finishes reading "Infinite Jest," "2666," or "Europe Central."

On the other hand, last year I gave up on a book by an author I used to love, Peter Handke's "Crossing the Sierra de Gredos," after 300 of its 700 pages, not only because I was bored stiff by the language but because there was absolutely no indication that anything would ever happen. So it's not like I can't cut my losses.

Back to "Infinite Jest." Several times in the last 80 or so pages we were brought back to the ridge overlooking Tucson, where the two secret agents, one Quebecois and one American, discuss the moral philosophy behind what I have referred to as the magically compelling videotape, or as they call it, The Entertainment. This sequence -- the scene is drawn out in ten- and fifteen-page episodes interspersed through much of the book so far -- shows how the author draws out a single scene to great lengths, gradually exposing meaning through events and -- in this case, exclusively -- through dialogue. The two operatives have a long disputatious conversation that acts at times as a chorus, bringing (gradually!) to light the main theme of the book, which is the tension between freedom and choice on the one hand and enslavement and addiction on the other.

More about that in next entry.

Meanwhile I also read, and finished, Manuel Puig's "The Buenos Aires Affair."