Fate, Time, and Language

Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will

David Foster Wallace, Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert; Introduction by James Ryerson and Epilogue by Jay Garfield

http://www.cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15156-6/fate-time-and-language

Pete Mandik

www.petemandik.com

Posted via email from petemandik's posterous

Selections from the filmography of James O. Incandenza

The Gallery at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies Presents:

A FAILED ENTERTAINMENT
Selections from the filmography of James O. Incandenza
Exhibition Dates: Jan 29 - Feb 19th
Opening Reception: Friday, Jan 29th, 6-8 pm
Film Screening to take place during opening reception.

In 1996 author David Foster Wallace published his novel Infinite Jest and was instantly hailed as one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, eventually being granted a MacArthur award. His sprawling and complex novel chronicles the lives of the characters surrounding James Incandenza- avant-garde filmmaker, mathematician, and visionary tennis instructor. The plot largely revolves around the missing master copy of one of Incandenza's films, titled Infinite Jest, a film so entertaining to its viewers that they become catatonic, losing all interest in anything other than endless viewings of the film.

Included as a footnote in Wallace's novel is theComplete filmography of James O. Incandenza, a detailed list of over 70 industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, and non-dramatic commercial works. The LeRoy Neiman Gallery has commissioned artists and filmmakers to re-create seminal works from Incandenza's filmography.

Contributors:

• Trisha Baga
• Sam Ekwurtzel
• Michael Gaillard
• Gene Gort
• Van Hanos
• Brendan Harman
• Tim Hyde
• The K.I.D.S.
• Kevjn Kelley
• Zerek Kempf
• Tim Lawless
• Tracy Molis
• Davida Nemeroff
• Rory Parks
• JJ Peet
• Robert Rhee
• William Santen
• Jessica Segall
• Grzegorz Surman
• hristine Wang

More TBA

Loveyourcopyeditor's Infinite Summer Wrap-up

Much love to my personal favorite of the Infinite Summer bloggers, Love Your Copyeditor. Here's an excerpt from her wrap-up, The Last Jest, aka Infinite Summer Week 14 (end):

I have an increased appreciation for the graphic elements in the book: Gately's scrawly 'Yo.' The precise rendering of the markings on drugs on page 891. Peemster's chart. The annular ring/eclipse/special wobbly lens/meniscus glyph that appears throughout. The sweet and earnest lunula in the bottom-right corner of page 981, like a coda symbol in music, asking you to pick up again or exit the phrase, depending.

While I know I need to shelve the book again for quite some time and move on to other projects and lick my psychic wounds, I am incredibly glad I participated in Infinite Summer. The guides at the mother site have been good company. And those I encountered on the splinter blogs I feel queerly affectionate toward, as though we had a real bond even though my commenting was sporadic and my status as a newbie blogger painfully obvious. To name just a few folks I Identify with: Infinite Zombies, Infinite Detox, Infinite Tasks, I Just Read About That . . . and more. The list may not be infinite but my appreciation for their contributions and insights is. Keep Coming Back.

Speaking of back, I bought this shirt:

It says Enfield Tennis Academy on the front.

Love,

Your Copyeditor

p.s. GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

As if it had an end...

Pretty convincing! What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest? (or, the Infinite Jest ending explained)

Slate article on the neural distinction between wanting and liking

This recent article in Slate seems damn appropriate for all ye nerds reading Infinite Jest this summer.

Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous. By Emily Yoffe

Juicy excerpts:

[Olds] eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.

Olds, and everyone else, assumed he'd found the brain's pleasure center (some scientists still think so). Later experiments done on humans confirmed that people will neglect almost everything—their personal hygiene, their family commitments—in order to keep getting that buzz.

But to Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, this supposed pleasure center didn't look very much like it was producing pleasure. Those self-stimulating rats, and later those humans, did not exhibit the euphoric satisfaction of creatures eating Double Stuf Oreos or repeatedly having orgasms. The animals, he writes in Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, were "excessively excited, even crazed." The rats were in a constant state of sniffing and foraging. Some of the human subjects described feeling sexually aroused but didn't experience climax. Mammals stimulating the lateral hypothalamus seem to be caught in a loop, Panksepp writes, "where each stimulation evoked a reinvigorated search strategy" (and Panksepp wasn't referring to Bing).

[...]

University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent Berridge has spent more than two decades figuring out how the brain experiences pleasure. Like Panksepp, he, too, has come to the conclusion that what James Olds' rats were stimulating was not their reward center. In a series of experiments, he and other researchers have been able to tease apart that the mammalian brain has separate systems for what Berridge calls wanting and liking.

Wanting is Berridge's equivalent for Panksepp's seeking system. It is the liking system that Berridge believes is the brain's reward center. When we experience pleasure, it is our own opioid system, rather than our dopamine system, that is being stimulated. This is why the opiate drugs induce a kind of blissful stupor so different from the animating effect of cocaine and amphetamines. Wanting and liking are complementary. The former catalyzes us to action; the latter brings us to a satisfied pause. Seeking needs to be turned off, if even for a little while, so that the system does not run in an endless loop. When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

Fractal Sky

I was pleased to see fractals, especially the Sierpinski gasket, mentioned recently over at infinitesummer.org. But I was disappointed that insufficient discussion was dedicated to explicating what it might mean for a printed text of finite length to implement, or approximate, or whatever, a fractal structure. So here’s my stab.

The Sierpinski gasket is infinitely decomposable into microstructures each of which mirrors the macrostructure above it--a triangular arrangement of one negative and three positive triangles each of which, the positives, consist of such an arrangement. So, one thing to look for in reading the text of IJ, is not just repeating structures, but repetitions that constitute the mirroring of the macro in the micro.

Of course, in a literal fractal there's an infinite decomposability that can be directly implemented in a literary fractal only if, for example, the text is printed in an infinite number of infinitely small characters.

Now, DFW is well aware of the various proposed solutions to the problem of literal infinities that have arisen in the history of math and philosophy. One way of conceiving of a finite entity as sufficing to represent an infinity is by conceiving it as a recipe that, if followed infinitely, has an infinite result. Infinite suds from just three words: "lather, rinse, repeat." Of course, the kind of infinity generated by the shampoo instruction isn’t fractal. To achieve that, it helps to have some sort of self-reference, as in, “Rewrite this very instruction with itself included as a terminating parenthetical remark.”

To wrap this up: my take on what's fractal-ish about IJ is that it, the text itself, presents a finite number of results of the implementation of a procedure which itself is represented in the text. The infinitely decomposable self-similar structure that is thereby represented is only approximated via the activity of reading (that is, following the procedure), and re-reading, and re-re-reading, the text.

Bodies and the sound of a mind coming apart

1. Bodies
I’m fascinated with the various remarks in IJ about bodies, and there’s a real mother lode (or better, “father lode”) in Winter B.S. 1960 – Tucson AZ garage scene with young J.O.I. and his dad.
For starters, there’s:

She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care. (157)
The trick will be transcending that overlarge head, son. Learning to move just the way you already sit still. Living in your body. (158)
The stimulator of this car must know the car, Jim, feel it, be inside much more than just the …compartment. It’s an object, Jim, a body, but don’t let it fool you, sitting here, mute. (159) [compare to Hal’s book-opening muteness]
It’s a body and will respond with a well-oiled purr once I get some decent oil in her and all Mercuryish at up to 95 big ones per for just that driver who treats its body like his own, who feels the big steel body he’s inside, who uietly and unnoticed feels the nubbly plastic of the grip of the shift up next to the wheel when he shifts just as he feels the skin and flesh, the muscle and sinew and bone wrapped in gray spiderwebs of nerves in the blood-fed hand just as he feels the plastic and metal and flange and teeth, the pistons and rubber and rods of the amber-fueled Montclair, when he shifts. (159)

I find the car=body riff of Jim’s dad’s really cool. I’m reminded by it of one of my favorite parts of Grant Morrison’s comic series The Filth where, in issue 10, “man made god,” there’s a guy who self-induces religious hallucinations via temporal lobe seizure.

When I heard scientists declare they’d found the source of all religious experience, I didn’t join in all the stupid, theological debates. So what if “God” chose to show his face in the form of a seizure in the brain’s left temporal lobe, it was still God. Soon as I could afford it, I bought myself an electromagnetic generator which promised to induce temporal lobe epilepsy…. You know what happened when I wired myself up? I became a kind of limitless transparent presence, alive and self-aware and totally absorbed in the wonders of my own creativity. I was God, driving a car of raw muscle through the world I’d made. …This temporal lobe Buddha button is real, the ultimate transcendental experience is available to everyone! It’s right there in the head of every crack-eyed rapist and child murderer and broken-hearted depressive. (5)

Back to Jim’s dad:

Jim, a toast to our knowledge of bodies. To high-level tennis on the road of life. Ah. Oh. (159)

Compare to p. 54’s:

Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.

Jim’s father to Jim, re: their respective generations:

We’re just bodies to you. We’re just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. (167-168)

So, after all of this long super-absorbing hypnotic ode to being aware of being a body, Jim’s father’s now expressing some ambivalence about his thesis, where being just a body is somewhat deprecating. One of the big payoffs, the big smack up side the head or punch in the gut that we’ve been set up for with all this car=body stuff is the wrenching description of the father’s fall:

A rude whip-lashing shove square in the back and my promising body with all its webs of nerves pulsing and firing was in full airborne flight and came down on my knees this flask is empty right down on my knees with all my weight and inertia on that scabrous hot sandpaper surface forced into what was an exact parody of an imitation of contemplative prayer, sliding forward. The flesh and then tissue and bone left twin tracks of brown red gray white like tire tracks of bodily gore extending from the service line to the net. (168)

Red and gray, by the way, are the tennis academy’s colors. Red and gray = heart and brain? As many have noted there’s a lot of anatomico-architectural parallelism with, for instance, the brainy MIT building, the cardioid layout of the tennis school. And also there’s the designation of “unit” as male sex-organ vs. Ennet House campus buildings on p. 201.

I was very much under the influence of this obsessing over bodies in my thinking about the following to gems:

Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary. See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return. (176)

Regarding E.T.A.’s version of the trivium and the quadrivium:

Plus also the six-term Entertainment Requirement because students hoping to prepare for careers as professional athletes are by intension training also to be entertainers, albeit of a deep and special sort, was Incandenza’s line, one of the few philosophical points he had to pretty much ram down the throats of both Avril and Schtitt, who was pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant. (188)

So, what is anti-Kantian about the line that J.O.I. is pushing, a line he presumably inherits from his father? When I teach this sort of stuff to my undergrads, I focus on the opposition between utilitarians, for whom the maximization of happiness/pleasure (“joi”?) is the end justifying all means, and the Kantians, for whom such maximization is abhorrent, for a human should never be treated as a means to an end, but only as an end unto himself. That a human would be an entertainer, or an entertainment, is quite a squicky idea from a Kantian point of view. Ditto re squick for being just a body.

2. The sound of a mind coming apart
Bodies are things in space. But enough about space. Let’s talk about time. It’s common, of course, to comment on DFW’s use of endnotes and the deliberately disruptive effect on the flow of the reading experience. Note too what the primary psychedelic effects of DMZ are, they are, contra LSD primarily ontological and, especially, temporal. See p. 170 and alsot note 57. From the note:

…comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes.

One of the ways in which DFW thinks out loud about time is through various sounds which are described as lying along a spectrum between the rhythmic and the lacking in rhythm.
At one end of the spectrum, there’s the finger drumming “without any kind of rhythm” on 176-177 which is “The sound of a fucking mind coming apart.” At an intermediate point of the spectrum is Madame Psychosis’s music which is “unpredictable and somehow rhythmic” (187 and also 190, 191) and utterly fascinating to Mario. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s this, which is just terrific:

By repeating this term over and over, perhaps in the same rhythm at which you squeeze a ball, you can reduce it to an empty series of phonemes, just formants and fricatives, trochaically stressed, signifying zip. (174)

DFW CFP

There's a call for papers out for a conference on David Foster Wallace's work (link). Thanks, Maureen Eckert for turning me on to this.

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is pleased to announce a one-day conference devoted to the discussion of Wallace’s work, to be held Friday, November 20th 2009, from 9 am to 5 pm. Please send your abstracts of no more than 250-words by August 15th, along with contact info and institutional affiliation (if any), to: footnotesconference@gmail.com.
We welcome papers exploring any aspect of Wallace’s work. Some suggested directions:
1) Reconsideration of Wallace’s Oeuvre: Papers examining Wallace’s neglected early works Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair; new perspectives on Infinite Jest; the direction of Wallace’s later work.
2) Wallace’s Literary Context: The reception of Wallace’s work and the way his image has been shaped by his fans, the media, and the academy; examinations of Wallace’s relation to his literary forebears, both 20th century and earlier; Wallace outside the bounds of “postmodernism”; Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature.
3) Theorizing Wallace: Wallace’s treatment of language and formal or figurative qualities in Wallace’s writing; applications of narrative theory to Wallace’s texts or consideration of his narrative innovations; Wallace’s analytic, phenomenological, or existential contexts; treatment of the self and subjectivity; relation to ethics/values/morality; feminism and gender issues.
4) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Wallace: The use of math, logic, philosophy, science, technology, politics, sociology, psychology, law, etc. in Wallace’s work; pedagogical issues related to Wallace’s work.

Suck it up

I’ve noticed a lot of recent whining in the IJ-dedicated portions of the blogosphere about how hard and thus skippable the yrstruly section is. What I haven’t noticed enough of is how contrary to the athleticism that IJ is very much about said whining is. (I thought infinite summer participants were supposed to be “endurance bibliophiles.” Sheesh!)

Look, for instance, at what immediately precedes the yrstruly stuff. It’s Lyle! His shirt says “TRANSCEND” and “DEUS PROVIDEBIT.” And on p. 128, in the penultimate pgraph before yrstruly is launched, appears the rhetorical question that may just as well be asked of DFW himself (though sans the Spandex part, I guess): “What kind of guru wears Spandex and lives off others’ perspiration?” Anyone who paid for the privilege to even lug the big book around in DFW’s lifetime made him a guru living off of others' perspiration. But more than that, he wants you to work while you read it. The effort of the thing is a big part of the point and the ultimate payoff.

Moving backward from 128, other bits relevant to the present point include:

p. 118 “The point of repetition is there is no point. Wait until it soaks into the hardware and then see the way this frees up your head. A whole shitload of head-space you don’t need for the mechanics anymore, after they’ve sunk in. Now the mechanics are wired in. Hardwired in. This frees the head in the remarkablest ways. Just wait. You start thinking a whole different way now, playing.”

p. 115 “…the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.”

p. 112 “SyberVision edits its visualization sequences with a melt-filter so Stan Smith’s follow-through loops seamlessly into his backswing for the exact same next stroke; the transitions are gauzy and dreamlike.”

p. 110 “You’re supposed to pretend it’s you on the bell-clear screen with the fluid and egoless strokes. You’re supposed to disappear into the loop and then carry that disappearance out with you, to play.”

I read the quoted material as, among other things, instructions for how to read IJ. So don’t, for instance, think of the yrstrly section as sorely lacking in punctuation. Think of it as edited with a melt-filter.

Surprise! Read an odd or even number of times

1. Infinite Jest and the spoiler-phillia/phobia debate

Entirely appropriate to the discussion of spoilers that cropped up here, as well as to the general question of the relevance of spoilerphobia wrt intentionally rereadable/rewatchable annular works such as IJ itself and the Entertainment, is this brand-new new article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Paradox of Suspense by Aaron Smuts. Excerpt:

The ultimate success of Hollywood blockbusters is dependent upon
repeat viewings. Fans return to theaters to see films multiple times
and buy DVDs so they can watch movies yet again. Although it is
something of a received dogma in philosophy and psychology that
suspense requires uncertainty, many of the biggest box office
successes are action movies that fans claim to find suspenseful on
repeated viewings. The conflict between the theory of suspense and
the accounts of viewers generates a problem known as the paradox
of suspense, which we can boil down to a simple question: If
suspense requires uncertainty, how can a viewer who knows the outcome
still feel suspense?

[...]

I will consider four different solutions to the paradox of suspense:
(1) the thought theory of entertained uncertainty, (2) the
desire-frustration theory of suspense, (3) the
moment-by-moment forgetting theory, and (4) the emotional
misidentification view. The thought theory of entertained
uncertainty explains the paradox by denying that actual
uncertainty is necessary for suspense; instead, all that is required
is for viewers to engage the fiction as they normally
would—entertaining thoughts of the story as if they were
undecided. The desire-frustration theory holds that
uncertainty, entertained or actual, is not necessary for suspense. To
create suspense, one merely needs to frustrate a desire to affect the
outcome of an imminent event. The moment-by-moment forgetting
view is the position that while viewers are immersed in a fictional
scenario, they effectively cannot remember the outcome. The
emotional misidentification view holds that it is impossible
for viewers who know the outcome to feel suspense, and the best
explanation of the claims of audiences to the contrary is that
viewers must be confusing their actual fear and anxiety with what
they take to be suspense.

2. More on quote-unquote "quotation"

It looks like there's some evidence of authorial intent vindicating, somewhat, the nested-quote theory of DFW's use of single-quotes in IJ. See anony's remarks in the thread here. With this on my mind, I couldn't help but think that all the discussion of double- and triple-agency between Steeply and Marathe is somehow relevant.

3. Intracranial entrapment.

I continue to be interested in the 'stuck-in-the-head' theme I brought up here. Daryl Houston @Infinite Zombies has some nice remarks along these lines here.

4. Press 'Play'

p. 68, Hal's recurring dream: "We sort of play. But it's all hypothetical, somehow. Even the 'we' is theory: I never get to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game."

p. 72, Kate Gompert's suicidal motive: "'I didn't want to play anymore is all.' 'Play,' nodding in confirmation, making small quick notes."

p. 84, Schtitt's response to the question Mario somehow managed to articulate, "And then but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?": "'...No different, maybe,'[...]'Maybe no different, so' [...] 'Not different' [...] 'except the chance to play.'"

DFW CATS

1. Spoils

As mentioned previously, this is my second time through IJ. I should mention also, though I’m unlikely to mention it again, that as I think out loud here through this reread, there will be spoilers aplenty. I must confess to the following two deficits of character: I actually like spoilers and have difficulty mustering sympathy for those who do not. To those of you who aren’t always skipping to the end like me, this may very well be your last warning.

2. Notes on the beginning-end and some Moby Dick-ishness.

It hadn’t previously occurred to me that literal end of the (non-endnote) text (p. 981) and the chronological end of the story (p. 17) have Gately and Hal, respectively, both relatively aware of being trapped in their own heads (Hal’s “red cave,” for instance (which may as well be Plato’s)), peering outward, flat on their backs, and contemplating the sky. This peering out the head theme is something that I noticed a lot in Moby Dick, which I’ve read only recently. Another parallel to MD is the violence toward the sky in the Hal sequence (p. 16). Ahab threatened to stab the sun, I recall, and Hal observes cell phone antennae stabbing the sky and a jet’s contrail slicing blue sky-skin.

3. Infinite Rainbow

The sky-slicing aerial violence also makes me think of Pynchon’s opening, “a screaming came across the sky” in Gravity's Rainbow. Two other bits of GR-ish stuff in the early pages of IJ: (1) Ray Gunn and I are both convinced that IJ’s annular glyphs at section openings are evocative of GR’s “sprocket holes” (see here for Ray's nice remark about the glyphs of both authors as signals of unfilmability). (2) When, toward the end of their session, the conversationalist is going off about the polycarbonate found in both Hal’s racket and JOI’s cranial cartridge, the mutual proximity of descriptors like “polycarbonate,” “gyroscopic,” and “priapistic” just screams (across the sky!): “imipolex-g.” The confluence of cybernetics and pleasure embodied in GR’s Slothrop-hounding V2’s turn into IJ’s “entertainment” which, in varying degrees of literalness (with the excessively literal instance being JOI himself (“Himself”)), really gets inside one’s head.

4. Total Foreseen Horror

DFWs breathless super-long sentences are often put to their best effect in describing someone dying, leaving their body, and or, just transcending the local action. (See for example, the end of the essay “a supposedly fun thing…” where DFW ascends to bird’s eye view of the cruise ship, or the story in Oblivion about the victim of the scalding diaper). Consider the hilarious and terrible section on the paranoid schizophrenic (PS) in the show Orin is watching who, the PS, afraid of radio active fluids, is injected with such fluids and subjected to a PET scan. Here the sentential breathlessness is pressed into the service of conveying absolute terror (the PS ends up screaming his mind away). Note too the strange-loop-y-ness of what happens to the PS. The PET scan generates and image of the fear, a fear of radioactive fluids and large machines that, the object of the fear, is pretty much definitive of the processes of PET scanning.

5. On Quote Marks

A query and a theory.

6. DFW CATS

See also this. And this:

moar funny pictures

Wallace Reread

Summer Wednesdays here at Brain Hammer will be dedicated to reflections on David Foster Wallace’s (DFW’s) Infinite Jest (IJ) and other works as I participate in the Infinite Summer project to plow through IJ at a pace of 75 pp a week til Sept 22. (Brag: I’ve already read IJ once. I’ve also read like a million other things by DFW, including Everything and More.) In doing so, I’ll be (somewhat) emulating a blogger who shall remain unnamed so that she doesn’t have to kill me when I come home tonight. I have a vague ambition to bring a professional philosopher’s point of view to the whole endeavor, but it occurs to me that this all might just veer toward the random. Like this:

Random thought #1. I was killing time in a B&N the other day and flipping through This Is Water, the bound version of that commencement speech DFW gave not long ago. The jacket flap calls him a philosopher, and though I get a bit cringe-y about who the popular media call a philosopher, in this case I don’t mind so much. I got to take a peek at DFW’s undergrad philosophy thesis a while ago and it was pretty damn impressive. He mastered way more modal logic mojo than I ever did as an undergrad. (Probably totally irrelevant autobiographical detail: DFW’s dad, James Wallace, was a philosophy prof at U of I Urbana while I was an undergrad in the early 90’s. I retrospectively regret not having taken a class from him. It somehow also seems relevant that I regret blowing an opportunity to take a class from William Gass when I was in grad school at Wash. U. in the late 90’s.) It’s well known that DFW gave some serious thought to pursuing a career in philosophy. It also seems clear that we’re all better off that he didn’t. (Dogmatic assertion: no piece of 20^th/21^st century analytic metaphysics could be possibly be more valuable to humanity than Infinite Jest.) But what remains unclear, though we’ll see as we go, is how much he contributed to philosophy anyway.

Random thought #2. One thing I’m very interested in about IJ and other DFW writings is this. In an interview I don’t have at hand just now, DFW described a buzz that he got when he wrote, a buzz, if I recall correctly, he admits feeling addicted to. Under the right conditions, the intellect can be a joy unto itself. This is a very seductive idea, especially to a consumer and producer of ideas. DFW was also aware, of course, of a dark side to this process. One thing I recall DFW saying (paraphrase from memory coming up) in This is Water, though I forget to whom he attributes it, is this: The mind makes a terrible master.

Random thought #3. I feel that I don’t fully grasp why, when republishing that story about the kid with the spiders in Oblivion, DFW re-titled it, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. People that want to drop by and school me on this one are more than welcome. Invoking Rorty seems appropriate to the "better novels than metaphysics" theme, but surely that can't be all there is to it.