Is It Me?

Or has Caryl Churchill come to look amazingly like Samuel Beckett?







And what about that smile on Sam?

Over Half

Somehow I managed to read 200 pages of Infinite Jest in the past week. And, I might add, that's with one eye people. I only had one eye. The other was swollen shut. Anyway, this puts me around page 620 now. And people are still telling me I won't finish it. WTF?

Honestly, I read the first paragraph of this book and knew, all things being equal, I would not put this mother down unless absolutely necessary. Like feeding the kids and changing diapers and basic life maintenance stuff. If I lived alone? I would have kept reading until I starved to death or passed out from lack of hydration or my brain exploded from that ruptured cyst (the reason for the eye swelling).

I guess I could understand stopping at page 20 or maybe 100 - maybe. But seriously, I'm on page 620. Why would I stop now? Why? It's not like I'm running 100 miles or biking across the country in a week or climbing Mt. Everest. I'm reading a big book is all. So people. Friends. Acquaintances. Anti-Jesters all. Leave off, k? I'm finishing this book. And I'm going to be reading this one along with it now 'cuz I need to have read it by March 29. Neener. Neener.

Source Material: Girl Becomes Tree

Lisa Hannigan - Free Until They Cut Me Down (Iron & Wine cover)

Shane | MySpace Video

John Baldessari / Terms Most Useful In Describing Creative Works Of Art / 1966-1968

Saw this recently when we took the kiddoes up to see The Art of Participation exhibit at SFMOMA. John Baldessari interview here.

The Map is Not the Territory #1

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: 'Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.' Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.

- Jorge Luis Borges

Today: Wrestled with Alligator. Lost. Stay Tuned.

Experiencing technical difficulties. My left eye is almost swollen shut. Doctors are assessing. Ack! Bright side: it only hurts when I wear my glasses.