In this revealing and sad New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace and his unfinished novel, D. T. Max writes the following:
Doug Hesse, a colleague, made the mistake of praising an essay of Wallace’s. “He did this gesture of wiping the butt with one hand and pointing to his mouth with the other,” Hesse remembers. “I learned really really quickly not to go beyond the equivalent of ‘How’s the weather?’ ”
A good rule of thumb when photographing ultimate is always to keep the disc in the frame, because otherwise it’s just a bunch of clowns running around on a field:
I’m having trouble coming up with a better example than The Fugs’ “CIA Man” for Burn after Reading.
No chance that a Post-Church Commission CIA hires the protagonist.
Little chance that the SAC who gives Nina a ride drives a Lexus.
All internet sleuthing—very shaky.
The mix-tape that Bobby comes up with.
Confusion about the effects of heavy metal exposure.
The various overt references to Thomas Harris and The X-Files only highlight the deficiencies in this story-world’s internal coherence, while apparently intending to do the opposite.
Bobby as a character—his motivation in diegetic terms versus his obvious narrative function (information dumping).
I ordered this after seeing an intriguing summary in a recent TLS. The opening scene involves a McDonald’s shoot-’em-up, where there are two shooters. The older of the two shoots the younger and flees. If I understood the exposition correctly, no one ever realized, police and all, that there were two shooters.
If television has taught me anything, it’s that forensic analysis, even in 1991, would reveal a) that the younger shooter’s death was not self-inflicted and b) that there were two guns used in the massacre. Now the TLS article mentioned something about “plutocrat hunter-gatherers” who are part of some type of serial murdering cult, and that sounds too sociologically interesting to abandon at this point; but I’m reading under protest.
(After “Le Directeur”)
Damn unlucky Thames
Drains the Spectator.
Even the bow-tied
editor
Of the Spectator
Leaks phlegm.
The reactionary
actuaries
Of the hibernator Spectator
Strut hand-in-hand,
A footpad’s band.
Under land
Darling Lil—
No lace
frill—
Hears the snot-nose
Of the hibernator Spectator’s
Head investigator
And puts on clothes.
I’ve yet to read a convincing explanation of the speaker in this poem, given Eliot’s political sensibilies, though I’m, as always, open to suggestions.
I taught Beowulf today, and I think it’s worth noting that the Geatish martial spirit was, contrary to all visible evidence, apparently being preserved in Sweden in the late 60s. This CIA memo mentions that Sweden, along with India, was one of the countries that might conceivably develop nuclear weapons in the next few years.
I found the memo on this National Security Archive exhibit on the Nuclear Emergency Search Team. Someone from Wilmington tried some low-enriched uranium extortion in the 70s, for example. (I worked in the Southport nuclear plant for a few months and was always imagining, in my administrative building, that something like that was going on at any given moment.)
Or, at least, on the specific copy of it I got from Verso as a gift for subscribing (finally) to NLR. The copy they sent me has about a twenty page interpolation of some type of organizational theory text, different typography and everything, almost in the middle. I don’t know if I received the book because they knew it was defective, or if the entire print run is like this; but I have to admit that I’ve thought about what it would be like to assign this edition in a class and then pretend as if the organizational theory text is in fact a Borgesian creation of Lefebvre’s. I could imagine spending hours puzzling out the implications of this bold move in seminar.
In a review of Stacey Abbott’s Celluloid Vampires (U of Texas P, 2007), Kapka Kassabova writes:
This promising motto (“A little less ritual and a little more fun”) comes to courtesy of Spike, the peroxide-blond punk rock vampire in the 1990s American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Spike symbolizes the New-Age vampire in modern cinema: young, American, anti-establishment, ironic, and allergic to boredom.
American, eh?
The first quotation in the OED for the word “hooey” is “*My prof’s full of hooey. He doesn’t know a C theme from an A one. *”