Note: The following is a true story, but the names of certain individuals, and other identifying details, have been changed.

A bullet through the head

The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college was the first of two six-week training programs at the Marines Corps officer training base at Quantico, Virginia. The second six-week training program, in the Marine Platoon Leader Class (PLC), is completed the following summer before graduation and acceptance of a commission in the USMC. The fourth week of my first summer was my first live fire training, which begins on the 100 yard rifle range. The Marine Corps takes rifle marksmanship far more seriously than any of the other three branches of the military. Every Marine officer must qualify each year as a rifleman. Failing to do so, the officer must write a letter to the Commandant of the Marine Corps and explain the unacceptable marksmanship. Coming to the attention of the top officer of the Corps would be auspicious, except for failure as a rifleman. The officer is expected to do whatever is necessary to re-qualify as soon as possible.

My training weapon was the M14, a redesign and upgrade of the WWII M1 Garand rifle. The most obvious difference was that the M14 was fitted with a bottom loading magazine that held up to 20 rounds. It was also modified to allow the rifleman to fire in fully automatic mode like a machine gun, BRRRRRRRRRRRT, with the flick of a selection lever. Otherwise, it was fired in semiautomatic mode like the M1. You squeezed the trigger once and fired one round at a time. One squeeze, one shot. With the firing of each round the spent cartridge shell was ejected, automatically, the next bullet was loaded into the firing chamber, and the weapon was ready for another squeeze of the trigger. The M14 rifle was designed to fire the 7.62 mm (30 caliber) ammunition that was standardized for all of the NATO countries. Another improvement was fitting a bi-pod under the rifle barrel for more stability when firing from a prone position.

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by Pervez Hoodbhoy

It was mid-October 1973 when, after a grueling 26-hour train ride from Karachi, I reached the physics department of Islamabad University (or Quaid-e-Azam University, as it is now known). As I dumped my luggage and “hold-all” in front of the chairman's office, a tall, handsome man with twinkling eyes looked at me curiously. He was wearing a bright orange Che Guevara t-shirt and shocking green pants. His long beard, though shorter than mine, was just as unruly and unkempt. We struck up a conversation. At 23, I had just graduated from MIT and was to be a lecturer in the department; he had already been teaching as associate professor for five years. The conversation turned out to be the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Together with Abdul Hameed Nayyar – also bearded at the time – we became known as the Sufis of Physics. Thirty six years later, when Faheem Hussain lost his battle against prostate cancer, our sadness was beyond measure.

Revolutionary, humanist, and scientist, Faheem Hussain embodied the political and social ferment of the late 1960's. With a Ph.D that he received in 1966 from Imperial College London, he had been well-placed for a solid career anywhere in the world. In a profession where names matter, he had worked under the famous P.T. Mathews in the group headed by the even better known Abdus Salam. After his degree, Faheem spent two years at the University of Chicago. This gave him a chance to work with some of the world's best physicists, but also brought him into contact with the American anti-Vietnam war movement and a powerful wave of revolutionary Marxist thinking. Even decades later, Faheem would describe himself as an “unreconstructed Marxist”. Participating in the mass anti-war demonstrations at UC had stirred his moral soul; he felt the urge to do more than just physics. Now married to Jane Steinfels, a like-minded soul who he met in Chicago, Faheem decided to return to Pakistan.

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Part One

by Daniel Rourke

“The spacetime of the lightcones and the fermions and scalar are connected to the chocolate grinder. The chocolate grinder receives octonionic structure from the water wheel.”

– Tony Smith, Valdosta Museum Website

In 1927 Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass was broken in transit. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp's title for the piece, depicts a mechanical Bride in its upper section and nine abstract Bachelors in its lower. Duchamp took oil, lead, varnish and dust and sandwiched them between panes of glass. The Bachelors encounter their Bride in the presence of a large, gorgeous, chocolate grinder whose drums revolve in motions which seem to reach up, across the divide, to touch the ethereal Bride in her domain.

In 1936 Duchamp 'fixed' the broken Bride by repairing, rather than replacing, the shattered panes of glass. He claimed to like it better that way.

Today progenies of Duchamp invest time, thought and often a great many dollars in their own artworks. The successful ones amongst them package those artworks up in foam, plaster and cellophane to be moved, shipped and re-exhibited in multiple gallery spaces again and again. Without dwelling on the commodification of the artwork I want to build my own scheme for understanding these movements. I want to rest a little and draw the lines of desire that artworks traverse; the paths they take that human intent had nothing to do with; the archives they carry within themselves. For every map there are points we must plot, spaces and places in real space and time that require isolation and signification. We grab a GPS device and codify the crossroads where St. Martin's Place meets Trafalgar Square, marking carefully the precise angle via which Madonna on the Rocks will be fed through the clamouring crowds into the The National Gallery's mouth. Artworks live in motion, just as readily as they live in the gallery. In the dark recess of transit they sketch a hidden, secret life away from the viewing eye, becoming not 'art', but 'object' – traversing the gap between these concepts as they travel.

The Bride now rests out her Autumn years in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, waiting for gravity to release her chocolate grinder once again from its sandwich of (un)shattered glass.

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To Roof

Ah, to put a roofing spade
to desiccated shingles

To lean upon the spade-handle’s end
leveraging stubborn nails
from their impacted seats

To wrench my back

To abrade my bleeding hands again
stroking the asphalt’s pebbled face

To fight a wind while laying felt
which, like Ahab’s sails, would whisk me
to a mad roofer’s end

To slam my thumb once more

To slash my hands with flashing
imagining the course of rainwater
down a 4 square deck–
……… to place aluminum just so
as if I could plumb
a droplet’s depth

To race the advance of a front

To look skyward anxious
under gathering clouds

To become so unfocused in haste
my courses, like the venal
schemes of politicians, veer off
disordered and untrue
leaving poor substrate constituents
vulnerable to a deluge

Ah, but then, at last,
to button it up

To take the scaffold down
and store the ladder

To pack the tools and,
eye-balling the shingled slope,
wax smug

To hope again I’d out-danced
natural law

To think I’d punked Poseidon
(who pelts my roof with rain and hail)

To stride off then self-satisfied
and step upon a roofing nail

………………………

By Jim Culleny; Sept 27, 2009

Jim Carroll's recent death inspired as many eulogies and elegies as might be expected from the passing of a poet, rocker, and memorist, especially one whose reputation is so bound to a specific place (New York City) and time (the late 1970's and early 1980's). My friend Michael Lally, also an urban Catholic poet of major repute, drew some online flak for using Carroll's death as an opportunity for reflection – on Jim, himself, and his life in comparison to Jim's (they were both working-class Catholic boys who stormed the hipster-poetry barricades).

Michael spoke honestly of his sense of competition with Jim, and I defended him in the “comments” section of his post, writing: “… for those who prefer to be true to a fallen writer's memory at the moment of his death, I would answer: What could be truer than that?” I then went on to tell my own story in relation to Jim's (who I didn't know):

“I, too, felt a lot of envy toward Jim Carroll. I had a manager and was trying to get a rock n roll record deal in NYC when he switched from spoken word to music and was signed in a heartbeat. He had the looks, the magnetism, the hipness … and then, all of a sudden, he had the deal with Rolling Stones Records. (I think it was Stones …) The truth is, my feelings had no more to do with Jim Carroll than perhaps yours did. He was a placeholder for some things inside of me that needed to get out. That's not his fault – but it's my story, which is ultimately the only one I'm qualified to write.”

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Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There’s a good chance the answer will be “no.” If nothing else, there’s reason to think this could be a contentious point among men and women of learning, debatable on both sides.

A span of thousands of years is both extremely short and impenetrably long. It’s short because human nature will not change much in that time. Which means our human tendency to discount the past and pooh-pooh the achievements of antique cultures will not have diminished. Dismissing technical achievements in the remote past is especially tempting. We’re willing to believe that people philandered and murdered and philosophized uselessly like we do today, but we conveniently reserve the notion of technical progress for ourselves. It’s really a poverty of imagination: They didn’t have the tools or libraries or scientific understanding we do today, so how could they have accomplished much? We tend to conflate science and technology, as if one cannot exist without the other. But without much science the Greeks did calculate the circumference of the earth; the Chinese did invent paper, gunpowder, and the printing press eons before Europeans; the Polynesians did navigate thousands of miles of open ocean on tiny barks; and the Egyptians (among many others) did log as much about the movement and appearance of stars and planets as astronomers know today. Nor are those special examples, or even unique—many technologies arose more than once.

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Krzysztof Kotarski

When Roman Polański was arrested this weekend, I immediately thought of this.

This is the genius of Dave Chappelle—that sentence could have been spoken in Polish, English or French, and “Nóż w wodzie”, “Chinatown” or “the Pianist” could fit in rather nicely in place of “Thriller” depending (of course) on one’s age and cultural demographic.

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A Good Beginning…

Excited as I was for autumn to arrive, it’s gotten off to an awful start. After spending three days bedridden with the first all-congesting cold to hit me this season, my head is still in a fog as thick as the one that shrouded the whole city this morning. But this season’s less-than-auspicious opener did afford me one thing I almost never grant myself: many hours of calm, quiet time to rest. This is something that comes hard to me, as I tend to fill what little down time I find doing anything but relaxing. Because I felt wretched enough that none of my usual pursuits—drawing, reading, strolling—were possible, I was left only one option: to just lie there and think.

After a few minutes indulging my mind’s fickle tides and following little thoughts to the most varied places imaginable, sleep swept in. This happened repeatedly, offering several veritable voyages as I lay cushioned between the conscious and unconscious. Early this afternoon brought me back to an episode from this past summer, walking through Milan’s little-known yet magnificent Bagatti Valsecchi Museum.

My visit was brief, as I’d gotten sidetracked on several tiny lanes before finally finding Via Gesù 5. I’d been additionally delayed in the museum’s two courtyards—ringed with intriguing inscriptions—so only made my way up the grand main stair with forty-odd minutes left before closing. It happened to be Friday, 31 July; the museum would be closed the entire month of August, and I was there for a whirlwind four-day work trip, so knew it was now or never.

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By Evert Cilliers

Before Obama one would have to go back to LBJ and FDR to find a US president with any balls.

The rest of them have been there to serve the wishes of our elite like sissy lackeys (they're not even Heideggers fronting for the Nazis; they're more like insect-munching Rensfields to Dracula). In fact, it's been an American tradition, ever since our founding fathers, for the people to put a stooge of the plutocracy in charge. Jefferson had no idea how vacuous a voice he was crying in the wilderness when he wrote: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” His hope was in total vain, because even in his day, the government equalled the plutocracy, plus he got one thing dead wrong: instead of defying the laws of the country, our plutocrats eventually found it easier to get their lobbyists to write the laws of the country.

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“Gravitational corridors could help spacecraft ply the solar system like ships
borne on ocean currents, (say) scientists investigating space travel.”
…………………………………………………………….–The Telegraph; Sept. 10,2009

Ignorant Explorers

In what seems void are corridors:
avenues in nets of gravity between planets
suns moons meteors dust, channels
in nets of love between us

………………
We set out through them
first in flame machines
burning hydrogen and smoldering lust
to come hopefully unspent upon
some new shore anywhere but here
anywhere but in boredom
anywhere but in the best place:
……………..
the den the lair the home the nest
the sanctum cloister cave the rest
………………….

anywhere but the wholly familiar
being such bold and
ignorant explorers
……………………….
……………………….

by Jim Culleny

by Nick Smyth

I

The nuclear ash from the Bloggingheads Incident may have settled, but it's a pretty good bet that creationism—and its related, kooky, attention-grabbing brethren—will continue to dominate internet headlines. It's an even safer bet that many of us will continue to oppose religious/mystical/creationist “cranks” in the name of Science. One of our main lines of attack will be territorial: we will accuse them of being on the wrong side. Science is over here, we will say, and you are over there, and we all know what that means.

The most interesting thing about this manoeuvre is that almost no-one performing it—scientist, philosopher, or otherwise—will be in possession of a single defensible definition of “science”. In other words, they won't know what they're talking about.

The situation is not good. In the defense of progress and civilization, some very smart people are marshalling a weak and ill-defined concept which cannot support the rhetorical weight they have placed upon it. The cranks may one day discover that this is so, and they will immediately (and devastatingly) point to the irony involved in being called irrational by people who do not know what they are talking about.

What's worse, I contend that this ignorance is unavoidable: there is no real boundary between “science” and “non-science”, and all of our posturing amounts to little more than power politics under the guise of reasoned discussion.

Now, if you believe, as I do, that the research programmes associated with what we commonly call “science” are among the most reliable guides to truth and progress, then you will want to know how we can defend those programmes against real threats to their authority without attacking them for being “pseudoscientific”. I hope to show that there is a far better option available to us, and it involves a simple change of focus.

To put my position bluntly, the problem with creationism isn't that it's “pseudoscience”. The problem with creationism is that it's bollocks.

“Bollocks” is one of the Great British Words underappreciated in North America. It denotes rubbish, nonsense, or claptrap with guttural force and not-very-subtle sexual undertones. Say it to yourself right now. Its derisive power should strike you immediately.

Yet, the very idea of creationism as bollocks implies a crucial change in focus, one which sets us back on a path that we unwisely abandoned at the turn of the 20^th century. In short, we must drop our modern obsession with science as a formal category and recover the older conception of science as intimately connected with epistemology, with issues of truth and justification. For some of us, this will not be easy.

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by Colin Marshall

I once heard a joke astutely analogizing humanity, that most meaning-seeking of all life forms, to a race of space aliens possessed of large trunks. Presented with any given fact, the aliens respond not by asking “Yes, but what does that mean?” but “Yes, but what does that have to do with trunks?” Were Yumiko, Maborosi's young protagonist, one of these aliens, she'd spend much of the film on the trunk hunt, consciously or subconsciously. But she's a human being, and as such always seeking the why, a seemingly simple tendency that constructs the entire picture's framework.

As the film opens, we witness, in flashback, the first event that throws Yumiko's mind into a questioning, wondering loop. As a little girl, she watched her hunched grandmother wander off into the distance, insisting that she must return, on foot, to her childhood home. The scene turns out to be a recurring dream that has plagued the now-twentysomething Yumiko since the grandmother's figure receded into the distance and never appeared again. Why did she feel compelled to return to the village of her youth? Why didn't she come back? Why couldn't Yumiko stop her? Izuo, Yumiko's husband, knows well what haunts his wife. “I'm not the reincarnation of your grandmother,” he reminds her when she suddenly wakes, the dream over once again.

Yumiko and Izuo live a limited but painless working-class lifestyle in urban Osaka, he working his days in a small factory, she caring for their baby son Yuichi. When his bicycle disappears, Izuo casually swipes another from a richer part of town. Koreeda illustrates the couple's day-to-day existence with subdued, near-wordless sequences whose naturalism puts us right on the edge of voyeurism. Disguising the purloined bike, Yumiko and Izuo repaint it together in secret. A delighted Yuichi laughs as Yumiko bathes him in a minature tub. Izuo expresses his unease at the topknot a co-worker, a onetime sumo wrestler, still wears. Using unadorned locations, very few close-ups or camera movements and almost entirely natural light, they demonstrate an aesthetic strain in Koreeda's work that's stronger nowhere than in this particular work, a film with all of cinema's controlled precision and none of its vestigial, theater-inherited artifice.

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Sughra Raza. Summer Stockings. 2006.

Digital photograph.

by Michael Blim

Now begins the end game of the health care reform legislation. The President has spoken, and Senator Baucus has finally made his play. The results could not be more disappointing.

These latest contributions to the health debate leave millions of people uncovered, and everyone else save people on Medicare and Medicaid and patients of the Veterans Administration health system still contracting insurance for care and cost with the same insurers that helped create the health care morass we have now. For our pains, those of us now insured or who will be insured under pending legislation, receive the guarantee that our coverage cannot be cancelled because of illness, pre-existing condition, or job loss. While important guarantees, they do nothing to answer how we will pay for rising premiums or combat the war for payment or reimbursement raged by providers and insurers even on people now adequately insured.

But the bottom line is that these latest proposals are neither universal nor fair: They do not guarantee every person equal access to medical care s/he needs. The proposals invite the creation of a plethora of complicated rules and regulations that will render difficult or impossible redress by ordinary citizens.

Some have reminded us of the old adage that law-making is a little like sausage-making. The result may be good, but you wouldn’t want to see how it’s done. In this instance, the probable result is as ugly as the process.

Try this analogy instead: our health system is like the Gordian knot. Only cutting it asunder will work. The Democratic Congress and President Obama have been trying carefully to untie it. This is a mission that can never succeed.

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By Namit Arora

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
__________________________________________

Imagine the Middle East in the early centuries of the Common Era. There is no Islam. The two dominant powers in the region are the Romans and the Persians, with a long history of fighting over territory and trade routes. The border between their two empires keeps shifting across Syria and Mesopotamia.

To the north of this border, in the steppes, are the Turks, deemed ‘savage and warlike’ by Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth century Roman historian and native of Syria. To the south, in the desert, are the Arabs. Neither the Persians, nor the Romans, took much interest in conquering these semi-nomadic tribal peoples. Instead, they followed that most pragmatic of imperial policies: turn these ‘semi-civilized’ folks into allies and use them opportunistically to score against their main rival.

At stake, besides territorial control, were the trade routes to the East for Chinese silk and Indian spices, which either went through the northern Turkish lands, or across the Sinai and the Red sea, or over the caravan routes hugging the western Arabian coast down to Aden and beyond by sea. [1] The Persians, during times of conflict, blocked all overland eastern access for the Romans.

So the two empires acted like modern corporations doling out political ‘contributions’, and the Arabs and the Turks learned to exploit the situation to their advantage, extracting a variety of military and economic subsidies from both empires. The Romans, after a botched military campaign to gain a foothold at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula and the Red sea, preferred thereafter to rely on the principalities of Arabia for the safer overland route to Aden. This caravan trade soon supported several small towns and kingdoms in Arabia. The imperial powers, by and large, sought to maintain some form of indirect rule or clientage.

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by Shiban Ganju

We had assembled outside Lucknow to train ‘master trainers’. They had travelled from their villages, one to two hundred miles away, for a six day education in health care. Women outnumbered men in this group of thirty five. We believed, on their return, they would become health trainers in their native villages.

Today was the fifth day. We had an open interactive session, where the trainees got to express their thoughts freely. They had already bonded with each other; camaraderie flourished from giggles and side chatter. Inhibitions had eased.

Puja, a small woman sitting near the window, stood and said she had just composed a poem, which she wanted to recite. The group shouted a noise of approval. She began. She had captured the essence of maternal and child health in rhyme. Trainees murmured appreciation; she was their resident poet.

The girl in yellow Sari, sitting on the opposite side, rose. She introduced herself, “My name is Mehrunissa. I want to express my gratitude to all of you and the organizers to let me participate here. I joined the women’s group one year ago. I started attending their meetings. Till that time, I had never participated in any group. For the first time in my life I started stepping out and this is the first time in my life that I have stayed out of my house on my own for seven days.”

“Did your husband or mother in law object?” asked the moderator.

“In the beginning my mother in law asked some questions but now she is used to it. My husband has supported me.”

The group cheered – men a little louder than the women – for this empowerment in action!

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The Ghost of the Arrow of Time

An hypothetical-resurrected-formerly-dead
in a daydream arrived with a scent of dread
which I could not put my finger on

yet knew that I knew
the way I know a déjà vu and
you

came as something I ephemerally knew
came as something ephemerally new

as a bud for instance at the tip of a limb
that once before has never been
but anyway was last spring again

came as a ghost with a cock-sure grin
in a hunter’s cap camouflaged and slim

so thin as to almost disappear
as it turned, the way a tide rolls out and in
almost as if it were never there

as a bow wave breaks in heavy seas
as now breaks over thee & me

to shudder us deeply along our keels
sometimes bringing us to our knees

scouring stains as a burglar steals
to wake-off distantly from our stern

as foam and eddies and whirlpools curl
as flotsam bobs and minutes burn

by Jim Culleny; Sept 2009

By Aditya Dev Sood

I have been directed to a line that says C.P.L.P. for some reason. Most of the passengers around me are holding Brazilian passports, though a series of flags, mostly unrecognizable to me, are flashing on the LED display. The Comunidades dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, I later learn, is a radically alternative way of cutting up the planet, predicated on Portugal’s colonial heritage and historical experience of the wider world. Along with Portugal, it includes Brazil, Angola, East Timor among other member states, while also acknowledging India (because of Goa) and China (because of Macau) as associate members.

I’m here because my company, the Center for Knowledge Societies, is being showcased as one of seven design firms from around the world at a exhibit called The Pace of Design, curated by Tulga Beyerle. It is part of a design biennale festival called ExperimentaDesign, directed by Guta Moura Guedes. Without the long and pedigreed design traditions of, say, Rotterdam, Berlin or Milan, Lisbon seems a quaint location for a major European design event. But the enthusiasm of the festival’s founder and director, Guta and her dedicated team have made the festival a relaxed yet comprehensive review of what contemporary design is and what it means for the cultures of Europe and the world.

Conferencing starts at a leisurely 11.00 am in the morning, and then only when the event bus arrives or quorum is achieved, whichever is later. The most important talks are scheduled at three in the afternoon, and then they last a professorial hour, rather than the 6 minutes 40 seconds that have become de rigueur in the design world. Openings are scheduled, for ten, eleven, and later in the evening, after a series of other dinners and ceremonial events, and well past midnight we’re still early birds at the nightclub party. In India, we are so used to taking grief from foreign visitors about time and timings, that it is oddly disconcerting to find oneself in the faster lane, shuffling so as to slow down and find the rhythm of one’s hosts, which is languid, fluid, flexible, and calm as the afternoon sun.

The air in Lisbon is gentle, and the sun looks to be taking all afternoon and evening to set, showing the city’s yellow, blue, and pastel-shaded buildings in their best light. In the city center are the municipal buildings in a dirty, almost acid, yellow that could only look poetic in this peacable and becalming light.

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Justin E. H. Smith

The Franco-Romanian aphorist and pessimist Émile Cioran describes his childhood in the Transylvanian village of Răşinari as follows:

My childhood was a paradise. Really! The Boacii hill is for me something entirely essential. Everything else seems to be of an incomparable mediocrity… You cannot imagine the extent to which those images are present to my mind. Without diminishing them in the least, an idiotic period that I regret having lived through has imposed itself between them and me.

I personally could not care less about the vividness of Cioran's memories of childhood. What matters to me are my own memories, not of Răşinari circa 1920 but of Rio Linda circa 1980, of the insects and the birds I encountered, of the fox that I imagined to live in what we called the ‘back pasture’ even though I'd never seen him; of the leaves I tore off from our garden's specimens, rolled between my fingers, and sampled on my tongue; of the mole I once found floating dead in the swimming pool; and of the cans of Del Monte vegetables I once discovered in the cupboard, bloated from botulism like a mole in a pool.

Who cares, you say, and that is in part my point. We each care about our own childhood thing, and can't believe that others, who've failed to share in it, nonetheless go about their adult lives as though nothing were missing. But while the particular details of Boacii Hill or of Rio Linda cannot be expected to matter, the fact that each of us has our own version of these places is worthy of some reflection.

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Watching the legions of Michael Jackson fans make pilgrimages to and build cairns of flowers and stuffed toys at the Neverland Ranch in southern California, I can’t say I shared their sorrow exactly. I did sympathize: Boy, had I been there. When David Foster Wallace hanged himself at his own southern California home on September 12, 2008—that’s the closest I’ve ever been to crying over the death of someone I didn’t know. What roiled my emotions all the more was the now-too-late conviction that I’d betrayed Wallace.

DFW called himself a novelist, wanted to be remembered as a novelist, corresponded with novelists about the craft, labored for years over the 2.75 novels he managed to finish (the last 0.75 of which unfinished novels is being molded in a full 1.00 novel called The Pale King by editors at Little, Brown, his publishing company, at this very moment). But as of September 12, 2008, beyond the disappointing exception of a 3,209-word New Yorker story (“Good People”), I hadn’t read more than a few spare sentences of the fiction Wallace considered his life’s work. Instead, all the riffs on dictionaries and tennis and John McCain and porno award shows that I’d committed to memory practically (I don’t even play tennis), all the lines I quoted to uncomprehending family members and the pieces I forwarded incessantly to friends who never read them, were from magazine articles. I loved Wallace for journalistic essays—what in less polite terms novelists often refer to as hack work—that Wallace did for mercenary reasons, because an editor dangled a paycheck, and he was polite, and he needed money like the rest of us.

Now there’s no reason to think Wallace loathed writing nonfiction—it just wasn’t his passion. He aligned himself with Dostoevsky and Pynchon, not Capote and Talese, and there’s even scuttlebutt out there that he killed himself in despair over his unshapely mess of a last book and the pressure of never living up to, well, himself. I will read that last book when it comes out, for sure, and since last September I’ve decoded a fair number of his hermetic short stories and even committed a month to finishing (and I did finish!) all 1,079 pages of Infinite Jest, down to every last little cross-eyed footnote’s footnote. I felt less guilty after finishing, but yet finishing only reinforced what I’d suspected. When the Library of America editors get around to selecting a picture of the long-haired, bandana-ed, tobacco-cheeked Wallace for its 2050 catalogues, they’re not going to spotlight his fiction in this first volume. It’ll be the nonfiction he composed during spare hours.

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