[F]rankly, this is some weird shit... The musical styles are all over the map except that they all only use human voices (and occasionally hands).

[I]nnovative writers have always faced opposition, but 50 years ago, an educated person would have been apologetic if he had never read Ulysses; after 2000, you had people like that bog-trotter Roddy Doyle saying Joyce wasn’t worth reading, as though it showed good sense not to have read Ulysses. Instead of being embarrassed at not making it past page 25 of Gravity’s Rainbow, some people were proud to have seen through that charlatan so quickly. These conservative critics seem to hold a “family values” attitude toward literature, believing that anything outside of the mainstream of fiction should be shunned, and that if a novel couldn't be read and appreciated by your average Joe or Jane, then it was a pretentious waste of time. Of course you don't have to like Joyce (or Pynchon or Gaddis), they’re certainly not for everyone, but to dismiss them as pretentious frauds and to glorify simpler, more traditional fiction struck me as an example of the growing anti-intellectualism in our country, right in step with schools mandating that evolution was just a “theory” and that creationism should be taught alongside it in science classes.

The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.

[A]ll of a sudden I got “The Office,” and right after we shot the pilot, I took pretty much all the money that I had made on that and bought the rights for a film. His agent said no at first, so I flew out to L.A. and sat with her, and said: “I know that I’m young, and I haven’t really done anything, but your client, he wrote an incredible book. I just wanted more people to know about David Foster Wallace.”

Anathem manages to remind the reader of H G Wells, Umberto Eco and Mervyn Peake and yet be entirely and gloriously itself.

I read this and can't say that I recommend it. There are some good moments, especially when Bock is writing about teenage street life, but the prose is uneven and it's not structurally inviting. It's definitely a first book and I wouldn't be surprised if Bock eventually knocks out a great novel, but this one isn't it. Having lived in Vegas for two years, though, I will say that it manages to capture elements of that city which are often overshadowed by The Strip.

Whores are to Vollmann as bears are to John Irving.

I found myself wondering, in fact, why there have been so few Las Vegas novels and why the best of them until now, John O’Brien’s “Leaving Las Vegas,” was so narrow and depressed.

Does the lust for aesthetic beauty always allow us to rationalize trampling on the artist's grave? Does the greatness of an artist diminish his right to dispose of his own unfinished work?

“I am looking at Wallace and Stephenson and how their storytelling techniques have been influenced by the Web,” Dr. Lewis said. “It is a style with multi-threaded stories that may be moving at different speeds in a way that is similar to the way people use the Web.”

[The] perception of secrecy or furtiveness tends to make people behave irrationally.

Elegant Complexity is the first critical work to provide detailed and thorough commentary on each of the 192 sections of David Foster Wallace's masterful Infinite Jest... Carlisle explains the novel's complex plot threads (and discrepancies) with expert insight and clear commentary. The book is 99% spoiler-free for first-time readers of Infinite Jest.

Part of our emergency is that it's so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the "moral clarity" of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.