I knew him, Horatio.

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead - Los Angeles Times

Infinite Jest, to me, in 1997 or so when I read it, was a life-changing thing. It's this huge monstrocity of a book and I don't remember where I got it. I saw DFW on The Charlie Rose show (skip to the 23 minute mark) and he was just so undeniably himself and trying not to be false (particularly in his discussion on the effect that David Lynch's Blue Velvet had on him) that I went out and bought IJ and immediately started reading it and fell into it.

It was one of the things that helped keep me together during a couple of tough times. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again had me in stitches and his mathematical writing (A History of Infinity) is too smart for me, really, but totally fascinating.

It would be a mockery to say that I'll miss him -- I'm sure I've never been within 500 miles of him, don't even know anyone that knew him -- but his writing changed my writing, my perception of what writing could be and how you could put yourself in it. So the world is sadder and dumber without him in it.

Here's a PDF of his fairly short piece Consider The Lobster.
Here's his commencement speech at Kenyon.
Here's his review of a dictionary (yes, really).
His piece "The Depressed Person", in Harper's.
Here's the best fansite I've found: The Howling Fantods.

a heathen

Cory Doctorow's got a story over at Tor.com which is pretty cool. It includes a sly little reference to The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll (the 0.75$ error leading to a spy-ring thing). That book was the first thing I ever read about hacking, in probably '89 or '90; the first time I heard of telnet or unix. It's dated as hell now -- fuck, it was dated as hell in '90, I bet, but it's got humourous little flourishes that make it entertaining even now:

(from http://vx.netlux.org/lib/mcs00.html)

Dave knew my ignorance of obscure Unix commands. I put up the best front I could: "Well, the e flag means list both the process name and environment, and the a flag lists everyone's process—not just your process. So the hacker wanted to see everything that was running on the system."

"OK, you got half of 'em. So what are the g and f flags for?"

"I dunno." Dave let me flounder until I admitted ignorance.

"You ask for a g listing when you want both interesting and uninteresting processes. All the unimportant jobs, like accounting, will show up. As will any hidden processes."

"And we know he's diddling with the accounting program."

Dave smiled. "So that leaves us with the f flag. And it's not in any Berkeley Unix. It's the AT&T Unix way to list each process's files. Berkeley Unix does this automatically, and doesn't need the f flag. Our friend doesn't know Berkeley Unix. He's from the school of old-fashioned Unix."

The Unix operating system was invented in the early 1970s at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. In the late '70s, Unix zealots from Bell Labs visited the Berkeley campus, and a new, richer version of Unix was developed. Along with hot tubs, leftist politics, and the free speech movement, Berkeley is known for its Unix implementation.

A schism developed between advocates of the small, compact AT&T Unix and the more elaborate Berkeley implementation. Despite conferences, standards, and promises, no consensus has appeared, and the world is left with two competing Unix operating systems.

Of course, our lab used Berkeley Unix, as do all right-thinking folks. East Coast people were said to be biased towards AT&T Unix, but then, they hadn't discovered hot tubs either.

From a single letter, Dave ruled out the entire computing population of the West Coast. Conceivably, a Berkeley hacker might use an old-fashioned command, but Dave discounted this. "We're watching someone who's never used Berkeley Unix." He sucked in his breath and whispered, "A heathen."

a plague for your dowry

xkcd's strip today brings up house of leaves by mark z danielewski. which is a genius book. nightmare-causing, take your breath away reading, for real. some of the writing is not as poetic as say harlan ellison's "speculative fiction" but it's certainly more claustrophobically horrifying. i finished this book at the bar, the day before my last conversation with the woman i thought was the love of my life. still is? i don't know. i stopped thinking about it. she's still the love of my life, but now in the past tense I guess. It's just one of those things where you associate something with what was happening -- e.g. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works II" 2nd disc is to me an incredibly erotic piece of music, just because of associations -- and House of Leaves is just a picture of a raw gaping wound. It doesn't hurt, but it reminds me that there was a tender part exposed and hurting.

So but what do you do? How do you just drop it? No one I know who's gone through hellfire and brimstone can adequately explain. And it's such a personal, subjective thing. If there's a universal that I have found in this, it's that people tend to pull back, reserve more of themselves and give less away. And that's so horrible, so very sad. But I see it time and again in my friends, and I see it in myself. The nerve numbed, you learn that you don't know what's normal anymore, so you learn to not trust yourself to keep from getting hurt. 

Sterling and I ate sushi, a while ago, and we talked about it, again. Except this time she was sober because of the pregnancy, so this time she remembered it I think. And it boils down to: I know it's not all my fault. But I feel like it is. I blame myself, even though I know it's not like that. The bitch of it is, I am sure she blames me too. Which is galling, especially considering the condescending attitude she gave me when last we spoke. Really, that's how I keep my anger going.

So yeah, this started as "look! comic link to awesome book!" and is now about me me me me. Well it's my blog so fuck you if you don't like it. Get yr own.

Enjoy this amazing and very entertaining speech by Malcom Gladwell on the lessons of happiness, self-knowlege and hidden desires inherent we can learn from spaghetti sauce:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

Here's some awesome music:

Grotus - Brown

Pogo/Faggotron - Alice

the past didn't go anywhere

Fellow workers, Utah Phillips died.

2 weeks ago last thurs

i finally stopped hating my personal little slice of hurt in the world, thursday 2 weeks ago at 2am.

The perenial favorite

Tropical storm, nee Hurricane Fay (by the time it hits land should be a 'cane. maybe. possibly.) is dropping a lot of rain down. The mrs is remarkably calm, as is the dog -- no thunder and lightning and ergo they're coo'. The cable's out (fuck you directv, fuck you right in the ass) but power's on, so it's strictly a DSL/DVD/videogame/ipod night of entertainment. Waiting for it to stop raining for like 5 minutes so the fucking dog can fucking pee, poor little dude.

There's a few things I still wanted to get, but nothing I direly *needed* so I guess everything's OK. A big box o' tapes in the garage got soaked but I pulled all the priceless and irreplaceable stuff (e.g. jammin' with bert and cap'n, deadline poet, a band apart) out when I put the box there. Need to xfer that soonish.

everything happens to me

Sterling had Michaelangelo today at 11ish am.

Picked up "Monk Alone": 2.5 hours of Thelonious Monk on the piano alone. It's a little bit like going mad in heaven. He does some standards and things you wouldn't expect ("everything happens to me", "just a gigolo") in his inimitable style. I really try to play guitar like he plays piano but god it's like planning to fall down the stairs: you can't do it naturally without fucking up. The odd accents, the pauses and embellishments.

"Between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea" and the four (!) versions of "everything happens to me" are just too. fucking. hardcore.

more proof i am a bad person

so eden calls me up. "your favorite person is back in miami." "would you be friends again...it was a long time ago, he's a different person, blahblhablhablhablah"

i don't care anymore. i mean, it would be cool if i could trust people again. it would be nice to be able to make friends without pulling fucking teeth. but nothing's going to undo that, so why bother? to pretend he wasn't a bad person? to act like I'm and he's OK and everything's cool? I might as well call the bee up and say lets play pool or whatever. which again, pa' que? i dunno. Eden's acting like he throws me into a rage, but it's really kind of worse because i feel nothing. He didn't care then, so why fake it now? I dont' get it. Indifference, which man...fuck I tried with that guy man. Afterwards, I mean. I tried the hardest and he just fucking threw it in my fucking face. So karma can take of that, I guess.

also, sun's mad at me now and i don't know why. but i guess i'm enough of an asshole that asking for a specific reason is kind of silly. putting me off for weeks with 'don't want to talk' which i know what it's like but then hangs with tai or mei? girl things, i don't know. and I don't even know if it's me or not. asking just makes it worse without explaining anything.

oh and laurachicken gets brain surgery soonish.

and i find out the sex this weekkkkkkkkkkkkk

finally three days later my leg stopped hurting although last night more stabbing pains. i think about vic, you know. i mean, he was fine that week. put in a full day and we said later and i left him working on some windows shit with W and poof he's gone. i gotta set things up for in case i shuffle off this mortal coil. I think of Dee and her bloodclot in her leg.

the funny part is that there was a storm

so i tell my friend Little Trouble Girl that my right nut's been itching all day off and on.

she says "maybe a storm's comin' "

The thing you sell yourself

My friends, my family, I me mine. they are all stuck in love. :/

it's late. i will go to sleep soon, but i am lucky. and i have reason for sadness and guilt and laughter and happiness. I can't really explain it without giving too much away. And there's some of the sadness.

Wrote some songs, writing some fiction, making some plans and now Summer coming to a close, sun's gone, mills' too in a different way, mei-mei and tai-tai too although we're in town (but you can't force someone to be friends, so...). I am perhaps just unlikeable.

January comes too slow and too soon both at once.

My father's dream, 20jul08

My father called me up last week, to tell me about a dream he'd had. My father and I have never spoken of dreams. There were french doors and they opened and Abuelo was there, with his big grin -- we've all got it really it's the mark of my family name really -- and holding a little boy's hand, he turned to my father and says "mira que se parece a ti cabezon". My father was too shocked to say anything. Yesterday was all hectic and doctors and driving but in the end, everything was OK, and we got to hear the heartbeat again. tuntun-tuntun-tunun

Life is beautiful.

In my next life I will be a stingray

you promised me poems.

Another year, and it gets further away and it hurts less, I guess. Eventually I will be able to stop feeling it at all. And if there were even the slightest bit of genuine sorry, we could be friends. Such a bitter pill. Last night at the big B, rockin' it with Tai-tai:

me: So I'm sad.
tai-tai: Why?
me: because it's the 4th of July.
tai-tai: So?
me: It's my anniversary for when my drama-llama bullshit happened.
tai-tai: oh.
me: I mean, I bet you don't even remember when the thing with your sister happened.
tai-tai: no, I don't know the day or even the month. I remember where i was and what I was doing.
me: but that's my point. I can't forget, and even if I did, there's fucking fireworks to remind me.
tai-tai: like a party! YAY!

this one's called "god knows, *****"

what do you want
misbegotten whore
your every word like something fetid
another abortion
scraped from the drooling maw of your cunt-mouth
you never tire
of hurting the ones around you
you set the hooks deep, god knows
god knows
you played the victim so often
you forgot it was a part
the world doesn't owe you,
god knows.

I really must talk to Aik about getting him to drum, if only for just this song.