Superfluous Matter
Books - The Sandman by Neil Gaiman

I missed out on comics as a kid; they were not part of my cultural consumption. Given my nerdy disposition they easily could have been, but for whatever reason it just didn't happen. Until The Sandman the only comic I'd read was The Watchmen and that was just a couple years ago.

Of course comic is not the right word for either work. Graphic novel is the accepted appellation among the community of people who follow this sort of thing closer than me. According to Peter Straub The Sandman actually qualifies as literature (or nothing else does).

I wholeheartedly agree.

The Sandman is a series of graphic novels with 75 issues that consumed Neil Gaiman's life from 1987 to 1996. He estimates it at over 2000 pages and considers it the largest thing he's ever written or ever will write. I recently acquired the whole set collected into ten volumes contained in a fancy slip-cover case. I read them all in extremely short order. I just couldn't stop.

I love Neil Gaiman's novels and short stories, but none of that matches The Sandman. He put everything he had into it and it shows. The choice of graphic novel as the format is irrelevant, it's way up there with my favourite books of all time.

I'm interested in reading other "literary" graphic novels, however I suspect that having read The Sandman and The Watchmen may have spoiled me. I'm hopeful for Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" though.

Positive Snowboarding

I had a great day today. That's kind of a big deal for me as it could be argued that I've had a a rather shitty go of it (I'm a tad inebriated now so you'll have to forgive the cusses in this post). To distinguish from other days this day was great on it's own and was not at all about that. I've had other great days since then (along with so many bad days), but at the end of them they're still about that because despite outward appearances I'm still (and probably forever) rather damaged. Today was different though. It was great on it's own.

I went snowboarding for the third time ever today and decided that it is a thing I like enough to invest money in buying equipment. I had a good lesson and a fantastic afternoon where I made real progress with my skills. It was too warm out, and the snow was imperfect and the atmosphere was typical dreary grey Ontario winter, but it was also awesome. Because the world is pretty fucking awesome when you think about it.

Despite having had a shitty go of it I also recognize that I'm absurdly privileged. Absurd isn't nearly a strong enough adjective but it's the best I've got right now. I'm a white straight male with a high IQ who grew up in a middle class, nominatively Protestant household in a first world country as the child of parents who both pursued and encouraged post-secondary education. All of that made it easy for me to obtain a Computer Science degree that has enabled me to get a job which pays me enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle as an independent adult without any debt. When the shitty thing did happen to me, it happened in a country where we could access excellent health care without incurring financial disaster. The only anti-privilege I can think of in my life was the divorce of my parents when I was in grade seven. But around half my friends at the time came from "broken" households so it's hard to argue that I was part of some oppressed minority. Plus my parent's divorce was mostly amicable from my point of view so I'm even privileged within the group of children of "broken" households. All these things put me ahead of such a large portion of the population of the world that it isn't worth coming up with an actual number. It rounds up to 100% in all contexts.

So yeah, a bad thing happened to me, but the world is still awesome and I am in a position where I feel like I must strive to acknowledge that. What on earth could I possibly complain about? There is so much to see and do and there is stuff that is basically magic happening all the time. My iPhone 4S is a super-computer in my pocket. Magic. In May my brother and I are taking my mom to France. We'll travel over 6000km and it will only take about 8 hours and we'll do it by FLYING and the flight will cost less than $1000 each round trip. Magic. I'm free to post my thoughts to a blog on the Internet which is just millions of piles of Magic. I spent a whole day today doing controlled falls down a really big hill in glorious nature instead of fighting bears and struggling to survive the winter. Not magic, but still pretty awesome that I not only have the spare time but that western society has oriented itself in such a way that it was not hard or prohibitively expensive for me to spend my spare time in such a frivolous way.

Maybe it's the endorphins from a day outside exercising, or maybe it's the four pints of medium-strength (~6%) beer enjoyed in the company of happy fun people but I'm in a good mood this evening because today was a great day.

Books - Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It's not that I haven't been reading lately, or even that I've been skipping blogging about the books I read. The reason I haven't posted about a book since the end of October is that the book I was reading since then was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It is an epic-sized book in every sense. 981 pages of small type (in trade paperback format), followed by 96 pages of endnotes in even smaller type (which are required reading to actually understand what is going on). Beyond the physical size (and weight!), the actual text is daunting and challenging. It takes place in the near future but much has changed in the world and the book doesn't waste much time explaining the lay of the land. You just sort of pick it up along the way. Add invented slang, a large cast of characters (who are never thoroughly introduced), intense non-linearity, and obscure self-references and you get a book that requires significant attention while reading if you want to make progress.

I am glad I read it, but it was hard work and took a long time is what I'm saying.

I don't even know how to talk about it here, so I'm going to defer to the comments of smarter people than myself. One remark I quite liked came from Jay McInerney in his review of the book for the New York Times: "While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences." The writing is spectacular but sometimes it goes off on tangents, and those tangents grow their own tangents and you find yourself so far from where you started that you're not even sure you're reading the same book. Like the endnotes, of which there are 388, some of them have their own footnotes!

Fortunately for me, I think, I enjoy tangents. Even when whole chapters pass that have nothing to do with the plot of the book, it's all still fascinating and engaging. I loved the language and words he used, like cardioid and demapping, but most of all the idiom "howling fantods," defined perfectly by Urban Dictionary:

A stage 4 case of the heebie jeebies.

Realizing that, after all this time, as I approach the end of this 981 page novel with 96 pages of footnotes, as much as I have loved every run-on sentence and obscure pharmacological reference I still cannot coherently answer the frequently-asked and painfully-simple airplane-seatmate question "what's it about?" has giving me a serious case of the howling fantods.

There is much reference to Québec separatism, despite being an American novel written by an American. In the near-future world of the novel (remembering that it was written pre-referendum in the 1990s) the cause of separatism has escalated rather than calmed, with multiple Québec terrorist groups causing problems all over North America (including the assassination of Jean Chrétien apparently). Although that all sounds serious, it's presented in a pretty ridiculous, slap-stick manner that is endlessly amusing (to me at least). The chief terrorist group of the book is Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (AFR), the wheelchair assassins, whose back-story consumes eight pages of endnotes and is far to involved to cover here. It's all great stuff though and any book that spends time discussing Canada in any way always seems more engaging to me.

The book finishes at a strange point with many unanswered questions. Upon completion I remembered that the very first twenty pages or so take place about a year after the events at end of the book. I went back and re-read them, only to realize that that section has a whole different meaning than my first interpretation. This is a book that must be read multiple times in order to extract all it has to offer, but I'm not sure I'll be up to trying again for a couple years. I poked around online for interpretations and it appears to be an activity of some interest on the Internet, piecing together what may have happened in the year between the end of the novel and the events of the first twenty pages.

This hasn't been a very coherent blog post. Despite my attempts to improve my writing skills I do not have the talent necessary to discuss a book of this magnitude in any meaningful way. It is just too big. If you're interested in learning more, check out the introduction to the tenth anniversary edition written by David Eggers; it's spot on.

Myself, I will close with the synopsis from the original edition in an attempt to at least convey what the book was about.

Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch it. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and the halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie - as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel. On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do.

Holiday Review

As usual, the holidays were a busy time for me this year. I failed at all my relaxation goals (like finishing the epic-sized book I've been reading for the past month) and spent the whole break in a constant state of activity. Fortunately the activity was all fantastic and normally involved spending time with amazing people. I saw old friends and family and also enjoyed the company of a surprising number of new people, all of whom were awesome too.

Using as few words as possible my holidays went roughly like this: The Hobbit, board games and scotch, full-day Civilization game, Christmas with my mom's side (ultra special guests: Shannon, Gareth and little monster), Christmas with my dad's side, family Christmas in London and then in Toronto (with Django), Christmas in Ottawa with lots of snow and hatchets, Christmas in Caledonia with pizza and marbles, market in London, Life of Pi, New Year's Party at my place, hanging with Mike in Toronto, hummus, Yerba Mate, more scotch and amazing beers.

I totally abandoned all my recent health changes for the holidays and I definitely notice the effects. I'm sluggish and five pounds of fat that magically melted off my body over the last three months has completely returned. I'm eager to get back to "standard operating procedure" and kicked it off this evening with a big-ass salad piled high with avocado. Gonna focus on large quantities of veggies for a bit while I wait for my body to once again stop craving sugar and flour.

2012-12 | 2013-02