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The Mice made an album and a half in the mid '80s and promptly split up. At the end of this month Scat is re-releasing both on one CD, and wow: it's really good. You hear early Replacements, some pre-Superchunk. The kind of stuff that you know you're going to love after the first chorus of the first song. Grab some mp3s if you don't believe me, and especially if you do.
Posted by lld at 09:24 PM | TrackBack
I promise I'm not (usually) so crazy as to have three David Foster Wallace-related entries in a row, but today on the busride home from work I finished the story in Oblivion entitled "Good Old Neon". As I got to the end I noticed an odd little thing at the bottom of the last page, some kind of notation, code or reference. This is what it says:
[→NMN.80.418]
I paused at it, thinking at first briefly that it was some ornate page number since it occupies a space roughly akin to where a page number would be in the bottom right corner, but it wasn't a page number (those are in the upper right). I flipped the page over and sure enough the story was over, on the next page was the beginning of the next story.
I sat there on the bus thinking "Okay, so this cryptic little thing obviously means something, NMN.80.418. Something I can figure out, maybe." I love a good puzzle.
I stared at it some--"It looks somewhat like a reference, so maybe NMN=Naperville Morning News (I made a mental note to Google to see if there is such thing), okay maybe it's the news story about the crash, and year 1980, and issue 418...okay but no, there aren't likely 418 issues in a year, so that can't be right." But then I realized that 1991 was the year of the crash, not 1980. Then suddenly my eye noticed that .418 was the batting average of the narrator mentioned on the very same page and '80 the year we are to assume he graduated from high school. "Okay, I thought, so then NMN? Well isn't the narrator's name Neal?" *flip flip flip* "Yeah! Thought so. So can we assume that MN are his middle and last initials? And if so, then...well what does that mean? Are these what his life boils down to--initials, graduation and batting average? So then what about the arrow? And the brackets?"
So I don't know. Anyone else have ideas?
Posted by lld at 08:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
I wrote the following letter to the editors at Gourmet, in support of David Foster Wallace's lobster article. It's not the most eloquent thing I've ever written, but it's really hard to write something like this and maintain a tone that people will consider and not just reject as extremism.
Dear Editors,Thank you for David Foster Wallace's article "Consider the Lobster". I am quite sure you're getting a torrent of angry mail attacking Wallace as a writer, his facts, his observations, and your judgment as editors. I applaud you for publishing such a thought-provoking article in spite of the reaction it was bound to elicit. I bought your magazine specifically to read this article and I'm really glad I did.
I've been a vegetarian for something like 15 years, and I was fascinated to witness in Wallace's article the early process of someone confronting those most ingrained of habits surrounding our food--thinking about the suffering that might be involved in the foods we eat and what we can do to reduce the amount of suffering in the world.
The amazing array of vegetarian foods available is merely a side-benefit to vegetarianism but one that I enjoy every single day, free of the 'confusion' Wallace suffers trying to balance gustatory enjoyment and animal suffering and death. Refusing to take part in the cycle of killing for food is not selflessness, it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done.
Posted by lld at 10:01 PM | TrackBack
Picked up a copy of the issue of Gourmet featuring David Foster Wallace's article on the Maine Lobster Festival today. He begins by describing a few aspects of the festival in his trademark way, but then not 1/3 of the way through begins to discuss the issue of boiling lobster alive, to which topic he devotes the rest of the article. It's remarkable not just because he's a great writer and is in top form, but because we get to read someone in the early-ish stages of questioning the practice of eating meat.
I find this really fascinating and I'll be writing about it more; I plan to write a letter to the magazine, partly to offset the hatemail they'll undoubtedly get (Wallace ends by taking the question to the readers: do you reject the notion that animals shouldn't die for your meal out of hand? Do you just avoid thinking about it, and if so, have you questioned your reluctance to think about it? &c.), and partly just to support the process that is certainly going on in his mind and hopefully in the minds of a few readers of the article--the process of confronting your eating habits, thinking about suffering and what you can do to reduce it in the world.
Posted by lld at 11:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
I've seen links to that 'free' iPod pyramid scheme around a few sites I visit, so let me just state for the record that I'd rather spend the $250 than bug my friends to sign up for crap.
What I don't understand about the whole deal is this: is eBay or whoever the other companies that you signup for really paying this company over $40 for each sign-up? (The way I understand it, you + 5 people sign up and then they send you the $250 iPod, therefore $42.50 per signup + I assume the pyramid scammers also take a cut, so it must be even more than that.) That seems like an incredibly bad use of eBay's promotion/marketing funds.
Speaking of new iPods, there's a tax-free holiday coming up and the university for which I work has a number of the new ones in stock at educational discounts, and mine's an original 5-gigger that's busting-at-the-seams full. It's a tempting deal.
Posted by lld at 08:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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