Steve sends a link to this audio show of David Foster Wallace talking to Bryan Garner, the author of The Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which I've eagerly ordered. It's currently on back order on Amazon.com, so go through Powell's.
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This is a test. Because Blogger doesn't seem to be publishing my posts.
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True or not true? Did Sophocles write Oedipus at Colonus at the age of 90?
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In the April 2001 Harper's there is an excellent article by David Foster Wallace on The Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which sounds pretty indispensible for amateur though non-fanatical SNOOTs like me, "SNOOT" defined thusly by Wallace: 'SNOOT (n) (highly colloquial) is this reviewer's nuclear family's nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire's column's prose itself. This reviewer's family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for "Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance" or "Syntax Nudniks of Our Time" depending on whether or not you were one.' (SNOOT note: Blogger brutalizes all ampersanded symbols on Macs, and so I can't put the little accent grave over the "a clef" and the umlaut over the "Sprachgefuhl" -- and below, in the title of the Kundera novel, "legerete" is positively porcupinatious with accents, but I had to take them out. Alas.)
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Back in Vancouver. I wish I'd seen the Silophone, but didn't get to it.

Things I bought: a waterproof sweater coated with Teflon. L'insupportable legerete de l'etre. Leather gloves that should have cost less than they did, considering that they had the shelf life of milk. Kiehl's Cucumber Essence.

The other day I looked out my hotel window and there was a whole crowd of old people bundled up in their winter coats, their arms sticking out to their sides like dolls wandering down the street in a loose queue. They looked, from so high up, like dolls, but elderly and walking tentatively in the snow. They were being led by a few hovering (indulgent, henlike, watchful, parental) people, or maybe I was imagining that. A tour group, perhaps, or an outing from a senior center somewhere. I realized they were all coming from Notre Dame, the church across the square, and there was a tickle in my heart to think of the old people and god and them wanting to be looked after themselves, with so much adulthood behind them and presumably much caring-for, wanting to be shepherded and watched and cared-for.
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The hotel's DSL isn't working, epic frustration! Nice hotel though. The bathtub is three feet deep, like sitting in a New Beetle. Weather today: lovely, but I am in a really bad mood, for no real reason -- not enough sleep? internet withdrawal? I finished reading Ubik, by PK Dick, and am now reading The Dark Light Years by Brian Aldiss, one of my favorites, from the 60s and 70s, now mostly out of print. Headed to the contemporary art museum this afternoon, like that. And a walk around Westmount.
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I am out of sorts.
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• Big sticky flakes are coming down here in Montreal, and the snow is falling laterally...yesterday was balmy and fine. Yes, Montreal does have the best bagels in the world: St. Viateur Bagels on St. Viateur St. Fresh out of the oven and smothered with lox and cream cheese...oh!! I'll never eat a New York bagel again. :-)
• And smoked meat at Schwartz's on St.Laurent, which is like pastrami, but better. Boyoboyoboy. Today, I'm sticking to a strict water and sprouts diet or I'll have to buy a new wardrobe in a larger size.
• I feel as if I am in a Luc Bresson movie, what with all the Euro-style punk kids stomping around spiky blue hair and trenchcoats. Excellent punk graffiti too, best graffiti, in fact, I've ever encountered in a North American city. And what gorgeous people! Wow.
• Met Michael Boyle today at a little cafe called Laika, also on St. Laurent. People are so friendly and nice! Smart interesting and helpful!
• Got an excellent present for Judith. Hee hee.

More later when we move to an overdesigned experience-economy hotel with high-speed internet access or something. I'm writing this from an internet cafe.
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Guys and piles of change. "In the race of life," Matt Haughey said once, "the man with the least change in his pockets wins." I am sitting here looking at one of the largest collection of piled-up coinage I've ever seen in a guy's house. Neatly stacked little towers of dimes and little towers of nickels are forming a mini-Tokyo here on the window ledge. There are these things that sort your coins and give you bills at various Walgreens in San Francisco, but they claim 10% of the take. One of my favorite things to do when I was little was to count out and stuff the coins into those paper tubes -- red for pennies, blue for nickels, green for dimes. Quarters were orange, I think. Sometimes my father would let me deposit it in my own bank account, which I opened when I was 10, with $12.00 from my carefully hoarded allowance ($0.25/week) tooth fairy payments ($0.25/tooth) and saved dimes originally intended for lunch milk, which I never liked. I got my sister to pay for candy, which we weren't allowed to have at home, because she liked candy a lot more than I did, and besides saving up $2.49 for a Don McLean album (American Pie), I didn't spend much. I don't think you can open bank accounts with $12.00 anymore. I think that account got up to $350 before I blew it all on an Olympus OM-2 when I was 12. I still have it, and it still works beautifully.
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Sitting here in front of me in the April 2000 issue of Harper's on the inside of the back cover, is a really bizarre fetishistic photograph of a beefcake foal in a Marlboro ad. I don't know if anyone has seen this thing, but it is one of the most peculiar photos I've ever seen used for selling tobacco. Everything besides the flesh-colored horse is out of focus, the horse is slanted to one side, its behind is facing the viewer, its tail is slightly raised. Come to Marlboro Country it says. Unnerving.
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Yesterday we went hiking in the pouring rain a half of an hour outside of Victoria, B.C. in one of these northern rain forests where the looming trees are carpeted with green moss, Oscar-the-Grouchlike, and the skunk cabbage was blooming big yellow blossoms like enormous tulips. Walked through a long dark wet tunnel to a waterfall. Then came home and dried off and drank some nice white burgundy from Chassagne Montrachet, ate some superb quail that Stewart cooked, cooked for an hour with pancetta and sage, and drank the same wine that the Pope drinks, this lovely 1981 Amarone, I think, though David called it something else, a name that I can't remember. Yum. It is sunny today and the boats are gliding by on the harbor and a cloud that is hovering like a grey cottonball of evil intent over the bay looks as if it will be vanquished by the sun any minute now.

Today we go and look for dobros and mandolins at some little shop in town, or maybe a National Steel, and take the ferry back to Vancouver. We fly tomorrow to Montréal.
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Yesterday my cab was late. Pulled up 15 minutes late and this tall guy in a real OUTFIT stepped out, trendy glasses, hair up in one of those hats people wear over their dreadlocks, overalls and STYLE. We got in the cab, and he had a big yellow Sony tape player strapped to the dash, turned it on and started up Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. We sat in silence listening to it for a while and the tinkly old harpsichord music seemed strangely incongruous, what with the guy clearly being such a cool cat and possible fashionista. So I asked him if he were studying Baroque Music and he, said well yeah, he was playing a lot of Bach lately. He turned out to be this classical pianist from Brooklyn who also plays with an outfit called Three Cops and a Hooker -- but he hates how everyone who plays jazz does drugs -- they're always smoking pot and whatnot, he said, and he can't abide that. We talked about how hard it is to stay an artist. How there were all these people we knew from art school and music school who somehow became sales representatives or managers at Wells Fargo or whatever, and couldn't understand how they got there, and so far from art. "They don't tell you how to STAY an artist in art school," my cab driver said. "That's what they need to teach you, more than anything. Its harder than you think it's gonna be."
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The evolution of work: from a thought picked up in Austin somewhere:

Are industrial era virtues such as arriving at a certain time at a certain place and fulfulling certain quotas or criteria now defunct? Is the idea really king? Occurring whenever it is that ideas occur? i.e. one no longer has to work 9-5 or in an office so long as one is able to have a good idea every week or so? Probably only applies to the cultural elite, this emphasis on working only in the best, cleverest or most creative way. Symbol Manipulators and Knowledge Workers -- are they now enjoying the kind of freedom and leisure that has been endlessly promised by every major and minor work revolution since WWII?
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Notes written on tablecloths and napkins: Difference between Design and Art: constraints are the reason that design is a job; you are paid for your creativity operating within a limited possibility space. Cordy: Art is swimming in an ocean, design is swimming in a pool.

Style as aspect of Design. We say that two things are "of a kind" when they differ from each other only by the more and the less: i.e. a difference of degree.
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Tired. Three hour flight delay. Spent much of the day in Denver reading Dave Hickey, Air Guitar. I read the Hank Williams story four times, I liked it so much! Sarah Vowell likes him too.
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Austin Rocks!

• Brilliant People are fun to spend time with Ben Cerveny, wow! what a mind! and Cordy Swope the things he thinks of! Gee. Heather told me we had the "thinkiest" panel on any conference, ever. No doubt. I wish everyone could have been around for the two days of conversation that led up to the panel by the (insert name of undivulged swanky hotel here) Hotel pool, discussing the experience economy, continuity, form as materiality, form as structure, etc. etc. I'll put all my notes up here tomorrow if I have time.
• Livestock barn at the Travis county fair Pigs and goats. Looking so pleased, these pigs and goats, fat and pink and unaware of the impending butchery. Though the goats not sleeping were a little tetchy. Zowee. So I got a leaflet called Pork: In Touch With You Daily. My cortisone cream is apparently not vegan. Nor is your house paint or your motor oil. Ew! which brings me to:
• Meat. Ew. Meat, everywhere, all around, all the time. Meat with cheese poured over it! Cheese poured over everything! Thank god for Mexican food. Without cheese. Ribs, big like the supports of a Quonset hut.
• The peculiarity of webfame. I was surrounded by people who were semi-famous among a certain number of people for being themselves. Being famous for being you. There was a lot of looking around to see if people were someone one should know. A very LA kind of thing to do. People not looking at you, but squinting to read your name tag.
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  { Friday, March 09, 2001 }  

  I'm off to Austin in the United Airlines party plane, which will include Judith, Peterme, Mathowie and other assorted webgeeks, webrascals and websweeties. I don't know why I woke up so damn early, like a kid at Christmas. After much consideration, I've reluctantly decided to leave my pink suede skirt, fake fur coat and white patent leather go-go boots at home, citing weather prognostications and a certain sartorial weakness on the mix 'n' match front. If you're looking for me, I'll be the one wearing black. Ela!
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  Mr. Glossosaurus writes with his own smart and engaging Uni-toothed Flossophy which includes a lot of sci-fi style conjecture, allusions to naked mole rats and speculates what "molting teeth" might be like:

  Your question of the One Big Tooth - reminded me of those thought experiments science fiction writers have when creating an alien species ( a la _Mote In God's Eye _ 'If we give the alien one big arm and two little arms, what kind of society will it create for itself?') - I also kind of remember having a similar conversation w/ my dentist about the necessity of flossing -- a person's jaw grows a lot between late childhood (when the permanent teeth finish growing in) and adulthood. Teeth shift around to accomodate this growth (same as the plates in the skull shift to accomodate the growth of the head, I guess?). A single hemispherical tooth wouldn't be able to adjust to the changing size/shape of the jaw and either crack when the jaw got too big, or stunt/deform the jaw. I guess for this to work through the stages of human development a person would have to go through teeth like a shark - a new uni-tooth every few weeks in the early stages of life, every few months or years later in life. Which would require a whole addition to the endocrine system so that the formation of new tooth could be slowed down as the person matured (though I can't think of a good biological reason [offhand, with my BIO 101 knowledge] for multiple sets of baby uni-teeth but only one adult uni-tooth) So maybe the uni-tooth development would be unregulated (like the growth and replacement of sharks' teeth) and grow a new hemispherical tooth every month, making dental care a moot point. And when you have a homo sapien with disposable teeth (that are yet super-strong) , there goes a whole ton of dietary restrictions. And from there - a race with no qualms about eating bark and pure cane sugar three meals a day, or opening beer bottles with their teeth. For that matter - a race that may have put off developing tools altogether, since like naked mole rats, they could bite through just about anything (no ingenuity required for that Tough Nut to Crack ). An alternate evolutionary tack, now that i think of it, would be to just ditch all that matching uni-tooth to jaw size through the developmental stages (molting teeth) and have homo unidentalis eschew chewing until adulthood and nurse all the way up to full physical maturity, when the one adult uni-tooth would grow into place. Oh my. Hm. Anyway, that's just a quick and not at all rigorous little bit of speculation that your flossing question had inspired.
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  { Thursday, March 08, 2001 }  

  Had one of those dazzling California vista experiences on my way to the Artist Dinner at the Headlands last night, sun dropping into the sea in a riot of pink, velvety hills swathed in mist, vermiculate road, hippie music on the radio. Then yummy portobello mushroom roue over potatoes and fish soup. And Tony, Adrian, Amanda.
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  Expanding on what Michel said below:

  "You can now make more money than your grandparents did. You can also drive really fast, and you can change your sex. You can find friends without having to go to church, and you can see movies in your own house. You can get pictures of naked people almost anywhere, and you can curse out loud freely. You can buy dinner in a box and not have to wash anything after you eat it. You can fly to any city you want and meet a sexual partner, or you can talk to them on the phone. You can have bright light twenty-four hours a day without having to clean soot off the walls, and you can listen to any music you want anytime, anywhere. You can find people everywhere who like exactly the same things you do, and you can print your own books. You can buy vegetables from the other side of the earth, and you can build a house in a day. You can be perfectly warm or cool at every moment, and you can stay in school all your life. You can have sex fourteen thousand times and not have a baby, or you can junk it cheaply if it’s the wrong time. You can write with pens that don’t dry out, or leak, or have to be plucked from a bird, and you can hear about people being hacked to death thousands of miles away. You can see pictures through telescopes almost to the end of space and from the beginning of time, and you can keep milk fresher longer than ever before. You can shit in a bowl and then whisk it away, and you can visit caged wild animals in the middle of a city. You can buy things to make you see and hear better, and you can live anywhere you want. You can get your face stretched tight like when it was new. And you can be sick and not die for a really really long time. You can even wash your clothes in a machine so why can’t you figure out a way to be happy all the time?"

  From the Acme Novelty Library Issue number Three, Fall 1994, by Chris Ware. By way of my new webchum Irma's weblog
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  Wood s lot, Canadian thinkblog.
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  { Wednesday, March 07, 2001 }  

  Right now I am flossing my teeth, and wondering why the hell we have teeth, plural. Why don't we have one large semi-circular tooth?
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  An extraordinarily fat man riding a bicycle. A man with a mouth full of cigarettes. Evel Knievel. Man with extremely long curling fingernails. You know these pictures. They are deep in the fabric of American culture.

  My latest project is compiling a list of items in the National Subconscious.
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  Judith alerts me to the 10socks site whereby you get 10 danish socks with numbers on them, and this really cool, expensive, muddy toothpaste. I just received my shipment of natural badger bristle toothbrushes from smallflower.com. Toothbrushing, which no one ever thinks about, can be a source of great joy and sensuality. One of my pet peeves is over-engineered $3.00 toothbrushes with planned obsolescence: they seem to last only two months, whereas these natural bristle brushes last for years. Just boil them every couple of months to clean them out and they're good to go. Maybe you don't need an SUV to make yourself happy, or a $100 pair of Nikes. Maybe what you need a $5.00 toothbrush. I know that my own joy in these toothbrushes is all out of proportion to their cost.
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  Looks like my friend Jon Santos is up to more hipness: He sends me the URL for the newly updated Common Space v 2.0 : Spring 2001 which functions as an artist and designer showcase. Tonight, if you can, head over to the BlindTiger in San Francisco for some live DJs and visuals.
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  { Tuesday, March 06, 2001 }  

  Windows Users I owe you an apology. Michael wrote me this morning to thank me for putting the quote below in Verdana and not Arial, and I realized that all you Windows users have been reading this site for the past 10 months in Arial -- I see it on my Mac in Geneva. I love Geneva, but it's really a Mac thing. Arial? Horrifying. I'm sorry to have put you through that. It's been rectified.
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  So much good mail today from Dave's readers:

  From John about my post below about marrying for love: " "True, we in the first world stand upon the hardships our relatives who came before us bore. They made marriage for love possible through their toil, work, and sacrifice. Despite all our protestations to the contrary, we need to remember that almost everybody in the US -- and the first world -- is "relatively" rich."

  From Michel in Amsterdam, also about my post below about marrying for love: "I would say we (1st and 2nd world) don't have it so easy either: having all our basic needs fulfilled leaves us with the immensely difficult task of being happy all the time.

  I mean, it's easy to know if you are hungry or not, but happy? loved? with all those choices and options we have, how do you ever know if you are doing it right? Without a lot of options, there usually isn't much regret or doubt either."

  He's right. The possibilities for genuine unhappiness abound in the industrialized nations, and, interestingly, suicide rates, a pretty good barometer of human misery, are lower in less developed countries, and actually decrease during times of war: i.e. there is an explanation for your misery external to yourself. Curious statistics, that, of course, I don't know the source for, but I've always remembered. So much of our unhappiness comes from ourselves.

  From Alwin, in response to my asking why there weren't any Russian Mail Order Groom web sites: "I suspect you were trolling, but I think the answer is obvious: men can get salaried jobs, don't take on child-raising responsibilities, and therefore don't have the economic pressures that women do."
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  " ...in the imperishable primal language of the human heart house means my house, your house, a man's own house. The house is the winning throw of the dice which man has wrested from the uncanniness of the universe; it is his defense against the chaos that threatens to invade him. Therefore his deeper wish is that it be his own house, that he not have to share with anyone other than his own family." -- Martin Buber, 1969

  
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  { Monday, March 05, 2001 }  

  The 2001 5k competition is now open for entries, in which you compete for the best in web design weighing in under 5120 bytes. Up with inframince! Down with bloat!
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  Something I read online yesterday has been haunting me. It said something to the effect that marrying someone for love was a luxury that the poor could not afford, something we here in the first world take for granted. I spent a lot of time yesterday perusing the Russian Mail Order Bride site that I happened upon when I was looking for information about a night club in Beirut (there are dozens of such sites). I noticed that it seemed to be the younger women that were seeking "financially secure" partners whereas the older women were the ones who were looking for love. There was also a preponderance of divorced 22-year-olds with children, not something you see often stateside.

  Why the noticeable lack of "mail-order husbands"?
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  { Sunday, March 04, 2001 }  

  I was thinking Morocco, but I've changed my mind. Now I'm thinking Tunisia.

  "Tunisia's list of visitor attractions would do justice to a country twice its size. From the stone-age settlements near the oasis at Kebili to the space-age sets of Star Wars (parts of which were filmed at Matmata), its lush-to-lunar landscapes have seen more action than the New World nations combined. Spend a few days here and you'll agree: daydreaming at the famous Roman ruins of Carthage and El-Jem is almost as good as stepping into Virgil's Aeneid and knocking one back with Dido, while a day's dawdling on the north coast's beaches will leave you wondering why Hannibal ever left.

  "Tourism remains very low-key throughout most of the country, though if you're looking for resort life you can find that too. Be it Tunis' French-Arab culture collage or the Sahara's unthinkably massive expanse, you're going to be impressed with what you find in Tunisia. After all, they've had 3000 years to prepare for your visit."

  More information here. Sounds paradisal.
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  { Saturday, March 03, 2001 }  

  Shakespeare used cocaine and marijuana?
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  Rebecca is so right. She writes, "I disagree with your idea that "Style is Fashion grown old." For me, style transcends fashion, it's the thing to which fashion aspires. Style looks good whether it's fashionable or not; fashion may or not look good, depending entirely on the eye and attitude of the one who wears it (or puts it together and lives in it, in the case of a room, or etc.)." I remember talking to someone who insisted that Lady Diana did not have style, in spite of all her attempts to acquire some, but that Queen Elizabeth -- consistently dowdy, frumpy and stodgy -- did. And she was right on the money.

  Stewart contributes the following:

  "Une mode ancienne demeure une curiosité; une mode passée depuis peu devient un ridicule; unde mode régnante qu'anime la vie nous semble la grâce même."

  "An old fashion remains a curiosity; a fashion but late gone by becomes an absurdity; a reigning fashion, full of life, strikes us as the very personification of grace."
  -- Octave Uzanne from Les Modes de Paris, 1898

  
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  Stunning feats of height! Dinner at Ecco with five witty and penis-obsessed gourmands, talk revolving around penises, stalkers, lactation, bestiality and penises. How do these conversations happen? We sat near a table where perched a bunch of shy prom attendees in tails and formal dresses, the girls all foofy and careful, the boys sitting ramrod straight in their chairs and doing their best Emily Post. Adorable, especially contrasted with the lurid subjects roiling around our table. (Takeaways: if you are going to attempt to smear someone, don't go straight to accusations of bestiality if you want to retain your credibility and actually have a chance at taking them down a peg or two. Save that for later if other accusations (drinking, fencing, swearing, quarrelling, drabbing) don't take. Noted.) Had chocolate cake for the fourth time in five days. What a life I lead! And later, at the 010101 opening at the SFMOMA, everyone noticed that I was much taller than usual. You never get to see the art at these things, because it's all schmooze-o-rama, so I have nothing to remark about the show. Except congratulations to Benjamin, the media arts curator! Nice work!
  LINK | 10:48 AM |
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  { Friday, March 02, 2001 }  

  From the New York Times interview with Rick Moody: "I'm really frustrated and disappointed with using the same old words and feeling like still experience eludes being captured in language a little bit. You know, there's this famous formulation by the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, whereby he said, "Desire exceeds the object." And a lot of time I feel like that. I feel sort of that way as a writer, that my desire to use language to capture emotional and psychic states is always outstripping the ability of this sign system to do its thing."
  LINK | 4:11 PM |
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  { Thursday, March 01, 2001 }  

  Things thought of lately:

  • Notes toward the Perfect Job: Getting paid to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, with people you like and respect. Preferably including lots of money. My friend Jim and I talked about whether we wanted Fame, Money or Prestige, and decided that by far Prestige was the most desirable. We defined it as 'the respect of one's peers" -- that people who are experts in your field admire your work. There are a great many people that are admired by people outside of their fields, but this means less than if people who really understand what you are doing think you are The Bee's Knees.
  • Love. One of the most important things, no? If not THE most important thing. And thought about all too little. It does not just appear, sprung fully formed and finished from the forehead of Zeus. I mean, its embryo can (or rather, I'm picturing the New Year's baby in too-large top hat), and I think that the potential for love happens often enough. But then once the embryonic love is found, it must be chosen, and made by both people. Love must be made. I sound like John Lennon here, but it's true. It's a kind of mutual cultivation or creation that requires a lot of things that people don't have much of these days: attention and time, openness and unguardedness. Flexibility. And of course the inevitable Timing. Ripeness is all.
  • Another thought: Love as System. Applying general systems theory to love: The structure of love like music or language (Beethoven's Quartets, or Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier or Frankie Avalon songs/ Panini's Grammar? Also cf. intro to Dave Hickey's Air Guitar.) Strictures being: gender, age, neuroses, sexual orientation, location, timing, your personal smell, socio-economic strata, ability to flirt with strangers, etc. etc. The main variable being hydra-headed humanity. Actions of the systems, what is spoken when? Hm. Just another post-structuralist astrological compatibility chart and horoscope? Think about this more. Vague recollection of reading something along these lines. Wish I had A Lover's Discourse handy. Was that it? Grumble. Clearly an unformed idea. Aspects and actions are muddled here. Hm.
  • Help me out here: are you The Shit or are you The Bomb?
  • Infra-mince. Please, if you have some good stuff on infra-mince (Duchamp!), please let me know. I am obsessed, even more so lately. Examples of infra-mince, from Duchamp himself: The sound of velvet trouser legs rubbing together; the difference between the space occupied by a clean shirt, and the same shirt, dirty; the energies generated by the fall of tears, the exhalation of cigarette smoke.
  • Style. I'm having a hard time figuring out what is Art, what is Design, what is Fashion, what is Culture and what is Style. Just as Myth is Gossip grown old, Style is Fashion grown old. I have a few provisional provisos, but I am still working on this one. Dick Hebidge's Subculture: The Meaning of Style might be useful here. (She digs it out, dusts it off) Wow. So 80's looking.
  
  LINK | 5:07 PM |
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