Coasters, Hints of Lime, Infinite Jest and related strife, an album endorsement in passing

I just did one smart thing and one dangerous thing. The former was to craft a coaster out of remaindered pennies—I have had no coaster for the vodka crans with which I’ve been unwinding, evenings. Jury’s out on whether or not the condensation which is the coaster’s reason for being will sidle down between the money. The dangerous thing was to sit down for some journaling and blogging with an opened bag of Tostitos-brand torilla chips, with a Hint of Lime. These chips rate highly on my snack list. It’s a party in my mouth, and everyone’s etc. Only Pizza Goldfish best them, and I can’t find Pizza Goldfish anywhere anymore, save in that Flavor Blasted variety which is not the same thing at all. But I will keep one eye apiece on both the condensation and the chip-consumption, not that you care, but this is more a two-item Things to Remember list for myself, it seems, anyway.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest looms ever larger in my consciousness, it occupies a greater and greater chunk of brainpower. Which isn’t to say that it’s difficult to read. It is, simply, a delight. This alone sets it far apart from Gravity’s Rainbow, which I read in fits and starts for something close to nine months, it was that much of a trudge. And comparisons of IJ to GR are not unfounded. They have similar, blurbworthy scopes; they are Tolstoyan in their ranging, here-now-there breadth, which breadth (in Tolstoy’s case anyway) I always likened to the Finger of God coming down at whim to prod and investigate the moral scruples and evolving struggles of His choicest mortal women and men. DFW’s chief difference from Pynchon, however, is his readibility. This statement will make some casual readers I can think of (Khai) gasp. For DFW does not fit the typical definition of “readable.” Sentences ramble on down the page like overflooded streams, and yet remain grammatically intact, somehow. Footnotes abound. Euphemisms abound, and often are referred back to with out re-catching up the reader (i.e. use of “map” for face and “Unit” for male genitalia, which usage of DFW’s itself, realize, mimics the street argot of certain precincts of Boston’s drug-user population and tennis academy adepts).

Fuck are these chips good.

Reading and processing this book while trying—no, while actually writing, not trying, for one must remember Yoda re: the fact that "there is no try[ing]"—to write Good Ground (title subject to change) is a daunting thing. As I read I’m often trying to anticipate where Wallace is next headed, or in other words asking myself the question Where would I go with this, if I had to stop reading here, if nothing beyond this period existed, and had to take the narrative somewhere logical but unexpected and some manner of thrilling? The fact that I never envision what DFW has hasn’t been the source of my reading-IJ-related trepidation, not quite. For who could so envision? The whole experience of reading IJ, rather, makes my inner doubter smack his forehead and say How fucking creative that is! Skill aside, you must give W., and Pynchon and Gaddis and the other maligns purveyors of postmodern tomes, due credit, if not for their skill as actual writers then at least for their roles / achievements as plotters, architects, and inventors of absurdities and prescients, sci-fi-quality extrapolations of the culture’s vector.

Some of the best chips are those that are just this side of too-big-for-your-mouth, chips for which you have to hyperextend the muscles of the jaw, chips that have curled over on themselves prior to the bake period of their factory births and so have impressive height in addition to width and height. These chips once entered into the mouth and bitten down upon splinter into a panoply of tasty fragments that deliver to different parts of the mouth simultaneously sensations of salt and Hint of Lime that in their aggregate and like I said simultaneous nature just floor me.

For the record: My Morning Jacket’s new album Z is worthy of purchase. No matter your tastes or habits. It’ll do you good.

So yeah. Work on the novel proceeds at the pace of about 1K words / day. I haven’t been getting into the character or place of the primary setting yet though, which is Eastern Long Island, and I fear that getting caught up in backstory will provide the foregrounding for the actual present happenings that who knows when I’ll get to? I think I’ll need to very deliberately sit down very soon and begin to set in motion the actual what’s-happening-now plot, without which the novel is not. Meantime, Food Bed Gospel goes through its fourthish draft, in anticipation of its first official contest, which I’ve decided’ll be a contest with an 11/30 deadline. Soon my baby leaves the nest. There comes a point at which you have to say I raised you best as I know how, now get out there and (suddenly I’m Robin Williams’s John Keating) make your life extraordinary.