Reading with Ron Padgett – how cool is that?

 

Location: St Johnsbury, VT, USA

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Suck a Donkey: the libel of Don Quixote (OR Where is the rhubarb?)

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Mladen Dolar, one of the Slovenian philosophers I enjoy reading from time to time, published a short work called  Rumors  (2025), navigating from the destructive nature of libel to the liberating function of gossip. Among the authors sampled to explicate his theory are Shakespeare and Cervantes, who some say were the same person(s). Dolar, however, never touches on this rumor, nor the one about William Shakespeare being Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The latter is in fact no longer a full-fledged rumor, and has emerged into the realm of truth through the work of the late Alexander Waugh and the De Vere Society, United Kingdom, and the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, United States. I recently used their work to help riddle the gist of David Foster Wallace’s  Infinite Jest  (1996), a 1000+ page cryptology game inspired by Charlton Ogburn’s tome  The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality  (1984). Curious if Wallace picked up on the “Wil...
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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 Alcoholi...
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Jajji!

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Generation after generation is enamored of being in the movies. My mother’s father often recounted how as a U.S. Marine munitions expert at Camp Pendleton, California, he set up the beach-scene explosions for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), seen at the end of this trailer in which he is off camera pushing buttons. My first chance came as an extra in ジャッジ! (pronounced “jajji,” meaning “judge”), in which I screwed up a shot by walking between the camera and the actors Satoshi Tsumabuki and Keiko Kitagawa. As I participated in the closing scenes with an eclectic mix of foreigners who had been bussed from Tokyo to the set at a desolate seaside resort on the Boso Peninsula, it all seemed an ill-conceived cheering-up centered around the promotion of a fish product following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and 2011 earthquake strangely referred to as “3/11.” The main character (Tsumabuki) wins an ad competition under the paternal-like assurances of a U.S. contest judge played by Jam...
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