Posts Tagged ‘David Foster Wallace’
Monday Morning Links
* Of course you had me at “Sun Myung Moon’s lost ecotopia.”
In 2000, Moon paid an undisclosed amount for roughly 1.5 million acres of land fronting the Paraguay River. Most of that property was in a town called Puerto Casado, about 100 miles downriver from Puerto Leda. Moon’s subsidiaries wanted the land to open commercial enterprises ranging from logging to fish farming. But a group of Puerto Casado residents launched a bitter legal battle to nullify the deal. While that controversy continued to divide Paraguayans, the Puerto Leda project proceeded under the radar. Moon turned the land over to 14 Japanese men—“national messiahs,” according to church documents, who were instructed to build an “ideal city” where people could live in harmony with nature, as God intended it. Moon declared that the territory represented “the least developed place on earth, and, hence, closest to original creation.”
* Right now I am sitting at my computer, writing a post that I will receive no money for and which is not part of any career plan. It’s a little thing, obviously. But why do I do it? Because human beings aren’t little efficiency machines. Human life is what you experience when you aren’t busily accruing material resources.
* 1994 literature syllabus from David Foster Wallace, featuring Stephen King, C.S. Lewis, Thomas Harris, and Mary Higgins Clark.
* Student Persistence in Bioelectricity, Fall 2012 (Duke University MOOC).
* New data from a long-term study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College suggest that some of the students most often targeted in online learning’s access mission are less likely than their peers to benefit from — and may in fact be hurt by — digital as opposed to face-to-face instruction.
* Five Experts Give College Scorecard a Barely Passing Grade.
* Accepting the Oscar for Marlon Brando, 1973.
* 9 Sexist Things That Happened At The Oscars.
* The Debt Everyone Is Freaking Out About Does Not Exist.
* “When I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the first things they told me was, ‘You’re not even to acknowledge the drone program. You’re not even to discuss that it exists,’” said Gibbs, now an MSNBC contributor.
* And an Angela Davis biopic comes out April 15.
All the Midweek Links
* Both In Focus and The Big Picture visit the 2012 Paralympics.
* Michelle Obama did great last night, but the story of a sick little girl named Zoey whose ability to live was saved by the ACA hits a bit closer to home.
* Who’s going to be the lesser evil in 2012 2008 2004 2000 1996 1992 1988 1984 1980 1976 1972 1968?
* On reporting poverty. Related: Melissa Harris-Perry talks poverty on MSNBC.
* Mitch Hurwitz Talks to Vulture About Reviving Arrested Development.
* The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block.” These results have since been confirmed.
* The real affirmative action: Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.
* How many people have died because Walter White got cancer? And a Breaking Bad Fermi problem: What is a good approximation of how much money Skyler had in the storage unit when she showed Walt how she stopped counting it?
* A portrait of David Foster Wallace as a midwestern author. And more. Words David Foster Wallace’s Mom Invented.
* Report: Student Debt Is Holding Back The Housing Recovery. Are you interested in student debt now, old people?
* In North Carolina, Obama’s 2008 Victory Was Ahead of Schedule.
* Getting spicy: Hacker Group Claims to Have Romney’s Tax Returns.
* BREAKING: Rachel Carson Didn’t Kill Millions of Africans.
* BREAKING: Social Security Administration to arm illegal immigrants with hollow-point bullets to murder taxpayers. Wake up, sheeple! The truth is out there.
* Erin DiMeglio is a third-string high-school quarterback.
* And for the kids: How We Got to Mars. The lives of the cosmonauts. HTML5 Map of the Firefly ‘Verse. And a lost interview with Ray Bradbury:
Monday Links
* A tale that grew in the telling: The Hobbit is officially a trilogy. Oh, all right, I’ll allow it.
* 84-minute David Foster Wallace TV interview from 2003. Go ahead, I’ll be here when you’re done.
* Symbolism a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Ancestry.com is claiming Barack Obama is descended from the first slave in America—on his mother’s side.
* Postscript on the Society of Control: Twitter can predict when you’ll get sick a week before you do, with 90% accuracy.
* Just remember, the Koch brothers can buy anything, but they can’t buy science.
* What everyone is linking today: How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance.
* Predatory For-Profit Colleges Pay Executives Based On Corporate Profitability, Not Student Outcomes. Meanwhile, 86% of these companies’ revenue is coming from the federal government.
* A proposed court-supervised agreement filed today will ease restrictions for transgender people born in Illinois to obtain new birth certificates that reflect their correct gender.
* The People of the Future have finally come to collect Chris Marker. Rest in peace.
* And today in obscenity: Sexual Assault Victims Charged Up To $1,200 In Wisconsin For Cost Of Their Rape Kits. That’s not okay at all.
Today’s News Yesterday
To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech’s ticcy unconscious “umm”s or “you know”s, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English—the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and structures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air and no going over, such that at 10:46 you have wound things up neatly and are in a position to say, “KFI is the station with the most frequent traffic reports. Alan LaGreen is in the KFI Traffic Center” (which, to be honest, Mr. Z. sometimes leaves himself only three or even two seconds for and has to say extremely fast, which he can always do without a flub). So then, ready: go.
David Foster Wallace, “Host.”
Tuesday Night Links
* Community is back March 15, but NBC still hates you; they’re putting Parks & Rec on hiatus instead.
* 46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace’s 50th Birthday. Via MeFi.
* Weirdest Unsolved Mysteries of World War II. I feel certain Indiana Jones was involved in each of these.
* “How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries.”
* A literary history of erasure.
* When Jon Hamm met Miss Piggy.
* Cory Doctorow reviews Lawrence Lessig’s Constitutional-conventionalist One Way Forward.
* ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.’ A brief history of the money shot.
* Canadians: They’re Just as Bad as Us!
* And of course you had me at 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. Via Kottke.
FLOGGING CULLY. A debilitated lecher, commonly an old one.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
TWIDDLE-DIDDLES. Testicles.
TWIDDLE POOP. An effeminate looking fellow.
Wednesday Night!
* Duke Lit is now advertising for a one-year postdoc in Marxist theory.
* Jim Henson, 1969: How to Make a Muppet. Also on Muppetwatch: A 1979 profile of Henson in anticipation of The Muppet Movie.
* The secret history of “Mahna Mahna”: “How a ditty from a soft-core Italian movie became the Muppets’ catchiest tune.”
* “Ninety-Nine Weeks”: an Occupy Wall Street fairy tale from Ursula K. Le Guin. Here’s another.
* More on the extraordinary syllabi of David Foster Wallace.
* Almost literally the least they could do: Davis Will Drop Charges Against, Pay Medical Bills of Pepper Spray Students.
* I’ve seen this movie: The Air Force “has asked industry to develop a new heat and motion sensor capable of detecting enemy gunfire from 25,000 feet over the battlefield — and then swiftly directing a bomb or missile onto the shooter.” I believe Terminator suggests the name HKs…
* The full congregation of Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial Baptist Church voted Sunday to prohibit the church pastor from legally marrying anyone until she can legally marry same-sex couples under North Carolina law.
* Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman say their poli-sci model shows the Affordable Care Act will be upheld. Scott Lemieux says there’s no reason to think they’ll confine themselves to precedent and that it still all comes down to what Anthony Kennedy has for breakfast.
* Mother Jones reads Newt Gingrich’s dissertation.
* Google greets Thanksgiving (outside the US) with the mother of all interactive doodles.
* Massachusetts becomes 16th state to protect transgender people from discrimination. Google benefits now include transgender employees.
* Honestly, anyone who invested a dime in Groupon should have their investing license taken away. This thing was barely ever a company.
* And speaking of obvious scams: Is a Law Degree a Good Investment Today?
Links from the Week
* As you may have seen on Twitter, the National Council of the American Studies Association endorsed Occupy Wall Street this weekend. Political Dissent in a Time of (Economic) Crisis.
* 147 Companies Control 40 Percent Of Global Transnational Corporate Wealth.
* Lenin’s Tomb challenges Occupy Wall Street on the subjects of consensus and demands.
In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision, minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto. This practice, called “standing aside” in American consensus processes, all too often involved intimidation of the dissenters, to the point that they completely withdrew from the decision-making process, rather than make an honorable and continuing expression of their dissent by voting, even as a minority, in accordance with their views. Having withdrawn, they ceased to be political beings — so that a “decision” could be made. More than one “decision” in the Clamshell Alliance was made by pressuring dissenters into silence and, through a chain of such intimidations, “consensus” was ultimately achieved only after dissenting members nullified themselves as participants in the process.
On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital aspect of all dialogue, dissensus. The ongoing dissent, the passionate dialogue that still persists even after a minority accedes temporarily to a majority decision, was replaced in the Clamshell by dull monologues — and the uncontroverted and deadening tone of consensus. In majority decision-making, the defeated minority can resolve to overturn a decision on which they have been defeated — they are free to openly and persistently articulate reasoned and potentially persuasive disagreements. Consensus, for its part, honors no minorities, but mutes them in favor of the metaphysical “one” of the “consensus” group.
* Still more critique of Occupy Baltimore and Occupy LA.
* Peak Oil and the Great Recession.
* How the Austerity Class Rules Washington.
* Exotic animal nightmare in Zanesville, OH.
* Two from Rolling Stone: The Keystone Pipeline Revolt: Why Mass Arrests are Just the Beginning and Climate Change and the End of Australia.
* Another climate skeptic bites the dust after finally bothering to look at the evidence.
“In fact, according to Rosenbaum the Justice Department attorney said, ‘We don’t believe that the VA has any authority or any responsibility to provide housing.”
* David Foster Wallace, “Attempted Fax Cover Sheet.”
* “Junot Diaz To Create The Dominican Superman.”
* The “Do cell phones cause cancer?” pendulum has swung back around again. This week they don’t.
* The Guardian reviews Murakami’s 1Q84.
* Steve Jobs reviews Barack Obama: Steve Jobs Told Obama He’d Be a One Term President.
* Jon Bon Jovi opens pay-what-you-can ‘soul kitchen.’
* And Boing Boing celebrates the expired patent for LEGO.
Monday Night Infinite Jest (and More)
* The MLK Memorial opened today on the Washington Mall. Pretty visually stunning.
* zunguzungu has your Libya links.
* The headline reads, “The Scramble for Access to Libya’s Oil Wealth Begins.”
* Kaufman, who has a lifelong passion for American folk music, has just written a biography of Guthrie. And, much more unusually for an academic, he is singing his way across the US to promote it. He is performing Guthrie’s songs, which he mixes with short lectures and projected images in what Kaufman calls a “live musical documentary.”
* Grant Morrison: The Rolling Stone interview. More here. Via Bleeding Cool.
* The New Yorker profiles Clarence Thomas. Via just about everybody.
* Also via literally everybody: The Decembrists’ new Infinite-Jest-themed music video.
* Don’t miss Brad DeLong’s brief history of the Obama administration. Via Digby.
* 2010: Detroit apocalypse porn. 2011: Detroit is the new Brooklyn.
* Inside the mind behind Feminist Hulk. If you’d bet the account was owned by a graduate student in English literature, pick up your money at the front desk.
* Inside the Tea Party: a UNC professor has polled Tea Party supporters to determine that the Tea Party’s core values are “authoritarianism, fear of change, libertarianism and nativism.” I can’t imagine anyone anywhere will find this study remotely controversial.
* Kevin Drum asks: Can we fix the economy? Sign me up for Krugman’s Lament (first comment); we can fix this, we just won’t.
* And a look inside how Scrabble warps your brain.
Competitive Scrabble players’ visual word recognition behavior differed significantly from non-experts’ for letter-prompted verbal fluency (coming up with words beginning with a specific letter) and anagramming accuracy, two Scrabble-specific skills. Competitive players were faster to judge whether or not a word was real. They also judged the validity of vertical words faster than non-experts and were quicker at picking up abstract words than non-competitive players. These findings indicate that Scrabble players are less reliant on the meaning of words to judge whether or not they are real, and more flexible at word recognition using orthographic information.
