Comedy at the Edge by Richard Zoglin

Standup comedy in New York has gone the way of everything else that was cool in the city in the 1970s: expensive, mainstream, and rigidly branded. But if you go to Comic Strip Live on the Upper East Side, on a Friday evening around 6, you see something different from the bland, two-drink-minimum efficiency of Caroline's in Times Square.

A pint-sized whirlwind of wry energy, simultaneously busting chops and betraying a motherly pride, Gladys introduces the lineup of unknown comedians waiting for their chances at the open mic. Dressed in a blazer and jeans, and in the spotlight glare against a brick backdrop, Gladys suggests these are young Dave Chappelles or Jerry Seinfelds--not just a ragtag assortment of stockbrokers, cab drivers, and real estate agents who want to turn funniness at parties into sitcom deals. There's nothing pretty or efficient about it. These guys, with lots of honing to do, are not likely to be on Comedy Central anytime soon. But there's an authenticity to it. With the rare joke that hits in the sparsely filled showroom, you feel a buzz of upward mobility--not the packaged, institutionalized mediocrity we've come to expect from these clubs.

That sense of raw potential is why I enjoyed reading Richard Zoglin's Comedy at the Edge: How Standup in the 1970s Changed America. It's basically a review of the major comedians who came of age in the 70s. After Lenny Bruce. Before "what's the deal with ____?" became a catchphrase. Guys like Carlin, Martin, and Pryor. And for someone who wasn't even born until these guys were safely into the sellout phases of their careers, it's good to get a glimpse of their edgier days.

The material itself isn't so novel, but the anecdotal nature makes it interesting. Each chapter goes in-depth with a comedian (except the cop-out chapter called "Women," which halfheartedly shouts out Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, and Elayne Boosler). Some are more interesting than others. For example, Richard Pryor's meltdowns are pretty well-known by now. Ditto Andy Kaufman's bone-deep wackiness. My favorite parts--by far--were the chapters on guys you don't really think of anymore as having been standups. Like Albert Brooks (always a favorite of mine). Has anyone else managed to be so funny while taking himself so freaking seriously? And I found myself mourning the also-ran career of Robert Klein, who I hadn't even known was a comedian before becoming one of those character actors who show up everywhere.

The problem with the book is that there's no cohesive timeline or structure. You don't really need a narrative thread here, but something to tie it all together besides "Hey, look, the 70s" would have been appreciated. But Zoglin is a snappy writer, and good at picking anecdotes, so the aimlessness is easy enough to forgive. If, however, in 30 years he decides to write a book about Dane Cook, I will be considerably less lenient.

I am so smart, S-M-R-T...

E.B. White is an evil, evil man. Not only did he kill Charlotte, he's been giving bum advice to impressionable young undergrads. But don't worry--a pretentious Cambridge grammarian will save us all!

Choice excerpt: So I won't be spending the month of April toasting 50 years of the overopinionated and underinformed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst.

Yeah, that's the problem with the world today. Grammar angst. Also, I'm sure his outrage has nothing to do with the fact that his own doorstop grammar manual has sold 1,733 copies over seven years, while Elements of Style has sold 1,214,022 over ten years. Hmm.

God knows I'm picky enough about grammar (sometimes it's okay to say "and me," people!), but this dude is insane. If it comes down to having to choose between solid and accessible (if imperfect) grammar advice and snooty academic potshots taken from a snooty academic platform, I'm siding with the "grammatical incompetents." Or is it "the side which I will choose is that of the 'grammatical incompetents'"? I'd say the former, but apparently all of my grammatical knowledge is built on a foundation of lies and cotton candy--so what do I know?

New York stories

New Yorkers love talking about New York. It's a fact. Anyone can write a travelogue of London, or Chicago, or Rome. But New Yorkers trust only themselves to do it for NYC. That's part of what makes this kind of navel-gazing travel lit so special: the writers who live here are more than a little in love with their surroundings, and it shows. It's not the shallow love you feel for Hawaii, or some other pretty, beachy spot; it's more of a hard-fought admiration for all the stupid, gritty things that annoy you on a daily basis--but which you'd miss if they disappeared suddenly.

For the twelfth entry in the Jacob-Katy book club, we picked a pair of such New York books: Here is New York, by E.B. White, and The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead. They're both made up of impressionistic essays about New York City--but White's gives a glimpse of 1948, while Whitehead's is current as of 2004. Read together, they're testaments to what has changed in sixty years, what hasn't changed, and what never will change.

Here is New York is almost entirely told from the E.B. White perspective, as he comes back to visit his old city from a new country life in Maine. Most of the impressions are his own, as he moves through cafes, talks to people around him, and ponders the city itself. Colossus is more of a collective work, trying to find what's at the heart of every New Yorker's experience. It bounces from one person's internal monologue to another, in chapters loosely based on a particular aspect of the city (the Brooklyn Bridge, Broadway, Port Authority, etc.) Both books are insightful--particularly White's eerie description of how vulnerable New York was and is to breaches like 9/11. And 60+ years later, White's has the advantage of describing the quaint New Yorkian touches that just don't exist anymore (bring back the pneumatic tubes, please, Mayor Bloomberg!)

White's writing is always solid and charming, but I thought the language was especially beautiful in Colossus--and that's what really cements it as just as crucial a time capsule as White's essay has become. (Maybe in 30 years, it'll be Whitehead's NYC prose in the Barnes & Noble subway ads alongside Dr. Smizmar.)

If either book had a drawback, it was that they didn't go quite far enough--there are plenty of topics that are crucial to any narrative of New York, but that just aren't present in either author's stuff. (Like sports.)

Favorite passages...

From Here is New York:
"...I am probably occupying the very room that any number of exalted and somewise memorable characters sat in, some of them on hot, breathless afternoons, lonely and private and full of their own sense of emanations from without."

"When a young man in Manhattan writes a letter to his girl in Brooklyn, the love message gets blown to her through a pneumatic tube--pfft--just like that. The subterranean system of telephone cables, power lines, steam pipes, gas mains, and sewer pipes is reason enough to abandon the island to the gods and the weevils."

From Colossus of New York:

On the Brooklyn Bridge: "They paste the name of the new mayor over the old mayor to save our tax dollars....Because no matter their political bent they understand the romance of bridges and have taken this walk more than once. This is non-partisan emptiness. Just yards to go. Remembering that disappointed feeling she gets each time she reaches the other side, then feeling that disappointed feeling. Check yourself for damage. Everything is where it should be. No miracle. The key to the city fell out of her pocket somewhere along the way and she's level again."

On Grand Central: "Of course the Dutch were quite shocked to find Grand Central Station under that big pile of dirt. Alas the Indians and their strict no-refund-without-receipt policy. And lo, as the earth cooled, Grand Central bubbled up through miles of magma, lodged in the crust of this island, settled here. The first immigrant. Still unassimilated. Ever indigestible. The river of skyscrapers flows around it. Travelers swim to it and cling, savoring solid handhold in roaring whitewhater. Churches fill up at regular intervals, on a schedule laid out in the business plan. like the best storms, rush hour starts out as a slight drizzle, then becomes unholy deluge."

On Times Square: "Simmer the idea of a metropolis until is reduced to a few blocks, sprinkle in a dash of hype and a tablespoon of woe. Add hubris to taste. Serving size: a lot."

[Editrix's note: when the Katy-Jacob collection of New York essays comes out, it will have both the aforementioned sports section and a lengthy discussion of the Ugg boot- and sweatpants-wearing denizens of 42nd and Broadway.]

Love is Strange

Last night was the inaugural New Yorker Speakeasy, a new series of literary cabaret nights sponsored by the magazine. Given the date, the theme was "Love is Strange." I'm not so sure love was strange last night, so much as intellectualized and neuroticized to the point of no return. Luckily, that's the kind of love I have tons of experience with, so I had a great time.

There was about an hour between when the doors opened and when the festivities started, so Miranda, Jacob, and I amused ourselves with questions like, "Does Sasha Frere-Jones get paid in iTunes giftcards?" and "Who would win in a fight--David Byrne or Gabriel Byrne?" (2 to 1 for Gabriel Byrne, unless the fight takes place in "David Byrne reality.")

The first act was a reading of the most risque story in New Yorker history: "Alma," by Junot Diaz. The magazine's fiction editor claimed that the story's publication marked the first time people canceled subscriptions due to sexual content--no mean feat, in 80+ years. I remember reading the story last year, enjoying it as a piece by a rising modern author, and not thinking too much about the graphic (but well-written!) sex stuff. I guess that's probably more of a reflection on my lack of boundaries or morals or whatever than of the magazine's readership in general. The actor reading it, Victor Rasuk, was charming and energetic enough to pull it off without any of the audience storming out in a huff, and running home to cancel their subscriptions.

Next came a mini-panel on writing and reading about love in fiction (not to be confused with erotimance, by the way). For what is a New Yorker event without a panel? This one had authors Karen Russell and Jeffrey Eugenides picking their favorite love stories from My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekov to Munro (copies of which had been left on our chairs beforehand). Russell's selection was from "We Didn't," a sweet, straightforward piece about teenage fumblings. Eugenides's pick was a little less fun, about the domestic ins and outs of bringing your life partner to a holiday dinner.

Then it was audio-visual time: Richard Brody, the ever-controversial David Denby, and David Remnick all picked their favorite love scenes from movies (In Praise of Love, The Big Sleep, and--strangely enough--Duck Soup).

While the event space was dark for movie time, and Miranda was being hit with the revelation that Bogey and Bacall weren't really talking about horses, Bonafide Celebrity Gabriel Byrne snuck in and sat down a few rows ahead of us. He was the penultimate segment of the night's entertainment. He got up on stage, and instead of launching right into his promised reading of Dylan Thomas's love letters, started telling a story from his own past. A story of lust, loss, and miniskirts in 1960s Dublin. It was rambly but sweet. The letter from Dylan Thomas to his wife was similarly rambly, but less sweet, when you consider that he was drinking himself to death at the time.

The big finale came in the form of Grizzly Bear--a Brooklyn-based indie band which sounds exactly like a Brooklyn-based indie band (complete with skinny jeans, natch), but who reduced Sasha Frere-Jones to gushing openly during their intro. Their set was okay enough, but the best part was a re-imagined version of Jojo's classic "Too Little Too Late" (provided here for Jacob, who swears he hasn't heard the song before).



Anyway, it was a fun evening--love-ish without being saccharine, sexy without being cheap. Cocktails and wit are definitely the way to go on Valentine's Day. I think Dorothy Parker would have been proud.

Hub Fan Bids Updike Adieu

The recent Updike tributes, in the New Yorker and other magazines, were great reminders of his work outside of the Rabbits and the Witches--like an excerpt from one of my favorite sports pieces ever, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Updike introduced me to a Fenway Park I never knew, but wish I did:

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

And the Updike extravaganza reminds me that I still haven't attempted to recreate his "Rockefeller Center Ho" trip (from a February 1956 issue of the New Yorker), and see if it is, in fact, possible to get from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center without touching 5th or 6th Avenues. I should get on that.

Americana by Don DeLillo

Even before the sad news on Tuesday, I'd been thinking about John Updike lately. And Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, and all the other Angsty Young Man writers of years past. I recently finished reading Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, and it's very much in the vein of those others. Glib dude seeks self, seeks tail, seeks less glibness.

Americana follows David Bell, a successful New York TV executive in 1970. Only 28, he's slightly obsessed with being the wunderkind around the office (making his secretary research the ages of any successful peers who might possibly be younger than he is). The first part of the book is a Mad Men-meets-Then We Came to the End scenario, with sharp, entertaining observations about life, love, and quirks in corporate Manhattan.

David is unhappy, although he feels like he shouldn't be: he has girls aplenty; he has an easy job; and he's good-looking, as he tells us repeatedly. David is also obsessed with framing his life as a movie. He describes his outfits in detail. He and his (now ex) wife move through their life together as though Fellini were following them with a camera. Even in divorce, they try for Neil Simon-style hijinks, by living in the same building.

When David's pet TV project is canceled and executives start dropping like flies at the network, he leaves the city, ostensibly to work on a Navajo-themed documentary for the network. He never quite gets there, though, and parts two and three are an On the Road-style attempt at finding meaning in American minutiae. David tags an artist friend whom he really just wants to sleep with, a washed-up journalist, and a failed novelist to go with him in a camper. They travel through the heartland, getting hung up in places like Chicago while he reminisces about his past and makes locals participate in an a weird, obtuse movie, restaging events from David's life. He rearranges all of his inner chaos, but with better blocking and pretentious exterior shots of sweeping American landscapes.

Although David isn't quite likeable (every time you want to cut him some slack for being glib and shallow, he tells an anecdote involving blunt, casual cruelty), it's hard to dislike him for long stretches of time, either. And he's kind of a perfect container for DeLillo's anti-consumerism spiel. It feels more authentic coming from a young, conflicted narrator standing in for a young, conflicted writer. It flows more easily, too--there's just not as much self-conscious social commentary as there is in White Noise, and so I liked Americana better.

I also liked the writing better. It's bumpy sometimes--it's pretty clearly a first novel--but in an endearing way. And the early descriptions of office life are just so dead-on, even 38 years later.

It looks like I'll have to do another DeLillo book soon, to see where the best-of-three lands.

Parts I liked especially:

"One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to lay low."

"Meredith was not so secure in her maturity that she did not suffer those periods of despondency and self-doubt which seem to weave through the lives of self-reliant women."

"There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands....Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex."

Save the words

Remember how in the 80s, Cabbage Patch dolls would come with little adoption certificates? And you'd have a good feeling, 'cause you were saving some adorable, chubby-cheeked urchin from a life of drudgery, picking cabbage leaves or whatever? Well, I don't have a Cabbage Patch Kid anymore (little Oliver Wendell is languishing somewhere in my parents' attic, I think), but I've found something that provides similar warm fuzzies and similar uselessness to society at large: save the words.

You "pledge" to save a word by using it in conversation, or scrawling it on the subway or whatever. This clearly isn't a decision to take lightly, so here are the words I'm considering saving:

frutescent - shrublike

oncethmus - the loud and harsh cry of a donkey

legatarian - pertaining to a deputy

panchymagogue - medicine purging bodily fluids from the body

phylactology - science of counter-espionage

plebicolar - appealing to the common people

venustation - the act of becoming beautiful or handsome

So tough to choose...they all need good homes...and how do you know which ones are going to grow up to resent you, once they're accepted back into the lexicon thanks to your love and nurturing?

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

We live in a post-superhero world. Today's presidential events aside, as a society we seem to be past the need for a cool dude--wrapped in American determination and blessed with superb ass-kicking kills--to sweep in and dispose of our street crime. We've got bigger problems.

The interesting thing about Watchmen, a limited-series DC comic, is that its creator saw this coming--23 years ago. Now retroactively repurposed as more of a graphic novel (thus saving its dignity, I guess), Watchmen is more sophisticated than your average superhero comic.

The main action of the book takes place in an alternate October 1985, where Nixon is still president (!). About seven years earlier, a federal act illegalized (is that a word? I'm going with it) "costumed adventurer" vigilantism, because the self-appointed heroes were getting in the way of the police. By the time the act was passed, costumed adventuring had become a cottage industry: some heroes had cashed in with endorsement deals and action figures; others offered themselves as rent-a-heroes for corporations; and the porn implications were pretty much endless. In short, Americans ruined helpful vigilantism the way we ruin everything else. So all practicing adventurers were forced into retirement or underground.

These included an old clique of heroes, who spent more time bickering than actually saving anyone:

• the Comedian, a brutal government mercenary who's not actually funny;
• the Nite Owl, a nebbishy guy who came up with a lot of Batman-esque gadgets with a bird theme;
• the original Silk Spectre, the token chick, who pushed her daughter into the family business;
• the second Silk Spectre (Laurie the daughter), who bitches a lot about being forced into the costume, but enjoys the benefits of dating other heroes;
• Ozymandias, a genius with an Alexander the Great fetish, who turned his previous hero popularity into a multibillion-dollar brand;
  
• Rorshach, an ink-blot-masked sociopath who avenges anything and everything he can get his hands on; and
• Dr. Manhattan, the one genuine "superhero," who was accidentally baked in a nuclear test oven, was obliterated to atoms, and reconstructed himself somehow as a godlike being. He has the ability to change matter, teleport, and know everything that will ever happen at all times. Because he's indestructible and has unlimited powers, of course he's on retainer by the U.S. government as the not-so-secret weapon of national security.

The story kicks in when one of them is found dead, and it starts looking like someone is hunting "masks," or the adventurers of old. But the more intriguing underplot is the unfolding of these heroes' history together--all the nastiness, the ineffectiveness, and neuroses that undid the whole lifestyle. The comics themselves, divided up into about ten different "chapters," are interspersed with fake memoir excerpts, magazine articles, etc. which give context to the characters.

Perhaps most interesting of all is the idea of how America would really approach grown men in costumes, taking it upon themselves to fight crime. This is the kind of thing that was touched upon in The Dark Knight last summer--what happens when a social construct outlives its usefulness? What do you do when the hero causes more damage than the villains he's chasing? You legislate it out of existence, that's what you do. But by then it's already part of the larger cultural consciousness, so you get a weird, shadowy area in the middle.

The writing is sharp--beyond the superhero issues, there's an interesting channeling of Cold War anxiety. And the art is pretty gorgeous, in a dark and grim kind of way. I don't know that this will get me into comics any more than The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay did last summer, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. If the movie is anywhere near as good, I'll happily fork over my ten bucks.

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008

Sometimes I like to pretend that I'm cool and literary. If I had more time and money, this double identity would involve reading magazines like n+1 and The Paris Review, and being familiar with the hip new short story writers. But I have neither time nor cash, so I depend on Dave Eggers's Best American Nonrequired Reading every year to fill the gap.

But the collection has been disappointing in recent years, and I thought about skipping it this year altogether. Then I saw who wrote the introduction for the 2008 edition: Judy Blume. Five minutes later, the Amazon transaction was complete. (My inner eleven-year-old makes far too many of my financial decisions.)

It's not actually a traditional intro, but rather an interview with Ms. Blume. It's full of non-sequiturs (and features a hand-drawn self-portrait), but it's entertaining enough. Plus, it reveals that her favorite Judy Blume book is also mine (Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, FYI).

The "Best American ___" lists at the front were uneven as usual. Bad hipster band names stop being funny after the first two. But I did like "Best American NY Times Headlines from 1907" and "Best American Facebook Groups," which included:

Legalize Dueling
Automatic Doors Make Me Feel Like a Jedi
I Have to Sing the ABCs to Know Which Letter Comes Before the Other
It Wasn’t Awkward Until You Said “Well, This Is Awkward.” Now It’s Awkward.
Carol Never Wore Her Safety Goggles. Now She Doesn't Need Them.

And I really liked
Best American Diary of the Living Dead: Are You There, God? It's Me. Also a Bunch of Zombies. It's no zombie-version-of-The Great Gatsby, but then what is?

The journalism is so-so. There's a New Yorker article that I never made it through when it was in the magazine. They reprint the Pulitzer-winning piece on Joshua Bell and busking that still makes me feel guilty when I tune out subway musicians. And the requisite Serious International Piece (an essay about African-Americans and Israel by Emily Raboteau) is interesting, but overlong. Probably the most interesting one is "Bill Clinton, Public Citizen," by George Saunders. Saunders was on the press corps for Clinton's big African tour, and giddy about it from start to finish. The Vanity Fair article, this is not. It does provide flashes of the old, much more fun Bill Clinton--pre-primary. In fact, I think Hillary is mentioned just once, in passing. The article is much more about Saunders's mancrush on Bill. Also, AIDS patients in Africa. But mostly the mancrush.

The short stories are better."Darkness," by Andrew Sean Greer, explores the relationship of an elderly lesbian couple, set against the backdrop of the sun's sudden and total disappearance. I'd disliked Greer's previous novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, but he's redeemed himself now. Another story I enjoyed was "Cake" by Patrick Tobin, which follows a thoroughly unlikeable chronic pain patient through a final meltdown. A new story by Stephen King was good too (slightly eerie, decently written, and only partly set in New England).

The graphic novel excerpts, well...I'm still not a graphic novel convert. I'm trying, but when one of the chosen excerpts is about a graphic novelist who has trouble writing his graphic novel, things are getting a little too meta. Give me good old-fashioned prose any day. But they do add visual interest to the book.

All in all, the book made for good subway reading--and now I can hold off on that Paris Review subscription for at least another year!

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Depending on which book you count as the first, Infinite Jest was number 11 in the Jacob-Katy book club. And it was a doozy. We've had our share of long, complicated ones (Ulysses, Bleak House), but this one was definitely the unwieldiest. Yet it may have been the most rewarding, in terms of sheer accomplishment. Between the two of us, we dragged the book across several continents (him), and on innumerable trains (me), took several months to read and reflect, and ultimately conquered the 1000+ pages (including 388 end notes).

And now, having read it and talked it over, I'm glad to have done it. It's an undeniable part of modern lit, and now that David Foster Wallace is gone, we'll never get anything quite like it again. Jacob has a much better plot overview than I was going to do, so here's the quick gist.

Basically, at an unidentified point in the near future, America is a mess. Large parts of the country are now wastelands. Technology and branding have pretty much taken over. We've absorbed Canada and Mexico--and French-Canadian separatists are especially pissed at the assimilation. Said French-Canadians are looking for a way to punish the Americans, and they've found out about a tape that's so addictive, anyone who views it is reduced to instant, irreversible mental mush. (Supposedly, what's on the tape is a veiled mother figure, bending down over the camera as though talking to a newborn infant, and saying, "I'm sorry.") But while the tape is the catalyst for the book, the plot is really about the tape's dead creator, and everyone/every place touched by him somehow. It's all loosely grouped into three main spheres, which rarely touch one another: the Canadian spies talking about the tape, the filmmaker's son and his friends at a ritzy Boston tennis academy, and the drug addicts at a rehab facility next door to the tennis academy.

But when I say things like "plot," I mean it in the loosest sense possible. 'Cause it's really just a thousand pages of David Foster Wallace including every detail that's ever crossed his mind, exploring issues he finds interesting (like tennis as war, addiction recovery as religion, or how easily Americans could be taken down by psychological porn). The language is good, though. There are literally hundreds of characters, and Wallace takes care to shift vocabulary and syntax accordingly. The sections which really shine are the ones where he pays equal attention to wonky detail and to description. Like in a scene where the kids in the tennis school play a game called Eschaton--essentially Risk on a tennis court--and end up going crazy, U.N.-style.

Also excellent are his descriptions of drug addiction and suicidal depression--they're terrifyingly vivid. And his passionate details about how and why someone would kill themselves are painful to read. Given that he'd clearly had mental health issues for a long time, part of me wonders if Infinite Jest was originally intended as a kind of suicide note--the serious writer's ultimate purge before he leaves the world. And it's all so scattered. I have no idea how he, let alone some poor schmuck of a development editor, could possibly keep track of the hundreds of characters, many plot threads, and erratic timeline enough to edit the manuscript. I have to assume that he cashed in his Famous Author Points, said, "Publish this as is," and that was pretty much it. But he's got enough bluster to pull it off, and even while you're struggling to read the book, you sense that there's something brilliant simmering underneath the extraneous crap.

And if you enjoy things like plot resolution and endings? Look elsewhere, friend.

I found it much easier to read once I started looking at the book as more of a collection of short stories, obliquely connected--kinda like Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Again, I'm glad to have read it. Now I can go back to reading Wallace's more straightforward (though still heavily footnoted) journalism without much guilt. And I'm also glad to have had a partner in crime, because I totally would have ditched the book after the first few chapters if I didn't know that Jacob was doing it too. All the same, I see the next book club selection being short and sweet. Something Seussian, perhaps?