Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

Philadelphia-based freelance writer
September 8, 2010

Franzen Redux

1) I received Freedom in the mail yesterday. Quite excited to start it, though I am just getting into Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which so far is fantastic.

2) I have a subscription to MOG, an online music site that’s a pleasant and necessary diversion at work. I was a big fan of Lala, until Apple bought it so they could demolish it (as it was an iTunes competitor). One cool thing about MOG is that there is a scale one can slide during a given song, selecting a notch on a spectrum from “Artist Only” to “Similar Artists.” So when I was listening to a ton of Ween, I could have slid the scale over to “Similar Artists” to listen to what MOG thought was in the same ballpark. And if I were listening to a compilation album, and Ween came up, I could then slide the scale all the way over to “Artist Only” and thereby jump into a Ween mix. And so on—you could jump in and out, deciding you like Ween but you’d like to see similar artists, and from that decide what you really wanted to hear was the Butthole Surfers or early Flaming Lips—and so forth. Here is an interesting New Yorker piece about the larger online-music scene, with some special attention paid to MOG.

Navigating MOG, though, has put me in mind of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and a program he describes one of the characters writing that uses (what sounds to me like) similar technology, and which the character sells off for nearly $20 million. I’d always thought it was called Eigenvector, but apparently it’s actually “Eigenmelody.”

It is, of course, deeply impressive that Franzen thought this up. I suppose similar things were around in the early 2000s, but I remember reading The Corrections a few years late and being impressed by the novelty of this idea. Invention isn’t considered the strength of Franzen’s writing, but this again calls to mind his friend, David Foster Wallace, and all the technological developments described in Infinite Jest.

2 Comments
September 7, 2010

Wikiperils

Sometimes you shouldn’t trust open-source information sources.

Leave a comment
September 3, 2010

M. Night

For reasons relating to my being unsure of how various parts of this blog work, for an early post I ended up creating a Category called “M. Night Shyamalan.” Thus giving the casual reader the impression that I blog about that dude, like, all the time. (I blogged about him once, in the context of planning to go see The Last Airbender, which my brother had been a production assistant on. Astute readers will note that I never again mentioned that movie, and if those readers are really astute they’ll be able to guess why.)

Also because of my lack of technical skill at this whole blog thing, I’ve decided it would be easier to write more about M. Night than deleting that category. Which I’m sure would only mean that that earlier post would belong to one fewer category, but in my mind WordPress itself would somehow be structurally damaged by the removal of this crucial category tag.

Anyway, the AV Club posted this item about Shyamalan possibly doing an Unbreakable sequel. It is an interesting possibility mainly because Unbreakable led all the way up to the exact point where you would typically be interested in a superhero movie, and then stopped; it makes sense as part of a multi-part narrative, but as a third or fourth installment, or, better yet, a straight-to-DVD prequel-type thing that completists would go nuts for. It’s a pretty silly movie that, in my opinion, “worked” only in the warm glow of goodwill from Shyamalan’s success with The Sixth Sense. So a sequel that picked up on the promise of a superhero showdown might actually be interesting.

It’s not to be, the AV Club item reports. But what made me think I ought to post this (other than having that annoying M. Night category to populate; seriously, I wish I could just get rid of it) was this transitional line from Sean O’Neal (whose writing on that site is kind of a surprise pleasure; I’m such a fan of Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, and Scott Tobias, it’s a bonus to enjoy stuff from other contributors, the moreso when it’s material like this item that would seem to be mere toss-offs): “Showing his usual acumen for giving the public exactly what he wants . . .”

Yes. Exactly. Thank you, Sean O’Neal.

1 Comment
September 3, 2010

Nyjer Morgan and the unwritten rules of baseball

On Sports Illustrated‘s website there’s an interesting article about Nyjer Morgan, the Washington Nationals outfielder who’s gotten in a bunch of incidents in the last week or so. The facts of the case are interesting enough in themselves (and I’ve heard that the brawl Morgan incited is pretty lively, although I am too squeamish about that stuff to have clicked through yet; after replays of football players getting injured, watching athletes brawl is one of my least favorite elements of televised sports).

But what the author of the piece, Jason Turbow, focuses in on is Morgan’s repeated flaunting of baseball’s “Code”: the unwritten rules that governs how players comport themselves. This kind of stuff is, in general, fascinating to me, and I also find it interesting the way these sorts of insights are creeping more and more into public view. There is so much more information now, so many more media outlets, it seems increasingly difficult for there to be anything left “behind the scenes.” (I am thinking generally about reality shows where things are produced, “Behind the Music”-type programming, document and information leaks, etc.)

On its surface this seems like a negative development, that the joy of these illusions is vanishing. But maybe it’s more complicated. I’m wondering, for instance, whether anyone really keeps all these unwritten rules in his or her mind. It seems to be in the nature of unwritten rules—or, calling back my 10th grade social studies class, folkways and mores—that they’re embedded somewhere deeper than mere software, that we basically don’t think of them. And in any case, it’s an outside, authorial presence that is calling our attention to the rules; it’s not Morgan or any other player who is pointing to the nebulous framework of rules, and when they do so it’s situation-specific, not some calculated effort to pull back the curtain. As an example, see Dallas Braden calling out Alex Rodriguez, earlier this season, for jogging back across the pitcher’s mound after a foul ball.

As a sidenote, Morgan started his career as a Pittsburgh Pirate. I’m curious to see whether there’ll be a local media report about the Pirates shipping him out for just this kind of insanity; going from the Pirates to the also-dirt-cheap Nationals, it doesn’t make sense to assume he went the way of Freddy Sanchez, Jason Bay, etc., etc., and got bought up for more money.

Leave a comment
September 2, 2010

Some (Other People’s) Thoughts on Infinite Jest

English professor Alan Jacobs has been reading it and blogging about the experience. Particularly interesting are comparisons to James Joyce’s Ulysses and some ruminations on reading it on a Kindle versus in physical form (which I learned, via these blog posts, is called a codex. Huh.)

Picking through these is resonant for me because the novel and different pieces of it have been coming back to me lately. I like that Jacobs makes criticisms of IJ; I do sort of agree that it was needlessly long. But there is a staying power to the book that tends to refute nitpicking, and to override the more focused, intellectual praise of the novel’s achievements. In a strange way, the book interacts with its own observations on / concerns with entertainment (broadly defined), becoming the sort of work whose scenes and images linger in memory more, at least for me, than do any of its themes or philosophical threads.

On a more specific level, I thought of IJ a lot while I was watching Inception. The obvious reason is that Leonardo DiCaprio washes up on a beach, which “rhymes” with the last line of IJ, describing Don Gately’s position: “And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”

OK, maybe it’s more a similarity of feeling and circumstance than an exact physical/meteorological parallel. Both works also work their way to the point where the beginning and end join one another.

Although Infinite Jest, rather pointedly, doesn’t quite join these two points, at least not in anything close to an explicit manner. That’s always bugged me about the book, but I also recognize it may be the chief reason the novel—and especially that last line, and most of the last chapters—still haunts me. I literally still am not sure of what happened. (And looking through Jacobs’ post, where he cites some other internet commentary on the novel, it seems there is no one answer, and not much in the way of consensus.)

More to the point, Infinite Jest‘s failure to connect everything makes more sense in light of the book’s themes and, especially, Wallace’s working title for it, A Failed Entertainment.

Anyway, all of that is a long gloss on my posting a link to an interesting discussion of the book. I’d like to read it again some day, but with all the other good stuff in a pile beside my bed, and the endurance-challenge that IJ is, it may be a while.

Leave a comment
September 1, 2010

Ween

A blast of late-high school-era nostalgia when I heard this hilarious Ween song. Oh, Ween. Before Flight of the Conchords, there was you. Stay beautiful.

Update: But then, minutes later, a reminder of the other, possibly weirder side of Ween: the beautiful, tender and apparently serious “Sarah.”

Leave a comment
September 1, 2010

Franzen

Jonathan Franzen interviewed by the AV Club here. Two of my favorite things, finally joined. His new novel, Freedom, is receiving glowing reviews. I’m bending in my position of resigning myself to waiting a year ’til the paperback comes out . . . and have just added my name to the surely long waiting list at the Carnegie Library. From the interview alone, though, one gets a sense of the scope of the novel and its ambition. You can also get a clear sense of Franzen as a thoughtful writer, grappling with significant issues: freedom, clearly, and what it means in the current American context, but also slightly meta concerns such as hooking and keeping readers. His take on it is, as with most things, unimpeachable: that it’s the writer’s job to produce work so compelling the reader turns away from cable, YouTube, video games, etc., etc. in order to read the book. Period.

In what limited press and review materials I’ve read from this novel’s publicity push, Franzen has come off as a more likeable person. Having read both How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, I got the clear sense that he’s a warm and funny person but that there’s a thin shell of reserve that can come off as chilly. Even reading this interview, the number of long pauses put me in mind of television appearances where his stoic face, those thick-framed glasses, that arrogant stubble(! I don’t know where that came from; I’m just going to go with it), made him come off as detached, a snob. Knowing he went to Swarthmore College, and possessing just enough knowledge of the place to form some key assumptions, probably doesn’t help. (I grew up one town over from Swarthmore.) Franzen seems, in general, the opposite side of the coin of his friend David Foster Wallace, who possessed a formidable intellect but seemed always to take pains to be self-deprecating and to connect to his audience. This is an observation, though, that suggests the folly of thinking you “really know” a public figure based on his/her writings and televised appearances.

Addendum: I forgot about this, or perhaps I never fully noticed, but I guess there was a small “feud” surrounding Franzen and Freedom when the writers Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner both complained about all the press. It was one of those annoying one-sided feuds that shouldn’t be called a “feud” because, well, you wouldn’t call mosquitoes buzzing around your ear a feud. But there’s a good rundown and, indeed, takedown by Lisa Solod at Open Salon (I guess a branch of Salon where people can post their own stuff? Don’t let that keep you away, though: the writing and reasoning are both Salon-quality.).

1 Comment
August 31, 2010

Interviews in the Paris Review

They are, indisputably, excellent. They’re always good craft-centered pieces (which is no surprise given that the series is “The Art of Fiction,” “The Art of Poetry,” etc.), but I suspect that even if you never felt the urge to write anything yourself, if you were interested in that particular writer’s work you would get a lot out of each one.

No surprise, then, from reading this Lorin Stein guest post (at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic blog) on the topic, that these interviews are the product of an involved and methodical process.

Here’s a link to the interview archives. Not many are available in full, but lots of the excerpts are meaty enough in and of themselves (and, you know, it’s fair enough that the Paris Review should want to sell issues, back or otherwise). This (excerpt from an) interview with James Ellroy is a beast, and prompted me to go to a bookstore and read the entire thing, which was equally beastly.

Leave a comment
August 28, 2010

Addendum to the Beloit College Mindset List

. . . which I lamented here. Full list for the class of 2014 here.

“76. Calvin has always been peeing on things, rather than an intelligent and imaginative little boy.”

Leave a comment
August 26, 2010

More Sports (Pan-Pennsylvanian Edition)

Two sports-related posts within a single (sports-related) post!

As a kind of follow-up to this post, on the woeful Pittsburgh Pirates, some recent stuff in the news about the team and, especially, the reasons for its awfulness:

–A Slate article asking the question, “Should the Pirates Spend Money to Win Ballgames?” and looking at the ins and outs of how they’d even go about doing that. Fascinating tidbit:

“Sabermetricians . . . have figured out ways to determine how much an individual player’s performance contributes to his team’s victories. Correlating those performance metrics to actual market prices for free agents shows that it costs management something like $5 million to purchase each additional win. (For example, by signing a $10-million-quality free agent, a team might improve its record by two games.)”

It does present more of an obvious dilemma for the Pirates’ ownership, as well as casting attention back on the greater disparities among large- and small-market teams within MLB.

Then again, if you’re feeling overly sympathetic, you might look back to the revelations that provided the impetus for the Slate article: leaked financial documents showing that the Pirates, among several other teams (most egregiously the Florida Marlins), made bank despite being among the worst-performing teams.

Moving over to football, I should say by way of preface that there’s only one professional team whose doings I give a fig about: the Philadelphia Eagles. The much-maligned, long-suffering, beleaguered Eagles.

Yet also the perennially in-contention Eagles. It’s true that, at this time of year, hope springs eternal for all 32 teams. Hope seems to be springing a bit too forcefully for the Eagles, by my estimation of their chances this year. Having dealt Donovan McNabb in favor of back-up and heir apparent Kevin Kolb, they’ve been tabbed by many to go through a rebuilding phase this year. I mostly agree with that: I have them finishing in the 8-8 or 9-7 range, and think it’s more likely they’ll finish a game or two below that than above it. And to that I say: That’s life. It’s rare that any team can rebuild on the fly, and still maintain—in spite of what I’ve just said—the chance to surprise people and remain a playoff contender.

That said, I’ve been cheered by reports like this ESPN profile and this Peter King column item that say Kevin Kolb is the real deal. I love that he’s getting this kind of praise, and that by all accounts it’s coming from inside the locker room. But I’ve periodically felt the need to throw cold water on myself, because buying into this sort of sports reportage feels like a shortcut to some kind of jinx: there’ve been so, so many big-money rookies and (as with Kolb, third-year) heirs apparent who’ve been similarly pumped up and anointed, only to fail dramatically or quietly, but in the end to fail, and to slump away into obscurity. Philadelphia, certainly, has had no shortage: Shawn Bradley and Mike Mamula are the first names that come to mind.

I don’t expect failure from Kolb. It’s just that, on the hype versus realistic-attainable-results spectrum, I don’t want to raise my hopes quite so high, at least not yet.

With that said . . .

E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles!!

Leave a comment