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Infinite (De)coding, or “His wit’s as thick as a Tewkesbury mustard.”

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  At a high school reunion in what I will call the Year of the iPhone 16, a classmate recommended I read David Foster Wallace’s  Infinite Jest  (1996), which I promptly dismissed as pretentious. I majored in literature and have read some whopper works of fiction, including James Joyce’s  Ulysses  and Leo Tolstoy’s  War and Peace , but  Infinite Jest  is just the type of book I tend to eschew for its popularity among men who showboat really long books in the same way they measure the length of their Johnsons (a metaphor the character Rod “the God” Tine, Sr. would appreciate). Perhaps Wallace was hip to that metaphor, as well, and meant to have much of the book go over the unsuspecting knob’s head, cony-catching some numbskulls with his southpaws, Hal et al (See footnote 268 and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQThnv8c2uI ). I myself would not have understood the extent of his project, namely the conundrum of anonymity (disguised with Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, etc., and
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Citation

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  Today my copy of Robert Chandler's translation of Andrey Platonov's Chevenger arrived. I was pleasantly pleased to find my translation work, Blue Depths: The Russian Revolution Poems of Andrei Platonov , mentioned under "Further Reading" on page 521. I was not able to get this work formally published, but for me there is a more energizing economy, more vital than monetary, that comes from knowing one's capacity can contribute in some way. For sure getting lost in the creative process is part of the joy, but after it all, as an engineer designs machines for use so a wordsmith works with words. 
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The stuff of art

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 This vignette is taken from a documentary for family I recorded in 2014. The material was also used for a poem . In it, Sr. Bernadette recounts her experiences around the 1980s and 90s running a home for women and children who had just come across the Mexican border to El Paso, Texas.
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