Friday!

* The ping-pong match in the press over the public option continues. Nobody can figure out whether or not Pelosi has the votes, whether or not Obama supports an Olympia-Snowe-style trigger, or just what will happen with the cloture vote in the Senate. Ezra Klein compares the likely House and Senate bills, which leads Matt Yglesias to suggest a best-of-both-worlds approach. Meanwhile a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll shows that public support for the public option remains steady at around 60%, which would be important if the Senate were a properly representative body.

* Lots of buzz today about Neill Blomkamp's next film after District 9, described by SCI FI Wire as a balls-out sci-fi epic.

* 'A Mid-Atlantic Miracle': Keeping public university costs down in Maryland.

* A judge has ruled the war crimes case against Blackwater/Xe will go forward.

* 'Living on $500,000 a Year': Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns. John Scalzi compares Fitzgerald's income and lifestyle to a writer's today.

* Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for president? This would take "fair and balanced" to a whole new level.

* And your entirely random chart of the day: The Population of Rome Through History. Via Kottke.

Wednesday catchup 2.

* Duke University researchers have proven that Barack Obama kills Republican boners.

* Also in Republican news: only 1 in 5 Americans now identify as a Republican. These numbers are terrible. It's hard to believe, but could we really be seeing the end of the GOP?

* An interview with the prop master for Mad Men.

* Chasing down the earliest common ancestor and the secret of abiogenesis. More at MeFi.

* From universal literacy to universal authorship?

* The House Next Door reviews The Yes Men Save the World, saying it's everything Capitalism: A Love Story wasn't.

With delightful wit, the Yes Men are saying, “Yes, we can!” to the making of a better world, doing what’s right on behalf of the corporations that do so much wrong. Instead of the Moore strategy of passively shaming, they actively participate in change, as when Bichlbaum, in the guise of a Dow Chemical spokesman, goes on the BBC in front of 300 million viewers to announce that the Bhopal catastrophe, the largest industrial accident in history, will finally be cleaned up by his employer. This simple act is a million times more radical and risk-taking than Moore’s noisily wielding a bullhorn in front of AIG headquarters. Moore may be responsible for the highest grossing documentary of all time, but not one of his films ever led to a two billion dollar drop in share prices in 23 minutes as this Yes Men stunt did!

* Lionel Shriver: "I sold my family for a novel." I had no idea this market existed! Obviously this is why my novel has stalled.

Still waiting.

* It's not exactly Douchiest College honors, but Duke is #14 on the Times's ranking of top 200 universities worldwide.

* Bitter Laughter reports by way of Nate Silver that public option opt-out may be a compromise that can actually get through the Senate—and Steve Benen agrees it's not a bad thing.

* Also in health care: Olbermann's hour-long "Special Comment" from last night, which wasn't nearly as unbearable as I imagined it would be when I heard it was coming.

* A second NJ-GOV poll—albeit one taken before Fatgate—shows Corzine up, this time by three.

* Lots of talk today about this New York Times genealogy of Michelle Obama, focused on an enslaved ancestor who was raped by her owner.

* Pee before you fly. It's funny how low-cost, outside-the-box carbon solutions—like Stephen Chu's suggestion that we paint our roofs white—are never taken seriously. It's like our society has a death wish.

* The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal.

Behold, the genre fiction generator, from Wondermark, via Boing Boing.

Post-exam link catchup.

* Today's abolish-the-Senate factoid: The 10 Senators on the Senate Finance Committee who voted for the public option yesterday represent millions more people than the 13 who voted against it. Dramatically depowering or outright eliminating the Senate should be near the top of any long-term political agenda for progressives. Also in Senate health care news: Tom Harkin says the public option has the votes to pass, while Ben Nelson thinks it's 2008.

* I don't usually play look-at-the-wingnut, but John Derbyshire says women shouldn't have the right to vote because we "got along like that for 130 years." Also, we should repeal civil rights legislation because it's wrong to "try to force people to be good." Well done, sir.

* Okay, a second round of look-at-the-wingnut: Newsmax ran a column yesterday advocating a military coup to solve "the Obama problem." Remember, conservatives love America and progressives hate America.

* Corzine continues to gain in New Jersey, with independent Chris Daggett now polling at 12%.

* Background ephemera from the new Red Dawn remake. It sounds like the Commies may have a point in this one.

* Where Superman gets his powers. At MeFi.

* New Scientist is having a flash fiction contest.

* Another entry in Jonathan Lethem's ten-million-part series on why he loves Philip K. Dick.

* People think torture works because it works in movies.

* New favorite song: Zork rock. (You know where I found it.)

* Also from Boing Boing: Trotsky: The Graphic Biography.

Short Sunday links.

* Can't The Hobbit catch a break?

* Mars may have more water than previously suspected.

* I really hope They Might Be Giants isn't joking about upcoming albums called There Goes Your Liberties and Here Comes the Syndicalists.

* Why can't writers talk extemporaneously?

* And William Safire has died.

Neuoscientist as novelist, at MSNBC, via 3QD.

"In some sense, I use my literary fiction as a channel to explore ideas that I come up with during the day," he told me.

For example, consider how the data in your brain determines your identity. "For a long time, there's been this open question of what it would be like to be someone else - or to be something else," he said. "Once you're John Malkovich, you wouldn't remember what it's like not to be John Malkovich."

That spawned Eagleman's little story about cross-species reincarnation, titled "Descent of Species": Suppose you admired the strength and beauty of horses, and you got the chance to become a horse in your next life. Once you become a horse, would you have enough wits to appreciate that life, or even enough wits to choose the life after that? And if that's the case, what unwitting demigods might we humans have been in our past lives?

Other stories play off the fact that existential meaning doesn't scale well. "What would happen if we showed Shakespeare to a dog or a bacterium?" Eagleman asked. "It's pointless, because what's meaningful to you changes by spatial scale."

For example, a microbial God might reserve the afterlife strictly for microbes, with humans merely serving as part of the scenery. Or the universe might be ruled by a cosmic Giantess who is as indifferent to our fate as we are to the fate of an amoeba.

This post ditches the official spoiler-line and talks about the ending of Infinite Jest. If it's important to you not to read such a post, please do not read this post.

I decided to read through to the end of Infinite Jest this morning, which means (1) this is post is off the spoiler-line and consequently deals with the text as a whole and (2) this may or may not be my last Infinite Summer post. In light of (2) I'd like to say that it's been truly great, and while I'm not able to participate in the Gravity's Rainbow followup due to my pending exams I hope to pick up again with whatever Book #3 turns out to be.

I think it's natural to end Infinite Jest in the spirit of of anticlimax nicely captured by Infinite Detox:

...as a reader, who’s poured 1,000 pages of emotional investment into this novel and its characters, this rings hollow and false. Frankly, I’m pissed off.

...Here’s the irony: One of Wallace’s big projects in Infinite Jest was to champion the notion of sincerity, right? Of forging connections and telling the truth and dropping the anhedonic mask and opening yourself up to the emotional gooiness that may result. From an intellectual standpoint, Wallace is very much pro-sincerity. And definitely ambivalent about “hip irony”, if not downright hostile toward it. Wallace can talk the talk about sincerity and directness and forging connections, but it’s like when it comes to the point of enacting that sincerity, dramatizing it and building it into the very fabric of Infinite Jest, he can’t (or doesn’t want to) bring himself to do it.

This tension between sincerity and irony—the impossible yearning for an open, unmediated authenticity of the sort we're smart enough to know can never be achieved—is productive of the melancholic tone that has characterized most of my reading of Infinite Jest this summer. In some essential, baseline sense I think it's what the book is All About.™ So IJ is most assuredly not a failure, exactly, so much as a very pointed and frustrating framing of a particularly intractable problem—which is to say IJ is a (mostly) successful book on the subject of universal human failure. We are left at the end of Infinite Jest with a story that hasn't even happened yet, much less capable of directing us towards some personal epiphany—but if we've been reading carefully all along we should have known it could never be otherwise. (See, for example, the conversation between Remy Marathe and Kate Gompert from 774-782, in which Marathe's story repeatedly resists the narrative closures an increasingly desperate Gompert is desperate to assign to it. How this book would end has always been right in front of our faces.)

Now, you can allow yourself to be seduced by the teasing but doomed impulse towards closure, the fantasy that answers to all the mysteries exist somewhere inside the book. Wallace himself even points to this in an interview:

(DFW) There is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.

(Wallace is, I think, being coy here. Of course there's hints about what happens after pg. 981, but they are completely incomplete and even contradictory, as he well knows, and in any event beside the point.)

Over the years Wallace fans has struggled admirably to puzzle out these supposedly converging lines with varying levels of success, and that work goes on in the Infinite Summer forums as we speak. For what it's worth: I think the DMZ/mushrooms theory makes a lot of sense, and definitely explains some of Hal's strange behavior in the middle of the novel, but I remain committed to the partial-viewing-of-the-Entertainment hypothesis, the heroic partial overcoming of which in evidence during the "Year of Glad" chapter I think better matches DFW's existential themes. I think they must have really dug up Himself's head, even if that seems to introduce precognitive dreams into the world of the novel alongside "wraiths," and I suspect a microwave-destroyed copy of the master was inside. There is no anti-Entertainment. I don't think the Entertainment ends the world, a la Dollhouse's "Epitaph One"; what it does is both less and more apocalyptic than that. Whether or not John Wayne was a spy he was "on Hal's side" by the grave and whatever came later, and I guess he probably died somewhere along the way, somehow. I don't know if I think Hal gets better. I think things get worse for Pemulis. I think O.N.A.N. dissolves.

But the impulse to make this sort of over-interpretive effort is itself a kind of misreading of the novel, which is, we must recognize, explicitly anticonfluential along the theories of Himself's own films. The displeasure of this sort of text is laid out unmistakably for us within the novel itself:

It was only after Himself's death that critics and theorists started to treat this question as potentially important. A woman at U. Cal-Irvine had earned tenure with an essay arguing that the reason-versus-no-reason debate bout what was unentertaining in Himself's work illuminated the central conundra of millennial après-garde film, most of which, in the teleputer age of home-only entertainment, involved the question why so much aesthetically ambitious film was so boring and why so much shitty reductive commercial entertainment was so much fun. (947)

The book—which, centered as it is around a mind-consuming MacGuffin called "the Entertainment" that destroys your ability to think, and therefore live, refuses to entertain us—is an object lesson in the fact that literature is about something other, and we can hope more, than mere pleasure. Infinite Jest is extremely fun at times and incredibly tedious at others—but in its mammoth scale, sprawling scope, and discontinuous presentation it could only ever leave us with a kind of unfulfilled, anti-entertained sense of disappointment at its end. To see the missing Year of Glad or to know X, Y, and Z about it would not change that inevitable anticlimax; in all likelihood it would only bring the discomforting divide between literature and Entertainment into even sharper relief while in the process sacrificing the calculated denial of easy pleasure that is at the core of the novel's claims to aesthetic worth. To try to close a narrative like this one is a readerly impulse that is almost impossible to avoid—it was, I'll admit, essentially the first thing I embarked on when I put down the book—but we should only attempt to do so with the understanding that we can't, and knowing that if we were better readers of Wallace we wouldn't even try. The ending was never and could never have been what Infinite Jest is about; that's why it comes first.

Wednesday miscellany!

* Startling: 50% of people think women should be legally required to take their husbands' names. Watch out, most married woman under forty I know! They're coming for you.

* Jonathan Lethem talks to The Jewish Daily Forward about the greatness of Philip K. Dick.

* Have we reached our civilization's tipping point? See also: why climate change is worse than we feared.

* AMC greenlights zombie series. Sounds promising. Between this and Red Mars AMC is making a strong push for my particular demographic.

* As of tonight, Microsoft can no longer sell Word.

* Another Battlestar reboot? Already? Really?

* Lesser-known editing and proofreading marks. (via)

* 'Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing.'

* And Ze gets philosophical.

You partake in a medical experiment. In the experiment you are given one of two pills. You don't know which one until after you take it. One shortens your life by 10 years, and the other lengthens your life by 10 years. You have just found out which pill you took. The question is: which pill do you think will increase the quality of your life the most? Would one make you change the way you live your life more than the other?

Sci-Fi links for a Thursday without joy.

* AskMetaFilter on slammin' science fiction-themed hip-hop.

* Where I Write: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors in Their Creative Spaces.

* Just Another Post-Apocalypse Story.

* Fox is promising not to ruin Dollhouse this time around.

* Terry Gilliam is hoping to adapt a Philip K. Dick novel, The World Jones Made. Will it be the first PKD movie since Blade Runner to be actually good? (Sorry Arnold.)

* And Warren Ellis says the future is small.

Wednesday afternoon links 2!

* Wikipedia's Rorschach cheat sheet. My contempt for the discipline of psychology really got in the way of my reading this article; I kept thinking, "Wait, people actually take Rorschach tests seriously?"

* For more information on my feelings about the Rorschach test see the story I published in Five Fingers Review #23 (now defunct). Note: I'm not sure this issue ever actually materialized. I never got a copy.

* Two takes on how to improve your teaching: restructure your expectations about college composition and teach naked.

* If I'm reading this article correctly, M&Ms cure spinal injury.

* The only rule at Fox News is that there are no rules.

* NPR considers the uncanny intelligence of crows. Via MeFi, which has more in the comments, including video of crows exploiting traffic patterns in Tokyo to crack nuts.

Three-way dance: Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair. A short snippet:

Michael Moorcock says “I invented the multiverse!”

Michael Moorcock says he invented the multiverse as a reassurance against the second law of thermodynamics and heat death of the universe.

...

Alan Moore says that “Jerusalem” disproves the existence of death from a scientific standpoint...

Via Bookslut.

I'm now current with the Infinite Summer schedule, though not prepared to say all that much about it yet. Well, there's this: while I'm enjoying the early passages of the book much more this time than I remember enjoying the middle and end of the book last time, I'm frustrated again (as I was frustrated the first time) by Wallace's unattributed borrowing of well-known urban legends for the book. The toothbrushes-in-asses burglary and the workman's comp email (spoiler alert! +2 pages from today's spoiler line) spring to mind most immediately as particularly frustrating examples of this.

I'll also second Kotsko on the problem of the black dialect sections, which are in fact fairly painful to read. In both these cases (as well as the footnotes, especially the layered footnotes, and the ubiquitous acronyms and abbreviations, and the multiple perspectives, and the constant and sometimes unmotivated switches between first and third person [with a little second thrown in for flavor], and on and on) there seems to me to be a deliberate attempt to distanciate the reader from any possibility of too-complete identification with the text as narrative. This is necessary, I suppose, because the first-person Hal Incandenza sections would be too spellbinding otherwise, threatening to totally overwhelm the rest of the text by comparison.

I also read the tennis academy, as I did the last time, as a remarkable solution to the problem of writing about writing without writing about writing. (See 109-121.) The initials E.T.A. may as well be M.F.A., and it's hard for me not to recognize in my own creative output

the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he's mode to get to the plateau, and doesn't mind staying at the plateau because it's comfortable and familiar, and he doesn't worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he's designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game—his whole game is based on this plateau now. And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks out of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he'll say he doesn't care, he says he's in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he's content. Until one day there's a quiet knock at the door... (116)

Other stuff:

* Duke swine flu Patient Zero located. Get your torches and pitchforks and meet me by the Chapel.

* NPR is having a microfiction contest, no entry fee (but no real prize either). I've already entered more than 1,300 times.

* Trailer for Ricky Gervais's SFish comedy "The Invention of Lying" about a universe where no one has ever thought to lie.

* What is a master's degree worth? My advice to students in the humanities, as always, is to stay away unless they're paying you to go. Don't miss the structural analysis from Columbia's Mark C. Taylor:

The next bubble to burst will be the education bubble. Make no mistake about it, education is big business and, like other big businesses, it is in big trouble. What people outside the education bubble don’t realize and people inside won’t admit is that many colleges and universities are in the same position that major banks and financial institutions are: their assets (endowments down 30-40 percent this year) are plummeting, their liabilities (debts) are growing, most of their costs are fixed and rising, and their income (return on investments, support from government and private donations, etc.) is falling.

This is hardly a prescription for financial success. Faced with this situation, colleges and universities are on the prowl for new sources of income. And one place they invariably turn is to new customers, i.e., students.

* Also on the academic front is this on the split between reading and writing in English departments from the always insightful Marc Bousquet, at the Valve. Welcome to my future, everyone:

As of Fall 2007, contingent faculty outnumber the tenure stream by at least 3 to 1, roughly the inverse of the proportions forty years earlier. Across the profession, this trend line will drive the percentage of tenure-stream faculty into single digits within twenty years. It is hard to imagine that the trend line for English could be worse--but it is-- and the outlook for literature is worse yet. A 2008 MLA analysis of federal IPEDS data (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) shows that between 1993 and 2004, the hiring of nontenurable faculty continued to dramatically outpace tenure-track hiring in the profession as a whole.

However, in terms of absolute numbers most disciplines actually gained a modest number of tenure-track lines, or at least held steady. Political science gained 2.5 percent new lines; philosophy and religion packed on 43 percent. English, however, lost over 3,000 tenure-track lines, an average annual loss of 300 positions. This amounted to slightly more than one in every 10 tenurable positions in English — literally a decimation. If that trend proves to have continued — and all indications are that it has — by early 2010 English will have shed another 1,500 lines.

I just thank God I have an MFA to fall back on.

Sunday night links.

* I can't bring myself to watch the murder of Neda Soltani on YouTube, but a lot of other people have. It's remarkable how quickly her face has become that of the protests in Iran.

* The New York Times has an article exposing abusive practices in the freelance textbook market in New York, with my good friend and old co-blogger PClem providing some of the ugly details.

* Polls show widespread public support for a public health care option. Will this remind Democrats in Congress that they swept the last two elections?

* Buffy vs Twilight.

* Infinite Summer begins tonight. Kottke kicks things off.

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.

That Louis Menand piece on graduate creative writing programs I mentioned a few days ago is now available online, presumably due to widespread Internet interest among the failed graduates of said programs. Naming no names.

Finally, my life story can be told: Bad Writing, the movie. (Thanks, Egan!)

More!

* The World Future Council eyes the possibility of punishing crimes against the future, but news on climate change and ocean acidification suggests we should be more concerned about crimes against the present.

* Here comes your Grant Morrison documentary.

* Early Ditko.

* How to bring the party.

* Are graduate creative writing programs worth it? Only if they're free, and frankly maybe not even then. This, however, is quite true:

A friend and classmate of mine recently said that our program was a place where people who ordinarily never would have met in their entire lives could become best friends.

It's the best reason to do it. Via Jezebel via @sposnik.

* Alain de Botton says "it's time for an ambitious new literature of the office."

* And an art historian thinks Duchamp's readymades weren't really readymades.

This is Ms. Shearer's case against the readymades so far.

Duchamp's readymade glass ampoule, which he named ''50 cc of Paris Air,'' is larger than any that would have been readily available to pharmacists. (And she has a tape of a man from Corning Glass saying so.)

''Beautiful Breath,'' the readymade perfume bottle with Man Ray's photograph of Duchamp on it (now owned by Yves Saint Laurent) is green, she says; the real bottles of ''Un Air Embaume,'' from Rigaud, are peach-colored (like the empty but still-fragrant one that Ms. Shearer bought for $650).

The readymade snow shovel, which now exists only in photographs and replicas, ''would hurt your hand'' if you tried to use it, Ms. Shearer says, because it has a square shaft. And it doesn't have the normal reinforcements to keep it from breaking. (She has hired people to make her a snow shovel like Duchamp's and use it until it breaks.)

There is more: the bird cage is too squat for a real bird, the iron hooks in the photograph of the coat rack appear to bend in an impossible position, the French window opens the wrong way, the bottle rack has an asymmetrical arrangement of hooks and the urinal is too curvaceous to have come from the Mott Iron Works, where Duchamp said he bought it.

Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes. During those same teenage years, he also ran a fantasy horse-racing circuit, complete with illustrated tout sheets and racing reports. He created imaginary owners, imaginary jockeys, imaginary track conditions.

Top submission titles at VQR, 2007-2009. Here's the 2006-2007 list. Via Kottke.