Unknown to him as outerspace: a link, with a thing at its destination

almost seems like self-restraint (of a kind where dependent clauses and
elongated, self-reflexive rumination betrays its subject) according to
its self-disciplining logic:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/02/05/070205fi_fiction_wallace?currentPage=all


new variation of an old(ish) theme:

"It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. Or never a battle — the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way."

This is unlikely to stop, FYI. And I'm sorry, to you, dear reader, to whom this is (obviously or not) directed.

Like Gold Bullion or Kruggerand, But Better

Being insulated from massive economic collapse may be an illusion, but when
it stems from having very little to lose, illusive insulation trumps the
evasive future possible.


Discrete Photon of the Soul #1

Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza and David Carradine-era Kung fu. Ten
years ago add a DuBois but no more, no need: self-perpetuating abstractions
have less purchase.


Discrete Photon of the Soul #2

Ozzie and Vazquez, triple opposite day headcheck cojones callout backfire.

When the book club got to its epistolary novel

1. Sports

Be advised that the Minnesota Vikings may go 0-7, and the seven babies named
Tavaris in the last six months will soon go by Tavis and/or Smiley and are doomed to multiple Wedgie recesses and a future in which no bras are ever fumbled with and no babies are ever procreated. Nice Gus Frerotte exegesis, stupid Fox North pregame production eggsuckers.

Be advised that another six White Sox players could break their own respective wrists in petulant post-foul ball lapses of judgment and the Minnesota Twins may still not
resurrect themselves into their mid-00s early exit from the postseason form.

I am confused. Does Dan Uggla's All-Star meltdown bear glad or ill tidings vis a vis postseason possibilities?

2. Politics

is not what it used to be. Which may be good. I am not sure - try not to pay attention.

3. Culture

see supra. also, according to a report summarized in a soft news story I read in what passes as a political/cultural magazine, the secret to the Danish levels of happiness, which exceed all other countries' levels of happiness, is having very low expectations on a consistent basis and being pleasantly surprised when they are not met.

Danes pay the highest taxes of any nation in the world (starting at 42 per cent, rising to 68 per cent), enjoy fewer hours of sunshine than Britain, have a higher divorce rate than most Europeans, live only averagely long and smoke and drink far more than is good for them. So what's going on?

In 2006, researchers from the Institute of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark examined a range of possible factors, from genes to cycling habits to cuisine. In a charming report, they offered two explanations: the Danes have never got over their rapture at winning the European football championships in 1992 (their happiness rose to new peaks that year, and has stayed on a plateau since), and - the main finding - Danes, unlike the woeful Greeks and Italians, have very low expectations of the immediate future. "Year after year," the researchers write, "they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.

So - moment of synthesis - the difference between being a Vikings fan and a Danish national lies in the degree to which pessimistic expectations are realized.

agency was had

the Mildred Bonk academy of misplaced affection - the Don Gately school of absolute identification with the smell of someone else's shit - the words in a notebook, followed by question marks, to be looked up and wondered at - Mr. Gigantic - are you seriously asking me what I think about the English Patient? - Cheers, Lilith and Frasier and when what makes you unique is hollow and banal - the hollow leg and Heidegger - tides being way out - 10 times or less - the late 20th century colonialism of cool and the condition of heartlessness - "you cooze you cunt" - fat sweaty poets and the ontology of diving boards - this last one about abortion: just sort of waiting to see if the next move may have it both ways - Midwestern winter as a pitiless bitch - much less much more - and but so -

Dont put lipstick on a pig

It would be nice to have pointed to a vacation in Nantucket, the Jersey shore, Minnesota lake house, or some other summer hotspot as the proximate cause of the gap in posts. No such luck. Mostly work and busy work and unreflective rumination on cultural phenomenon I had recently come across, the kind of experience Predrag recently referred to as as "discrete photons of soul or whatever."


Discrete photon of soul #1

Eat the rich


I played golf at a country club this summer. The former greenskeeper of the course was a guy I used to work for, and they had disposed him without much of a pension or a word of thanks for 35 years of work. I continued to work for, and golf with, his family, during the formative 14-18 year old life phase. This period also included the Dead Kennedys, Noam Chomsky, and Camel Lights, in terms of unscripted self-actualization and agonizingly scripted attempts at self-fashioning. So I came to see this country club as an emblem of the Good Stuff that Bad People Had Because the World is an Unjust Place. That emblem had an antidote (mixed metaphors being an appropriate means of capturing the conceptual blurriness of this period) - AND WE HAVE TO FIGHT THAT INJUSTICE! - that seemed cooler than attempting to get ahead to attain the kind of status that would make it easy to reap benefits from the state of affairs, rather than bear burdens.

I guess most of my feelings about country clubs and class were oriented around what feels like a Cool-O-Meter, is what I mean. That's not how I understood it though. It was an ethical stance. but I think it's probably more aesthetic now, the aversion to (ratcheted down from disdain of) the country club. Sort of Caddyshack crossed with the combative boredom of the similarly situated. Check on the injustice, check on complicitness with it, but also check on the fight it rather than become resigned to or escape from it. A good Kierkegaardian would want to explore whether there is also a religious stance on the issue. Not being one, I'm not sure. I'm also not sure what it means that I'm the kind of person who not only devotes a fair amount of time thinking about how he stands vis a vis the concept and semiotic meaning of country clubs, but also thinks that said stance conveys something larger about the drift (or evolution, who the fuck knows?) in perception that makes us strangers of our past selves.

Discrete Photon #2
Night of the Gun

David Carr used to smoke crack. And be a journalist. And beat his girlfriends up. He hung out with Bob Mould and Tom Arnold and various players across the Minneapolis scene of the 80s. And then one of his girlfriends, who had connections with Columbians and acquired access to kilos therefrom, got pregnant and never quite got clean. The twins, when born, were crack babies. He got clean, raised the twins, got back into journalism, and now writes for the Times. This is an addiction memoir that asks whether a person in recovery can access what happened through the prism of his own addled recollections. Not likely seems to be the answer, and Carr's attempt to deal with this by treating his story like any other journalistic fodder (conducting interviews, accumulating sources, etc.) is the book's central conceit. It uses David Foster Wallace and Faulkner and Mailer in epigrams. Incidentally, if unsurprisingly, Carr hearts the Hold Steady. I will save normative commentary for later.

You be good, people! Don't sleep on old EPMD.