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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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Jack Brown

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“It was rare that I escaped the confines of Columbia when one fine fall Saturday in October 1943, demerit free, I was given a 12-hour pass starting at noon. I wasted no time in abandoning ship and hotfooting it over to 128th Street to catch the subway bound for Times Square, the heart of the great U.S. metropolis. With a quickstep, I boarded and held on in wonderment as the electric-powered marvel, like a giant mole, sped through dark tunnels. At each stop, more people squeezed in than out so that we hung suspended from straps gripped firmly in hand while those without were kept in place by bodies closing in on all sides. At Times Square, all exited en masse into the brightly lit station, where throngs more were waiting to get on. I couldn’t distinguish which of the passages was egress and was carried by the crowd up and out of the mole’s hole into the crisp autumn air tainted with the exhaust of cabs, buses and some private automobiles. I stood on the sidewalk as long...
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The intelligence in artificial intelligence, a matter of poetics

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Only one question, one test of intelligence remains: Can a computer love? When I think of the communist poet of love, I think of Andrei Platonov, his love of people, his love of language, and his love of machines – his “aspiration to create a better, fairer world.” He wrote only one collection of verse, Blue Depths , but his fiction is more poetic in its imagery and its use of language, “[his] use of letters, archaisms, substandard vocabulary, and even handwriting. Platonov’s experiments in language and his interest in the physical fact of a text gained him an immediate audience.” Chevenger , his quixotic ramble through the heart of Civil War-torn Russia in search of the communist utopia, reminds me of the often ignored stretches of the Midwest from Wisconsin to Nebraska. The novel captures Platonov’s early ideals, embodied in the main character, Sasha Dvanov, who is trained in the operation of locomotives by Zakhar Pavlovich, a man who “so achingly and jealously loved st...
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