Infinite Digest

https://samizdat.co/digest/notes/

To mark the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1996 novel, Brooklyn-based data visualization artist and design professor Christian Swinehart is creating a graphical companion to the book.

Infinite Digest is a series of interactive visualizations of the novel’s plotlines, characters, and self-referential structure. The first two installments, exploring the book’s timeline and its many footnotes, are currently live, and more will appear over the next few months.

(Thanks, Christian.)

| Art · Literature

Testimonial

The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one animal is responsible for greatest and highest points of excellence. A lion excels in courage, an ox in reliability and adaptability to agriculture, the horse in intelligence and speed, the ass and mule, as is stated by the poets, in patience and hard work; and other animals have other good points: this one animal combines the excellence of all others without one exception. He is naturally, suitable for war work and the pursuits of peace, and equally fitted to be of use and to be a pleasant companion. It would not be easy, as you will believe, to enumerate all the excellences and all the services to ourselves of this animal.

— Theodorus Gaza, Laudatio Canis, 1482

| Literature

Selflessness

Carol Shields’ 2000 short story “Absence” does not contain the letter I:

She woke up early, drank a cup of strong, unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.

She resolves to write about it: “‘A woman sat down and wrote,’ she wrote.”

| Language · Literature

A Second Act

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HOMERO-EYES.PNG

Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust contains a character named Homer Simpson:

Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, he was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile.

In a 2012 interview with Smithsonian, Matt Groening said, “I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. Since Homer was my father’s name, and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word ‘simp’ in it, which is short for ‘simpleton’ — I just went with it.”

| Entertainment · Literature

Overboard

1931 saw the publication of a remarkable detective novel. The Floating Admiral had been written by 12 members of the Detection Club, London’s society of mystery writers:

  1. Victor Whitechurch
  2. G.D.H. Cole and Margaret Cole
  3. Henry Wade
  4. Agatha Christie
  5. John Rhode
  6. Milward Kennedy
  7. Dorothy L. Sayers
  8. Ronald Knox
  9. Freeman Wills Crofts
  10. Edgar Jepson
  11. Clemence Dane
  12. Anthony Berkeley

They had written a chapter apiece, serially, without communicating. Each inherited the manuscript from the last and had to make some private sense of the story, including their own complications, before passing it on to the next contributor. To ensure fair play, each writer had to supply a satisfactory solution to the snowballing mystery when they turned in their own chapter.

Amazingly, it worked. Jacques Barzun wrote, “These members of the (London) Detection Club collaborate with skill in a piece of detection rather more tight-knit than one had a right to expect. There is enough to amuse and to stimulate detection; and the Introduction by Dorothy Sayers and supplements by critics and solvers give an insight into the writers’ thoughts and modes of work.”

Here it is.

| Literature

Observation

https://pixabay.com/photos/moon-full-moon-sky-night-sky-lunar-1859616/

Reading books in one’s youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depth of one’s own experience.

— Chang Ch’ao

| Literature

The Art of Living

https://pixabay.com/photos/old-stove-hot-fire-flame-2568425/

When I am going out for an evening I arrange the fire in my stove so that I do not fail to find a good one when I return, though it would have engaged my frequent attention present. So that, when I know I am to be at home, I sometimes make believe that I may go out, to save trouble. And this is the art of living, too, — to leave our life in a condition to go alone, and not to require a constant supervision. We will then sit down serenely to live, as by the side of a stove.

— Thoreau, Journal, Feb. 20, 1841

| Literature

The Beautiful City

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Relation_of_the_Individual_to_the_State_by_John_La_Farge.png

Plato’s Republic itself does not begin, as some of the modern writers would have it, with some such sentence as, ‘Human civilization, as seen through its successive stages of development, is a dynamic movement from heterogeneity to homogeneity,’ or some other equally incomprehensible rot. It begins rather with the genial sentence: ‘I went down yesterday to the Piraeus, with Glauco, the son of Aristo, to pay my devotion to the goddess; and desirous, at the same time, to observe in what manner they would celebrate the festival, as they were now to do it for the first time.’

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, 1937

| Language · Literature

Decalogue

Jonathan Franzen’s “10 rules for novelists”:

  1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
  2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
  3. Never use the word then as a conjunction — we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
  4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
  5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
  6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
  7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
  8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
  9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
  10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

(From The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, 2018.)

| Literature