California Long-Term Care - About Infinity Schools: Fill & Download for Free

A few years ago I was invited to a gathering at the house of a very rich man in one of the upscale desert cities southeast of Los Angeles. For the sole purpose of parties and weekend retreats, he had built an Italianate villa on a large piece of land opening up onto the wilderness. The house was partially circumscribed by a crescent shaped infinity pool that fell off into nothingness before the great rolling hills of the Sonoran landscape. The walls retracted so that the entire dwelling seemed intimately joined with this outdoor paradise. Its interior was appointed in the most opulent manner, with imported marble floors, expensive original paintings from contemporary artists, and, most impressively for me, a massive wine cellar full of hundreds of rare wines and scotches.I was there only by the thinnest thread of associations: I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody. I was not then living in Los Angeles but was merely in town for a job interview, which, in spite of some high hopes, had left me disappointed once again. Unemployed for more than a year, I was now facing the grim reality of my own financially precarious situation.At some point in the evening I found myself at a small table with the Gatsby-like character who was hosting this gathering. He was a man in his 50’s, very physically fit, with the kind of upper body musculature that, at that age, can only come from daily workouts and perhaps some pharmaceutical help. Although he had long lived in Southern California, and now had the easy, understated quality that passes for good manners there, he also retained the directness and lack of pretense characteristic of the Midwest of his childhood.I complimented him on his choices in architecture, which he discussed with considerable knowledge and pride. He became more philosophical, however, as I expressed my envy for his position in life. I told him that I had always lived for my passions. I studied philosophy in college and graduate school and had ever since pursued just those experiences I thought would lead me to a better understanding of the world and of myself. I said, perhaps not with absolute sincerity, that I now wished I instead had given more thought to making a living. Who, I asked, would not want to be able to build such a beautiful home for himself?Be careful what you wish for, he said, glancing upward at the desert sky. I could immediately see that he had put great thought into what he was about to tell me. He seemed to have a lot on his mind, and he had found a sympathetic ear in me, someone whom he likely would never see again. Over the next hour I played the role of drinker’s confessor, listening to him express some of his most personal misgivings about his own life.While this all came out over the course of a long and meandering conversation, what follows is my best effort to compress what he said into a single monologue. It is constructed out of many actual phrases and sometimes complete lines he spoke to me that evening. I think it gives a very accurate impression of the man and his point of view.When you don't have money, you think money is going to solve your problems —and to some extent it does. But at a certain point it brings its own problems with it. Having money is like having a child. You have to care for it, you have to tend to it, you have to watch it every minute. You do this not only to make sure it grows, but also to make sure it doesn’t shrink. Money is alive and volatile. That means I am constantly thinking about my money. It’s what I think about first thing in the morning. It’s what I think about before I go to bed... Now, that makes it sound like a burden, and sometimes it is a burden. But the brutal truth is that nothing in my life gives me greater satisfaction than making money. If you’ve never experienced it, it might be hard for you to understand. Take this house for example. I made all the money for this in one year, just one small stock investment that I hit exactly right. I turned one hundred thousand dollars into 3 million dollars. Every day I would just wake up laughing as that stock kept going up. In one single day my shares went up over 50 grand! Amazing feeling! But that’s what’s crazy. I mean, I enjoy all this stuff well enough. All my junk amuses me a little bit, keeps me from getting bored. But as far as my possessions go, honestly — and I’ve really thought about this — I get more pleasure from my dogs than anything else. That’s the truth! Materially, I don’t need much to be happy. I already have everything I want. What I am working for, if I am entirely honest, is just the thrill of making more money. It’s like playing a game, a game in which the prize is power, the power that is represented by that money. Power for what? It doesn't matter! The prize is the power itself. It’s all about the feeling of power. There is a sensation I get when I make money… If you haven’t experienced it, I can only compare it to sex, or gambling, or cocaine. It’s exactly like that — maybe even better. So my investments and my business ventures are like various casino games, except in my games the odds usually favor me…. And what I live for on a daily basis is just the thrill of playing those games. It’s the damn’d truth! If I quit trying to make money, I wouldn’t even know why to get out of bed in the morning…. I first started to realize just how screwed up I was when I started thinking about other people’s professions in terms of the bottom line. I mean, I have a pal from childhood who is a doctor, and I found myself thinking what an irrational job choice this was for him. He cares about money too, and I just thought, what a waste… how inefficient a use of his time and talent, since there are so many better ways to make money. Crazy, huh? I don’t know what it’s like to be a doctor, but I would guess there’s a whole level of meaning there that people get off on. That doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s like all I really understand is money! What I realized as I entered my fifties a few years ago is that business has become my identity — and I am not sure I like who I am. But I have no choice, no more than a lifelong drug addict does. I see businessmen bullshit themselves about why they are really doing it — you know, that it’s all for their family or whatever other bull crap. Don’t fool yourself, I think. I know you! You’re just feeding the monkey! …. Anyhow, that’s my story, KP. I am not entirely proud of my life, but I accept it. I try to be as comfortable as I can, to have as much fun as I can, but I’m not in denial about anything. I know I’m basically just a junky living for the next hit.As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”As the words of this man reveal, some of these differences work in their favor, some not. No matter what goal one pursues in life, there will be unintended consequences. These consequences are part of the total package. You can’t take the good without the bad. For this reason, it’s wise, in any deal, to understand the totality of what you are signing on for.There are many paradoxes to being wealthy, just as there are with other positive things in life (being beautiful, being young, being highly talented, to name a few). But one of the greatest paradoxes of all has to be that the possession of wealth can insidiously undermine the freedom of the wealthy person to fully enjoy the fruits of their wealth. What at first seems to be the clearest path to personal fulfillment actually impedes one’s ability to reach that goal.As I see it, the moral of this story is not that wealth is bad. That’s an open question for me. The main thing I worry about, in that regard, is what it means to be wealthy in a world in which so many people have so little. But that’s a different issue.The real moral of this tale concerns an even deeper puzzle of our nature. We humans are always torn in two by these kinds of paradoxes. There I was, a man who had spent his whole life “seeking wisdom,” and, as a consequence, was now close to being unable to take care of himself financially. What good is wisdom if you don’t have the power to take action in the world? And yet there he was, a rich man of great power, with no clue at all as to what worthwhile thing he might do with that power.There’s nothing absolute about any of this. There surely exists a both/and that subsumes the either/or on which this paradox is built. But I do believe that, in any individual case, the path to finding this balance is far narrower and more fraught with pitfalls than most of us know.

DFW.This guy, not the airport:It's wild that many people in Silicon Valley don't recognize those initials. The other day I had to explain Infinite Jest to one of the smartest and most influential people I know. It was the first time he'd heard of the book.We could've used this literary titan, a self-deprecating genius who could tackle any subject, and he could've used us.David Foster Wallace (author):Spoke our language. The Internet sounds like David Foster Wallace.[1]Delighted in asking and answering questions. Like most of us, DFW had a day job — fiction, trying to tackle The Pale King — but was also a master essayist. Nonfiction was his plaything.[2] Quora could've been his playground.Snarked. The publication: Gourmet, a prestigious food and wine magazine. His assignment: The annual Maine Lobster Festival. His product: 7,000 words on the ethics of boiling a creature alive in order to enhance the consumer's pleasure, complete with discussion on the crustacean's sensory system.[3] Readers and advertisers were undoubtedly surprised by the unusual angle.Boasted expertise in a range of heavy-hitting topics.[4] He was so much more than Literature and Writing.Hailed from the Midwest. As in, outside Silicon Valley.Out-grammared everyone.[5]Shepherded the grammatically feeble. That is, he taught lower-level English classes.[6] Quora could've used his help editing.Knew the ins and outs of footnotes.Spoke eloquently and candidly of Depression and Loneliness.[7] I suspect many among us visit these topics during dark times, hoping to find words from another soul in the trenches.[8]Was an addict. A tasteless point to make, perhaps, but upvotes and follows and edits can be habit-forming.The next best thing would be Quora hosting DFW's friend and fellow writer, Jonathan Franzen. Getting him on here would be victory greater than getting Obama on Reddit (August 2012), for Franzen is not a friend of the internet: "It's doubtful," he said, "that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction."[9]_________[1] To the Internet's detriment, argues Maud Newton in The NYT Magazine (2011):[In an essay] Wallace speaks of “the whole cynical postmodern deal” and “the whole mainstream celebrity culture,” and concludes that “the whole thing sucks.” ... “whole” appears 20 times in the essay, so frequently that it begins to seem not just sloppy and imprecise but argumentatively, even aggressively, disingenuous. At their worst these verbal tics make it impossible to evaluate his analysis; I’m constantly wishing he would either choose a more straightforward way to limit his contentions or fully commit to one of them.Of course, Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, “catching, highly infectious.” And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.Visit some blogs — personal blogs, academic blogs, blogs associated with some of our most esteemed periodicals — to see these tendencies writ large.full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html?pagewanted=all[2] DFW in an interview with Tim Scocca (1998):I'll be honest. I think of myself as a fiction writer. I'm real interested in fiction, and all elements of fiction. Fiction's more important to me. So I'm also I think more scared and tense about fiction, more worried about my stuff, more worried about whether I'm any good or not, or I'm on the wrong track or not.Whereas the thing that was fun about a lot of the nonfiction is, you know, it's not that I didn't care, but it was just mostly like, yeah, I'll try this. I'm not an expert at it. I don't pretend to be. It's not particularly important to me whether the magazine, you know, even takes the thing I do or not. And so it was just more, I guess the nonfiction seems a lot more like play.full transcript: http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/scocca/2010/11/22/i_m_not_a_journalist_and_i_don_t_pretend_to_be_one_david_foster_wallace_on_nonfiction_1998_part_1.html[3] From DFW's "Consider the Lobster," Gourmet magazine (2004):Up until sometime in the 1800s, [lobster] was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. One reason for their low status was how plentiful lobsters were in old New England. “Unbelievable abundance” is how one source describes the situation, including accounts of Plymouth pilgrims wading out and capturing all they wanted by hand, and of early Boston’s seashore being littered with lobsters after hard storms—these latter were treated as a smelly nuisance and ground up for fertilizer. There is also the fact that premodern lobster was often cooked dead and then preserved, usually packed in salt or crude hermetic containers. Maine’s earliest lobster industry was based around a dozen such seaside canneries in the 1840s, from which lobster was shipped as far away as California, in demand only because it was cheap and high in protein, basically chewable fuel.Now, of course, lobster is posh, a delicacy, only a step or two down from caviar. The meat is richer and more substantial than most fish, its taste subtle compared to the marine-gaminess of mussels and clams. In the U.S. pop-food imagination, lobster is now the seafood analog to steak, with which it’s so often twinned as Surf ’n’ Turf on the really expensive part of the chain steak house menu.full text: http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster[4] A list of Quora topics David Foster Wallace would've owned[a]:Philosophy. His professors at Amherst College considered him a "rare philosophical talent, an exceptional student who combined raw analytical horsepower with an indefatigable work ethic. He was thought, by himself and by others, to be headed toward a career as a professor of philosophy."[b]Mathematics and Logic (philosophy). He focused on both in college and, much later, published "Everything and More," a nonfiction book that tells the story of ∞ in a breathless survey of the history of math. The structure of Infinite Jest resembles a fractal, he once remarked.[c]Politics. He spent a week traveling with McCain's primary campaign during the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election.[d]9/11 Attacks.[e]Religion. Allegedly he went to church every day, but he didn't talk about it much.[f] Maybe he would've writtten some anonymous answers.Mental Illness. DFW's own demons are well-documented.Addictions. He hung out in halfway houses for sport.[g] Addiction is a recurring theme in Infinite Jest.[h]Teaching. He had some curious classroom practices: Cheap, mass-market paperbacks were the only required reading in his English 102 class at Pomona College. The likes of Jackie Collins and Stephen King, he argued, would be "harder than more conventionally 'literary' works to unpack and read critically."[i]Tennis. He played the sport since childhood[j] and covered matches on assignment for the likes of Esquire.[k]Dogs (pets).[l] He had two rescues, and there was talk of him opening a shelter.Popular Culture.[m]Success.[n]Dating and Relationships. He died a married man but before that had a reputation as a ladykiller: "He once complained to Franzen that his destiny in life seemed to be to 'put my penis in as many vaginas as possible.'"[o]Dentistry. The first draft of Infinite Jest had a ton of tooth trivia that had to be extracted. DFW's editor "pointed out that the stereo chemistry of the bicuspid root was probably not of compelling interest to most readers."[p]Poetry, heh.[q][5] From DFW's "Tense Present," Harper's Magazine (2001):The term I was raised with is SNOOT. I submit that we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd. SNOOTs' attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives' attitudes about contemporary culture: We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs' importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT's cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails. We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else. [a]full text: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.htmlimage via http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/culturalcompass/2011/04/26/in-the-galleries-david-foster-wallaces-affinity-for-grammar-and-usage/[6] Former student Sue Dickman, from a collection of DFW tributes on McSweeney's:I used to confuse 'further' and 'farther,' and, apparently, I did it quite often. In one of my stories, I’d confused them yet again, and in the margins, he’d written, simply, 'I hate you.' I’ve never confused them since. He once left me a note, postponing a meeting, excusing himself by saying, 'I’m so hungry I’m going to fall over.' While I was irritated that he wasn’t there, I immediately adopted that sentence and have been saying it ever since.more tributes: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/memories-of-david-foster-wallace[7] From DFW's "The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing," The Amherst Review (1984):To me it's like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach. Almost everyone has felt really sick to his or her stomach, so everyone knows what it's like: it's less than fun. OK. OK. But that feeling is localized: it's more or less just your stomach. Imagine your whole body being sick like that: your feet, the big muscles in your legs, your collarbone, your head, your hair, everything, all just as sick as a fluey stomach. Then, If you can imagine that, please imagine it even more spread out and total. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in your body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e.coli and lactobacilli in you, too — the mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere, in everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that — sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom, swollen and throbbing, off-color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here, twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases, everything off balance and woozy. Quarks and neutrinos out of their minds and bouncing sick all over the place, bouncing like crazy. Just imagine that, a sickness spread utterly through every bit of you, even the bits of the bits. So that your very ... very essence is characterized by nothing other than the feature of sickness; you and the sickness are, as they say, "one."That's kind of what the Bad Thing is like at its roots. Everything in you is sick and grotesque. And since your only acquaintance with the whole world is through parts of you — like your sense organs and your mind, etc. — and since these parts are sick as hell, the whole world as you perceive it and know it and are in it comes at you through this filter of bad sickness and becomes bad. As everything becomes bad in you, all the good goes out of the world like air out of a big broken balloon. There's nothing in this world you know but horrible rotten smells, sad and grotesque and lurid pastel sights, raucous or deadly-sad sounds. Intolerable open-ended situations lined on a continuum with just no end at all.full text: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:YvYoUJ2gLTEJ:quomodocumque.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/wallace-amherst_review-the_planet.pdf+&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiH3jJXi7bjSM_2L8PhRZTooLn3UiLfReikgADFO2Z6h4AUMZqGQRgYKlN4E65dja7bD8qCeHaMf8RBrx5thDHTO5lJdSZlOYszttp49YEdb6QqMpWpgBhA5KfSKnQdlD6MWRgv&sig=AHIEtbRyCdoSidF85-Zvw5HlehAtX6XcVw[8] From Infinite Jest (1996 book):The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.[9] source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one_________[a] I'm sure I missed some. Chime in: If you could ask DFW one question, what would it be?[b] source: "Philosophical Sweep: To understand the fiction of David Foster Wallace, it helps to have a little Wittgenstein." http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2010/12/philosophical_sweep.html[c] DFW in an interview with "Bookworm" host Michael Silverblatt, 1996:It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first — was the draft that I delivered to Michael in '94, and it went through some I think 'mercy cuts', so it's probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now.[d] From DFW's "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and The Shrub," Rolling Stone (magazine) (2000):There's another thing John McCain always says. He makes sure he concludes every speech and [town hall meeting] with it, so the buses' press hear it about 100 times this week. He always pauses a second for effect and then says: "I'm going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don't agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth." This is McCain's closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder. Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?[e] From DFW's "9/11: The View From the Midwest," Rolling Stone (2001):Everybody has flags out. Homes, businesses. It's odd: You never see anybody putting out a flag, but by Wednesday morning there they all are. Big flags, small flags, regular flag-size flags. A lot of home-owners here have those special angled flag-holders by their front door, the kind whose brace takes four Phillips screws. And thousands of those little hand-held flags-on-a-stick you normally see at parades – some yards have dozens all over as if they'd somehow sprouted overnight. Rural-road people attach the little flags to their mailboxes out by the street. Some cars have them wedged in their grille or duct-taped to the antenna. Some upscale people have actual poles; their flags are at half-mast. More than a few large homes around Franklin Park or out on the east side even have enormous multistory flags hanging gonfalon-style down over their facades. It's a total mystery where people get flags this big or how they got them up there. ... The Yellow Pages have nothing under Flag.[f] source: http://www.mbird.com/2012/08/david-foster-wallace-went-to-church-constantly/image via http://www.amazon.com/Fate-Time-Language-Essay-Free/dp/0231151578[g] DFW in a conversation with Valerie Stivers (c. 1996):I would go to halfway houses and just sit there. I lurked a lot. Nice thing about halfway houses is they are real run-down and real sloppy and you can just sit around. And the more you sit around looking uncomfortable and out of place, the more it looks like you belong there. Some of the people knew this [breaking and entering] stuff very well and they loved to talk about it. And nobody is as talkative as a drug addict who just had his drugs taken away. They are eager to tell you their life [stories].full conversation: http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0596May/Verbal/dfwread.html[h] One of the best parts of Infinite Jest is a list of "exotic new facts" picked up in these halfway houses:That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.That certain persons will simply not like you no matter what you do.That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.That pretty much everybody masturbates.That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.[i] DFW's syllabus: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2010/dfw/teaching/#syllabus[j] How good was David Foster Wallace (author) at tennis?[k] From DFW's "Federer as Religious Experience," The New York Times, 2006:Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.htmlFrom DFW's "The String Theory," Esquire, 1996:Television tends to level everybody out and make everyone seem kind of blandly good-looking, but at Montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting- or even downright funny-looking. Jim Courier, former number one but now waning and seeded tenth here 43, looks like Howdy Doody in a hat on TV but here turns out to be a very big boy — the “Guide Média” lists him at 175 pounds, but he’s way more than that, with big smooth muscles and the gait and expression of a Mafia enforcer. Michael Chang, twenty-three and number five in the world, sort of looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely muscular and totally hairless legs. He has a mushroom-shaped head, inky-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I’ve seen outside a graduate creative-writing program. Pete Sampras (tennis player) is mostly teeth and eyebrows in person and has unbelievably hairy legs and forearms — hair in the sort of abundance that allows me confidently to bet that he has hair on his back and is thus at least not 100 percent blessed and graced by the universe. Goran Ivanisevic is large and tan and surprisingly good-looking, at least for a Croat; I always imagine Croats looking ravaged and emaciated, like somebody out of a Munch lithograph — except for an incongruous and wholly absurd bowl haircut that makes him look like somebody in a Beatles tribute band. It’s Ivanisevic who will beat Joyce in three sets in the main draw’s second round. Czech former top-ten Petr Korda is another classic-looking mismatch: At six three and 160, he has the body of an upright greyhound and the face of — eerily, uncannily — a freshly hatched chicken (plus soulless eyes that reflect no light and seem to see only in the way that fishes’ and birds’ eyes see).full text: http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/the-string-theory-0796#ixzz28a80GWUk[l] DFW in an interview with The Believer, 2003:I’m still not sure I’ve got much to relate. I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I’m not going to read anytime soon. I know I used to work mostly in restaurants, which chewing tobacco rendered impractical in ways that are not hard to imagine. Then for a while I worked mostly in libraries. (By “working” I mean doing the first few drafts and revisions, which I do longhand. I’ve always typed at home, and I don’t consider typing working, really.) Anyway, but then I started to have dogs. If you live by yourself and have dogs, things get strange. I know I’m not the only person who projects skewed parental neuroses onto his pets or companion-animals or whatever. But I have it pretty bad; it’s a source of some amusement to friends. First, I began to get this strong feeling that it was traumatic for them to be left alone more than a couple hours. This is not quite as psycho as it may seem, because most of the dogs I’ve ended up with have had shall we say hard puppyhoods, including one past owner who went to jail… but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that I got reluctant to leave them alone for very long, and then after a while I got so I actually needed one or more dogs around in order to be comfortable enough to feel like working. And all that put a crimp in outside-the-home writing, a change that in retrospect was not all that good for me because (a) I have agoraphobic tendencies anyway, and (b) home is obviously full of all kinds of distractions that library carrels aren’t. The point being that I mostly work at home now, although I know I’d work better, faster, more concentratedly if I went someplace else. If work is going shitty, I try to make sure that at least a couple hours in the morning are carved out for this disciplined thing called Work. If it’s going well, I often work in the p.m. too, although of course if it’s going well it doesn’t feel disciplined or like uppercase Work because it’s what I want to be doing anyway. What often happens is that when work goes well all my routines and disciplines go out the window simply because I don’t need them, and then when it starts not going well I flounder around trying to reconstruct disciplines I can enforce and habits I can stick to. Which is part of what I meant by saying that my way of doing it seems chaotic, at least compared to the writing processes of other people I know about (which now includes you).[I]full interview: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace[m] From an interview with DFW biographer D. T. Max in the Christian Science Monitor (2012):Not only was he was acquainted with pop culture, he thought he was addicted to it. He said his primary addiction wasn't to marijuana or alcohol, it was to television. David, with his anxiety and depression, found television fundamentally soothing: He was addicted to narrative. He said the narratives were too easy, too smooth, the endings too pat. But his sister says in the book that she didn't know anyone who had a need for TV like David had.full interview: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2012/0927/Biographer-D.T.-Max-getting-inside-David-Foster-Wallace-s-head[n] From DFW's commencement address at Kenyon College (2005):In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. ...Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.full transcript: http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words[o] source: "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by DT Max." http://www.amazon.com/Every-Love-Story-Is-Ghost/dp/0670025925[p] Another piece from his 1996 conversation with Valerie Stivers: http://www.stim.com/Stim-x/0596May/Verbal/dfwread.html[q]An early poem: My mother works so hard so hard and for bread. She needs some lard. She bakes the bread. And makes the bed. And when she’s threw she feels she’s dayd.from a permanent collection of DFW's books and papers, housed at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center, scanned with permission by a blogger: http://www.writebynight.net/writings-from-a-past-life/wfpl-david-foster-wallace/[I] Yeah, I realize this is only tangentially related to dogs. If you're reading this deeply, though, I suspect you don't mind.

Context in actual historyThe ties with France were severed from 1763 to 1855, and bilateral communications were thoroughly controlled by the English, which contrasts with Louisiana that could communicate freely with France as they wanted, to the point rich Créoles of la Nouvelle-Orléans would send their children to study in France, something Quebecers could not do anymore (they did previously : in New France’s Canada, it was common for the nobility to send their children to get a military education in Rochefort). An example is Joseph Le Moyne de Serigny, a Canadien that became the military governor of Rochefort (France) in the 17th century. It did happen that some French priests came to Québec or that some Quebecer politicians or priests visited France then but it was rare.In the 18th century, before the English Conquest, an ethnogenesis of Quebecers was already happening, “Canadiens” as a group were already differenciated and their French was already diverging a bit from the common ancestor Classical French. For example, the word tuque (as opposed to bonnet in France) is an innovation from 1726. So while Canadiens were a type of provincial French, they were already acquiring an originality. The English would try to divide and conquer and pit the Canadiens against the French and they failed.Something that was very different with New France compared to all the other colonies in America is that the French did not desire to allow an autonomous cultural life to exist and so never introduced printing presses in the colonies. This means that any book a Canadien would have wanted to print would have had to be printed directly in France. This also means it was not really possible to have scientific societies, something you could find in English colonies and in hispanic colonies thanks to their king Carlos III of Spain, an enlightened despot. Anglophones often do not know that but the intellectual life in hispanic colonies was thriving and it was a paradise for scientists. Some historians argue that there existed an “American Enlightement” in which a “Republic of Letters” appeared between the hispanic colonies and the English colonies. New France was not part of this, and I don’t think we can speak of a “Quebecer Enlightement”. When the French naturalist Buffon claimed that American animals were degenerated compared to European animals, there was a great outrage in American colonies either French or English… but I have never heard about any reaction to this in New France, despite it was… French colonies. English perceived this society as an intellectual desert and in a way it’s not false considering the expectations they had (but as I said it wasn’t really these Canadiens’ fault and the situation improved later : when English gave them printing presses, they printed their own journals and discussed their own ideas. When English gave them their constitutional principles, they studied them seriously (and made the mistake to take them seriously and were surprised to realize these rights were only meant for the anglos, not them). When the English gave them parliamentalism, they invested themselves a lot in this system and participated to it and made it functional instead of not caring. It worked so well that the representative government of Lower Canada really represented the interests of the Canadiens… which were of course opposed to the interests of Britain, hence our failed revolution. So the Canadiens were not more stupid, they just had less opportunities.« […] les Canadiens ou Créoles sont bien faits, robustes, grands, forts, vigoureux, entreprenans, braves et infatigables, il ne leur manque que la connoissance des belles Lettres »“[…] the Canadiens or Créoles are well shaped, robust, tall, strong, vigorous, enterprising, brave and tereless, the only thing that is missing from them is the knowledge of the belles-lettres”(Le baron de Lahontan, 1703)The Finno-Swedish botanist Pehr Kalm said in 1749 that the Canadien nobles were more interested and took greater pleasure in “natural history” and knowledge than English, that regarded knowledge more in an utilitarian way, and that the pursuit of knowledge to them was a distraction to the real matters : business. So there was a potential, an intellectual curiosity to exploit, but it did not come to fruition.However I cannot ignore that for a long time, Quebecers did not really value education much, at least not as much as they should have, and it’s still a little true today. In 1820–1829, 21 % of the population of Lower Canada could read. 50 years later it was 53 %. Today it’s 81 %, which makes us 19 % of illiteracy. It’s a scandal and a great shame, especially considering that Cuba achieves an almost 100 % literacy with much less means.[Edit: More details on the Hispanic Enlightement in the Americas. Starting in around 1760, there were “Patriotic Societies”, “Societies of Friends of the Country” (Sociedad de Amigos del País), like the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País of Havana (Cuba). Under the reign of Carlos III, there were German metallurgists and mineralogists sent to Mexico, New Granada and Peru in 1788 by Spain. In 1800, José Celistino Mutis from Bogotá in New Granada was considered one of the best botanists of the world. Alexander von Humboldt considered that there was no better place for the pursuit of scientific studies that Mexico City. The case of the Thirteen Colonies is more famous, with for example Benjamin Franklin. These two intellectual worlds would eventually write to each other. In the plains of the Captainship of Venezuela in the vice-royalty of New Granada, Alexander von Humboldt found people aware of the works of Benjamin Franklin. In 1800, the American Philosophical Society was writing letters with scholars in Mexico City and Cuba. In 1801–1802, the Gazeta de Guatemala (Kingdom of Guatemala, New Spain) did an extensive critic of the medical studies published by Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Smith Barton of Philadelphia. In 1808, José Hipólito Unánue from the vice-royalty of Peru published a book on the climate of Lima, El clima de Lima, with references from the Medical Repository from New York. We are very far from anything like that in French colonies, or French colonies under British control.(Source : Arthur P. Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline, pp. 12–15.) ]So when George Washington wrote elegant letters to the Canadiens quoting the ideas of Montesquieu or when the French citoyen Genêt of the French Republic wrote flowered letters to the Canadiens, they were completely out of touch with the local context. Prudent Lajeunesse, a Canadien emissary that came to speak to the US Continental Congress of Philadelphia in 1776, clearly explained to them that it was pointless to send letters to make them rise up.“Shortly after Ritzema's visit, a “French” Canadian arrived in Philadelphia, Prudent Lajeunesse. He was a Longueuil resident and Richelieu valley campaign partisan captain, most recently serving in Montréal. On 20 January, Wooster had provided him with an envoy's passport, to "give Congress true Information" about the "Sentiments and way of Thinking of his Countrymen." Upon arrival, the Canadien conferred with the important Committee of Secret Correspondence, including such powerful members as Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, and John Jay. That committee provided its Lajeunesse Report on 14 February.The Canadien described the ongoing struggle for habitant loyalties, pitting seigneurs and clergy against Continentals and their patriot Canadian friends. By his report, Congress's letters "made little Impression, the common People being generally unable to read. "Therefore, Lajeunesse noted, "it would be of great Service if some Persons from the Congress were sent to Canada" to explain, face-to-face, the nature of the current conflict. He opined that "unless some such Measure is taken," Continental affairs would "meet with continual Difficulty and Obstruction."After months of generals' requests for a Congressional committee, Lajeunesse's testimony was the straw that broke the camel's back. On 14 February, the very day that the Committee of Secret Correspondence provided its report, Congress decided to send a committee to Canada. The new committee would consist of two members of Congress, augmented by specially qualified civilians. A long series of delays, however, kept the delegation in Philadelphia, during which time additional visitors arrived from Canada.”(Mark R. Anderson, The Battle for the Fourteenth Colony: America's War of Liberation in Canada 1774–1776, p. 229.)It reminds me a lot the complaints of the Argentine Manuel Ugarte about his people. He complained that education in Argentina in the 20th century would not prepare people to be aware of what is going on in the world and that the danger the US constituted to Latin America could not be appreciated at home because people didn’t know enough their context, their history and also what their politicians would say.“These elementary notions [about the United States], which - owing to the incomplete and desultory instruction of South American schools - I had never had within my reach while I was studying for my baccalaureate, increased my curiosity and my disquiet. I read in a newspaper an article threatening Mexico and making a menacing allusion to four dates, the significance of which I proceeded to inquire into. In a historical text-book I discovered that in 1826 Henry Clay, the American Secretary of State, prevented Bolívar from extending the revolutionary movement for independence into Cuba. In a study of the separation from the mother country of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, I found in the separatist movement of certain colonies traces of an intervention of the United States foreshadowing the policy which was afterwards more clearly defined in the Antilles. Later on, I learnt of the demands of General Wilkinson, the interested defender of the establishments of Ohio, and I began, though without understanding as yet its full scope, to receive a revelation of that subtle policy which tended to hamper the action of Spain by taking the advantage of the conflict between Ferdinand VII and Bonaparte. […]It was only to us Spanish Americans, sunk as we were, and as we still are, in an inexplicable lethargy, that they appeared to be unknown; though it was we whom they most particularly concerned.Then query after query sprang up in succession. How was it that no protest was raised throughout all Spanish-speaking America when the Mexican territories in Texas, California, and New Mexico were annexed to the United States? Why was there no revolt of consciences on the North American Continent [sic] when those who had fomented the separatist movement in Cuba in the name of liberty, of peoples to self-determination, imposed the Platt Amendment, and exacted the concession of strategic naval stations on the coasts of the island? Can the existence at Washington of a department for the Spanish-American republics, organized like a Ministry for the Colonies, be reconciled with the full autonomy of our countries? Does not the Monroe doctrine imply a protectorate?”(Manuel Ugarte. El destino de un continente, 1925)So Quebecers too were quite naïve about the world, as they too were deprived of education.2. A New France that won in 1760The French reaction to the lack of efficiency of the Navy against the British was to reform it deeply, and the Navy the British fought in 1775 was now much different and gave them much more trouble. I have no doubts that there would have been similar reforms in the colonies to prevent the near-loss that almost happened. This might have transformed the colonies a lot.With this new history, it’s likely that France would have imposed war reparations on Britain, or perhaps even have snatched colonies (the Carribean ones for sure and maybe Madras in India).France would of course never have supported the Bostonian rebels, at least only as sending weapons trough “private citizens”, and so they would have lost, would have been hung, would have been under dictature under the Colonial Office for a few years and would have been disciplined into submission. The US would never arise and for generations, people would regard that as a mistake, would call it by the euphemism “the Events of 1775–1783” and when they would have stopped being traumatized by this, they would say “the Rebellions of 1775–1783”.It’s therefore possible the French Treasury would have been relatively in better shape, and so no General Estates in 1789 and potentially no Revolution, provided the price of bread was still decent. It’s possible that France would still have had a movement for Constitutional Monarchy, and it’s possible it would have eventually won, but it would maybe have been done the peaceful way trough reforms.Without the United States, there is not really a modern-style Republic example to look at, and therefore the reference for Republics would still be the Italian Thalassocratic Republics, such as the Most Serene Republic of Venice, the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Commonwealth of England in the 17th century or the United Provinces of Netherlands. The world could be quite very different.Let’s assume however a French Revolution still happened, for some reason. I am almost certain that New France would be in the royalist side (chouan/vendéen), for the simple reason that the Ancien Régime system was not really dysfunctional in America. Quebecers had the awesome privilege to not pay taxes like the infamous taille (revenue tax) or the gabelle for salt. I am not aware of a tax on bread (bachelon) either. Quebecers for generations said bad things about the taille despite they had no idea what it was, if you want an idea of how bad the reputation of it was. Quebecers had to obey to lords but were given for free huge pieces of land, unlike nothing that existed in France, and the lord was not allowed to increase the manorial rents after the initial rent was set. Therefore, land was more cheap under this system than under capitalism. Historically, Quebecers were very careful about the abolition of this system as they knew that with capitalism came speculation, and that the land would be more costly and their situation not necessarily much better than under the lords. They would therefore not have reasons to oppose the Ancien Régime to the point of becoming violent about it, and the anti-manorial speech in 1837 was perhaps more due to the capitalistic abuses, illegal under the Custom of Paris, than due to the manorial system itself in general. They would probably have agreed to not have lords anymore, but all they would need to do would be to turn the lands into alleu lands, something that already existed in French Law.« Sans mentir, les paysans y vivent plus commodément qu’une infinité de gentilshommes en France. Quand je dis paysans je me trompe, il faut dire habitants, car ce titre de paysan n’est pas plus reçu ici qu’en Espagne, soit parce qu’ils ne payent ni sel ni taille, qu’ils ont la liberté de chasser et de pêcher ou qu’enfin leur vie aisée les met en parallèle des nobles. »“Without lying, the peasants live here more cosily than an infinity of gentlemen in France. When I say peasant I am mistaken, one should say inhabitants, because this title of peasant is not any better received here than in Spain, either because they do not pay either sel or taille [these are taxes], they have the liberty of hunting and fishing or finally their eased life puts them in parallel to nobles.”(Le baron de Lahontan, 1703)Quebecers being more devoutly catholic than the French would probably be, like in real history, be totally horrified by the killing of the refractory priests that did not want to be subjected to the authority of the French Republic instead of Rome. Quebecers would have loved France no matter what but would have not approved what the Republic did, and they would do both without cognitive dissonance, with is the traditional inconsistency Quebecers are so good at.« L’opinion qui prévaut le plus sur le Canada, parmi les officiers [britanniques], est que ce pays n’est et ne sera jamais qu’une charge onéreuse pour l’Angleterre. […] Ils disent que les Canadiens ne seront jamais un peuple attaché à l’Angleterre ; qu’ils laissent à chaque instant percer leur attachement pour la France, tout en convenant qu’ils sont mieux traités par le gouvernement anglais ; que, s’il fallait lever une milice pour marcher en temps de guerre, la moitié ne s’armerait pas contre les Américains, aucun peut-être contre les Français. […] La première classe [de la population], composée des seigneurs et des hommes attachés au gouvernement anglais, hait la révolution française dans tous ses principes, et paraît plus exagérée sur ce point que le ministère anglais lui-même. La seconde classe des Canadiens, opposée aux seigneurs et aux seigneuries, aime la révolution française, et quant à ses crimes, ils les détestent sans cesser d’aimer la France. La troisième, c’est-à-dire la dernière classe, aime la France et les Français, sans penser à la révolution, et sans en rien savoir. »“The opinion that prevails the most on Canada, among the [British] officers, is that this country is not and will never be anything more than an costly charge for England. […] They say that the Canadiens will never be a people attached to England; that they allow at every moment appear their attachment to France, while agreeing that they are better treated by the English government; that, if there was a need to levy a militia to march in time of war, half would not arm up against the Americans, none maybe against the French. […] The first class [of the population] is composed of lords and men attached to the English government, hates the French Revolution in all its principles, and seems more exaggerated than the English ministry itself. The second class of Canadiens, opposed to the lords and to the lordships, loves the French Revolution, and as for her crimes, they hate them without stopping to love France. The third, meaning the last class, loves France and the French, without thinking of the Revolution, and without knowing anything about it.”(Le duc de Larochefoucauld-Liancourt, 1795)As a result, it’s possible the French monarchy would go in exile to Québec City, much like what the Portuguese did when Napoléon invaded Lisbon.Transfer of the Portuguese Court to Brazil - WikipediaI suspect the Court would have installed itself in the Château Saint-Louis in Québec City. This would create two Frances, like there are two Chinas now with the People’s Republic and Taiwan, and so two authentic ways to be French, but based on different principles.(Château Saint-Louis before it burned in 1834)Since now the Court would be in Québec City, there would be a cultural revolution, as now all the high culture, all the printing presses, ideas from Europe (including the republican ones), etc. would appear. Historically, republicanism was much more influenced by the United States in Québec but now, there are good chances France would weight even more than before and so Quebecers would be intellectually much less different, especially if France had the prestige to have defeated Prussia and England.I am almost certain that indigenous peoples would make a point to come to visit the King, which to them was known as “Onontio Goa”. They knew that there was another Onontio above the French governor (Onontio), that was the father above this father (note that in Iroquois culture, families were avuncular so the father was not very important). Indigenous would problably want to secure the terms and conditions of their alliance directly with the highest autority as they would expect better guarantees this way since Onontio Goa had the last word on everything the French did. Some nations already met Onontio Goa, like the Innu that met Henri IV in 1602, but most had not. As usual, the French would do every effort to show the splendor and power of Onontio Goa, like they did with Onontio in 1701.I am not aware of an independentist sentiment towards France, despite there could be policies that could eventually have angered colonists like the monopoly of the King on the mines for example (which impeded free enterprise). Therefore it’s possible independence could have happen a little by default, the Brazilian way, and for much similar reasons following a similar itinerary (which would be triggered by the Crown being located in Québec City).