Noah: “So there was this Chinese guy who had the new iPhone, and then he lost it, so he killed himself.”
Andy: “Yeah, it’s that whole ninja code of honour thing”
Me: “Wait! IPhones are made by ninjas?”
Pete Hindle
Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.
Filed under Regular …
Infinite Jest Interim Report (Palimpsest Review)
My reading of Infinite Jest is part of Infinite Summer, an online reading group of the novel by David Wallace Foster
Infinite Jest: is it really that great a novel, or is it merely called a great novel owing to its size? After all, American’s like big things: Buicks, skyscrapers, Texas. And Infinite Jest is a big book, at 1079 pages in total.
Although currently on track with the reading schedule as laid out on the Infinite Summer website, I’ve been holding myself back. I’ve got a really high reading speed, and I’ve been reading other books at the same time, as I’m not finding Wallace’s writing style that interesting. Yes, it has some good points, and some amusing funny parts, but it’s sheer length finds it unfocused, the narrative is all over the place (despite being a few hundred pages in), and the over-reliance on footnotes is a distracting affectation.
(For instance, in this paragraph I’m writing in the main body of the text to tell you that the footnotes are considered one of the novels main strengths by IJ’s aficionados, pointing to the fragmentary nature of reading via the internet as an excuse for this strange writing quirk. But by writing in the main body of the text you keep the narrative flow but still impart information like I’m doing here. I think authors refer to this as ‘writing skills’.)
Infinite Jest is, no doubt, an interesting book. But whilst reading it I’ve been reminded of all those short novels that you are heartbroken to leave behind once finished. One such book that I’ve been using as ballast for my reading speed is Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest, a story about searching for a way to a magical realm. I’d heard it was a good book via the underground sci-fi grapevine, but not paid too much attention to the plot. I probably should have done, because the mcguffin that gets you into the magical realm of Palimpest is having sex.
Valente’s book has a lot more sex in it than the ordinary fantasy books I come across – er, I mean read. But it is sensitively handled, and belies the underlying theme of the book – that of seduction. Those who wish to travel to Palimpsest are seduced by the city, and it’s promise of a different life, but Valente makes it clear that sometimes those promises are lies.
While Palimpsest was in no way the novel I was expecting, it’s concise effort to tell four interleaved tales served as an ideal counterpoint to Wallace’s rambling style. Valente knows how to write the sort of punchy prose that made me keep reading, her style reminiscent of a sexier, gothic-ier Neil Gaiman. Having finished Palimpest I only wish that there was a sequel I could pick up – I doubt I will be left with a similar yearning once Infinite Jest is finished.
Summer Reading
Now that the scary ’100th post’ is out of the way, this seems like a good time to talk about the program of reading I’m undertaking this summer. For my coursework, I’m slogging through what seems to be an unending amount of PDF’s and websites which suck all the joy out of reading. I even have a automatic folder of PDF’s that I’ve collected over the course of the year that refer to things that are Worthy and To Be Read.
To counter-act this, I’m reading a lot of different stuff. Stuff that is out of place from the usual stuff I read. I’ve just finished Confederacy of Dunces, and have a small pile of interesting fiction to follow it up with. Part of that involves doing the Infinite Summer challenge, where I’ll be reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace over the course of the summer.
This all stems from last year, when I realised that I’d pretty much read all of the SF that I was interested in. That’s not to say that I’m no longer interested in SF, it’s just that I read so darn fast that I’m going to have to wait for more books to be written. I was also stymied in conversation when talking about books – I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve got blank looks after making reference to classics of science fiction literature.
(It’s not my fault you’ve not read your Bester)
In an effort to both better myself and have more conversations about books then, I’m now announcing my summer reading list:
- Confederacy of Dunces (completed!)
- Child 44 (lent to me by the lovely and kind Colleen)
- Palimpsest
- Infinte Jest
- Hell’s Cartographers
- Douglas Coupland (no, it’s a book about Douglas Coupland, I’m not being stupid)
- Queen of Candesce
- McSweeney’s 29
As you can see from clicking those links, a lot of those books are still quite SF in nature, so I’d be grateful for any suggestions as to other stuff I could read. I’m not sure that I’m up to reading any Bronte quite yet, but anything more intermediate than straight-up regency would be interesting… (just not Georgette Heyer, okay?)
Crows, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Crows are the color of anarchy
and close up they’re a little scary.
An eye as bright as anything.
Having a pet crow would be
like having Voltaire on a string.
Ballard Quote:
I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again… the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.
Basic Tech V – Mostly Harmless
The title of the fifth book in Douglas Adams’ series, “Mostly Harmless”, comes from a fictional description of the earth as a civilisation. It’s a great pairing of words – the innocuous framed with a hint of threat.
Above: The Soul of a New Machine
Isn’t that what the world of programming is like though? It’s ninety-five percent unthreatening typing activities, with a final five percent of 1970’s punk behaviour. And I mean really punk – it could be anything from low-level annoyance to core-wars style worms that destroy all information. This makes programming mostly harmless, just like the pipe-wrench is mostly not deadly.
For me, the work on this project has been really slow going, and I’ve found it very long and arduous to work with the code in this fashion. One of the earlier references in this series of posts was the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, where the major characters are confronted with a spreading virus that destroys the ability for people to speak, transfers a religious belief system into their mind, and makes them run off to join a weird cult. This gets referred to by one of the characters as neuro-lingustic hacking.
This project’s aim has been about using computer tools to examine my pattern of lingustic use. The resulting experimentation with code has convinced me that, in no small way, I should be concentrating on actually making bodies of text rather than dividing my time between attempting to code and and attempting to write. The idea of a reflective tool for text is still a fantastic idea that needs further experimentation, but I’m not sure that I can do it justice between my skill in programming and my desire to create well-crafted sentences.
To that extent, this module has been mostly harmless to me. I’m no longer interested in programming in the way that I was prior to starting it, but I’m not going to rule out the idea of finishing off this project (see the Evaulation PDF) later on in the year. But I can’t breathe true life into the project in the way that a good programmer can. The MV/8000, pictured at the top of this post, was made famous by Tracey Kidder in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Soul of a New Machine.
This book, so-titled because of the attention to detail that the dedicated team of engineers and programmers put into this early computer breathed life into a hard-pushed project, is a clear line of demarkation between between writing as an activity and programming. In-house documents from the producers of the MV/8000 (aka the Eagle) are nowhere near as exciting as Kidder’s prose, and would not have propelled either the Eagle, Kidder, or the cast of characters Kidder wrote about to anywhere near the level of fame and notoriety they still had twenty years later.
There will always be a need for textual framing of events, objects, and movements. In the next phase of my studies, I’ll be looking at the Star and Shadow’s volunteer workers, and framing that within a context of grass-roots arts activities, whilst working on the final project for the course. Both of these will projects will take the form of texts that can be read, so there’s good call for me to concentrate on something other than code. And, whilst one of my main aims when coming on the course was to develop my skills as a coder, finding out over the length of this module that I need to direct my energies into something else has been mostly harmless.
Old Video, New Post
I’m putting this up because my mum told me she liked it. Thanks! It’s a video made with the programming language Processing, inspired by the work of Douglas Coupland.
