depth first search

There’s been some coverage in the New York Times of the recent e-book pricing dispute between Amazon and Macmillan focusing on the potential for consumer backlash over e-book prices. The coverage includes the following quote:

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

I certainly suspect that in today’s retail culture, basic economic reasoning often gives way to a kind of applied psychology. The prevalence of $x.99 prices, the strategic use of “discounts,” and the variety of tricks and techniques that raise retail bottom lines are certainly proof that this kind of tactical salesmanship does something (which studies seem to support). 

But really people, boycotting based on price isn’t exactly a new or serious problem, which is probably best seen if we consider the more common name for this practice — shopping.

I think creative people ought to avoid getting bent out of shape the second the sturm und drang of capitalism interferes with their cash flow. In many ways, the attacks on Amazon are getting so much purchase because many authors have sandboxes and and are not afraid of using them.

But here is another view. Amazon is facing serious competition in almost every business unit. Macmillan, on the other hand, is a constitutionally mandated and congressionally protected monopolist in the sense that they have the exclusive right to sell certain content.

Yet Jane Smith, Amazon engineer is not taking to the internet to whine about how her livelihood is imperiled because Macmillan is charging too much for e-books in an environment where fewer people are reading paid content, even though her personal security is possibly in greater jeopardy (iPad anyone?). Instead all we hear is John Smith, mid-list Macmillan author, describing how evil and anti-competitive Amazon is.

Look, the authors will be fine (at least modulo any future societal decline in reading), and if they turn out not to be, it won’t be because of Amazon.

Update: Consider.

Women complain that instead of calling to ask them out, or even make plans for a date, men simply text, “Heading downtown. Where r u?” as they walk to the subway. That may be deliberate. “There is no longer any reason to answer the phone when a woman calls you or return her call when she leaves you a message,” insists one dating pro at World of Seduction. “What should you do? Text message, of course.” Text messages, he argues, deflect unnecessary personal involvement and keep women on edge.

I can’t say I understand anything going on in the linked-to article from today’s QOTD. I suspect that it is not much better than gibberish.

Today’s quote, however, reminded me of a particularly hilarious (and prescient) section in Infinite Jest on video phones. Either you know what I’m talking about or you don’t.

But the more you read his other works, the more it becomes obvious that Wallace couldn’t even sign a credit card slip without bolting on an addendum. The dude loved endnotes–I’m pretty sure that’s the only real reason they are there.

A Bonus Second QOTD:

I guess what I would ask is what happens when you run across a word whose precise definition you don’t know (in any book). Do you just skip over it or figure that the context will iron it out? I know I often skip and figure. Good readers (and I’m not claiming to be one — see the comment just prior) will stop and look up the word. When you see an unfamiliar word (e.g. “Coatlicue”) that has an end note saying “No clue” (e.g. note 216), you are being told pretty clearly to go look the word up.

My VERY SPOILERY thoughts after finishing Infinite Jest below the fold.

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I’ve been really enjoying reading Infinite Jest over the summer, as one small participant in a somewhat larger coalition. I must admit that one of the side effects of reading this book is a renewed interest in vocabulary. Another is that, after lugging around this brick of a novel, I have a keen interest in buying a Kindle, though at this point, I’m sort of enjoying the new definition in my biceps.

One question I’ve been mulling over while reading is why exactly I like this book. Let me be clear — there are a lot of obvious things not to like about this book. The heft is one. The disjointed structure another. The sometimes excessive amount of wordplay. The occasionally meaningless end notes (and the corresponding work required to flip back and forth between the pages of this massive tome).

Aside: To illustrate the structural and mechanical problems of flipping to end notes and back, here is a photograph of my much abused bookmarks.

What I like about the book is not really quite as solid or easily identifiable as the flaws. For awhile I suspected that my enjoyment came from the novel triggering some kind of status reflex along the lines of “Look at this big impressive novel I’m reading. I must be so smart.” Really, for me, it comes down to the little narrative gems, like DFW’s description of two student athletes eating dinner.

Petropolis Kahn and Eliot Kownspan eat with such horrible P.O.W.ish gusto that nobody else will sit with them — they’re by themselves at a small table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid a kind of fine mist or spray.

Or this short hysterical scene where younger students uncover an unplugged, leftover fridge deep under E.T.A.

‘Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?’
‘Happy to back way, way off,’ says Carl Whale, his light receding.
‘Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.’
…
‘Such a smell I’m smelling!’
‘There’s mayonnaise!He left mayonnaise in there.’
‘Why the bulge in the top of the lid?’
‘The ballooning carton of orange juice!’
‘Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.’
‘So why’s that sandwich-meat moving?’
‘Maggots?’
‘Maggots!’
‘Shut it! Sleeps! Kick it shut!’
‘This right here is exactly as close as I’m ever getting to that fridge ever again, Chu.’
…
‘This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.’

But even in between these little gems, in the meat and heft, the narrative always seems just easy enough to read that you don’t even realize how much of the novel’s world you are absorbing, as if it sort of slips in through osmosis and entrenches itself in your metabolic pathways as you lug the physical weight of the book around.

And the plot and characters are there, spanning the whole spectrum from agents of geopolitical intrigue to individual substance abusers. The in-between world is both fantastic and fantastical,  and somehow, even when I feel lost, I never am.

And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the broken glass, sweep, sweep, the bristles were the thing’s essence. No?

–p. 150

I only took one class in English Literature as a college student. The course was called “Fairy Tales and Magic Fictions” and we studied a number of not-very-canonical pieces, including the first Harry Potter novel, and Alice in Wonderland. For my only A paper for the course, I hypothesized that wonderland, instead of being fantastical, was actually a perfectly rational alternative world, one based on different axioms of logic than our own. I borrowed generously, and not at all rigorously (very much in the style of an undergraduate), from Lewis Carroll’s biographical history as a logician, and controversial suggestions of pedophilia. The thesis was that wonderland imitated Lewis Carroll’s own desire for a self-consistent world different from our own, one that was accepting of his own sexual deviance.

In The Broom of the System, the motivation behind the alternate universe of David Foster Wallace isn’t some sort of entrenched deviance, but rather an exposed kind of normality. To DFW, the normal world is broken, and if only we could be made to see it that way, we could begin to do something about it. We are the broom that breaks windows, not the broom the sweeps broken glass.

[Aside, consider this quote:

Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?

]

The meta-fictional elements, the novel within the novel, the roughly Wittgensteinian tricks, were sufficient to confuse and alienate me early in the novel. Lenore’s brother, who exchanged exam answers for drugs at Amherst (which he hid in his artificial leg), was the only character not rendered unrecognizable by the edits to the reality of the novel’s world.

By the end of the book, as more and more elements of brokeness are exposed, the heroine, Lenore Beadsman, sits unresponsive in the lobby of an office building as all the major and minor characters, for a variety of farcical reasons, decend upon and surround her. Then, an enigmatic change of scene follows that both denies and enrages. The book turns into a mystery with no mystery, a farce with nothing to satirize, a tradegy where all the deaths are left to the page after the final printed word. We’re left with a broom handle and a bunch of broken glass.

I just read that Hollywood is making a movie based on the novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is my second favorite novel of all time, second only to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I haven’t read either again, for fear of stomping over the memory of reading them the first time. Where Marquez delves into the fantastical to show us something real about ourselves, Ishiguro shows us something fantastic by dwelling on the real.

My wife and I dressed up as undecided Ohio voters for a party on Friday. Vote Obama, wait no, vote McCain, wait, ugh, I can’t decide.

I wasn’t involved, but others at the party played what I thought was a clever prank. They stole borrowed a neighbor’s pumpkin, carved it into a Jack-o-Lantern, then put it back. I can just imagine the head scratching that must have happened at the neighbors the next morning.

We went to see a great Q&A with David Price and Philip Gourevitch at the Continental Club on South Congress last night. As writer Q&As go, this was surprisingly genuine, probably due mainly to the light touch of Gourevitch, who is experienced in these things.

I’ve never really been down to SoCo before, and found it a pleasantly developed part of town, with kitschy faux seventies store fronts, breezy bars, and a hipster crowd. So that’s where the hipsters go when the coffee shops close? Not easy parking in the area though. (A cop giving out tickets prompted us to return to our car to check that we were legally parked, a ten minute excursion that resulted in a not so subtle amount of grumpiness on my behalf. Ana has infinite patience.)

Texas lost. At least that’s what I conclude form the funeral like silence last night. At least I was able to sleep well.

Thanks to the good samaritan who returned the book I left on the bus this morning to the library where it belongs.

As I was checking online to see if the book had been returned I realized that libraries already are an internet of things. The past is the future is the present.