From this fascinating LRB
article by James Davidson:
There is a nice irony here, for Constantine’s critical conversion was
dependent, we are told, on old-fashioned battlefield oracles not
dissimilar to those in which the Iamids – who were still apparently
prophesying after perhaps a thousand years or more, but would not do
so for much longer – had proved so expert. First, according to a
contemporary panegyric of around 310 AD, a mystic vision was granted
to Constantine. The mantic god Apollo, Sun Unconquered, appeared to
him with the winged goddess Victory and three crosses XXX,
guaranteeing thirty years of rule. Then, much later, we hear of a
slightly different image, not the three crosses of thirty, but the X
of Xristianity, a rebus to end all rebuses, a final godly punchline,
the ultimate visual pun. When the X was tilted slightly to become the
cross of crucifixion, one of three on Golgotha, Tisamenus’ beloved
butterflying Victory was transmogrified into Constantine’s Christian
angel, not hovering uncertainly, but sent down from Lord God direct.
In the same way the gigantic Winged Victory on the roundabout at Hyde
Park Corner was reconfigured for the Edwardian period as an ‘Angel of
Peace’.
I carried my food-stained old copy of Infinite Jest to the voting fire
station this afternoon. In the hour or so I waited to cast my ballot
(mostly) against various stupendous Louisiana initiatives and (nearly)
for the Prohibition Ticket, I read the first fifty or so pages. The
insect crawling around the stereo equipment and the beach ball in Orin’s
condo pool were far more artless ficelles than I had remembered, and of
course it’s poignant to read the Kate Gompert section. My reading of the
book, which I don’t pretend to be novel, is that it is entirely Hal’s
imaginative re-telling of his own story, which doesn’t actually take
place in a world of O.N.A.N and subsidized time. There are involutions
here with the similarities between Hal and Wallace himself as well. I
think one of the early keys to this is the way in which “Quo Vadis,”
Gatley’s accomplice, is revealed in the early footnotes–there’s a
coyness about the empirical basis of the narrative there.
I am quite curious about why the English edition of One Human Minute
does not contain “Provocation,” whereas the German does (and is titled
Provokationen, no less).
I am reading the German translation, albeit slowly, not yet having
adequate Polish. The remarks about Heidegger and Mann are of interest.
Also “Der Nazi als Gangster ist schon eine allzu triviale Banalisierung
des Problems, als Diener des Teufels aber ist er eine pathetische
Banalitat.” John Galbraith would’ve disagreed.
Though I’m sure the answer is “no,” I’ve been thinking today about
whether or not it was possible that Lovecraft knew anything of Cantor’s
ideas about infinity. The infinitesimal islands of the rationals, for
example.
Characters like Schmidt in “Mr. Squishy,” the dead man in “Good Old
Neon,” and, in particular, the law student in the last BIwHM, are far
more verbally (and intellectually, in the middle case) adept than
realism would dictate. I know that the Yale Law School doesn’t just let
anyone in (and the only language missing from the frequent quotations at
Scott Horton’s Harper’s blog, as far as I can tell, is Hittite), but
what are the chances that this law student being interviewed would a)
know the word “catamenial” and b) use it in conversation?
I just deleted the last twenty-one comments. There seems to be no way to
reverse that. Sorry.
From “Mr. Squishy”:
“Awad, whose knowledge of small craft operation came entirely from a
manual he was now using as a paddle. . .” (60).
I hope to write some more extended reflections on some of Wallace’s
fiction in the near future. One thing I have in mind is an
interpretation of the above-quoted story. His humor might be
underappreciated.
These are three paratextual areas that I would like to explore in more
detail. Specifically, I’m interested in the current utility of and
history of past attempts to use translations as a way of illuminating
textual cruxes. Kevin Canty told a class I was in that the Danish
(possibly Dutch) translator of one of his books was the only person to
ever note that he switched the models of car that a character was
driving. Those types of errors have little phenomenological interest in
the study of fiction, I’d suppose, but the records of more substantial
translator/author correspondence would be interesting to read. (All of
this would require some measure of polyglottery, of course, though most
of the correspondence itself would have to be in the source language.)
Wallace believed, with good reason, that Michiko Kakutani could not
possibly have read Infinite Jest before writing her original
impercipient review, and her
appraisal
remedies little.
The only thing that showed a lack of discipline about Infinite Jest is
Wallace allowing it to be edited down as much as it was, almost
certainly out of commercial necessity. (The letters to DeLillo in the
Harry Ransom Center discuss this in passing.) I do not mean this as an
evaluative comment; it’s just that there are more descriptively accurate
ways to criticize the book than claiming it suffers from
self-indulgence. I wrote a brief
essay about how the
etymology of a single word in the book was deeply interwoven with its
broader concerns, and I believe that almost every page of the novel
contains the same level of relevant detail. The lack of discipline to
discover it lies with the reader.
The Departed is the worst Oscar Best Picture Winner I’ve ever seen, by
a considerable margin. (There are many, needless to say, that I haven’t,
but still.) I scanned the reviews in IMDB, and they were all, with the
possible exception of Hoberman, very wrong.
I accepted the PS3 challenge. It came with a game called Metal Gear
Solid 4. When I heard the Lady Octopus’s origin story (she was
victimized for living in a Scandinavian village where, “unlike the rest
of Europe,” villagers enjoyed eating octopus), I realized that much more
was lost in translation than I had suspected.
