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Found in How to Win at Chess: A Complete Course* by I.A. Horowitz.

Found in A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork* by Joseph Campbell.

Update: Listen to this: “The nice thing about life is that it’s filled with second chances. Quoting Bill” (224).

Seriously. Nailed it.

This was nice, too: “Scott leaned toward her to sing a bit of old Beatles, a line about carrying pictures of Chairman Mao”* (223).

I’m not quite finished with the book yet, so I can’t promise that there won’t be more interjections like this. Too good, too good, too good.

If you don’t already own the book…*

This: “He […] could feel a slowness come upon him, familiar though never felt before […] deeply and totally known” (216). ¹

And this: “They show the great state portrait in the deep distance and she is pretty sure there is no wart in Andy’s drawing” (178).

Or how about this: “In other words a series of open-mouth antics with a strutting component” (173).

Let’s not forget: “Then there was the finger Bill had received in the mail. He kept it around a while, a ring finger he guessed, …” (197).

Maybe mostly: “… the champagne came sluicing …” (211).

“Sluicing.”

Say that again: “sluicing.”

Slower: “slooooo siiiiiing.”

Oh yes.

I’m so happy we got to see Don DeLillo speak when he was here at SLU (sing? sorry. couldn’t be helped.) a few years ago. He was amazing. Oddly, smaller than I expected. I guess he looks taller and bigger in the head shots on his books. ??? Anyway.

You should just read Mao II: A Novel* by Don DeLillo. Heck, you should read everything he’s ever written (note to self).

I’m pretty nearly finished with Mao II. The language is so… artful. That’s the word I need. Artful. Just amazingly artful. The dialogs are perfect. The way you are inside a character’s head, but not shoved there, more like sucked there, but almost imperceptibly. It. Is. Just. Beautiful.

And there’s sluicing.

The second book in Harkuki Murakami’s Rat trilogy, Pinball, 1973* again stars our unnamed narrator, The Rat, and J (who runs J’s Bar). Our narrator has a unique relationship with a three-flipper pinball machine, “Spaceship,” as well as with a pair of twin girls, also unnamed, but for a while 208 and 209.

This is another very short (179 pages of main text) book, so I finished it pretty quickly, too. Good thing, because that means I also don’t have to write a long post about it and can soon get to my piece on Mao II: A Novel*, which I’m love-love-LOVING! Every time I sit down to read, there’s something I want to write about. Luckily for you, as soon as I stand up I forget what it was, and I haven’t written any notes…. So that piece might be short, too. We’ll see…

Earlier this summer, I read Hear the Wind Sing* by Haruki Murakami. At only 130 pages of main text, this book is quite short. For summer reading, anyway. But it wasn’t my summer reading. I’d finished that already.

HTWS is the first book in Murakami’s Rat trilogy, The Rat being a character in the books… the close friend of our unnamed narrator. It’s a pretty easy, fast read. And it wasn’t really widely published/distributed in English (thus the high prices on amazon.com for this super tiny book). Evidently Murakami doesn’t think of this or the second in the trilogy as his best work. Hmmm.

Oh well. I liked it anyway. And went on to read the second in the trilogy as well (I’d read the third — which was widely distributed — quite a while ago, not knowing it was part of a trilogy). So there. Oh. And you’ll be hearing about that (the second book) in this space sometime, too.

So my friend Brandmatt emailed me a while back and asked if I had heard of a writer named Evan Dara. I hadn’t. Matt said he was reading The Lost Scrapbook* and that it was great. O.K., so that was enough for me to get a copy … but when I looked for one, what I saw about it made me want it even more: “most accomplished first novel since William Gaddis’ [sic] The Recognitions,* and then his second novel was compared to Infinite Jest.* Oh boy. So I really had to get a copy. But it’s out of print. And I had just ordered one of the last copies available of William Vollmann’s Rising Up and Rising Down,* his seven-volume study of violence, which set me back $500 (though counter-intuitively ordered through what McSweeny’s advertised as a sale). But then William Vollmann himself had picked The Lost Scrapbook as the winner of a national fiction competition. So I ended up finding a used copy for $18. And though I’ve been super busy the past few days between teaching and work, I’ve managed to burn through 360 pages. And it is great. The comparisons with Gaddis and DFW are valid, though his voice is his own. He also has a kind of DeLilloan ear for a wide range of speaking voices. There are a lot of these voices in the novel, and Dara shifts more or less seamlessly between them. That aspect reminds me of my own abandoned novel Vox Americana (especially a one-sided telephone conversation¹—I used that a few times … not that I do it very seamlessly … and, and … on rereading it, having abandoned it was probably for the best. So I guess I don’t have to bother going back and finishing it.). I’ve got 116 pages to go to see how Dara uses the eponymous scrapbook to tie everything together. But it’s worth reading for the sound alone.

Daniel Handler’s (aka Lemony Snicket) blurb on the back of Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity* by David Foster Wallace: “All the grace of pure mathematics without the parts that made me want to bang my head against the wall.”

OK.

For a while…

From DFW’s own foreward:

Like the other booklets [this booklet is 305 pages long, not including the scholarly boilerplate, the bibliography, and the index] in this ‘Great Discovers’ series, Everything and More is a piece of pop technical writing. […] The aim is to discuss these [mathematical] achievements in such a way that they’re vivid and comprehensible to readers who do not have pro-grade technical backgrounds and expertise. (pp. 1–2)

Which he does. Mostly.

So I was super excited to read a book whose subject matter, while fascinating, is just plain difficult to a mathematically challenged person such as myself. But excited I was.

Because it’s written by DFW and he really can make me get/love/devour any subject about which he writes.

Because at one point in the text, DFW says he sucked at math (yeah, right)¹ and hated all his math classes.

Because throughout the text, DFW reminds us that we don’t even have to have had college math to get the gist of the book (he even will point out things that, sure, are great to know, and yes, he is stating them, and boy, yes, do they make no sense to me whatsoever, but, he says, (I paraphrase) “That’s OK, you don’t need to understand that, just trust me and you’ll be fine.”).

Because Lemony Snicket* has a blurb on the back (that was a huge plus).

Because as much as math makes my brain explode, I do find it terribly interesting… to a point.

My brain remained intact, oh, I’d say until about section 5-ish maybe. Confession: yes, it did just get too complicated for me. Boast: but I did finish the book. Confession: after finishing, I was kinda “WTF?” I almost started reading it again immediately…. but didn’t think I had it in me.

I’m thinking that at some point I will read Everything and More again and do what he (DFW) suggests: i.e., skip everything that he’s marked I.Y.I. (If You’re Interested). I read all those the first go-around, and he wasn’t kidding. Some of them are just way too technical for someone like me who completely bombed college math.

So thanks, DFW, for writing this book. I promise I did get something out of it. Not the least of which was the pure enjoyment of reading your writing….

Finally! The post about my summer reading, 1Q84* by Haruki Murakami. I tend to like to pick long books for my summer reading, so I’ll spend the whole summer (and sometimes, much longer than the whole summer) reading the same book. At 944 pages, I thought this qualified.

Oh but no. I started it, OK, technically before summer started, I think in late April maybe? I can’t remember. Anyway, typically, I do start my summer reading early, because it usually takes me longer than three months to get through the massive novel I pick each year. And so this year I finished two days after summer started. Ummmm.

I’m kinda copping out on this post (although the book is very good and I enjoyed it immensely) by just saying, “Watch this video:”

Boy.

I’m becoming a voracious reader.

For me.

Adult me.

Child me was a voracious reader.

…

Summer’s not officially over yet, and I’ve not only finished my planned summer reading,* but I’ve also finished three* more* books* (OK, two are quite short) and am more than a third of the way through Mao II.*

I had to post this because I’m reminded, after not having read DeLillo for a while, just how much I enjoy his writing. Once I pick up the book, it’s really hard for me to put it back down and get back to work. Or play.

Is this the first public critique of the one percent to explicitly use that construction?

3 June [1940]

From a letter from Lady Oxford to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies:

“Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining. …. in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.”

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exists. (344)

Ellipses in the original.

My Country Right or Left: 1940-1943

Maybe we ought to change the title of this section of Patrick’s blog to “What my wife has read…” I am now officially three books behind in my posting, and am almost finished with a fourth book. Oooooh.

Anyway. The eponymous essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments* by David Foster Wallace is… wait for it… great! DFW chronicles a Celebrity cruise for a “certain swanky East-Coast magazine” (Harpers). You don’t have to read more than the first chapter to get the drift. Oh, but you should.

Thinking back on it — how long ago was it when I actually read it? — I sort of think he could have written it about part of our most recent vacation. Although I might do that again. Once. Patrick has already written about that, and I pretty much concur. But I say I might do it again once, because I think I’d like to be in the Fremont area at nighttime. And I’d like to go to Dino’s again.

I don’t see us ever taking a cruise; I’d have to O.D. on Dramamine® for sure. So it was cool to read the very detailed descriptions of one.

It’s interesting to me that immediately before boarding the cruise, you’re subjected to near torture for three or four hours while waiting to board the ship. The you board and all of a sudden it’s sheer bliss. Then about half-way through the cruise you’re sick of your room being cleaned spotless every time you step out… and the towel guy on the pool deck replacing your towel every time you get up from your lounge chair… and, and, and. You’re just ready to go home and not do “‘…something you haven’t done in a long, long, time: Absolutely Nothing.’”

I’ll pass.

This is the seventh post in a series.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
• Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
• E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
• Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All
• Greatly Exaggerated
• David Lynch Keeps His Head
• Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again… Again

“gnarled emissions of steam and smoke….”

Photo taken at The Woody Creek Tavern

I cannot adequately express my initial reaction to Las Vegas … it was something like complete outrage. Never has any other place repulsed me so totally. We pulled into town close to midnight on a Monday night and the streets were thronged with ill-mannered, ill-dressed vulgarians moving en masse from one garish spectacle to another. The general ambience was something like that of a frat party … not just any frat party, but one held at the fraternity house having the lowest cumulative GPA on campus, at the campus of a college notorious for accepting any slack-witted imbecile who includes a $45.00 check with his application. There was a kind of uniform in evidence: males of the species favored askew ball caps with baggy athletic clown shorts and oversized T-shirts; females paired stretch micro dresses with stiletto heels … all had used the same mason’s trowel to apply pounds of pancake makeup. It was like a full-scale audition for “Hot Chicks with Douche Bags,” though very few hot chicks were in evidence … if only someone had told these poor creatures that a two inch long skirt is not for everyone. The din of hoots and hollers was unbearable. But wait! We had yet to enter the casino.

After 2 am, the casinos were still packed. Everyone was still “humping the American dream” as HST said, though I wished they looked like caricatures of used car salesmdn from Dallas. There was nothing so tasteful in evidence.

The thing is, everything is so cheap and trashy, not least of all the people themselves.

The appeal of gambling is lost on me.

We are staying at the Flamingo and our burlesque show is said to be “the steamiest show on the strip.” I cannot get excited about the prospect: “The show provides a high energy performance with the use of outrageous props such as bathtubs, guitars, lollipops, and feather boas.” I’m struggling to understand the quality of mind that finds a bathtub “outrageous.” These props are the most pedestrian ones imaginable, but probably suitable for the debased minds that wander into the show. Debbie Reynolds in a silver afro wig singing Sergeant Pepper’s is beginning to sound mighty appealing by comparison.

Elevator 1: On my way down to the mall-like lobby to find coffee. Trapped with a group of Ukrainian tourists, apparently minor functionaries in the Mafia. Most were grumbling good naturedly about having “lost everything” with more than a little ill-advised pride (“learn to enjoy losing”). But one had hit it big at the roulette table playing the number 28. Clearly he was destined for bigger things than his associates. He was wearing those tight high-waisted jeans popular among men involved in east European organized crime.

Elevator 2: A man makes a general comment to the other occupants of the elevator : “Another day in paradise.” There was no hint of irony in his voice, but he was so happy to be hemorrhaging his annual savings and his smile was so sweet and sincere that I couldn’t bring myself to punch him. The other occupant wished him well as he exited the elevator, then turned his attention to my mustache. It is a pretty Vegas-worthy growth and tends to attract uncomfortable attention from other men in elevators. There was the college baseball player from North Dakota who all but proposed marriage to me. But I digress.

Tourists at the strip hotels fall into two camps: foreigners and xenophobic American bigots. Every time the former communicate in something other than good old uh-MERK-in, the latter roll their eyes as if to say, “who let these fuckin’ greasers in.” The foreigners are at least as susceptible to the American Dream as the Americans themselves, if not more so, given the fact that they traveled further to find it.

The pool pairs terrible insipid pop music at high volume with overpriced drinks. More poor fashion sense, though it’s nice to see that some women actually do wear high heels with their bikinis. Men past a certain age display what David Foster Wallace so aptly described as “rat snout tits.”* We leave disappointed when it becomes clear that the promised (and much anticipated on our part) booty shaking contest is not going to happen. Perhaps not enough volunteers signed up, but this seems unlikely, as many young women were practicing desultorily.

Still unable to find a tin ape that shakes dice or a plastic zippo with a roulette wheel embedded in it. That these were $7.50 and $6.95 respectively fills me with anxiety about what these trinkets would cost over 40 years later. And why is trash from 40 years ago charming in a kitschy way while trash from today is just trash? And don’t get me started on why slot machines no longer have a heavy lever to pull. We were fit back then, by God. Now a push button is all we can muster. Ah, nation in decline.

Have secured a small Las Vegas snow globe, lots of postcards, and a couple books of photographs of old Las Vegas. So far, the best signage is downtown and on the way there. It’s no less vulgar than the strip, just older. The area is gritty, but a locals bar called Dino’s lounge redeems it entirely. Two drinks for $4.50.

We will head downtown to Fremont street on the way out of town, but my basic response to the city in the context of HST’s famous book is pretty much set: The essential character of the American Dream is nightmarish. Excess and the myth of easy money mark everything to an appalling degree. In that respect, Vegas is just like anyplace else, only more so.

The evidence of Thompson’s close run for sheriff of Pitkin County Colorado in 1970 is still in evidence in Aspen. The bar at the Hotel Jerome and The Woody Creek Tavern still hang the poster Tom Benton* designed for Thompson’s run for sheriff; but that, in its way, is just capitalizing on Thompson’s name to sell a few more cocktails.

I was at a party a few miles up in Lenado, just past where Thompson used to live.

It was a reunion for a group who lived and worked up at a logging camp in the seventies. They would have been part of that Aspen freak contingent. Everyone remembered Thompson, but memories of that election were vague at best.

It’s pretty clear that the greedheads and limousine-liberals depicted in Thompson’s essay have pretty much won the day. The developers have been good at keeping all the development from looking too ugly. On the one hand, that four lane highway Thompson mentions never did barrel straight through the center of Aspen. In the right season when the weather is fine, you will still be treated to the most terrifyingly beautiful scenery imaginable as you creep over Independence Pass. (A long time Aspen/Lenado resident gave me the sage advice, "always steer into the mountain, not the cliff”).

It’s not clear how local the local freaks ever really were. Thompson offers a concise description of a scene that has occurred again and again in various geographic locales:

The pattern never varies; a low-rent area suddenly blooms new and loose and human—and then fashionable, which attracts the press and the cops at about the same time. Cop problems attract more publicity, which then attracts fad-salesman and hustlers—which means money, and that attracts junkies and jack-rollers. Their bad action causes publicity and—for some perverse reason—an influx of bored, upward mobile types who dig the menace of “white ghetto” life and whose expense-account tastes drive local rents and street prices out of reach of the original settlers … who are forced, once again, to move on.¹

During happy hour at the Jerome Tavern (sorry, that’s now called the J-Bar), Jim’s friend Kyu said that Aspen was a pretty hip place to be back in the day, but it has grown pretentious and insufferable. I’m inclined to agree. But both Jim and Kyu had lived up at Lenado even then because Aspen was already well out of reach of the average freak doing menial labor.

And what about the police Thompson wanted to rein in? My first exposure to the police in Aspen was when we turned around in a side street off main. There were three Toyota Highlander SUVs with local law enforcement markings. The vehicles were hybrids, of course. “Ecology” is an important niche market. Then later at the Woody Creek Tavern, a young woman balked at being asked to show ID: “I’ve been drinking here since I was sixteen!” Well, the ownership had apparently changed, according to the bartender, and besides, “the cops …” he left an ominous silence. The cops, indeed. To give them their due, it might just be that they enjoy roughly searching a couple of drunken teen sluts on a slow Saturday night. But who doesn’t. No, they don’t seem to have remained the overtly menacing force they once were. One can even imagine them maintaining a fleet of bicycles as HST’s platform originally suggested they do. The current Pitkin County Sheriff is named DiSalvo. A DiSalvo for Sheriff sticker on the Woody Creek Tavern back bar says he wants to legalize pot. Now that most of the freaks have gone straight, that too would be a valuable commodity to bring into the legal market. Many an ex-freak still likes to smoke a big reefer after a hard day of working for the man.

Well, most of the ex-heads I met seemed to have survived with a good deal of idealism intact. But overall, the freaks got subsumed into the larger market. Everything can and will be commodified, so now, that small and promising pocket of resistance is just one very small component of the GDP. And the former site of the Elks Club where Thompson and his followers called last minute freak voters and awaited the election results is now … wait for it … a Prada store!

Let’s hear it for the one percent … Aspen über alles.