Celebrating thirty years of malaise. Even more from Damon Linker.

xkcd catches my inner monologue.

Another Tuesday night linkdump.

* Anthony Karen photographs the KKK for Life Magazine.

* A public records request to the offices of Mark Sanford has revealed actually existing media bias: conservatives outlets promising the governor a safe place to spin his story. Even Colbert got into the act, writing Sanford in character. (Via Steve Benen.)

* Neil sends along this video of four artists painting the same (digital) canvas at once, though both he and I agree it's somehow not quite as cool as it seems like it should be.

* Happy birthday, MetaFilter!

Al Franken's opening statement from yesterday's Supreme Court confirmation hearing. About midway through Franken makes our terms clear when he calls out the real judicial activists. Franken oh-twelve?

Did Battlestar Galactica have the worst ending in the history of on-screen science fiction? Brad Templeton lays out the evidence. Via io9.

Durham's own Regulator Bookshop has a new "keep it local" ad on YouTube.

Monday night links.

* After a brief flirtation with "top five" status, Brüno is back to being a box-office disappointment.

* Top ten comics cities. #2: Chris Ware's Chicago. Via MetaFilter.

* xkcd tackles the frighteningly addictive power of TV Tropes.

* SF by the numbers. Via Boing Boing.

* Why are we so fat?

* Also in the New Yorker: profiles of Al Franken and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, last seen ratifying nature's right to exist.

* And allow me to offer my heartiest gerrycanavan.blogspot.com welcome to North Carolina's newest resident.

Rather short Infinite Summer post from me this time around as I put together all the things that need to be put together for my late-summer stint as an instructor at the Duke University Institute for Gifted Youngsters. Like last year, posting will be somewhat slow the next three weeks; I'll mostly be posting only in the very early morning, at night, and on weekends, with occasional daytime posts here and there whenever I'm able to commit a little time theft.

With IGY on my mind, I was really struck by footnote 76, which provides as good a summary as you'll find of the inner life of anyone stamped "gifted" when they are young, not just Hal Incandenza but also my IGY students and me and most of the people who have become my close friends over the years and maybe you as well:

Hal Incandenza had been thought for a while as a toddler to have some sort of Attention Deficit Disorder—partly because he read so fast and spent so little time on each level of various pre-CD-ROM video games, partly because just about any upscale kid even slightly to port or starboard of the bell curve's acme was thought at that time to have A.D.D.—and for a while there'd been a certain amount of specialist-shuttling, and many of the specialists were veterans of Mario and were preconditioned to see Hal as also damaged, but thanks to the diagnostic savvy of Brandeis's Child Development Center the damage assessments were not only retracted but reversed way out to the other side of the Damaged-to-Gifted spectrum, and for much of the glabrous part of his childhood Hal'd been classified as somewhere between "Borderline Gifted" and "Gifted"—though part of this high cerebral rank was because B.C.D.C.'s diagnostic tests weren't quite so keen when it came to distinguishing between raw neural gifts and the young Hal's monomaniacally obsessive interest and effort, as if Hal were trying as if his very life were in the balance to please some person or persons, even though no one had ever even hinted that his life depended on seeming gifted or precocious or even exceptionally pleasing—and when he'd committed to memory entire dictionaries and vocab-check software and syntax manuals and then had gotten some chance to recite some small part of what he'd pounded into his RAM for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these times of public performance and pleasure—the Weston M.A. school district in the early B.S. 1990s had had interschool range-of-reading-and-recall spelling-beeish competitions called "Battle of the Books," which these were for Hal pretty much of a public turkey-shoot and approval-fest—when he'd extracted what was desired from memory and faultlessly pronounced it before certain persons, he'd felt almost that same pale sweet aura that an LSD afterglow conferred, some milky corona, like almost a halo of approved grace, made all the milkier by the faultless nonchalance of a Moms who made it clear that his value was not contingent on winning first or even second prize, ever.

The incredibly slippery slope from this sort of childhood precociousness to adult dysfunction is something we've talked about here once or twice before in connection with the films of Wes Anderson, whose thematically similar The Royal Tenenbaums pops up around the fringes of IJ discussion quite a bit. And we can see now what a hard-luck case I really am: thirty years old and I'm still a student, still chasing the same damn high.

Most of the rest of what I'd have to say about today's spoiler line was already covered in my post last week on DFW, addiction, and suicide, for which Joelle is something of an exemplary case. This weekend's pages were pretty much all Joelle, all the time, not that I'm complaining. She's an interesting character and somehow able to bring us closer to the mind of Himself than anyone else we've met thus far.

Verso has your video from the Marxism 2009 last week in Bloomsbury. Below: David Harvey.

The neurology of swearing: a study recently published in NeuroReport suggest curse words may have pain-relieving effects.

Glenn Greenwald brings us more on the rumors that Eric Holder will appoint a special prosecutor for the Bush administration, with varying and conflicting reports about the possible scope and scale of the investigation.

Early reports that Brüno might flag at the box office appear to have been mistaken—according to Deadline Hollywood it's now projected to be one of the top five R-rated-comedy openings of all time. My disappointed take on it below.

Three more.

* Big media hype for the new show from The State alums, Michael and Michael Have Issues.

* 'Smoke Monster From Lost Given Own Primetime Spin-Off Series.'

* Train v. tornado. Place your bets.

Newsweek: Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. "You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation's laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort," Holder says. "But the reality of being A.G. is that I'm also part of the president's team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values."

These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell Newsweek that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."

There's some discussion of this claim and what it means at MetaFilter and Greenwald, as well as reports tonight that Cheney ordered the CIA to lie to Congress.

Having watched the almost unwatchable, deeply unfunny Brüno in a nearly empty theater tonight, I wonder whether the provocative and offensive original ending might not have made for a more successful film. What this movie really needed was a climactic moment of forced self-reflection that indicts the audience for its willing participation in this drawn-out, ugly spectacle; that, and that alone, might have elevated this long series of banal and childish gross-out pranks to something that actually warrants a comparison to Swift. As Brüno stands, the film has almost no depth, its "critique"—of what?—no actual content.

'The Man Who Crashed the World': Michael Lewis on Joe Cassano, former head of AIG's disastrous Financial Products Unit.

Ernest Hemingway, spy!

(This one turned out a little longer than expected.)

There have been two references so far in Infinite Jest to "the M.I.T. language riots of B.S. 1997," a reference so slight it hardly seems worth the trouble of tracking down. The first we find in James O. Incandenza's massive filmography on pg. 987n24, linked from pg. 64:

Union of Theoretical Grammarians in Cambridge. B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. Documentary cast; 35 mm.;26 minutes; color; silent with heavy use of computerized distortion in facial close-ups. Documentary and closed-caption interviews with participants in the public Steven Pinker-Avril M. Incandenza debate on the political implications of prescriptive grammar during the infamous Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts convention credited with helping incite the M.I.T. language riots of B.S. 1997.

Forty footnotes later, on 996n60, we get this about "the near-new M.I.T. student union" (184):

Replacing the old neo-Georgian J. A. Stratton Student Center, right off Mass. Ave. and gutted with C4 during the so-called M.I.T. Language Riots of twelve years past.

Glossing over the difference in capitalization, taken together these two footnotes place the "present" of the novel as exactly now: 2009.

We don't know much about what has happened in the intervening decade, and as was discussed in the comments to the last post I don't think Infinite Jest is productively read as predictive fiction. (Instead it should be understood as always twenty minutes into the future.) We get, for instance, a quiet reference to the Kemp administration on pg. 177, a moderately reasonable prognostication for DFW to make in 1996 (though Jack Kemp was widely considered a failure as Dole's running mate at the time)—but it's paired with a no-chance-in-hell Limbaugh administration that is clearly satiric. (Both references are somewhat suspect, in any event, as they originate in-dialogue from a character at the Ennet House who euphemistically admits they have "some trouble recalling certain intervals" during these periods. So maybe it's a joke within a joke.) We know Vermont has become the Great Concavity—where feral hamsters rule unchecked!—and that videophones have come and gone, and that broadcast television has ended in favor of TPs, apparently some sort of on-demand service not unlike Netflix.

But we don't know much, because these sorts of predictions just aren't the point.

So enough of that—back to the M.I.T. language riots. This is an allusion to Don DeLillo's Ratner's Star (1976), a novel which shares some affinities with Infinite Jest, including a boy-genius plotline, multivocal narrative, deep suspicion about the reliability of both personal subjectivity and bureaucratic institutions, and intense theoretical interest in the inner workings of language. The riots are covered in their entirely on pages 31-33 of Ratner's Star in a short bit of dialogue from J. Graham Hummer, "widely known as the instigator of the MIT language riots":

"Tell us about the MIT business," Mimsy said. "I've never heard the details."

"There are no details."

"Did people really throw stones at each other and overturn cars and the like? I mean was there actual killing in the streets?"

"I was simply trying to assert that what there is in common between a particular fact and the sentence that asserts this fact can itself be put into a sentence."

"And this led to rioting?"

This weird, obscure moment, which could be slotted into Infinite Jest itself without a tremendous amount of revision, introduces the problem of cognitive reflexivity that structures a lot of both Ratner's Star and IJ. It centers around what is in essence, the Gödel paradox, the problematic fact that statements-about-statements are themselves statements, that there is no self-consistent exterior vantage point from which we can look objectively at our own subjective experiences of the world—that as soon as we attempt to think or speak about the way we think and speak we become hopelessly lost in paradox, in indecidability, and in confusing and shadowy incompleteness. And I hope it isn't too much of a stretch to assert that this is exactly the problem we face when we confront addict subjectivity:

That most Substance-addiction people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is Analysis-Paralysis.

...That 99% of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequence of are never good. That this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one's mind. In short that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of oneself... (203-204)

The strange compulsion towards endlessly looping cognitive reflexivity—thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking...—leads in the end to that terrible desire that is central to addiction, the desire for one's consciousness to be obliterated altogether:

...a little-mentioned paradox of Substance addiction is: that once you are sufficiently enslaved by a Sustance to need to quit the substance in order to save your life, the enslaving Substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you. Or that sometime after your Substance has just been taken away from you in order to save your life, as you hunker down for required A.M. and P.M. prayers, you will find yourself beginning to pray to be allowed literally to lose your mind, to be able to wrap your mind in an old newspaper or something and leave it in an alley to shift for itself, without you. (201)

This is, that is, the desire for suicide that haunts so much of Infinite Jest, that in the wake of 9/13/08 threatens to consume the book altogether. Reading The Bell Jar is like this; knowing that Sylvia Plath committed suicide a month after its publication destroys our ability to believe its assertions of an apparently happy ending for its Sylvia-stand-in, Esther. Knowing what happened to DFW—what he did to himself—deeply unsettles our ability to believe "[t]hat no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable" (204), which seems now, in retrospect, less like truth, and more like the prayer of a person who hopes they might someday believe it.

Getting very close to the start of my term at [Undisclosed Location], which will mean a lot less blogging. I won't be blogging much during the day at all.

In other words, it'll be kind of like today.

* In the comments earlier today sb offered me a much-deserved Trophy of Perpetual Futility.

* Today's Infinite Summer writeup comes from the L.A. Times book blog. Via Paper Cuts.

JC: Might this turn into an annual tradition, perhaps with other books?

MB: I have already received a raft of suggestions for next summer's reading, including "Ulysses," "Underworld," "Don Quixote" and the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Whether this becomes an annual or year-around thing will depend largely on how successful this one proves, and whether or not I am utterly exhausted by its end.

* Non-Essential Mnemonics, at McSweeney's.

What about Jersey? Mafioso, murderers, addicts, juvenile vagrants, Bon Jovi. Here they praise these felonious people. Blighted little Jersey: guns, hookers, Goombas, Atlantic City. "Come home, criminal miscreants" reads the tourism website. And here come the hucksters, racketeers, trannies, and every korrupt-cop. Jersey, news flash: Criminals rarely benefit children, businesses, or organizations.

A short essay on the socio-political climate in New Jersey and a mnemonic for the last names of all 44 American presidents.

* "Locavore," "frenemy," "staycation," and "vlog" make Webster's.

* Salon's David Rakoff and Anthony Lane review Brüno. Here's Lane:

How efficient, though, is embarrassment as a comic device? It’s a quick hit, and it corrals the audience on the side of smugness; but its victories are Pyrrhic, and it tends to fizzle out unless held in by a plot—as it was in “Fawlty Towers,” which, from its base on the English seaside, fathomed the most embarrassable race on earth. Baron Cohen, in exporting his japes, comes up against a people much less devoted to the wince. I realized, watching “Borat” again, that what it exposed was not a vacuity in American manners but, more often than not, a tolerance unimaginable elsewhere. Borat’s Southern hostess didn’t shriek when he appeared with a bag of feces; she sympathized, and gently showed him what to do, and the same thing happens in “Brüno,” when a martial-arts instructor, confronted by a foreigner with two dildos, doesn’t flinch. He teaches Brüno some defensive moves, then adds, “This is totally different from anything I’ve ever done.” Ditto the Hollywood psychic—another risky target, eh?—who watches Brüno mime an act of air-fellatio and says, after completion, “Well, good luck with your life.” In both cases, I feel that the patsy, though gulled, comes off better than the gag man; the joke is on Baron Cohen, for foisting indecency on the decent. The joker is trumped by the square.

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of what George Saunders wrote of Borat, or, for that matter, of the bad taste it still leaves in my mouth.

Band of the morning/week/month/other arbitrary length of time: Durham's own The Mountain Goats.





(Thanks Eric and Kate!)

Great moments in raw human ugliness:

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason.

...

The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers' first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.

"When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool," Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. "The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately."

...

"There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.

Thank you for visiting www.walmartstores.com/twitter (the “Site”). The Site includes a networking service operated by Wal-Mart-Stores, Inc. (“Wal-Mart”) to allow users to share experiences and communicate their thoughts and opinions. In light of the complexities governing the use and operation of websites, we have set forth below a series of Site Access and Use Terms (“Terms”) that apply to access to and use of the Site. We hope that you will understand that, in the complex legal world of the internet, website access and use terms are required. We have also included below, as part of the Terms, an identification of our agent for receipt of notice regarding copyright claims and other communications regarding the Site. BY CHOOSING TO ACCESS AND USE THIS SITE, YOU ARE EXPRESSLY AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THESE TERMS.

You're doing it wrong. Via Boing Boing.