My homeboy Steve Reich won a Pulitzer. So did Atlanta author Douglas Blackmon, for his awesome book (judging by what I read when I borrowed it from Mom between holiday meals last winter), Slavery by Another Name. Need to move that one back on the list.

This past weekend I did the 40-mile hike I'd been pondering for a while. It was hard. It was worth it. I will do it again. I hadn't done proper hiking since early January, so I was feeling a bit like Dickens:

Restlessness, you will say. Whatever it is, it is always driving me, and I cannot help it. I have rested nine or ten weeks, and sometimes feel as if it had been a year---though I had the strangest nervous miseries before I stopped. If I couldn't walk fast and far I should just explode and perish.

35 Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare. Via Lined and Unlined, where you'll find several cool pointers about the Oulipo literary group.

I love this post about measuring whether an artist is under- or over-valued. The method is pretty cool, basically comparing the Human Accomplishment ranking and the available Amazon music inventory, and making a rough P/E ratio. This post focuses on notable composers and it looks like Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque composers get shorted, while late Romantics (especially opera dudes) get more hype than they deserve. And you see the same sort of bias in the season programming of most major orchestras. Anyway, two cool things this brings to mind. One, I like this idea of bubbles in culture. Reminds me of the vast difference in New York Times coverage of conflicts in Darfur vs. the Congo, though one area has been about 10 times as deadly. There are all kinds of interesting feedback loops that affect how we perceive and respond to our world. And two, realizing that there's so much rough-and-ready data out there that we've unwittingly created, just waiting to be mined.

I've had blogger's depression lately, but I'm working my way back out of it.

The AJC has some really nice photos from the premiere of Gone with the Wind. I never knew there was a motorcade, teeming crowds, etc. Even has a nice playbill.

James Tanner's Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace is a nice parody of the writer's style. A little absurd but kind of spot-on. Amusing for a little while, just like it always is when you're watching someone else work. But if you get a chance to read a bit of Wallace (granted, I'm no expert---I've only got maybe 3-400 pages under my belt, but more is on the way), you get a sense of how crazy inventive this guy was, whether you like the stories or not.

In the stories in Oblivion, all these layers of ambiguity or inexactness juxtapose with excessive detail. I like the way the narrators/protagonists/Wallace zip around making associations and adjustments and corrections, sentences accumulating detail as you read. At its best it's kind of like a mural with words. Everything, large, all at once.

Let me get fetishy with a couple sentences. My favorite bit in recent memory, from The Soul Is Not a Smithy:

I was often the first to register the sound of my father's key in the front door. It took only four steps and a brief sockslide into the foyer to be able to see him first as he entered on a wave of outside air.

Four steps and a sockslide and a wave of outside air. Lord, that's perfect. I'm willing to grant that I especially like that one because it makes me think of Dad, but I haven't read something so compact but evocative in a long time. Here's a funny bit from the opening story, Mister Squishy, mostly set in a market research office:

Attached to the breast pocket on the same side of his shirt as his nametag was also a large pin or button emblazoned with the familiar Mister Squishy brand icon, which was a plump and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its eyes squeezed parly shut in an expression that somehow connoted delight, satiation, and rapacious desire all at the same time.

You can certainly read the verbosity as annoying and peacockish, but I can't help but love seeing the product of a mind at work, like he's been doing some serious thinking and noticing. Likewise, a couple dozen pages further into the story, some clever meeting room cynicism:

All that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted...

I'd say Good Old Neon was the highlight for me, but the title story Oblivion gives it good competition. The first is imagined reflections before a suicide. The second a husband's retelling of an ongoing dispute with his wife about his alleged snoring. Neither of those summaries do them justice. Read those two at least.

Of course you can substitute for the word "travel" any number of things you enjoy:

Last week the question arose as to what we would do differently if we were immortal... I answered that I would travel more.

Later the question was asked, what would you do differently if you found out you had only a short time to live. I answered again that I would travel more. Click, buzz, whirr...does not compute, does not compute... Given that I would travel more if I was to live either less or more the probability that I was at just that level of mortality that I should not be traveling now must be vanishingly small.

An interesting bit from a David Foster Wallace reading circa Infinite Jest:

I would go to halfway houses and just sit there. I lurked a lot. Nice thing about halfway houses is they are real run-down and real sloppy and you can just sit around. And the more you sit around looking uncomfortable and out of place, the more it looks like you belong there. Some of the people knew this [breaking and entering] stuff very well and they loved to talk about it. And nobody is as talkative as a drug addict who just had his drugs taken away.

It's paired with a decent interview where he predicts the rise of curators and filters in internetland, and also mentions how important an editor is...

I, of course, get all wrapped up. ''I know. I'll have an allusion to a Russian thing that's half true and only people who speak Russian will know.'' Great, you are now talking to exactly one person on the planet earth.

Is it truly so hard to keep sidewalks open and walkable? Recent problems in Toronto [via funkaoshi] remind me of my local gripes last year. That spot in my 'hood recently patched up those threadbare spots with new paving stones. Need to get a photo.

I've been enjoying Daniel Pink's travel tips series, but one bit from tip number 7 about how to zip through airport security really spoke to me. I'm both ashamed and proud to see myself here:

Men are crazy. We are hyper-competitive. So, every opportunity we have to best someone else, we will take it. What this means is when men get in a security line, they do not want to move more slowly than the guy behind them because that would compromise their masculinity.

And that is why you should get in the line with the male business travelers. Our tacit competition will keep things moving quickly.

A collection of tweet-length opera synopses. A few favorites: The Flying Dutchman: "Any port in a storm. Tall dark and mysterious wants my daughter. She wants to save him, but can she be faithful? Splashy splashy."

Salome: "Out of control teen uses stepdad to get back at would-be boyfriend, learns some confusing lessons about love"

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

---Michel Foucault

Things I intend to do:

1. Travel outside my home state of Georgia at least once every month. This was my official New Year's Resolution, probably the first year I've ever taken the resolution thing seriously. So far I'm 3 for 3 (January February March), and I've got #4 lined up for April, and a few other flights under consideration, along with the obligatory driving+hiking trips just over the border.
2. Run an ultramarathon, i.e. any distance greater than the standard 26.2-mile marathon. I've been thinking about this for a good while, and I'll be keeping an eye out for a decent 50K or 50M this year. I doubt I'll be in shape to run the whole distance, but walking a bit is normal for these things. Or I might ignore the official races and tie this goal in with...
3. Hiking from Blood Mountain to Amicalola Falls. I've been talking about this one for probably 6-7 years. It's the southernmost stretch of the Appalachian Trail and the AT Approach Trail, about 40 miles. I've done comparable mileage on somewhat more forgiving terrain, so I know it's doable. I just want to get it out of the way. I gave it a shot with a friend of mine last year (I think? or the year before?), but had to pull up short. Since then, I can't help thinking, if only I'd done X and Y and Z differently. Failure always brings up a new strategy.
4. Buy a house. Actually, let's put this down as a "maybe." I do want a porch, though.

Online monoculture and the end of the niche. In summary: online recommendation systems tend to offer a more diverse selection, but tends to reward fewer products more greatly than others:

In Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop.

I wish I followed the math better. Interesting stuff in the comments, too.

I've just started reading the so-far excellent The Lost City of Z, about exploration in the Amazon jungle. The central character was a member of the Royal Geographic Society, and the author goes to the London headquarters to do some research...

In a corridor of the Royal Geographic Society's building, I noticed on the wall a gigantic seventeenth-century map of the globe. On the margins were sea monsters and dragons. For ages, cartographers had no means of knowing what existed on most of the earth. And more often than not these gaps were filled in with fantastical kingdoms and beasts, as if the make-believe, no matter how terrifying, were less frightening than the truly unknown.

As in maps, so in life.

In a section later in the book (that I also interpret more broadly to relate to bold striking-forth and unknown futures in Life), another explorer describes the typical reactions he got to his plans:

There were the Prudent, who said: "This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do." There were the Wise, who said: "This is an extraordinarily foolish thing to do; but at least you will know better next time." There were the Very Wise, who said: "This is a foolish thing to do, but not nearly so foolish as it sounds."

Warhol on good art vs bad art. Brilliant.

I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen.

---Milton Babbitt

The last bit from a 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace [pdf] in Whiskey Island Magazine, some advice for young writers:

This is a long haul. Writing is a long haul. I'm hoping that none of the stuff that I've done so far is anywhere close to the best stuff I can do. Let's hope we're not fifty-five and doing the same thing. I'd say avoid burning out. You can burn out by struggling in privation and neglect for many years, but you can also bum out if you're given a' little bit of attention. People come to your hotel room and think you have interesting things to say. You can allow that to make you start to think that you can't say anything unless it's interesting. For me, 50% of the stuff I do is bad, and that's just going to be the way it is, and if I can't accept that then I'm not cut out for this. The trick is to know what's bad and not let other people see it.

Igor Stravinsky (↑, one of my favorite composers) is probably best known for his collaboration with Serge Diaghilev on the The Rite of Spring ballet and its scandalous premiere. But a few years after that, with Diaghilev's prodding, he brought out another ballet score with older, more conservative roots, Pulcinella.

What made Pulcinella different was that Stravinsky took most of the music from lesser-known classical-era composers like Pergolesi, Gallo, Monza, et al. "It was a backward glance, of course, but it was a look in the mirror, too." Stravinsky took whole melodies and bass lines from the old stuff, and within that framework he rejiggered the harmonies, rhythms, and orchestration.

I began by composing on the Pergolesi manuscripts themselves, as though I were correcting an old work of my own. I knew that I could not produce a 'forgery' of Pergolesi because my motor habits are so different; at best, I could repeat him in my own accent.

The reception of the new work wasn't all positive...

I was... attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing 'simple' music, blamed for deserting 'modernism,' accused of renouncing my 'true Russian heritage.' People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried 'sacrilege': "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone."

... but he had his reasons...

To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love.