Out of Reach: Notes from the David Foster Wallace Symposium by A-J Aronstein:

Thinking back to two days of talking about suicide, love, literary commitment, illness, perfection, and grief, it seems silly to sneer at the earnestness of readers who understand Wallace’s work much more deeply than I could ever hope to. I can’t report feeling any closer to a resolution about how writers should carry forward Wallace’s considerations of the constitutive struggles of ordinary life.

The symposium did repeatedly drive home the obvious fact that I don’t miss him as badly (and can’t miss him as badly) as the people who knew him personally. Not just as a spectral, textual, complex set of sometimes life-changing ideas about the world, but rather as a fleshy, six-foot-plus, pain in the ass, bandana-ed human dude who once asked Rolling Stone to provide a special caregiver for his dogs with “emotional issues” before covering the McCain campaign in 2000, and who left behind friends and family and a heap of paper that now sits in catalogued boxes for the rest us all to decipher, dissect, and translate.

More importantly, it revealed something of the motivating force behind our collective desire to discover for ourselves the ordinary humanness of writers we admire, and the ways we go about trying to do it by opening those boxes full of paper.

It’s Different for ‘Girls’ by Emily Nussbaum:

When a TV critic reports on a new show, it’s okay to say the series is promising, even the next big thing, but ideally, one shouldn’t go native. One should probably also talk in the third person. In this case, however, I’ll have to make an exception. Because from the moment I saw the pilot of Girls (which airs on April 15), I was a goner, a convert. In an office at HBO, my heart sped up. I laughed out loud; I “got” the characters—four friends, adrift in a modern New York of unpaid internships and bad sex on dirty sofas. But the show also spoke to me in another way. As a person who has followed, for more than twenty years, recurrent, maddening ­debates about the lives of young women, the series felt to me like a gift. Girls was a bold defense (and a searing critique) of the so-called Millennial Generation by a person still in her twenties. It was a sex comedy from the female POV, taking on subjects like STDs and abortion with a radical savoir-faire as well as a visual grubbiness that was a statement in itself. It embraced digital culture, and daily confession, as a default setting. Even before the Republican candidates adopted The Handmaid’s Tale as a platform, [Lena] Dunham’s sly, brazen, graphic comedy, with its stress on female friendships, its pleasure in the sick punch line, its compassion for the necessity of making mistakes, felt like a retort to a culture that pathologizes feminine adventure. As my younger colleague Willa Paskin put it, the show felt, to her peers, FUBU: “for us by us.”

[…]

But really, the show Girls most closely resembles doesn’t involve a girl at all. It’s FX’s Louie, the acclaimed DIY cable comedy now filming its third season, created by the middle-aged comedian Louis CK. The top stand-up in the country, Louie CK has become a bit of a secular saint to his followers, a model of the auteurist show­runner—the man who didn’t compromise his vision. Like Dunham, he writes, edits, directs, and stars as a character based on him. Of course, Louie is a recently divorced middle-aged comic with two kids; Hannah is a twentysomething memoirist hooking up in Brooklyn. Yet the two share many qualities: They’re Mr. ­Magoos of the dating world, stumbling into mortification, then exploiting it as material. Each exposes an imperfect body for slapstick and self-assertion. These characters are sensitive solipsists, artists struggling through a period of confused limbo, prone to fits of self-pity—although the fictional personae are far less driven, hardworking, and ambitious than their creators.

Dunham is interested enough in the parallels that she dressed as Louis CK for Halloween, in a bald cap and facial hair. She posted a picture to Louis himself on Twitter, apologizing for the poor resemblance. But that experiment clearly left her with mixed feelings. She tweeted, “Me dressing like a man for Halloween does not have a Melanie Laurent in Beginners-ish quality. No Jules & Jim vibe. I look like Pat. Ugh.” Then the next day: “Chances are if you dressed as a sexy cat this Halloween it feels different to live in our minds.”

Pass the Books. Hold the Oil. by Thomas Friedman:

Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says [Andreas] Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”

Commenter Rajiv matter-of-factly points out some of what we need to do here in the United States to that end:

It is high time that states invest in education and make it a core competitive value. Let’s make the decision to pay a little more in taxes so that we can make our states more competitive than others. Increase days in school, pay teachers more, make teacher pay performance oriented, and end tenure. More than anything else, invest for success.

A Lot of Gas by Elizabeth Kolbert:

“Since I took office, our dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year,” the President said in Cushing [Oklahoma, the site of a proposed oil pipeline]. “Last year, we imported one million fewer barrels per day than the year before.” Obama sounded, as he generally does, thoughtful and reasonable, and the figures that he cited were, for the most part, accurate. Indeed, as the [New York] Times reported last week, dependency on foreign oil has fallen dramatically in recent years. But, in terms of what matters most, the President’s energy tour was a dispiriting affair. In the course of two days, he made four speeches. The number of times he mentioned the major impact of America’s energy use—global warming—was zero. In Oklahoma, he announced that he was expediting the construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. The announcement made no sense—except, perhaps, as political theatre. A few months ago, the Administration refused to allow construction of the pipeline’s northern leg, precisely on the ground that Republicans were trying to rush the permitting process. The whole point of the Keystone pipeline is to transport more dirty oil from Canada’s tar sands, which goes to show that you can’t be in favor of more pipelines and in favor of a cleaner environment at the same time. A smorgasbord energy strategy is, as Joe Romm observed recently on the blog Climate Progress, hardly any strategy at all: “Just a year ago, ‘all-of-the-above’ was actually a standard Republican talking point, so much so that Democrats routinely mocked it.”

It’s a Rich Man’s World: How Billionaire Backers Pick America’s Candidates by Thomas Frank, Harper’s (April 2012):

The idea that our votes can simply be purchased by a large enough ad expenditure is contradicted by the burnt-out husks of gold-plated political campaigns that litter recent history — think of the floundering Steve Forbes, or the tongue-tied Rick Perry, or eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s fantastically expensive 2010 bid for the California governorship. Yet the other argument, that we remain proud and free and immune to the barrage, is such an obvious rationalization that you hear it advanced only by people who stand to benefit from the present spectacle, or are actually in some way responsible for it.

The latter category would include Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, who told an audience of lawyers back in January that “I don’t care who is doing the speech — the more the merrier.” Then Scalia tossed in one of the great canards of our time: “People are not stupid. If they don’t like it, they’ll shut it off.” All power, in other words, rests in the hand with the remote. Against the scoffing majesty of the American TV viewer, all the assembled efforts of the nation’s tycoons are as gentle Mediterranean waves against looming Gibraltar.

As it happens, this kind of clueless optimism contributed to the Citizens United decision itself. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared flatly that “this Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Got that? Independent expenditures are by definition clean, because those Super PACs are, you know, independent. The court continued unfolding its wisdom:

That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.

History records that when the court made this amazing proclamation on January 21, 2010, the electorate was in fact in the throes of a wrenching crisis of faith brought on by precisely “the appearance of influence or access” that Justice Kennedy declared to be impossible: namely, that apparent power of Wall Street banks to get themselves a colossal government bailout, an occurrence that had prompted rallies and protests and talk-show jeremiads by the thousand. All the judges had to do to see how wrong they were was use that all-powerful remote and turn on the damn TV.

Taking Control (What’s Behind the Conservative Attack on Women) by Margaret Talbot:

Social conservatives could pay more attention to another, more challenging social issue: the decline in marriage. More than half of all births to American women under the age of thirty now take place outside of marriage, and children who grow up without married parents are less likely to go to college and to find employment, and are more likely to live in poverty, to become pregnant as teen-agers, and to go to prison than children with married parents. It might be tough for Newt Gingrich to make marital commitment a centerpiece of his platform, but Santorum could. In the same interview in which he condemned contraception, he talked about how he would use the moral authority of the Presidency to support marriage. But, on the campaign trail and on his official Web site, his social-issue rhetoric is almost all about abortion, contraception, reinstating Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and passing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

Indeed, social conservatives seem to see a bigger threat to marriage from committed gay couples who want in on it than from straight ones who opt out of it. Maybe Santorum doesn’t say much about the decline because the people who are currently marrying more, divorcing less, and having fewer children out of wedlock—the people who are more apt to have what the researcher W. Bradford Wilcox calls “the marriage mind-set”—are not his people. They are Americans with college degrees (the snobs). Many of them live in households where the wife is the economic powerhouse, and professionally accomplished. Talking about them might mean giving blue-state liberals a little credit.

Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20 by The Onion:

In addition to compiling the many reasons why the relationship was no longer working, Wallace’s letter featured sections on “Why We Could Never Grow Old Together,” “Ways It—Us, The World, And Everything—Has All Changed,” and “Things I’ve Never Told You (That Will Certainly Change Your Mind About Me).”

“One thing I found annoying was that you had to read all the way to the middle to figure out what things on the first page of the letter were talking about,” Thompson said. “For instance, he kept referring to somebody named The Cackler without explanation until page 11, at which point I finally found out that The Cackler is my friend Renée—essentially forcing me to read the whole first 11 pages over again. And then there are all the footnotes. I always felt he overused those in his valentines, too.”

Shared in honor of his 50th birthday, which would have been Tuesday.

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus:

We did not know it yet, but LeBov had already issued guidance that the toxicity was perceptibly worse after you’ve broken exposure from it, the reaction far more visceral. From Esther’s mouth came something that was causing a chemical disruption, like a mist borne on the climate. That’s the only way to explain it, and this was when any notion of a toxicity not connected to Esther’s language seemed instantly absurd. This wasn’t her hair or clothing or rural dander. This was nothing that could be washed off. The evidence was pouring right out of her face and we were bathing in it. There was a soiled quality to her words, something oily that made them, literally, hard to hear.

Later philosophers of the crisis, like Sernier, would mock the poetics of all this. He’d decry the absence of facts, the vague and personalized anecdotes that inevitably pollute the possibility for real understanding. Personal stories, Sernier would say, are the most powerful impediment to any true understanding of this crisis. As soon as we litter our insights with pronouns, they spoil. Ideas and people do not mix.

I would agree with everything Sernier says. But I’ll point out that bugs crawl from his mouth now, and there’s no one left to read what he wrote.

I’m only seven chapters into this and it may not meet the expectations its premise warrants, but the prose alone is worth the price of admission.

M.I.A. Shouldn’t Have Apologized by Sasha Frere-Jones

The outrage is tiresome and deeply hypocritical, in all the tiresome ways you’ve been tired out by before. M.I.A. was illustrating her line, acting out the attitude of the words: performing. Fine, it may not be legal to flip the bird on television, but that’s simply a remnant of the fifties we haven’t shaken. Unless somebody was handing out Xanax with the foam fingers, Lucas Oil Stadium was ringing with the music of profanities last night. More to the point, television viewers were submitted to ad after ad that likened women—negatively—to sofas, cars, and candy. Mr. Winter [of the Parents Television Council] didn’t have anything to say about that, so I’d like to raise both of my middle fingers to him and anyone who thinks profanity is somehow more harmful to our children than images of violence and misogyny.

theartsdesk in Paris: The Oldest Film Star of All by Ronald Bergan:

Cinema and the Tower made a legitimate couple, both being offsprings of mechanical art and having a relation with riveted architecture - one with its bolts and the other with its splicing. It should be remembered that the Eiffel Tower is only six years older than the cinema, and that the birth and growth of cinema were almost immediately parallel to the birth and growth of modernism in the other arts. It is fitting, therefore, that La Ville-Lumière (of which the Tower is the beacon) should have played host to the first public performance of the Cinématographe on 28 December 1895 at the Salon Indian in the Grand Café in the Boulevard des Capucines presented by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. There is a poetic congruity of their name and profession. Let there be Light! And lo there was Cinema! And the Eiffel Tower was featured almost immediately in the new art.

On cinema’s lifelong love affair with the Eiffel Tower.