mental real estate
Jessie says Nathan’s been reading the development books, just so that he knows what to do. Now more than ever that seems to be true. Downside: he’s stunningly contrarian on occasion– a two-and-a-half year old trying to get in, after a slightly late start, his full quota of one million times saying “No!” before he turns three. Upside: Monday night, after I lay in the dark with him for a couple of minutes (something we do after we finish reading stories and turn out the light) he said “I’m a different person. I’m not you!”
Last week Jordan accomplished a great deal of David Foster Wallace memorial blogging. You should go read it. I wasn’t quite as deeply affected as Jordan was by DFW’s sudden, grim passing, but I was very deeply affected by Infinite Jest when I read it, perhaps a year after it came out– I took it with me on trains, couldn’t put it down, found it not daunting but completely absorbing, and I think that if I reread it I’d still find it so. The intellectual games served a temperament; they were fun and sad and they got me to say “Life really might be like that.” What if it is?
When you’re done reading Jordan’s blog, but before you tear yourself away from the Internets, you should go look at Forrest Gander’s new writing on the Poetry Foundation blog– and at the rest of the fall team of bloggers there, too, especially Javier Huerta, whose verse I did not know at all but whose short piece about privilege will go on provoking talk for some time.
This week I don’t know which of the two desiderata I want more intensely, or more often: for Barack Obama to win this election, or simply for the election and its attendant news blitz to end, so that I can clear the mental real estate now devoted to such questions as whether cell phone-only voters skew polls (turns out they do) and what happens if there’s a 269-269 tie (if Obama has won the popular vote, Obama probably becomes President; if McCain has won the popular vote, it’s a national tangle that makes Florida 2000 look like a slice of pie).
If you too are way too close to the election, and if you have a couple of slices of time in which you can do something (other than write a check– checks are nice) to affect the outcome, and if you too would like Obama to win, you can use his state-by-state tool in order to learn where to go and what to do, even if you live in an uncontested state. If you live in Massachusetts and want to do something from home, you will almost certainly be asked to call New Hampshire.