While I am loving reliving The Book Thief through Mark's eyes, the fact that he hasn't posted a review on Infinite Jest past page 49 is making it much easier for me to pick it up, get halfway through the same paragraph I did last time, and put it right back down again.

edit: I am over the hump, double-endnote-deflowered. I hope this book doesn't end up being beyond Mark's skills as a reviewer because I'm really interested in his take on it.

At this point I'm pretty sure Hal filmed something that the cultural attache is watching and this will end up being something the plot hinges on. Don't tell me if I'm right.

At one point my book's appendices were going to have appendices. Fortunately the Buffistas talked me down.

FYI -- for anyone who bought the $20 Groupon to Barnes & Noble back in February, the amount is reduced to $10 in 2 days, on April 11. That was part of the terms & conditions -- if you don't use it by April 11, it loses half its value.

So if you bought one, go use it before Monday!

A long, fascinating, heartbreaking interview with Karen Green, David Foster Wallace's widow.

She's an artist and the first work she did after his death was something called The Forgiveness Machine.

"The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long," she says, "with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell." The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto.

Green put the machine on display at a gallery in Pasadena near the Los Angeles suburb, Claremont, where she and Wallace had lived in the four years they had been married. She was fascinated by the effect that it had on people who used it. "It was strange," she suggests, "it all looked like fun, but then when the moment came for people to put their message actually in it, they became anxious. It was like: what if it works and I really have to forgive my terrible parent or whoever."

*****

The whole piece is very moving. She's living in Petaluma now, a near neighbor of Tom Waits and close to where Winona Ryder grew up and where Polly Klaas was kidnapped. What an odd nexus.

I hate that plunge in my stomach when I find out someone I've just grown to love was already dead before I heard of them.

our rats are low

oh ffs, suicide?! Damn I wished I'd finished Infinite Jest before I found this out (I know, fat chance. With the book on my radar now there's no way). Now I'm going in to this with the same attitude that made me hate Confederacy of Dunces. I think I have to switch to Julie & Julia for a while. Shit, now I'm crying. bastard.

Dear Laga: Stay away from Hemingway and Sylvia Plath.

I haven't cracked Plath outside of school but I devoured Hemingway. I was never angry at him because he had a terminal illness and I think he had the right to choose his passing.

Is depression a terminal illness?

I wished I finished Infinite Jest when I started it, years ago. I tried to read it again a couple of years ago but I found the whole thing coloured by Wallace's suicide.

I'm going to see a staged reading of something from Pale King next week in San Francisco. As the only bit of DFW I've read is "Consider the Lobster", I expect to be completely out of my depth.

I wished I finished Infinite Jest when I started it, years ago.

If you want to try picking it up again, I'll probably be ready in a few days.