Erdos Had The Number First

It’s imposing to look at, as it sits there on my shelf. It’s like
1000 pages, 300 of which are footnotes [1]

I saw some guy on the train reading it today. I wanted to ask him
what he thought, but I’m timid and it was morning on the el and nobody
talks to each other and who am I to buck that trend.

But Wallace is a gifted writer. And that doesn’t matter one god damn bit.
This book was great, it’s just the ending that sucked.

If I can digress a little bit here and wonder why is that endings so
often suck? Endings are hard, but so are beginings. But people focus so much on the beginings of things, and try to to think about their endings.

Birth Death
Marriage Divorce
Hire Fire

Like college students thinking it’s love because they’re too young to tell
the difference between the passion of passionate passion and hormones and
capital L Love.[3]

But back to the book, the first 100 pages are tough. Strange characters are introduced, situations are set up, Canadian politics are discussed, time is spent
in Alston [4]

And then, the story begins to form. That formation is gripping, the
people involved are compelling. I will also say that if Mr. Wallace
is not one of Bill’s friends, then he’s at least met him once or twice.
His depictions of addiction are terrifyingly accurate. So few stories of addicts
touch of the real[5] horror of addiction, and that is life after
substance. Wallace does. He covers it in detail, all the little crap
about dancing and cooking and how when you get clean you might have to
deal with the reason that you started with your substance in the first
place and how that (the dealing with the You in all of this) is not
easy or fun or anything else besides hard. And who am I to even say
what it is.

And there is tennis. Lots of tennis. And bugs. It’s a great book
really, it is. You should read it. Just be prepared. And be prepared
to get pissed off.

I’m not sure why I’m so mad about this book,especially as I read what
I’ve written. I did like it. But the ending Dear God! The Ending!

The Horror. The Horror.

Partly, it’s probably because I basically read the book twice. And
partly because as I lay in bed trying not to get thrown to the floor
in the North Atlantic, I read this book. I slogged through this book and
carried it with me across two continents. And this book, this book with
such promise and a middle section like Britney Spears, let me down, like an
album by Britney Spears.[6]

Footnotes:
[1] Some of those are wildly funny,inaccurate, astute and could be
fashioned into a free-standing book themselves.

[4] Which is the 8th ring of hell

[5] as far as I’m concerned

[3] Look at me, I’m some kind of old foggy talking about hormone crazed kids.

[6] Did I really end with a reference to Britney Spears’ body?

So, I guess I’m a blogger now.

Here’s the thing, I’ve made fun of bloggers for a while now. I never
bought into the hype, I never bought into the ‘this changes
everything’ mentality that seemed to characterize the entire blogging
movement. This is partly because I think groups of people are stupid.

Not stupid in a ‘Why can’t Johnny read’ way, but stupid in a
‘regression toward the mean’ kind of way.

Maybe that’s not bad.

But anyway, now I’ve got a blog and I’m trying to figure out if I
should apologize to all the people I argued with who told me that
it’s not a movement, who told me it’s not anything other than the
journal reformed.

I’ve never liked the thought of journaling. Which is bad, because if
I want to write, I should be keeping a journal. I argued with my
writing profs in school, I’ve argued with anyone who would argue that
journaling is not a prerequisite of writing. But it probably is.

Perhaps not the formal journaling of a historian, but some way to put
down the thought fragments that occur and are so often lost. How many
times on the el in the morning have the great ideas of the age been
lost to ‘I’ll write that down as soon as I get to work’.

This extended sort of digression is the one argument that I still have
against blogs. This whole thing, assuming you’ve read this far, is
really just a stream of consciousness with very little editing. How
can that help anyone?