Tranquility

“Tranquillity to-day is either innate (the philistine) or to be acquired only by a deliberate doping of the personality.”

C.L.R. James

PS another good story I read recently in The New Yorker

“Victory Lap,” by George Saunders, published in The New Yorker

PPS Did you know that The New Yorker is a good place to find interesting short stories? (Yes, I know you knew, I’m just trying to fill up space here, and anyway, maybe you didn’t know, maybe you didn’t, how am I supposed to know, you don’t have to be so smug about it.)

The New Yorker publishes another excerpt from Wallace’s unfinished The Pale King

Titled (by whom, I wonder) “All That,” this excerpt seems to me to work as an autonomous story. I’m interested to find out how it works into the novel, especially as this might help answer questions I have about the story, specifically about it’s narrator (who is he?) and the significance of his “religious feelings” to the novel’s moral stance. I’m assuming The Pale King is still planned to be released this year…? (I almost want to say Pale Fire, but that’s another novel by another writer with material published–controversially–posthumously, isn’t it?) Anyway, the story is odd, as it bears some of the hallmarks of Wallace’s style, but these aspects seem deliberately dulled and redirected to different ways of functioning. Some people (on the Internet–although I’ve found little written about this story; very little) have pointed out the use of parenthetic interjections and digressions, halted thoughts and tortuous grammar. Some of that is here, it’s true, but instead of distinguishing the narrator as cerebral, intelligent, in-his-own-head, and above all knowingly postmodern, it appears to me to delineate a narrator who is of average intellect, who seems slightly out of his head, aloof, straying from lines of thought, narrating from a state of implicit melancholy, despite his admission of episodes of ecstasy experienced as a child. Something about the simplicity of the reflection is anachronistic…it doesn’t quite fit into the times, and I’m almost sure that aspect is of great significance…

But I guess I’ll have to wait for the publication of The Pale King to form a more enlightened opinion of this strange piece.

“All That” by David Foster Wallace, published in The New Yorker

College Graduate Realizes His Mind Has Stopped Functioning

A 24-year-old college graduate criticized his family for watching the popular television show American Idol, but when pressed for a justification, he realized he was not able to defend himself. He knew it was wrong, that it was offensive, and that it was detrimental to the lives of the millions of people who watch the show. Yet he could not come up with a single rational argument to support this intuition. After a few aborted attempts at logical argument, he finally sighed impotently and watched the remainder of the program with his family. He even chuckled when the infamous “pants-on-the-ground” guy came on the screen, then mused with a degree of sadness that he had once been a Nation subscriber.

School Officials Ban THE DICTIONARY

Apparently a parent complained of a child coming across the term “oral sex” in a dictionary at an elementary school. School officials offered a restrained, evenly considered response — we will act quickly to ensure the malignant influence of dictionaries is suppressed at once!

One official said, “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature.” That’s good. My advice: think of dirty words before looking them up; it’ll be a lot faster that way.

Really, pulling the dictionary from schools is obviously an extreme reaction. I would suggest asking Merriam-Webster to reorganize their dictionaries, placing all the dirty words at random throughout the book to frustrate the efforts of all the kids who have sin in their hearts.

http://www.pe.com/localnews/menifee/stories/PE_News_Local_W_sdictionary22.414bdf0.html

Thanks for the link, The Agitator

Studies show that Hawkmen die young because of their reckless attitude in the face of danger

Essential Art House, Volume -1

Today I watched Eagle Eye, directed by DJ Caruso (former hyperdub prodigy) and produced by Indiana Jones. It’s a great film. But I recommend it only for true cinephiles. It is a very opaque film that challenges conventional morality and bourgeois lifestyles. Chia Leboux reprises the same meticulously drawn character that he played in last year’s Transformers 2, which had leftist intellectuals up in arms and poseur art house audiences scratching their heads in bemused stupor. That’s it. I was lying on the couch trying to fall asleep.

Movie of the Week

88 Minutes presents Al Pacino in top form. You should really see it. It’s directed by the visionary filmmaker Jon Avnet, whose work on 1989’s Do You Know the Muffin Man? confirmed the world’s suspicion that this was a talent that knew how to do something on celluloid. There was some controversy upon the release of 88 Minutes (there’s always some hubbub with the auteur directors) – audiences were reported to have mistakenly exited the theater at the 88-minute mark, thereby missing the remaining 20-minute finale, which is the most thrilling action sequence in the history of number-themed films. Avnet refused to apologize for the stunt, angering critics but solidifying his reputation among art-house audiences.

Quick Pig

New studies suggest that rather than eating the pig, we should be teaching him maths. Perhaps he would find Orwell’s Animal Farm a snortlingly sporting read. But oh, I’m serious. Some scientists say the pig is in no way kin to you and me, others say actually the genomes bear striking similarities, but all are coming to agree that the pig is one intelligent little food resource.

A New York Times article gives more information.

He dreams he is having dinner with Ben Jonson

Emily Bobrow profiles Lydia Davis, whose cerebral and perspicuous prose is compiled in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (she’s also currently producing a new translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary).

at More Intelligent Life