Monday, November 26, 2012

I'm Twitter-Famous

Ian Can Read: Twitter Fame

Something pretty cool/terrifying happened yesterday; it doesn't have anything at all to do with books, but it was pretty neat and frankly I can write whatever I want on this thing -- this is not a democracy,[1] is what I'm saying -- so I'm going to go ahead and write it all out now. If nothing else, the True Story will be revealed.

I'm gonna start at the beginning. Paul Ryan is a health nut frat bro with an expenditure-slashing addiction[2] and Mitt Romney decided he wanted to have him as his Vice President. For the longest time, Mr. Ryan's Twitter handle was @PaulRyanVP. After he lost, he kept it for a while; too long, really. Joe Biden's[3] Twitter handle is @JoeBiden. Do you see the problem?

Shortly after the election, I changed my Twitter name to @IanDonovanVP in mockery of Ryan. Hell, if we're all appointing ourselves titles, I may as well do the same. I'm no less the Vice President than he is! How could I not mock him? Look at him. Dude needs to be knocked down a peg.[4]

RUN, GRANDMA, HE'S GOT A BOW
He's listening to Kenny Loggins 

So on Saturday, I went to check if Mr. Ryan had changed his name back. On my phone, I searched for "Paul Ryan" and saw that the Verified Account at the top was named @RepPaulRyan. I figured, "Oh, he changed his name back," and looked at his Tweets. Weirdly, he only follows one account -- The National Debt, which has a Twitter, apparently -- and all of his Tweets were from before the election. I thought, "Oh, that's weird; his campaign must've scrubbed up his account, deleting all of the election stuff . . . AND UNFOLLOWING MITT ROMNEY OH MY GOD AHHHHH" and I sent out this bad boy:

As you should expect from a nobody like me with so few followers, nothing happened. I think two of my friends[5] favorited it. Basically no reaction; my poop jokes usually garner the same amount of activity. I moved on, sort of. The next day -- so, yesterday -- I tried again. My goal was to have more people see it. It was a Funny Thing I Found On The Internet.

The world exploded.[6] I don't know who, but somebody with a decent following decided to re-tweet[7] my update. After that, it snowballed. People kept on passing it along. "Look at this," they said. "This kid wrote a thing." Eventually, it was shared by Mia Farrow, some dude from CNBC, and Chris Hayes of MSNBC. Shit blew up, is what I'm trying to say.

I was on the train back to Boston from NJ after Thanksgiving before it got truly big. I looked at the Twitter app on my phone and saw a Favstar[8] notification about "Congrats on your 100-star Tweet!" and I said, "Oh no, something terrible has happened." I checked the Interactions and that "This bears repeating" Tweet had around 300 retweets. For the next few hours, the app was constantly showing new activity. Every time I checked the Interactions tab, I'd see, "So-and-so and 15 other people retweeted . . ." I was jazzed.

I wrote more jokes about it during the day. I was excited; my Tweet was trending,[9] for chrissakes. Justin Bieber trends.

Then came the haters. I don't remember the exact like timeline of when these guys started coming out of the woodwork, but people started replying to my Tweets in a pretty haterish manner. Some of my favorites:

This woman apparently dislikes Mia Farrow:

Belinda, I make an ass out of myself literally all of the time on Twitter. Like 90% of what I post is about how I love such-and-such Taylor Swift song or "Hey, guys, I farted just now. Isn't that something." Why you gotta be so mean?

Around 10:00 PM, this article was posted on the Web. It is not inaccurate in that everything they posted, well, I said all those things. They cut some things out, though, to better fit the narrative they wanted,[10] which was really interesting. I had never been the subject of a story before. I know the entire tale of what happened, so it's neat to see those events shaped into a Piece Of Journalism.

Speaking of journalism, Buzzfeed can go fuck itself.[11] Once my Tweet hit its apex (give or take), a Buzzfeed journo named Micah Grimes mentioned me and how what I said actually wasn't true.[12] I chimed in, crediting them and explaining exactly what my motives were:

Then I wrote a joke to Alex Prewitt, my friend -- in a Tweet not directed at Mr. Grimes, mind you -- about how I was rolling in a pit of Twitter fame:

For which I was called a "tool."

The state of online journalism:

I just saw this one now, and it's actually hysterical. This person called me ugly and then favorited his own Tweet.

Anyway, yeah. Oh, and here are some more Tweets I wrote about this whole thing:[13]

And lastly:

No response yet from The Donald himself, but someone else chimed in:




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[1] I wish my name were something like Rick so I could be all, "This is a Rick-tatorship!"↩

[2] He knows how senior citizens love coupons, so he was gonna replace Medicare with vouchers. EXTREME!↩

[3] Who is aka the ACTUAL Vice President.↩

[4] And if anyone is to do it, it's me, a snarky college graduate.↩

[5] AFM and JH, I think.↩

[6] This is untrue. A figure of speech.↩

[7] This is like "Sharing" a Facebook update. The idea is that this person showed my tweet to his or her (almost certainly many) followers.↩

[8] A series of bots to tell you when your Tweets reach various numbers of favorites: 50, 100, 250, 500, etc.↩

[9] "Trending" is when a phrase becomes popular on Twitter. In this case, it was "Paul Ryan unfollowed Mitt Romney." Twitter keeps a list of its currently-trending phrases, only adding to their popularity.↩

[10] This, I think, is that a Crazed Idiot Liberal Tweets Lie, Brainless Morons Believe It. The goofy part is that nothing about my Tweets indicated that I was liberal. I could've voted for Romney -- stop laughing! -- and still written those things. Regardless of my allegiance, Paul Ryan unfollowing his old running mate on Twitter is funny. I wonder what their breakup song would be?↩

[11] Earmuffs, Grandma.↩

[12] This, to his credit, is absolutely right. The @PaulRyanVP account is separate from @RepPaulRyan, though both are verified. Can one person have two verified accounts? Is that allowed? Huh. Anyway, the VP one still exists and it still follows Mitt. The Rep one never followed Mitt.↩

[13] Really all of this is an excuse to pimp my faux-wit.↩

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Saturday, November 24, 2012

Infinite Jest #11

Entry Eleven

 The Quebecois have a reverse-Medusa myth called L'Odalisque de Sainte Thérese -- I don't know how to make l'accent grave -- where anyone who looks it in the face becomes a bunch of diamonds and jewels (this as opposed to being turned to stone, which is not exactly the reverse of jewels, but okay) and DFW makes a point of mentioning it a bunch of times: Steeply and Marathe mention its parallels to The Entertainment and they talk about Himself's weird movie where a Medusa and The Odalisk have a like hour-long fight scene, which they view as some kind of comedic thing.

Mirrors: Effective against mythical beasts and babies
Joelle is the Odalisk, only real. Obviously (well, maybe not obviously; I can't rule out supernatural creatures in a book like this) L'Odalisque isn't a real tangible monster any more than dragons or fairies are but Joelle is (A) real and (B) the human equivalent of a creature that freezes people with her beauty. She claims that that's why she wears a veil: Her beauty is so striking and thorough that people see her face and cease having the will to do anything other than stare at it forever. I don't know if that's entirely true, but I can think of two reasons why it would be the case and two why it wouldn't be:
  1. She worked with Himself in the making of The Entertainment, so I can only assume she's the star of the thing. The samizdat does actually consume people entirely, so there's a point in her favor.
  2. Her work as Madame Psychosis puts Mario into a similar state -- maybe not Frozen With Pleasure, but the kid can relax and go to sleep -- so maybe her "power" is transmitted, albeit in a watered-down fashion, through her voice.
  3. Presumably she didn't wear the veil while dating Orin or before making The Entertainment; did her power only surface during the making of the film? Is it possible that the movie itself is what gave her the ability to freeze people with just how gorgeous she is? No one got frozen in real life, pre-samizdat? Really?
  4. Avril once threw acid at her face and Wallace describes Joelle as an "acid-dodger extraordinaire," but he may be being ironic, kind of like how you'd call a guy who gets punched in a nose a professional boxer.
Anyway Joelle and Gately have a nice conversation about a guy who shoots another guy in a bar for "making him small in front of his girl." I like Gately a lot because he seems like a genuine fella who's made mistakes, but it's always weird to read the weird shit he's seen and lived. I completely forgot that he killed a man by suffocating him via a gag when he (the man, Gately's robbery victim) couldn't breathe through his nose on account of a cold. I also really like it when he gets flustered when talking to Joelle or Geoffrey Day with their insane vocabularies and syntax. He's almost acting as a voice for the reader: "And jesus here she goes again talking like an English teacher."

Randy Lenz kills a lot of animals and it makes me uncomfortable, probably even moreso than the man-turned-rotisserie-chicken of however many chapters ago. Something about suffocating cats in trash bags, lighting them (the cats) on fire -- though the one that ran after him was kind of funny -- and luring dogs with meatloaf before cutting their throats bothers me a lot.

YOU WILL TASTE REVENGE, LENZ
Rodney Tine, a USOUS official, measures his penis constantly. I do not know what this represents.

What in the hell are Avril and John Wayne doing? Were they gonna do it? Make a sex? Why are they dressed as a (nude) football player and a cheerleader? Is Avril into roleplaying as her son's life? What the shit is going on? Pemulis walks in on them and kills it with his Best Lines Ever:
I probably won't even waste everybody's time asking if I'm interrupting.
I predict this'll take about two minutes at most.
Pemulis's face when
The scene with Hal lying on his bed is great, too. Pemulis pops his head in and asks if Hal's eaten; Hal says, "The beast has killed and gorged and now lies in the shade of the Baobob tree." Pemulis leaves. Then Wayne pops his head into Hal's room, says nothing at all, just stands there for two minutes, and then leaves. Amazing.

"Hey, erm, Hal, me and your Mom, uh . . ."
Every time a chapter (section?) has an overlong title like "SELECTED SNIPPETS FROM THE INDIVIDUAL-RESIDENT-INFORMAL-INTERFACE MOMENTS OF D.W. GATELY . . . " I do a little dance because I know it's going to be a treat.

David Foster Wallace writes sex scenes in a way that confuses my genitalia.

There's a blind kid at the Academy and he's actually really good, so a few of the other students begin wearing blindfolds in a like zen attempt to heighten their other senses. Pemulis gets a hold of one, a blindfold-wearer, and this poor kid just has to pee and he wants someone to lead him to the bathroom and Pemulis talks his ear off about various topics -- all this time the boy doing a pee-pee dance -- and they discuss the possibility of Pemulis maybe securing some of the lad's urine to sell on the black market.

I think Pemulis might be my favorite character, actually. It's probably between him and Don W. Gately and maybe Hal but Pemulis stars in most of my favorite sections. I don't know anything about him, like where he's from or what his deal is or anything, but the dude's a jokester.
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Saturday, November 17, 2012

Four More Books!

Ian Can Read: Four More Books!

I knew how to read prior to this summer's Book-a-Thon[1] and I did use that skill before writing about it on the World Wide Web.[2] Here's a list of a few of the books I remember enough that I must've enjoyed them. Unlike other posts, I'm not going to go back to the source material, so there's a good chance that most of what I say about these will be outright false.

  • The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman. It's his second novel and it's much better than the first.[3] It's about a guy who has a special paint that makes him invisible, and he uses it to watch people. He'll go in your house, sit in the corner for like four days, and watch your life. I read it over a week during senior year, concurrent with working -- real creepy story and the pages turn quickly.
  • I Drink For A Reason by David Cross[4]. I looked at that link just now and you can get it from Amazon for $5.60, which is a total steal. It's a series of essays and memoirs and fictional satirical memoirs written by one of the more daring comics in the biznizz. The true masterpiece is his open letter to Larry The Cable Guy, available on YouTube in two parts HERE and HERE. It's one of the best takedowns in recent memory. Apply a cold rag to the burned area, "Larry."
  • Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman is a really neat look at one of the world's brightest minds. He reminds me of my grandfather, if my grandfather had a Ph.D in physics and worked on the Manhattan Project. Watch him talk about magnets. Now imagine that style of explanation applied to telling neat stories about his time in college picking up women[5] and pleding a fraternity. There's really neat historical stuff about the making of The Bomb, too. I dunno. Guy's one of my Science Heroes.
  • Simon Pegg's Nerd Do Well. Simon Pegg is my favorite comedic actor -- Spaced[6], Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, the upcoming The World's End -- and he (co)writes every good thing he stars in. Makes sense that I'd like his book. It wasn't great -- his professional acting career (i.e., his life from 1999 to the book's present) gets maybe 10% of the page space in favor of more childhood reminiscences -- but it's definitely worth a read if you're curious about Pegg's early life. The bit where he meets George Romero[7] is a neat I-admire-your-work-no-I-admire-YOUR-work moment.

I'm still reading Infinite Jest and I'll write about it eventually. Things are happening.




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[1] More of a Book-a-Sisyphean-Trudge now, thanks to Infinite Jest.↩

[2] Trenchant!↩

[3] Downtown Owl is okay, and I say that as a fan of his. "Owl" has a huge problem where all of the characters -- high-schoolers, mostly -- talk in exactly the same detached, ironic fashion; they sound like the author. The Visible Man doesn't have that issue because (A) there are far fewer characters -- the story revolves around the Visible Man and his psychiatrist -- and (B) literally everyone shouted at Klosterman about the problem, so he consciously changed his style.↩

[4] Perhaps best known as Dr. Tobias Funke on Arrested Development.↩

[5] SPOILER ALERT: Feynman was a total ladies' man. (Also let me randomly plug Father John Misty's "Only Son Of The Ladiesman.")↩

[6] This is my favorite show. TV in the UK works differently (and I'd say better) than in the US, so they "only" did 14 episodes, but it's a perfect series about "life-wasting" Gen Xers. Pegg and Jessica Stevenson wrote it and star in it, Edgar Wright (who directed those three movies, too) directs it, Nick Frost is another main character, it's just great. Shaun Of The Dead is its like spiritual successor.↩

[7] Director of the old ". . . Of The Dead" films, father of the Zombie Movie.↩

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Sunday, November 11, 2012

Infinite Jest #10

Entry Ten

 Gately's in charge of cooking at the House, and one night he boils up some hot dogs and there's some rumblings of "I'd rather not" from Joelle van Dyne, so he goes to drive to some Whole Foods hippy thing and pick up some greens. He drives through Inman Square, which means DFW describes my neighborhood for like a whole page. Dude's talking about driving down Prospect, turning, going past Ryle's Jazz Club, and c.

So he's driving and he drives past a video shop run by some dudes and the AFR shows up, looking for their copy of The Entertainment. Poor guys didn't even know they had it, but les Assassins knew, and they showed up with a vengeance. They kill one guy by driving a train spike into his eye -- that isn't really described, though: It's more of a "Oh, shit, my brother's at the table with a train spike driven into his eye!" The other one, though, fuck.

One assassin clubs the fella's knee so he kneels to their height, and another asks him where the video is. He really doesn't know what they're talking about -- the store's a mess, videos all over the place (though this may have been exacerbated by the AFR coming in and rummaging) and there's like no inventory system -- but they don't care. The guy had been carrying a broom, sweeping up the shop, and one end had been whittled to a point. He had weaponized it, is what I'm saying. So the one assassin grabs him by the hair and pulls his head back so he's looking straight up, and another one takes the broom and pushes it through his mouth, down through his internal organs -- this is described really slowly and thoroughly, by the way; I'm curious as to its anatomical accuracy, given how the different nerve endings are named and something, like, pops inside him so he tastes blood -- and out the (erm) other end.

He doesn't die right off the bat, either. I mean, he might as well be dead, as he's been made into a rotisserie and he's immobile, but he stays alive for a few seconds, choking and bleeding shit into himself. Ugh.

There's also a long section in here where Himself is writing some sort of memoir -- it actually is from a collection of short autobiographical essays of famous directors, if you read the endnote -- about moving a bed with his father. It's written in an entirely different style. It's not like the Roy Tony ebonics sections, where the difference is more clear; it's just another, like, "valid" kind of writing.

This happens near page 500. By this point, we're around halfway done with Infinite Jest. We sort of know DFW's bag of tricks, or at least we've been exposed to most of them. Prior to this section, though, I had forgotten a little bit what "normal" or at the very least non-postmodern (modern?) prose looked like. For a while, there aren't end notes. People don't reference weird mathematical formulas. It's like a section from another book by another author, which is the point, because Himself wrote this. I guess what I'm saying is that Wallace is capable of writing a 12-page chapter through the hands of one of his fictional characters and have it be (A) totally different and (B) like a critically-acclaimed book I'd have read in high school.

Roy Tony scares Ken Erdedy into receiving his hug.

I think both Steeply (USOUS) and Marathe have copies of the samizdat, since they talk about both having lost people to its viewing. Force of will is irrelevant. The Entertainment always wins.

Moms leads an "anti-diddling" seminar with the young girls in the ETA while Hal, Axford, and Pemulis wait to be punished / murdered for the Eschaton incident. They're sitting and waiting for Hal's Uncle Charles Travis -- the headmaster of the ETA, now, after Himself's microwave suicide -- to finish talking to some unfortunate 7 year-old girl who's been admitted to the Academy on account of her being ranked something like 30th in the country in Girls' 12's. C.T. gives her the spiel about "We will break you down and rebuild you as a stronger tennis player," and he mentions something like, "We'll take your head apart and implant the force of will . . ." and the girl starts crying because she's afraid she's about to be murdered.

Hal, Axford, and Pemulis enter Travis's office and he ominously has the door close behind them. Shit's about to GO DOWN, SON.
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Infinite Jest #9

Entry Nine

 I've read over 100 pages since the last time I wrote so I'm going to do two posts again.

 Fish soup. Marathe and Steeply talk about fish soup forever. They're going on about the whole freedom to / freedom from dichotomy and Steeply says something to the effect of, "Americans are motivated to acquire pleasure for themselves," and Marathe says, "Well, what is to stop you from hurting others to reach that goal? What if your pleasure is only attainable by preventing the pleasure of another?" And then they talk about splitting a can of soupe aux pois for approximately four hours.

"Ah, but yes, let's say it is just you and I, and it is a Single Serving Size of la spoupe."
"We'd split it. That's an American invention, by the way, the S.S.S."
"You are insatiable for this soupe; a half-serving will only infuriate you, teasing your hunger."
"Well then we'd bid on the soup, and the winner would pay the other person the money, and then he'd go to the store and buy more soup."
"This is the only soup. There is no more soup."

It's mostly about how people will choose to watch The Entertainment, even knowing that it may kill them, because the curiosity will eat them up inside.

I was wrong about that Clipperton kid killing himself, by the way. I mean, he does totally kill himself, but it's not because he loses. To the contrary, he wins a ton and becomes a like national phenomenon. He's not ranked #1 in the country, though, because all of his wins are sort of negated on account of the terroristic threats, and being ranked first is all he wanted (probably). But then the person in charge of junior tennis in the USA retires or is fired or whatever and a new guy comes in from left field, unaware that Clipperton is batshit insane and holding his life hostage to win matches. Dude looks at Clipperton's undefeated -- aka "Still Alive" -- record and says, "Well, shit, he's got to be number one," and Clipperton can't take it, the pressure, and drops out of whatever academy he was in and falls off the face of the Earth for a while. He shows up at the ETA and demands -- begs, too -- to talk to Himself about (re?)admission to the Academy and so Mario brings him in and he sits down with him a while and Himself comes in and Clipperton pulls his gun out and blows his own brains out onto the walls. Some junior players just can't handle the pressure.

Gately cleans shit and semen from another halfway house in the mornings as a job. It's pretty gross how these guys have a Jizz Corner where they go and just mercilessly have at their own genitals.

Subsidized Time was put in place by President Gentle to solve a financial crisis. Turns out people want a lot of social programs paired with virtually no taxation. Who knew. Demand their leaders sign pledges not to raise taxes. Truly a nightmare dystopian world.

Whole lotta tennis in this section -- lots of tennis drills, more accurately -- and it was much worse than anything I did on the baseball team in high school. I played baseball in high school -- ladies -- and this conditioning is much worse. (I was also really slow and awful, athletically, so my memories of conditioning are bound to be skewed negative.) Lots of running, hitting balls, sprinting back, running some more, drinking Gatorade out of paper cones, doing insane wind-sprints where you're basically like expected to vomit at the end.

More to the point, I don't know what this part of the book has to do with anything. Is it weird that I'm not entirely sure what this story is about? At work, people will ask me what it's about, what's going on with the story, and my best way to answer is to say, "There are three separate story threads right now -- a tennis academy, a halfway house, and this league of assassins in wheelchairs -- and I'm not sure how they're going to come together. I don't know if they will come together." I'm now seeing that that's actually a decent synopsis of the book that you could put on the back with a big picture of my stupid face but, like, why is there all this tennis stuff? What's advanced, plot-wise, by reading about the Tap-And-Whack drill? Is advancing the plot even the point? I feel like it isn't. Maybe something with Hal's ankle? Maybe he'll smoke way too much marijuana on account of the ankle pain and end up in the Enfield House.

BIG NEWS re: the Entertainment. Apparently there was some sort of study where scientists (it's always the damn scientists) prodded some part of a brain that unleashes insane endorphins and then they hooked the prod up to a lever -- this was through some sort of light electrostimulus -- so the mice/cats/dogs/dolphins could unleash the pleasure (HIYOOO) on themselves and then that's totally all they did. Each animal died because they'd only push the lever. Moved up the food chain, too, and each one killed itself, basically, for the sake of the pleasure. They moved to humans and said, "HEY SERIOUSLY THIS MIGHT KILL YOU," and people showed up in droves. Took off work for this thing. And so back to the "Humans are incapable of resisting things they want, even when those things can kill them."

That's probably what the book is about, actually.

"Hey Ian, what's Infinite Jest about?"
"I dunno; did you see they've got Freaks And Geeks on Netflix now? I watched the whole thing this weekend."
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