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.

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."

Google chairman: Google+ is completely optional!

Google Plus is completely optional. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to.

--Google chairman Eric Schmidt (via Gawker)

Gee, thanks, I took you up on that the very first day, without your specific permission.

It's amazing that despite its relatively infinite capacity to store and study data, Google feels it needs to know even more about me than it already knows after I've been using GMail for years. Schmidt would probably say Google can't protect me as well as it might be able to, if only it knew I liked the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- but it already knows that, because I've written about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on this blog, which is on the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google. So how is me filling out a profile on Google+ going to give them any more?

Anyway, I wrote a whole novel about this -- or rather, half the novel is about this kind of thing, and half, more than half really, is just loads of sex. Which was a lot more fun to write about.

Check it out.

Mystery crash in the desert

A weekend roll-over crash in the Mojave Desert led to the discovery of a dead 23-year-old Twentynine Palms man, San Bernardino County coroner's officials say.

The dead man suffered head injuries believed to be unrelated to the wreck, which now has prompted a homicide investigation, according to coroner's officials.

-- story in the Riverside Press-Enterprise

Never seen anything more like a "Law and Order" opening.

EXT. -- DESERT HIGHWAY -- DAWN

A car comes along a desert highway, veering across the yellow line, then finally off the road and overturning several times before coming to rest on its side. Silence as the dust settles. Hold on the car's wheels spinning to a stop.

EXT. -- CRASH SITE -- LATER IN THE DAY

The car from a different angle. The site is now crawling with emergency workers. into the foreground come DETECTIVE LENNY and a SHERIFFS DEPUTY.

DEPUTY

I figure he left the roadway over there, did a header into the wash, and then flipped over about four times til he wound up over here.

RACK FOCUS to the wreck in the BACKGROUND. DETECTIVE ED stands up and waves and shouts.

ED

Lenny! Check this out!

OPPOSITE ANGLE as LENNY and the DEPUTY walk over to the wreck, with ED in the foreground, kneeling with the driver's body which is under a sheet.

ED (lifting sheet slightly)

Looks like head injuries.

LENNY

Yeah, I would have figured that.

ED

Well, unless you see a Louisville Slugger in the wreckage, I don't think it's from the crash.

LENNY

What do you mean?

ED

Something made this reverse Mark McGuire signature on his temple.

LENNY (to the deputy)

Pick up everybody carrying a baseball bat.

The DEPUTY goes off.

LENNY (Shouting after the deputy)

He definitely doesn't play for the Angels!

RUN TITLES.

So long, Messers Suzuki, and thanks for all the cushions

Don't you hate the way the younger generation thinks they invented something they didn't?

There was talk at the conference of the ways in which the digital revolution has helped spread the teachings of the Buddha, once accessible to Americans only through pilgrimages to Asia.

-- from an L.A. Times story on a
recent "Buddhist geeks" conference which
"brought together bloggers, tweeters, scholars,
teachers and just plain Buddhist practitioners."

So much for the 100+ year history of Zen in America.

Collapsitarian paranoid of the day: former New Orleans cop

What if gasoline hit $5 a gallon and unemployment was still hanging around the current ~15%? What if there were a few small protests that turned a bit violent -- not even on the scale of what we see in Europe -- but a few townhall meetings that get out of hand? The level of comfort in this country is quickly sliding downhill and it will only take a few provocations, a few simple emergencies and all hell will break loose.

That's from a post by "a former New Orleans police officer who has seen what societal collapse looks like first-hand during Hurricane Katrina" and now lives in Oklahoma (!) and has a website called "Truth is Treason." Man, that's credibility! That's JUST who I'd find believable about the sociology of the supposedly coming world collapse.

"A few town hall meetings that get out of hand?" That's what's going to trigger widespread panic?

Let's just try to imagine how that would happen. Gas is $5 a gallon, or 20% higher than it is now. (Or if you're in Oklahoma, maybe 25% higher.) Unemployment is 15%, which is not only what it pretty much is now, but is a laughably low number to justify anything like widespread discontent. And then... and then! A few townhall meetings get out of hand. To the barricades! No, to WalMart to stock up on water and ammo!

Maybe if you live in Oklahoma, suffering through the worst drought in 80 years, unemployed, bombarded by tornadoes for six months of the year, it all starts to sound believable. But really -- things like this are why people on the coasts mock people in places like Oklahoma.

About the progress of my novel

I've been working on my present project, a long novel called "Knock Yourself Out," for a solid two and a half years, since the last week of December 2008, when I got a series of ideas that led directly to starting writing the following April. But other parts of the novel are based on ideas I had as early as March 1996, when I wrote a five page scenario about a man who is trapped by a snowstorm at O'Hare and has to make his way back through the Midwest, through successive blizzards, and when he arrives back in California his life is off-kilter. I paired an idea I had in late 2008, which was a sort of psychological sex thriller set in a rainy Berkeley hills mansion, with that idea, and started writing in April, 2009.

It took until the end of 2009 to write most of the first section, and then in February 2010 I took a car trip to the midwest to research the whole notion of driving in blizzards. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 road trip.") Then it took me until the end of the summer to actually finish the first part of the book -- but I still hadn't written the first chronological section, in which the guy gets snowbound. All I had written was the part set in the San Francisco Bay Area, after he returns from the trip.

Then in September and October 2010 I went to the Mojave Desert to research the second part of the book, because after the guy's life goes off-kilter he moves to the desert and gets involved with the wrong crowd. (See the series of blog entries tagged with "2010 desert trip.") And since returning from that sojourn in October 2010 I've been working on the desert part. I'm about, oh, two-thirds of the way through it, on the downhill slope where everything has been put in place and all I have to do is work through the plot -- as least as far as a first draft is concerned.

Meanwhile, I learned something interesting about narrative. Cris and I have been watching the series "Breaking Bad" on DVD, and we just finished the third season -- or thought we did. The season is broken up onto 4 DVDs, containing episodes 1-4, 5-7, 8-10, and 11-13 respectively. And somehow our Netflix queue got messed up and instead of disc 3 we got disc 4 and watched all of it without realizing we had missed anything.

Yes, we didn't realize we had missed anything. We missed seeing the third quarter of the season, three entire episodes totaling the length of a feature film, and didn't miss anything in the story. (The following sentence is for anyone familiar with the show.) Hank is still in the hospital after getting shot in episode 7; Walt has fired his first meth lab assistant and is now working with his original partner Jessie; Walt's wife Skyler is still floundering in her affair with her boss. Apparently nothing happens in those episodes we missed.

Right now I'm in the same part of my book -- the third quarter -- laboriously working through the plot. I'm a plodding fiction writer, I have to write through all the actions to understand character motivation and figure out why people make the choices at the end of the book I usually already know, by the middle of the book, that they will make. But the lesson of the unnoticed "Breaking Bad" episodes for me is: nobody cares. Cut all that shit out and nobody will notice.

So I'm looking forward to doing that in my second draft. After I finish this one, sometime by the end of the year.
 

A little later: I wrote the above entry before finding this entirely accurate and sadly hilarious article in The Onion depicting a novelist's self-loathing as he realizes all the effort he has put into his novel is in vain: Novelist Has Whole Shitty World Plotted Out. I found the entry thanks to an acquaintance who tweeted about it: "This Onion article is like looking at the most unflattering photo of myself ever taken."

Ron Paul and Lou Dobbs get hard thinking about the collapse

When the hoi polloi "don't get what they want," they "will be in the streets," Rep. Ron Paul says to a suitably excited Lou Dobbs. Both of whom have plenty to gain and nothing to lose from encouraging the fat-ass couch potato Fox News viewer to view the roiling masses with horror.

Because we just saw it in England, didn't we! Five nights of rioting and looting by the underclass. Except it wasn't quite all the underclass; plenty of privileged middle-class and even rich kids went out too, to see what they could grab.

He's right about one thing, if this is what he even means: that it's economic policies, not politics per se, that animates people. The Republicans' only problem is that it's their economic policies that have put the hoi polloi in this position. However, the smash-and-grab rioters of England were not doing it to feed their families, but to get hundred-dollar Nikes. Pure opportunism. And actually they have nothing to do with the kind of panic foreseen by the collapsitarians, no latter how much that crowd is pointing to the riots and yelling "See? See?!"

A typical screed from a paranoid right-winger

I often note the posts of collapsitarians, but today let's look at a typical blatt from one of your basic paranoid right-wing racists. It's titled Lone Wolf False Flag or Real Mumbai-Style Active Shooters?

"False Flag" is right-wing-paranoid lingo for an act blamed on one group but secretly perpetrated by their enemies in order to defame them. The classic example is the Reichstag fire, blamed on the Jews, but actually done by the Nazis. Ever since they blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, almost every act of terrorism is said by one foamer or another to be a "false flag" act, or in other words, a terrorist act secretly enacted by the government and blamed on right-wingers. You get the idea. Without further ado:

As the media and Spokesman-in-Chief, President Obama, warn us of a "lone wolf terrorist event" on or around September 11th, I can't help but think back at all of the articles I've written or posted regarding a "Mumbai-style Attack" or an active shooter scenario such as Arizona's Jared Loughner and the Oslo, Norway event. Many on the far-right continue to believe that this incident will portray a typical causcasian of the conservative swagger to be the trigger man in an effort to further demonize the "Patriot movement" (which has withered into the Old Republican Guard 2.0, ala George Bush-esque Rick Perry and Palin's successor: war-mongering, former IRS tax prosecutor Michelle Bachman) and alleviate pressure on the Middle East and "Obama's homeland." ...

Gun bans. Permanent renewal of the PATRIOT ACT. Orwellian pre-crime thought police. Internet censorship. Even further widespread eavesdropping and wiretapping. New "terror laws" regarding assembling in groups, limits to free speech and access to firearms. This would be one of the cheapest and yet most effective terrorist plots in American history. And with it, broad, sweeping political powers for the Elite.

So that's their basic paranoid take on things: All regulation exists to limit the rights of true patriots, and because any serious terrorist act would only lead to more laws and regulations, which are in the interest of the government, it follows that only the government would be behind terrorist acts.

This is the train of thought of the 9-11 conspiracy nuts, who go to great lengths to demonstrate that only a well-trained crack government effort could possibly have produced the destruction of Sep. 11th, 2001. I won't even both to link to any such blatts, you can find them yourself in ten seconds if you try. They are entertaining for a few minutes and then simply tiresome. Look for them to peak next month, and then if anything remotely terroristic happens in the next, oh, 20 years.

Dr. Seuss, 1970s hipster

Don't know when this photograph of Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss, was taken, but from the polyester print shirt I'm guessing early 1970s.

Click on the image for a larger version, from the article in today's L.A. Times. 

I love everything about that picture: the picture window, the heavy beige phone you could use to conk a burglar, the ceramic mug that might say something like "World's Greatest Artist Is Also My Grandpa," and above all the bold print of the shirt peeking out under the beige sweater. I look at that and think: this is what a successful mid-century artist looked like, dressed like, lived like. I'll bet if you could find a picture of Charles Schultz from the same year, it wouldn't be far off. 

Update the next day: This article has another photo of Seuss at home, showing an interior room and a more relaxed grey turtleneck style. Geisel seems to have liked neutral colors -- an interesting facet for a man whose drawings were fantastical.

Summer of Infinite Jest: DFW's bandana

Pretty much just what you'd think:

I started wearing bandannas in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time. When it's really hot, I would perspire so much that I would drip on the page. Actually, I started wearing it that year, and then it became a big help in Yaddo in '87 because I would drip into the typewriter, and I was worried that I would get a shock. And then I discovered that I felt better with them on. And then I dated a woman who ... said there were these various chakras, and one of the big ones was what she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. And in a lot of cultures, it was considered better to keep your head covered. And then I began thinking about the phrase, Keeping your head together, you know? .... It's a security blanket for me.... It makes me... feel kind of creepy that people view it as an affectation or trademark or something. It's more just a foible, it's the recognition of a weakness, which is that I'm just kind of worried my head's going to explode.

-- Quoted on Flavorwire from a book of interviews with David Foster Wallace

He's covering his spout hole so his head doesn't explode. Perfectly clear. Any more questions?

Things I had to look up: José Juan Tablada

Over a year ago, the New Yorker published a Roberto Bolaño story, "Prefiguration of Lalo Cura," which I really had a hard time reading. I kept the copy of the magazine on my bedside table for the day when I would finally have time to try reading it again, and I have finally got to it.

The story is narrated by a man whose mother was an actress in minor porn movies of, I guess, the 1980s, and is really about the oeuvre of the German filmmaker who wrote and directed the films, which are described in hallucinatory detail. Along the way, as was his habit, Bolaño makes a passing reference to an obscure poet:

For example, Oscar Guillermo Montes [one of the actors in the pornos] in a scene from a movie I've forgotten the rest of: he's naked from the waist down, his penis hangs flaccid and dripping. Behind the actor, a landscape unfolds: mountains, ravines, rivers, forests, towering clouds, a city, perhaps a volcano, a desert. Oscar Guillermo Montes perches on a high ridge, an icy breeze playing with a lock of his hair. That's all. It's like a poem by Tablada, isn't it? But you've never heard of Tablada.

Emphasis mine. Quite right, I had never heard of Tablada -- who was he?

A poet of the early 20th century, José Juan Tablada (1871-1945) is known as the poet who introduced haiku to the Spanish language. According to this article, he lived a fascinating life. Among other pursuits, he traveled to Japan several times and was honored by the emperor, lived in Paris for a time and consorted with the surrealists, ran a bookshop with his wife in New York City, and represented the Mexican government in Columbia and Venezuela.

That article (by Ty Hadman on his website Aha Poetry), which starts out a little amateurishly, is actually very well-informed and is worth reading in full. As for the Bolaño story, it's interesting, but you have to be in a mood to slow down and get into it.

In Tablada's honor, then:

Wandering, visiting, writing,
    Tablada wielded his pen and brush
        like a warrior with one master:
    poetry

Envisioning a better book

In the last few working sessions on my novel, I've been writing a crucial chapter -- I say it's crucial because it is really the turning point of the second part: By the end of this chapter, the main character has started down a road he will never return from.

As I work on this chapter I've been following a pattern of drafting content in one session, completely rewriting it in the next. Last weekend, for example, I completely rewrote on Saturday what I had struggled through on Monday the 25th, when I took a vacation day to write and could come up with nothing more than 150 words. The result was much better than I wrote on the Monday, that's for sure. So this chapter has taken me longer, but it's the better for it.

I still have glimpses of a better book, one in which the language is polished and things are truly good. I'm starting to realize that my first novel "Make Nice," for example, was, well, good in some ways, but not very good in the ways that count. By which I mean really interesting prose, a lack of dross, some inspiration and originality. (It does have some of that, and of course those are the best parts. The climactic scene featuring Marilyn Monroe, for example: really good.) If I were to tackle a rewrite of "Make Nice" now (which I will never do), it would be a lot better. But I think I can learn more from writing new books, not rewriting old ones.

Dr. Tom Little and his companions, 5 August 2010

Just a note to commemorate Dr. Tom Little and nine other aid workers who were killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan a year ago today. Little and his colleagues had worked to deliver medical care in Afghanistan for decades, in some cases since the 1970s.

Freedom of choice

He says of (Ukraine) today, as former Orange prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko stands trial, that everyone watches the news "as if it were a soap opera. We recently had elections of which someone said we had a choice between a sports car without brakes, or brakes without a car. Since Ukrainians are never in a hurry we chose the brakes with no car."

from a profile of writer Andrey Kurkov
in the Guardian, 29 July 2011

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 7: the Eschaton match

Now well into the 300s (of pages), I read today the Eschaton scene. Eschaton is a war game played by the tennis academy kids on a world map stretched out over 4 tennis courts in which you bomb other teams' territory by lobbing tennis balls onto it, the tennis balls representing thermonuclear weapons. And this scene, all twenty pages of it or so, is really the first utter masterpiece of the book. The author begins with the origin of the game, its rules, its motley equipment, long footnotes about theory, etc. -- and then depicts the match itself. Somewhere along the line, the scene switches from symbolic violence to real violence, from farce to what might be tragedy (we don't know by the end of the scene, but it's conceivable that one or two of the players has actually been killed). I was really impressed by the way the author manages this transition, while stage-managing the actions of at least 25 characters, some of them participating, some only "spectating," and at the same time crafting what is, at least, a remarkable allegory of how games are war, especially war games. Other themes: how combatants are essentially adolescent, no matter how adult and grave they try to be; how one generation passes its traditions on to the next, partially in hopes that precise transmittal of this tradition will ensure nothing changes, and how these hopes are inevitably dashed; and how people constantly disappoint themselves and each other.

Preceding this scene we're finally back on the outskirts of Tucson with the two secret agents who are discussing the magically compelling videotape. In this scene we find out that the content of the tape is pleasing, and that its origin is American (i.e. United Statesian, which in this book is part of a North American union, although the protagonists [antagonists?] of this scene speak as if Canada and the U.S. are still separate countries), but nothing else. They have a conversation about who is responsible for the deaths caused by the compelling videotape -- which victims find themselves unable to stop or turn away from, and thus die from thirst in their seats after several days -- the producer or the consumer, if a product is so addictive it kills. I liked this scene much better than the preceding ones that showed this pair. They seemed less menacing and more like a tragic chorus.

And before that was the scene about the drag queen addict going pretty much insane as he goes through heroin withdrawl in the worst way possible. Grisly, but clearly inseparable from the author's purposes.

More hysteria from the collapsitarian center

Yes, the center, not the fringe. Given that the collapsitarians are all on the fringe anyway, it still makes sense that the movement itself has a left, right and center. Anyway:

Since "terrorism" is now a term we can use to describe just about any action deemed a threat to the public and government infrastructure, the possibilities for what the next "terror attack" will look like are endless. It can come in the form of suicide bombers at your local shopping mall, a cyber attack on financial markets launched via the internet, or any number of other potential threats that have been recently highlighted by our Department of Homeland Security. There need be only a single event that occurs at an opportune time and is pushed by the mainstream media and all hell will break loose.

Imagine, for a minute, what America would look like if nationwide curfews were implemented, civil rights were suspended (including confiscation of guns), the US dollar crashed, ATM's and credit card transactions were restricted, and food and gas purchases were limited.

-- Gerald Celente

The reasonable-sounding rhetoric in that example masks very poorly its hysterical premise: that somehow "a single event" such as a suicide bomber in a first-world country would be enough to push the entire world financial system into collapse. Frankly, a suicide bomber in a mall probably wouldn't have much effect, given that malls failed as a retail model years ago and are now passing from the scene and such an attack is likely to only blow up closed storefronts and lonely discount shoe stores. Now if you blew up a NASCAR race, that would get some attention. An attack on America!

Meanwhile, Dilbert jumped on the bandwagon in Sunday's strip:

On today's great reality show, 'The President and the Nutty Congress'

The main problem is that the Republican Party does not actually care very much about the deficit. It cares about, in order: Low taxes for high-income earners; reducing social spending, especially for the poor; protecting the defense budget; and low deficits. The Obama administration and many Democrats actually do care about the deficit and are willing to sacrifice their priorities in order to achieve it, a desire that was on full display during the health care reform debate. Republicans care about deficit reduction only to the extent that it can be undertaken without impeding upon other, higher priorities.

--Jonathan Chait on tnr.com

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 6

I read two long scenes: the phone conversation between Orin and Hal on just what happened when their father committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven, and the following section, almost as long, about the Port Washington tennis match. Or at least the lead-up to it; I don't know if we get more of a it later.

I actually skipped the first five or six pages of the brothers' phone conversation, which simply looked like banter, and got to the meat of it: the part about their father's death, a section which answers the question of how anyone could actually commit suicide by putting their head in a microwave oven. I won't spoil it for you if you haven't read it. What impressed me about this whole scene is the mastery of black comedy. The whole idea of committing suicide by microwave is so absurd that it's impossible to believe, but when the author clearly describes how it might actually be accomplished, and its results, you the reader are forced to deal with this event along with the characters.

That said, I am just not finding anything about the dad figure all that interesting. Oh, I forgot about the whole scene that precedes this -- the scene of Joelle Van Dyne at a party of film grad students. Somewhere else in this blog I have expressed my revulsion at film grad students, a revulsion born of close exposure to them when I was a film criticism undergraduate. And they don't seem any more likable through DFW's eyes. As for the positively baroque and obsessive drug preparations which Joelle goes through, that was hard to read too. Clearly the author is both 1) comparing the anticipatory pleasure experienced by an addict before getting high with the anticipation of a suicide, and 2) himself taking a definitely weird obsessive pleasure in depicting it. Of course most of the over-detailed parts of this book, which are so many as to actually take up most of the book, share in this delight in obsessive detail, so that it comes to seem as if it's one of the author's main themes. If it's true that this is a book about the seductive nature of consumption, then I find this strategy on the part of the author to be wrong-headed. The joy he takes in depicting obsession is itself obsessive: there's not enough irony between them. It's like reading erotica that you know the author was turned on by when he or she wrote it.

I pretty much enjoyed the tennis match. I want to make it clear that I don't care about tennis one bit, but the pleasure I take in reading about it in this book is like that of any reader who learns about a subject by reading a novel about it. (Cf. my I.J. entry no. 4 in which I remarked on this effect as well.)

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 5

Last night I read the section from page 193 to 210 which introduces Ennet House and its surroundings and denizens. Yes, we've seen some of them before, but in this section the author does a very head-on description of the place -- its surroundings, including with respect to the tennis academy which has dominated the first two hundred pages, plus a long section on the things "you learn" in rehab there. After several pages of this (for example, you learn "that no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that," and "that the metro Boston street term for not having any money is sporting lint"), the narration shifts to several pages about the various tattoos of Ennet House denizens.

The information on tattoos is presented as the fruit of an obsessive interest by one of the residents, Ewell, but the passage struck me as the first part of the book which is truly dated. When the author wrote the book in the early 1990s, tattoos were still largely limited to the kinds of people described here -- prisoners, gang members, and the more outre members of the drug or queer community. Tattoos are depicted as disfiguring, as one of the stupid and "permanent" consequences of the poor judgement that results from doing drugs. As large as the author's imagination clearly is, he obviously never imagined that tattooing would become so mainstream that it's now unusual for a youth in his or her 20s or 30s not to have one.

Before tattoos, piercing was in vogue. In the 1990s, I got pierced. I never got tattooed. Now age 55, all my piercings are gone except one. Still don't have a tattoo.

I haven't mentioned, by the way, the section which precedes this, about Madame Psychosis' radio show. I enjoyed the section, and not because I expect or hope this radio show or its mysterious host to appear anywhere in the rest of the book except maybe in passing reference, but because I love weird radio that's on late at night and that almost no one listens to.

Antwerp to 2666 -- beginning to end for Bolaño

Man, what an achievement 2666 was. I re-read the last twenty pages of The Part About Fate this weekend -- maybe the part which is most like the Bolaño book I'm actually reading now, Antwerp.

Antwerp is very short, probably no more than 4000 words, so I'm savoring it. I read a chapter (each of which are 200-500 words long) one day and re-read it a day or two later and then move on. There is no plot, or only a very obscure one. The book sort of reads like a novel of which only the first sentence of every paragraph has been printed; in fact, I thought idly that you could actually use it as a template and write a paragraph for each sentence, using the existing sentence somewhere in the paragraph. Or you could write an alternate novel using the chapter titles only. Or you could write a series of songs using the chapter titles. (There are 55 chapters or so, so it would be a lot of songs. But the chapter titles do sound like song titles.)

Why do I say that The Part About Fate, from Bolaño's final novel, is like Antwerp, which he wrote more than twenty years earlier? Because both are noirish. And this strikes me now because part of the novel I'm working on now is noirish.

Morgan Meis put it all much better in this review from the website "The Smart Set":

Ignacio Echevarría, Bolaño's executor, called Antwerp the "Big Bang" that created Bolaño's subsequent literary universe. That would mean the fragmentary jottings from Antwerp later expand into the dense 900 pages of 2666, Bolaño's magnum opus of crime and horror revolving around the small town of Santa Teresa. In a few literal ways this is probably true. Crime and violence are the twin stars in Bolaño's works. They are already there in Antwerp, the narrative of which (if there can be said to be one at all) centers on the murder of six kids at a place called the Calabria Commune campground.

I'm more interested, for the moment, in how Antwerp is the birth of a literary mood in Bolaño, one that also stayed with him throughout the production of his longer and more ambitious works. Yes, Antwerp is the creation of themes and characters that will reappear throughout Bolaño's writings. It is also the creation of Bolaño the writer, a statement about the kind of writer he wants to be.

Huh, plus the fact that I have a character in my book named Echevarría. With the accent over the i, if you please.

Foamer has apocalyptic vision in downtown... Columbus, Ohio

Gadfly, failed congressional candidate and opinionated old white man Dave Daubenmire took his granddaughter to the Fourth of July in downtown Columbus, Ohio, and was struck by this apocalyptic vision:

Boiling in the inner cities is a witch's brew of out-of-control passions fed by ignorance, poverty, drugs, and sex. ... Our journey into downtown Columbus exposed us to an element that has been quietly lurking in the shadows. All of the signs have been visible, yet our rose-colored glasses and Polyannic attitudes have cast a false brightness into the storm clouds.

The thunder is rolling in the form of roving gangs of fatherless families trolling the sidewalks of the inner cities. Saggy-trousered teenage boys, tattooed from pillar to post, wander the sidewalks, followed by scantily-clad teenage mothers with a toddler saddled to the hip.

But Dave, at least the men are still leading!

That was from last week's post. This week he takes up one of his standard hobby-horses: the alleged effeminization of evangelical Christianity and his broad dislike of most of its leaders. Along the way, he suddenly blurts:

Heck, I guess Jesus isn't good enough. It takes an "anointed teacher" to help lead you to your destiny. The thought of getting out a Bible and getting on your face just doesn’t seem to do the job anymore. I've always found eating carpet to be an effective way of getting in touch with my destiny.

Emphasis mine, but wow, did that ever jump out. That doesn't mean today what it used to mean, Coach.

Friday things

Today's the 8th anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño in 2003. He died awaiting a liver transplant. Did you know you can donate a part of your own liver to someone whose liver is breaking, and both of you come out alive? Your liver grows back! Wow.

This morning in Whole Foods, among their usual greatest-hits-of-the-Sixties/Seventies/Eighties, the Muszak played Martha and the Muffins' great "Echo Beach," perhaps the greatest hit of 1980. (1980 also brought David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes," the B-52s' "Private Idaho" and "Rock Lobster," The Brian Eno/Talking Heads collaboration "Fear of Music," Michael Jackson's "Rock with You," and the Psychedelic Furs' "Sister Europe." Other than that it wasn't such a great year musically. Example: The Rolling Stones' disappointing followup to 1979's triple-awesome "Some Girls," the album "Emotional Rescue," of which the title song was the only really good cut.)

Readers know I make my living as a technical writer. McSweeney's just published a brilliant satire positing Gertrude Stein as a tech writer in Ben Greenman's awesome "Gertrude Stein Gets Her New iPhone."

Modernism: Resurface for interpreters

For no particular reason, I copied the text of an 800-word article in the NYT book section reviewing several new crime novels, submitted the text to a randomizer, and got the following modernist text.

My only changes were to break it into paragraphs and capitalize the first words of sentences. Parts of it are definitely Joycean:

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Today's fake: Caught faking footage of fireworks, producer justifies it

A local TV program in Boston that broadcast images of fireworks exploding over area landmarks faked aspects of the footage -- and when the producer was confronted about the fakery, he defended and justified it.

Though the fireworks were shot from a barge in the harbor, some of the images broadcast would mean the fireworks were fired from other locations -- in other words, you couldn't see the bursts and the landmarks from the same angle. When the producer was asked how this came to be, he admitted the footage was digitally altered, but said it was really no different than the comedy "Boston Legal" showing exterior establishing shots of Boston before interior scenes that were actually shot in California. And besides, it wasn't news, it was "entertainment," so it should be all right.

By that logic, the station could show footage of a July Fourth parade in New York and claim it was Boston's parade. For that matter, why film a parade at all, why not just use last year's footage, as parades are all alike?

Dream of secrets

Epic dream in which I got into the habit of breaking and entering expensive houses and lofts in a Noe Valley-like neighborhood. I wouldn't take anything in these invasions, only relaxed among the nice furnishings while the owners were out. But then it happened that in one such burglary I took a sleepy four-year-old, and went for a walk at night around the neighborhood. When it came time to return the child to its home, I couldn't remember which rich house it belonged to, so I simply guessed. I deposited the child in the house I guessed it came from, and got away.

All the while, I was volunteering at a non-profit group run by a conservative woman celebrity, a Palin type. When news of the putative kidnapping came out -- not sure whether I had guessed the wrong house, or whether the child simply told the story to its parents -- even though the culprit was not yet known, the FBI was on the case and I felt they would soon find me out. I felt it was my responsibility to go and warn my employer, so I went and told her about the breaking and entering but not about the kidnapping. And she didn't connect what I had told her to the news at all. At the end of the dream she was called away to other business but gave me a look like "We'll talk about this later."

It's almost like the first half of a Patricia Highsmith thriller -- the lonely, aimless man who has a secret life, with much of the tension around whether and how he will be found out. Of course, since all such stories by Highsmith were allegories of closeted homosexuality, I wonder if such a story would still fly today. I suppose it would -- people are still full of secrets.

Circle squared

Not sure how I ended up here, but I found myself on the iTunes catalog page for "A Penguin Books Amplified Edition" of "On the Road," where I found these cavils listed on the side:

How depressing is that.

First we have to imagine a universe where someone under 12 listens to audio books. (I have a hard enough time imagining a universe where anyone at all does so, but I hear it's a big market for people who spend a lot of time in traffic or mall-walking, so good for them, but there are no 12-year-olds in either group.) Then we have to imagine that, say, a ten-year-old would pay one bit of attention to the first few pages (or minutes) of "On the Road,' with Dean Moriarty coming to New York and eating creampuffs, living in "a cold water flat" and reminding the narrator of "a young Gene Autry."

Above all, what 10-year-old is going to be interested in something with "mild drug use, infrequent/mild profanity or crude humor"? There is probably more drug use, profanity and crude humor on his own playground.

How it cheapens art when you try to rein it in these bureaucratic categories.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 4

My internet reading habits have become governed by an RSS feed, which collects a wide range of stuff from various authors or publications, or on various topics, and which I try to skim through every day. When I find something I want to read at length, I use a widget from readability.com to save it to read later. Then every couple of days I copy all the latest articles from my readability.com collection into a single MS Word document and then print that out. Then I finally read it all over the next day or two, away from the computer. It becomes a sort of self-edited magazine.

Last night in Infinite Jest I reached the chapter which opens with the fairly inane telephone conversation between Hal and Orin Incandenza and then goes on to include four "documents" such as an insurance company email about a wacky construction site accident and an essay of sorts about the introduction, wide adoption, adjustments to, and sudden consumer rejection of videophone technology. These documents are all on different subjects, written in a different style, and it struck me that reading them in succession is not unlike reading my printed-out articles from the RSS feed.

Here we see the author's playfulness, and that's the main thing I took away. The second thing was his willingness to go to exhaustive length about a subject, such as the essay about the adoption and subsequent rejection of "videophony." Its author explains at great length, employing the level of detail that only a geek, such as a "Lord of the Rings" geek, could muster about his chosen subject, while recounting something which is fairly obvious on its face (no one who is not a narcissist or an attractive teenager feels very comfortable using a webcam). Because of this, the essay could probably be cut to a third its length and lose almost nothing. So I conclude that the level of detail is the whole point. It's an exhibition of what it's like to know everything about one little corner of the universe, and happily explain it all to everyone.

That, of course, is why Wikipedia is such a success. There is someone like that for almost every subject in the world -- not just the obvious fan-focused topics such as LOTR or Star Trek. With a little study, I myself might be able to rustle up a pretty good critical essay on the early films of Wim Wenders.

But before Wikipedia, we had novels. Moby Dick, with its exhaustive description of 19th century whaling, is the obvious comparison. But the best novels always give readers a sense that they're learning a lot of important and -- this is very important -- authentic things about something. Readers of Shogun are, by the time they finish the tome, convinced they could get along pretty well in 17th century Japan. Even my mother's 85-year-old husband said to me last month: "I know some Japanese: kimasu. Because I read Shogun." I thought to myself, Hmm, to go? Probably not... Then, remembering the book and the Japanese word which is repeated over and over, I said "You mean wakarimasu -- to understand." And he agreed, yes, that was it.