Tell us how you really feel, Bret.

Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?

Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well I don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching...

Now this is how you hold a grudge, people. Wait until someone dies and then respond to a jab from 17 years earlier! DFW on American Psycho in 1993:

DFW: ...You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s "American Psycho": it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.

LM: But at least in the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.

Via Sagatrope

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There's this nifty tool floating around the internet the last couple days called I Write Like. You put a couple paragraphs into a box, click submit, and get the name of a famous author that you write like. I was wondering how good it was, so I spent a couple hours putting in some paragraphs of famous authors to see what I Write Like would come up with.

The results were mixed. A lot of these writers write like David Foster Wallace even if David Foster Wallace writes like Ian Fleming. I found the Project Gutenberg website with the top 100 ebooks and I Write Like did pretty well with the first couple paragraphs with most of those authors. In any case, I Write Like nailed 14 of the 30 classic authors giving it a success rate of 47%. For what it's worth, Jersey Shore Nickname Generator is accurate 94% of the time. Note: The tool is fun. This isn't a fair test.

James Joyce - The Dubliners is like James Joyce.
Stephen King - The Gingerbread Girl is like Dan Brown or William Gibson depending how many paragraphs you take.
William Gibson - Neuromancer is like David Foster Wallace.
David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster is like Ian Fleming.
Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is like Mark Twain.
Ambrose Bierce - An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is like Robert Louis Stephenson. This is my favorite short story, by the way.
William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily is like Margaret Mitchell.
Ernest Hemingway - Hills Like White Elephants is like Ian Fleming. I was pretty sure this one would be right.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is like H.P. Lovecraft.
H. P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness is like Edgar Allan Poe.
Edgar Allan Poe - The Angel of the Odd is like David Foster Wallace.
J.D. Salinger - For Esmé - with Love and Squalor is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Arthur Conan Doyle - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis is like James Joyce.
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson is like Robert Louis Stevenson.
William Shakespeare - Hamlet is like William Shakespeare.
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice is like Jane Austen.
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is like Lewis Carroll.
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo is like Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities is like Charles Dickens.
Bram Stoker - Dracula is like Bram Stoker.
H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds, by is like H.G. Wells.
Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights is like Daniel Defoe.
Agata Christie - The Secret Adversary is like Agatha Christie.
Beatrix Potter - Peter Rabbit is like Arthur Conan Doyle.
Herman Melville - Moby Dick; Or the Whale is like Robert Louis Stevenson.
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein is like Mary Shelley.
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy is like Leo Tolstoy.
Homer - The Iliad is like William Shakespeare.
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle is like Kurt Vonnegut.

Then, in the interest of pandering, I thought I'd look up a few contemporary writers/websites I like:
Jason Kottke is like (this surprises no one) David Foster Wallace.
The Daily What is like Stephen King.
John Gruber / Daring Fireball is like Stephen King.
Andy Baio / Waxy.org is like James Joyce.
Michael Lewis is like David Foster Wallace.
Chuck Klosterman is like Kurt Vonegut.
Bill Simmons is like Stephen King.

Now some pop culture folks:
Tracy Jordan is like James Joyce.
Don Draper's slide projector monologue is like Margaret Atwood.
The Real Shaq on Twitter is like Dan Brown.
Britney Spears on Twitter is like Dan Brown. (Probably because he uses web addresses in his writing?)
Britney Spears - Oops...I Did it Again is like Stephanie Meyer.
Jawbreaker - Kiss the Bottle is like David Foster Wallace.
Anthony Bourdain is like Dan Brown.

For what it's worth, when you put this post through the tool, it's like H.P. Lovecraft. Who did we leave out? Post your finds in the comments.

Lugar Común (Common Place) is a photo project matching women and their maids "designed to disrupt our acceptance of established social hierarchies". The project put 50 sets of maids and employers from Argentina, Chile, and Colombia in similar outfits and poses. Pretty cool project.



Thanks, Kerry

On August 13th, both The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love come out in theaters. The Monocular Group made a trailer for The Expendables to remind you what will happen if Eat, Pray, Love wins the weekend. "You will see this movie. Not off your torrents. In a fucking theater. Where violence belongs."

I live on Lake St and every couple years you find out why. We were away this weekend when our entire neighborhood flooded, stranding cars and trains. Here's an awesome video by Paper Fortress Films showing the situation Saturday afternoon.



A couple years ago, I made this much less awesome video to show a flood.

Not much to say, is there?

TomTom is releasing a Star Wars themed voice pack for it's GPS units. This is the viral ad they released to celebrate. It worked for me.

Here's Darth Vader:


Thanks, Derek.

I was almost certain I'd written about this here before, but I can't seem to find anything. The article of the week has to be this long investigative look at the northeast nitrous scene. I can't recommend the article highly enough.

If you've been to a big concert or festival in the last 10 years or so, specifically a jam band, you've seen the dudes selling nitrous balloons and the crowd around them. The nitrous tanks earn BIG money, and because of that, they're run by folks willing to do anything to protect them. I was a tour manager for a long time (which I'll hopefully write about sometime), and the Philly Gas Mob was always a presence at festivals. I doubt I'd be fascinated by this topic if I hadn't actually seen them around. We used to talk about the Philly Gas Mob as a mythical idea. We knew there was some organization to it, but no one really knew anything about it. It was violent and a problem by the time we stopped touring, and it's just gotten worse now, and more out in the open.

The whole article is hilarious in that, "Wait, this really happens?" kind of way.

Nitrous is called "hippie crack" because of its addictive qualities. Every morning, the festival campgrounds are riddled with balloons, "like bullet shells on a battlefield," says a fan. Unlike traditional drugs, which have long-lasting effects and can carry a fan through a concert, the high from N20 is cheap and quick. After that, it's often back to the end of the tank line for another round. "It's an instant rush of pure euphoria, but it only lasts for 30 seconds or a minute, and then you want it back," says Justin Heller, a fan who owns his own biodiesel company. He no longer does balloons, but remembers the days of buying 15 in a row. "You don't think about your money—you're just like, 'I want that again, I want that again, I want that again.' "

I read this Newsweek Tumblr excerpt of Fareed Zakaria's column Obama's CEO Problem. To save you the trouble, Obama's CEO problem is too much regulation. If only there was less regulation, the top 500 American nonfinancial companies, who have $1.8 trillion in cash, would be stimulating the economy more themselves. $1.8 trillion is a lot of money and would go a long way. "The Business Roundtable, which had supported the Obama administration, has begun to complain about the myriad new laws and regulations being cooked up in Washington."

And then, about 25 seconds later, I read this Reuters' piece via TPM, which made the point that the regulations governing offshore drilling call for use of oil skimming material already being used in the BP oils spill, which means there really shouldn't be any more drilling or exploration until skimming capacity is increased.

So, I would argue that there really isn't too much regulation at all, and what there is isn't working.

Vanity Fair magazine asked 52 experts to pick the five most important architecture works since 1980. There were 132 listed, and here's a link to the top 21. See also the complete results and a slide show on Gehry's buildings. Kudos to VF for at least making it possible to look at the top 21 buildings on one page. Slide shows are killing the internet.

I've been to 2 of the buildings, what about you?