On the hyperactive discussion forums, everyone from Wallace virgins to connoisseurs can offer interpretations and suggest topics (organized by the reading schedule in order to prevent spoilers). One reader wondered about the book’s setting — a futuristic hybrid of the United States, Canada and Mexico referred to as the Organization of North American Nations or by the acronym ONAN — sparking a conversation about the biblical character Onan and the notoriously wasteful practice of masturbation (i.e., onanism). Elsewhere, the novel’s reference to a “trial-size dove bar” sparked a debate about whether Wallace was referring to the chocolate or the soap. Eventually, a fan — whose source claims to have asked the author personally — announced definitively that it was, in fact, a reference to the ice-cream bar. Puzzling over this kind of pop cultural minutiae is all the more fun when reading along with a few thousand of your closest Internet friends.

Bits of Wallace writing uncover the dread and loneliness of living in a televised, mass media culture:

Of course, “Infinite Jest” also captures what Wallace called “a real American type of sadness” — that of “a white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated” guy who is successful, and yet terribly lonely and adrift. Which makes the idea of bringing so many people together for a communal reading of the book all that more meaningful. To some, the “book club” may seem like an archaic social experience — connotations of housewives and airport novels abound — but many Infinite Summer participants enjoy the, well, infinite possibilities of this Web project.

I also find that Wallace’s style, with footnote within footnotes and topic that loop out of control, fits well— or anticipates— how readers approach reading in a digital culture.

• The True 21st Century Begins, Argento Bruno
• 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic, Bruce Sterling

In Argento’s reading of history, there was a gap between the last century and the current one:

Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.

The “true” 20th century — the Communist century — began in 1914 and ended in 1989. We are now in the true 21st century.

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where “history ended.” Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Argento considers differences in American and European sentiment: How a shared political and economic history, foremost the wars of the 20th century, give members of the two continents very different answers to political and cultural challenges of the future and the economic turmoil that will surely overshadow the next decade. He is, nonetheless, optimistic:

The year to come is best approached as a learning opportunity. It offers a golden chance to bury our dead prejudices and learn how to properly feed the living. Once we stop shaking all over and scolding Americans, we will recognize the tremendous potential this new century offers the people of the world. The sun still shines, the grass still grows, we are still human. If we stopped pretending to be puppets of an invisible hand, we would not fret over the loss of the 20th century’s strings. We might see that life is sweet

* It’s classic, but 21st century use of a pseudonym— Bruce Sterling is Bruno Argento.

There’s a certain brand of movie that I most enjoy. Some people call them “Puzzle Movies.” Others call them “Brain Burners.” Each has, at some point or another, been referred to as “that flick I watched while I was baked out of my mind.”

The Morning News survey’s films that puzzle us:

Mindfuck Movies.

I’m keen on watching The Dark City and finish David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which I’m currently watching.

When we shred on a plastic Les Paul or Explorer in Guitar Hero (or Stratocaster in its competitor, Rock Band), break a back sweat on the Wii balance board, or pinch and stretch a Google Map on the iPhone, we may not know it, but we’re fulfilling a promise. Almost two decades ago, the tech world was obsessed with virtual reality. Computer scientists, geeky journalists, venturesome academics, and heat seekers in general elbowed their way into places like the NASA Ames Research Center to indulge in VR. They donned awkward helmets with tiny screens and speakers that immersed them in the equivalent of a computer-generated Habitrail.

My discontent as a city biker bubbled into an act of violence today.

On my bike ride home this evening, a man nearly hit me on a calm two-lane street while yelling “Fuck you, Faggot.”

This sort of thing often happens. On occasions like this, I’ll often catch an irate driver at an upcoming stop light. This was not the case this evening: I almost caught the man at the next light, but he was a little too fast.

(Not that I would do anything to him at the stop, except give him a look of indignation or maybe an explicit gesture. One time I did scare the shit out of an old lady who had wronged me by knocking on her drivers-side window. At that time, I really like the idea that she had honked and almost run me over with the notion that I was just a biker, an unreal fragment on the road. I’d like to believe that my act of startling her made her think about the real world.)

This evening I did not catch the abuser, but I did see the bar/restaurant that he turned into. (The bar, by the way, is a faux Japanese restaurant, which gives me umbrage apart from the situation.

In a large, tight parking lot at dusk, I knew it would be hard for me to be seen. I waited, parked my bike at an establishment across the street, and then walked over to the guy’s car and slit one of his tires. I also left a note, “please be nice to bikers.” The tone of my note is influenced by my habitually reading of passiveaggresivenotes.com.

I’m normally not one for violence, but I do like exacting karma-tic justice. I hope, though, that I can suppress the joy that I receive from performing this act, because it a joy reaped by violence.

I have often found myself in the delicate situation of having to express my thoughts on books I haven’t read. Because I teach literature at university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that I haven’t even opened. It’s true that this is also the case for the majority of my students, but if even one of them has read the text I’m discussing, there is a risk that at any moment my class will be disrupted and I will find myself humiliated.

Bayard does not exactly say one should lie about the books they’ve read, but he does offer that we can no many thing about books unread:

Between a book we’ve read closely and a book we’ve never even heard of, there is a whole range of gradations that deserve our attention. In the case of books we have supposedly read, we must consider just what is meant by reading, a term that can refer to a variety of practices. Conversely, many books that by all appearances we haven’t read exert an influence on us nevertheless, as their reputations spread through society. Reading is not a simple, seamless process; it has fault lines, deficiencies and approximations.

 Fittingly, Bayard has authored How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

First of all, David Byrne has a blog. (Unfortunately, the blog is not called Talking Head, or any variation of this).

Secondly, Byrne makes fun of IKEA on his blog:

My sister had the idea that we would take my parents to IKEA to look at possible replacements for their kitchen cabinets, counters, sinks and storage. I loved the idea of a trip to IKEA since I’d never been there ever. And as it was to be a look-see and not a buying trip, the pressure would be low. I was looking forward to the famous Swedish meatballs for lunch too.

IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could**:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

One soon realizes that one of the goals of this “game” is to decide which cabinets, in which wood or wood-like material, would, could or should be combined with which counter materials, and then to match them to a particular style sofa and upholstery, and finally, to select the color and texture of floor material that would coordinate best with all the above.

Additional Authors Note: I want to write a history, or some kind of work about IKEA. At this point I only have a title, Do It Yourself: How IKEA Transformed Modern Furniture.

In 2003, Power wrote the book Problem from Hell: American and the Age of Genocide. Much of her comment was founded in this work, and her on-going research on the relationship between U.S. foreign policy and genocide.

Power admits that the choice of examining the U.S. role is, in part, arbitrary: she is American; she has better access to American resources. However, a central argument in a Problem from Hell is that the U.S., with its power, influence, and self-projected democracy, is the one- or one-of-few- world power that is geo-politically aligned to prevent genocide. Yet, Power laments that the U.S. did little in the past century to prevent and end genocide.

Why We Don’t Fight

There are many prosaic challenges, in spite of the moral/ethic realization that a country like the U.S. should put forth effort to prevent genocide, that have slowed the U.S. from taken even basic action in response to genocide, says Power. There is the interpretative task of categorizing or defining genocide. There is the difficulty of acting unilaterally or against the interests of other world powers. There is the uneasy specter of military conflict, if other prevention methods fail. There is the real and imagined precedence of other international and domestic issue. (This list, of course goes on, and Power has document the U.S’s many hindrances to action.

There also seems to the sense among many people, that stopping genocide requires military action. An assessment Power rejects. She counts thousands of ways that the U.S. could have cheaply, safely, and effectively slow the forces of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, the Congo, and Burma. She alludes the these powers as a toolbox-of-sorts- a range of different tools the U.S. could implement, and does, in fact, implement in other foreign policy scenarios. Tragically, though, “The toolbox has not been opened,” says Power. (There are exceptions to this complaint, the U.S did act in Bosnia, as Power noted.)

The Promise of Change

In her lecture, Power offered little redemption for past U.S. negligence to human rights atrocities, but she did offer a bleak and conditional hope that things are changing in the U.S., and elsewhere in the world. This is mostly happening with citizens and activist groups, and Power presents the Dafur situation as a case study of this. Activist have learned from past failure, Power offers; and citizens are lobbying like never before for that the U.S., that the Senate and Congress to do something about Dafur.

Power also lauds Barack Obama, and other progressives, who have not only acknowledge the problem of genocide and other human rights issues, but have made these issues cornerstones of their campaign and policy platforms. (It’s worth noting the Power has worked for the Senate office of Obama and is an advisor to the Obama presidential campaign. Also, Power says that the Clinton campaign is also progressive on this issue. And that, really, ever major presidental contender has, due to pressure from citizens and advocacy groups, has a sophisticated platform on genocide.)

U.S. Illegitimacy: Torture and the War in Iraq.

If the U.S. is a key part of the international solution to genocide, its conversely appropriate that the U.S. is a problem, as well. While Power argues that the U.S. has the money and power to uphold human rights in the world, she says that the country’s moral and legal legitimacy has suffered due to its current foreign policy and international behavior.

In response to an audience question, Power commented on the U.S’s involment in Iraq- on how 15 years ago the most powerful people in the U.S. government (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) had an opportunity to prevent the mass killing of Kurds in northern Iraq, but instead chose to further invest in Saddam Hussien’s regime. She commented on the irony, or hypocrisy, of using this as a rationale for unilaterally invading Iraq for non-humanitarian outcomes.

Troubling also are black sites, torture, and domestic spying. While selective foreign policy interests are inevitable, according to Power, the U.S. has shown contempt to international human rights laws. In a simple sense, a country that tortures has little leverage to speak or act against other human rights violations. The war on terror, then, has not only damaged the U.S’s national security, it has degraded its moral standing.

Power is currently working on a new book, Chasing the Flame: Viera de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. (I’m not sure when the book will be published.)

The film looks at (economically) exclusive clubs wherein younger women pay larges amounts of money ($2,000-10,000 a night) to spend time with handsome, youthful, and entertaining young men. For the most part, the women are paying for attention, but sex is also involved.

The men at these clubs seem youthfully resilient, yet tired and disillusioned. The men are very aware of the powers at play in what they do. They say forthrightly that they sell dreams and happiness in the form of romantic attention. The best liked and asked for of these men make $50,000 a month for their services.

Several of the hosting clubs have advertisements for the men online:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBXn48CY-vM&rel=1]

A rather interesting ripple in the story is that the majority of the women entertained at host boy clubs are themselves entertainers, whether hostesses, exotic dancers, or prostitutes (the categories bleed significantly). So much of the money they make entertaining men is spend on their on need for more-genuine friendship and sexual attention.

I’ll be posting more on this topic…

Additionally, if you have a Netflix account, this documentary is available for “Instant” watching online.