the glossys

fairly successful day that started with donating books to goodwill, checking out local bike shops, and buying a stack of magazines at borders for 40% off. still waiting a few weeks for the discount to reach the pristine philosophy section. the two short stories collection were a steal at $3 each. i am a bit skeptical about egger's "the best american nonrequired reading 2008", having viewed the series as a product of cultural a.d.d. from the pick i am most excited by the magazines all of which i have never read due to their rather high prices and my dislike of cafe reading.

here are the ones i picked:

Lapham's Quarterly Volume IV, Number 3: Food

Paris Review 197: William Gibson & Samuel R. Delany Interviews 

Clash 60: The Film Issue
Lula 12: Girl of My Dreams
Monocle Issues 45 Volume 5: What does it take to make a city both liveable and lively?

currently, the only two publications i read regularly are foreign policy and the new yorker. i'm thinking of adding one or two quarterly publications. i'm decided against clash and lula and wavering on paris review since i already have the new yorker. interestingly, the last three added to three other publication (the gentlewoman, fantastic man, and boat studio ) make six rather superficially inviting zines from great britain; what's in their water? i am mostly likely to subscribe to boat, which relocates to and writes regarding a different city every issue. and a bit because it has the least embarrassing name.

Boat Studio [site link] [review]
Clash [site link]
Fantastic Man [site link] [review]
The Gentlewoman [site link] [review]
Lapham's Quarterly [site link]
Lula [site link]
Monocle [site link]
Paris Review [site link]



Lapham's Quarterly  Review

"Published four times a year, each issue of Lapham’s Quarterly adopts and explores a single theme...A typical issue features an introductory Preamble from Editor Lewis H. Lapham; approximately 100 “Voices in Time” — that is, appropriately themed selections drawn from the annals and archives of the past — and newly commissioned commentary and criticism from today’s preeminent scholars and writers. Myriad photographs, paintings, charts, graphs, and maps round out each issue’s 224 pages."

I have two primary complaints about the content. The preamble promised a good mix of history, culture, and politics relating to food. Based on the open article's somewhat serious concluding slant on neo-Malthusianism, the obesity crisis, and current food production I was expecting more attempt to trace the origins of our growing food crisis both at home and abroad which were only partially satiated at the end by an article on America's pastoral nostalgia (which is why agricultural reform is so vexing--see the insidious and delusional ad campaign in DC's tunnels). Yet this section only warranted a passing few pages in a ~250 page ad-less magazine. There is a pretension to create a more informed public, and not putting aside the fun of reading about ancients feast rituals and Bourdain's meal of an endangered species (=__=), but shouldn't people also learn a little bit about themselves? For example that the cows we eat are feed on an unnatural diet of corn which would kill them if not for the abundance of antibiotics pumped into them, which means that our meat is unhealthier than ever, fattier and full of medicine that passes onto us and not to our benefit. I think there is a clear necessity on the topic of food to be vocal about these long-term problems: the battle over GMOs, the crisis in farm subsidies, the issue of obesity vs. malnutrition and its class dimensions or even on a more literary basis how we are what we eat and now in worse ways than ever.

At the same time I understand these are weighty issues which have been most effectively addressed in books (though "An Omnivore's Dilemma" managed to be literary, political, and interesting) and academic papers. but Lapham neatly side-stepped hard work in order to focus rather exclusively on a disconnected literary past. The two hundred or so pages in between are filled with short passages culled from myriad sources spanning the breadth of human history, from literature to court records to manner books to autobiography...there is an interest in establishing a long dialogue across cultures, but most of the time it reads as a western tale with a smatter of eastern flavor to appear comprehensive. I like the choices, especially since i've read half of them in high school or college--"To Praise a Mockingbird", "Things Fall Apart", "Oliver Twist", "Walden", "The Jungle", "A Modest Proposal", "Lives of Artists"...--so I get bored. Lapham clearly writes for a Western moneyed audience (who else can afford the cover price?) but it fails to become more than a rehash of the narrow narrative we have already ingested as kids. Perhaps I should not judge from a single issue since it was a 2011 finalist for the National Magazine Award. It is doubtlessly better than most magazines. I also admit that the pictures are gorgeous (rubber cover!), the format is comfortable, and I enjoy its lack of ads. But I am bothered by its relatively few new material and its extreme collage nature. Throughout my life I have had to continuously work against an inability to focus and I suppose I dislike my reading materials mirroring my lack.


Monocle Review

"Monocle is a global briefing covering international affairs, business, culture and design."

I enjoyed this magazine much more than Lampham's. The later is maybe like changing channels every five minutes on a TV dealing only in literary foods while the former a long documentary that weaves several dimensions (business, culture, design) into a loose focus on a large topic complete with interesting asides. Though it might be more of a montage, Monacle somehow feels more comfortable a read than Lampham's failed simplicity: narrow theme != depth. Granted there is a lot more money -- see the middle section of monocle monogramed wares, the blackberry insert booklet, and the patek philippe back cover (complete yuppie chow)-- thus more work put into Monocle: great long and short interviews, original research, and easy-on-the-eyes formatting and glossy photography sections.

I especially love the photos, favorites being the series on Monacle's own base called the Midori House (above). I'm also amused by its Japanese slant: a good half of "50 things to improve your life" has to do with Japanese living: Kentaro recipes, salarymen cotton crepe trousers, Maruni furnitures, Hakusan crockery. The first bit is personally interesting; roommates and god knows that I need to figure out other food to eat besides dumplings, tofu, and dried ramen.

05/50: A Clutch of Kentaro Recipes You Know by Heart
"For those dismayed by the fact that Japanese food is fare easier to consume than it is to create. Kentaro Kobayashi is a godsend. The chef has penned a raft of Japanese cookery books, which make the taste of rustling up a buttered yellowtail rice bowl or miso pork noodles seem effortless. His home cooking books also dispel the lingering myth that Japanese cuisine consists only of raw fish, rice, and conveyer belts, with each focusing on a range of everyday food types. With many released under the umbrella title "Easy Japanese Cooking", favorites including Bento Love, Donburi Mania, Noodle Comfort and Veggie Heaven."

aid

i. i finished infinite jest.
ii. i watched dfw's  interview again.
iii. i am keeping tabs on the crisis unfolding in congress and in the horn of africa.

somehow i feel a heavy link between i/ii and iii. during early college i very much contemplating joining peace corp or americorp. i think it was for a selfish purpose or rather because i had lost a sense of purpose. i couldn't see my future because i had so many things i wanted to do yet a real job seemed so drab and routine. everything was so accessible that i lost grasp of a one real thing. this is hard to explain. i am not saying that i should have only one interest or passion, but that even with multiple interests i should be in pursuit of a common ideal. perhaps kundera alludes to this when he explained the two kinds of men who pursue a multitude of women: "some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all woman. others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world." i think the former tribe is happier.

but i lost grasp of that ideal, partially due to the freedom that living an silver-spoon american life has given me and partially due to lack of self-discipline. and so while i was fine and happy most of the time, there was also a layer of dissatisfaction that would momentarily surface whenever i was not doing anything exciting. so i do deeply identify with marathe's side of the debate in infinite jest and with dfw's cultural criticisms. i have felt the beginning of that slope which endless gratification gives us. it is not some big momentous event, but the small effects are palpable in unity. a recent performance by michael landy had him categorize and destroy every bit of his possession in a ford assembly line-like setting. i am reminded of how easy it is to obtain things, physically and mentally, yet how hard it is to unload them. and how constantly regretful i was and still am with all the things i want cluttering out what i need.

so i contemplated escape, to go to africa and find need and purpose again on the edge. unfortunately it didn't work out, though i am still searching for ways to reach the same effect. but looking at the current drought situation in africa and calls for changes in humanitarian aid, i am reminded of sophomore year again, which tells me some things about the nature of giving and why i am irked with people who show off their humanitarian effort or indiscriminately dump money on aid. one, because aid, in the form of money most often, is pretty much worthless these days without proper investigation what with all the rampant corruption among large non-profits. and two, because what gets pushed aside when considering volunteer work is that one often gains so much more in terms of becoming a fuller person than what one gives. it should be a humbling moment.

-------

a few select quotes from a tv interview with david foster wallace, 2003

dfw: "i know there's a paradox in the u.s. that the people who get powerful jobs tend to go to really good schools and often in school you study the liberal arts which is philosophy and classical stuff and languages which is all about the nobility of the spirit and broadening the mind and from this you go to a specialized school to learn how to sue people and how to write copy that will make people buy a certain suv...and yeah its....i dn't know what to think about it then i'm not sure really that its ever been all that different. because very few of us get to use pretty much what we were taught. i know that in America there is an entire class, now i'm talking about a very specific class of  upper and upper middle-class kids whose parents can afford to send them to very good schools where they get very good education, who often end up in jobs that are financially rewarding but do not have anything to do with what they were taught, persuasively taught, was important and worthwhile in school."

---

dfw: "when i was growing up one of the mythological periods is the great depression where the story goes that everyone pulled together...it seems to me now that the country's reaction to feeling frightened and insecure is to buy suvs that are large and massive and tank-like and make individual people feel safer but also gets 4 miles to the galleon in a country where the gasoline is probably one-fifth as expensive as it ought to be...there is a sanity in Europe about gasoline prices and fuel consumption that is not here yet...and yet we're voting for people who are deciding to go over and very possibly kill hundreds of thousands of civilians to kill a few enemies. none of which are important but the fact that no one here is talking about the connections between how we live and what we drive and the things that are happening...the speed with which it becomes those bad people those bad fanatics, what they hate is our freedom and our way of life...which is hard to swallow. who hates freedom? people hate people not freedom.
i...now don't know what's going to happen. i as an american am scared...this is totally personally but i am more scared of us and that is a bleak place to be. i don't think this is an evil country or that americans are evil but we've had it very easy materially for a long time and we've gotten very little help in understanding things that are important besides being comfortable and i'm not sure anyone knows how we'll react if it gets bad here..."

interviewer: "are there any forms of rebellion?"

dfw: "sure. well there are people doing it all over the place. i don't know about people repelling down buildings and getting tear-gased and stuff. the people i know that are rebelling meaningfully don't buy a lot of stuff and don't get their view of the world from television and are willing to spend 4 or 5 hours researching an election than rather going by commercials. the thing about it is that in america we think of rebelling as this very sexy thing that involves action and force and looking good. my guess is that the forms of rebellion that will end up changing things here will be very quiet and individual and probably not all that interesting to look out from the outside...thinking in a chair and thinking about what this means and why the fact what i drive might have something to do with how in other parts of the world feel about me is not interesting."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When you tell grownups that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.

If you were to say to the grown-ups: "I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof," they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: "I saw a house that cost $20,000." Then they would exclaim: "Oh, what a pretty house that is!"

That's the way they are. One must not hold it against them. Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people.

a favorite passage from infinite jest

aka some self-advice for law school

"TENNIS AND THE FERAL PRODIGY"

NARRATED BY HAL INCANDENZA, AN 11.5-MINUTE DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT CARTRIDGE DIRECTED, RECORDED, EDITED, AND -- ACCORDING TO THE ENTRY FORM -- WRITTEN BY MARIO INCANDENZA, IN RECEIPT OF NEW-NEW-ENGLAND REGIONAL HONORABLE MENTION IN INTERLACE TELENTERTAINMENT'S ANNUAL "NEW EYES, NEW VOICES" YOUNG FILMMAKERS' CONTEST, APRIL IN THE YEAR OF THE YUSHITYU 2007 MIMETIC-RESOLUTION-CARTRIDGE-VIEW-MOTHERBOARD-EASY-TO- INSTALL UPGRADE FOR INFERNATRON / INTERLACE TP SYSTEMS FOR HOME, OFFICE OR MOBILE (SIC), ALMOST EXACTLY THREE YEARS AFTER DR. JAMES O. INCANDENZA PASSED FROM THIS LIFE


Here is how to put on a big red tent of a shirt that has E.T.A. across the chest in gray.

Please ease carefully into your supporter and adjust the elastic straps so the straps do not bite into your butt and make bulged ridges in your butt that everyone can see once you've sweated through your shorts.

Here is how to wrap your torn ankle so tightly in its flesh-tone Ace bandages your left leg feels like a log.

Here is how to win, later.

This is a yellow iron-mesh Ball-Hopper full of dirty green dead old balls. Take them to the East Courts while the dawn is still chalky and no one's around except the mourning doves that infest the pines at sunrise, and the air is so sopped you can see your summer breath. Hit serves to no one. Make a mess of balls along the base of the opposite fence as the sun hauls itself up over the Harbor and a thin sweat breaks and the serves start to boom. Stop thinking and let it flow and go boom, boom. The shiver of the ball against the opposite fence. Hit about a thousand serves to no one while Himself sits and advises with his flask. Older men's legs are white and hairless from decades in pants. Here is the set of keys a stride's length before you in the court as you serve dead balls to no one. After each serve you must almost fall forward into the court and in one smoothmotion bend and scoop up the keys with your left hand. This is how to train yourself to follow through into the court after the serve. You still, years after the man's death, cannot keep your keys anywhere but on the floor.

This is how to hold the stick.

Learn to call the racquet a stick. Everyone does, here. It's a tradition : The Stick. Something so much an extension of you deserves a sobriquet.

Please look. You'll be shown exactly once how to hold it. This is how to hold it. Just like this. Forget all the near-Eastern-slice-backhand-grip bafflegab. Just say Hello is all. Just shake hands with the calfskin grip of the stick. This is how to hold it. The stick is your friend. You will become very close.

Grasp your friend firmly at all times. A firm grasp is essential for both control and power. Here is how to carry a tennis ball around in your stick-hand, squeezing it over and over for long stretches of time -- in class, on the phone, in lab, in front of the TP, a wet ball for the shower, ideally squeezing it at all times except during meals. See the Academy dining hall, where tennis balls sit beside every plate. Squeeze the tennis ball rhythmically month after year until you feel it no more than your heart squeezing blood and your right forearm is three times the size of your left and your arm looks from across a court like a gorilla's arm or a stevedore's arm pasted on the body of a child.

Here is how to do extra individual drills before the Academy's A.M. drills, before breakfast, so that after the thousandth ball hit just out of reach by Himself, with his mammoth wingspan and ghastly calves, urging you with nothing but smiles on to great and greater demonstrations of effort, so that after you've gotten your third and final wind and must vomit, there is little inside to vomit and the spasms pass quickly and an east breeze blows cooler past you and you feel clean and can breathe.

Here is how to don red and gray E.T.A. sweats and squad-jog a weekly 40 km. up and down urban Commonwealth Avenue even though you would rather set your hair on fire than jog in a pack. Jogging is painful and pointless, but you are not in charge. Your brother gets to ride shotgun while a senile German blows BBs at your legs both of them laughing and screaming Schnell. Enfield is due east of the Marathon's Hills of Heartbreak, which are just up Commonwealth past the Reservoir in Newton. Urban jogging in a sweaty pack is tedious. Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is a sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation : it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.

Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn't seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.

Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practising and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent's unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.

Here is how to handle being a feral prodigy. Here is how to handle being seeded at tournaments, signifying that seeding committees composed of old big-armed men publicly expect you to reach a certain round. Reaching at least the round you're supposed to is known at tournaments as "justifying your seed". By repeating this term over and over, perhaps in the same rhythm at which you squeeze a ball, you can reduce it to an empty series of phonemes, just formants and fricatives, trochaically stressed, signifying zip.

Here is how to beat unseeded, wide-eyed opponents from Iowa or Rhode Island in the early rounds of tournaments without expending much energy but also without seeming contemptuous.

This is how to play with personal integrity in a tournament's early rounds, when there is no umpire. Any ball that lands on your side and is too close to call : call it fair. Here is how to be invulnerable to gamesmanship. To keep your attention's aperture tight. Here is how to teach yourself, when an opponent maybe cheats on the line-calls, to remind yourself that what goes around comes around. That a poor sport's punishment is always self-inflicted.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

Here is how to spray yourself down exactly once with Lemon Pledge, the ultimate sunscreen, then discover that when you go out and sweat into it it smells like close-order skunk.

Here is how to take nonnarcotic muscle relaxants for the back spasms that come from thousands of serves to no one.

Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute.

This is the whirlpool, a friend.

Here is how to set up the electric ball machine at dawn on the days Himself is away living up to what will be his final talent.

Here is how to tie a bow tie. Here is how to sit through small openings of your father's first art films, surrounded by surly foreign cigarette smoke and conversations so pretentious you literally cannot believe them, you're sure you have misheard them. Pretend you're engaged by the jagged angles and multiple exposures without pretending you have the slightest idea what's going on. Assume your brother's expression.

Here is how to sweat.

Here is how to hand a trophy to Lateral Alice Moore to put in the E.T.A. lobby's glass case under its system of spotlights and small signs.

What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.

Here is how to pack carbohydrates into your tissues for a four-singles two-doubles match day in a Florida June. Please learn to sleep with perpetual sunburn.

Expect some rough dreams. They come with the territory. Try to accept them. Let them teach you.

Keep a flashlight by your bed. It helps with the dreams.

Please make no extramural friends. Discourage advances from outside the circuit. Turn down dates.

If you do exactly the rehabilitative exercises They assign you, no matter how silly and tedious, the ankle will mend more quickly.

This type of stretch helps prevent the groin-pull.

Treat your knees and elbow with all reasonable care : you will have them with you for a long time.

Here is how to turn down an extramural date so you won't be asked again. Say something like "I'm terribly sorry I can't come out to see '8 1/2' revived on a wall-size Cambridge Celluloid Festival viewer on Friday, Kimberly, or Daphne, but you see if I jump rope for two hours then jog backwards through Newton till I puke They'll let me watch match-cartridges and then my mother will read aloud to me from the 'O.E.D.' until 2200 lights-out," and c. ; so you can be sure that henceforth Daphne / Kimberly / Jennifer will take her adolescent-mating-dance-type-ritual- socialization business somewhere else. Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. Be constantly focused and on alert : feral talent is its own set of expectations and can abandon you at any one of the detours of so-called normal American life at any time, so be on guard.

Here is how to schnell.

Here is how to go through your normal adolescent growth spurt and have every limb in your body ache like a migraine because selected groups of muscles have been worked until thick and intensile and they resist as the sudden growth of bone tries to stretch them, and they ache all the time. There is medication for this condition.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock : be no one.

It is easier than you think.

Here is how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars' reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how : never tell anyone where you are.

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear : sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

This can be tricky.

Here is how to get free sticks and strings and clothes and gear from Dunlop, Inc. as long as you let them spraypaint the distinctive Dunlop logo on your sticks' strings and sew logos on your shoulder and the left pocket of your shorts and use a Dunlop gear-bag, and you become a walking lunging sweating advertisement for Dunlop, Inc. ; this is all as long as you keep justifying your seed and preserving your rank ; the Dunlop, Inc. New New England Regional Athletic Rep will address you as "Our gray swan" ; he wears designer slacks and choking cologne and about twice a year wants to help you dress and has to be slapped like a gnat.

Be a Student of the Game. Like most clichés of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle or blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the circuit. E.T.A. peers waiting for deLint to knock quietly at their door and ask to chat. Opponents. It's all educational. How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary.

See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.

This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always.

On this issue there is no counsel : you must make your best guess. For myself, I do not expect ever really to know.

But in the interval, if it is an interval : here is Motrin for your joints, Noxzema for your burn, Lemon Pledge if you prefer nausea to burn, Contracol for your back, benzoin for your hands, Epsom salts and anti-inflammatories for your ankle, and extracurriculars for your folks, who just wanted to make sure you didn't miss anything they got.