I thoroughly enjoyed Infinite Jest and ever since I've been on the lookout for more by DFW. Oblivion is a collection of eight short stories which have all the clever writing and run-on sentences of Infinite Jest but packaged up into much smaller and more manageable chunks. Not that they're any easier to read but being able to finish a story in a single sitting makes it a bit easier to wrap your head around it.

One day I want to re-read Infinite Jest but that day won't be coming any time soon. As an alternative I chose to read Oblivion through twice before moving on to my next book. The stories all seem to go in totally unexpected directions and knowing those shifts were coming helped inform my second reading. I was able to stop trying to see the shape of the story in my head and just enjoy the ride. Because the shapes, well they're not Euclidean.

The stories also leave loose ends hanging. It may be more accurate to say that they don't endeavour to tie up any ends at all and so everything is left open to speculation. The stories are satisfying, eventually, but they just...end. I was never ready for it. I suppose Infinite Jest was the same; I guess it's DFW's style. I see his works of fiction as not really stories but brief windows into interesting events with no beginning or end but just a fixed amount of time where those events may be observed. When a windows closes, things are done. And the length of time the window is open does not correspond to a traditional sense of completed narrative.

I won't go into any detail about any of the individual stories except to say that "Incarnations of Burned Children" was the most mind-breakingly frightening thing I've ever read. If you have children, probably don't read it OK? As for the rest, if you're thinking of tackling Infinite Jest but are not sure you want to make the investment then try those first. If no story makes you want to throw the book through the wall for it's abuse of what most people consider sensible fiction and you think you can tolerate a ten-fold increase in the quantity of such abuses, noting that the abuses of Oblivion are typical but by no means representative, then you just might enjoy DFW's magnum opus. Maybe.

I honestly don't think I'd recommend DFW to anyone in seriousness though. I hold my own enjoyment of them not with pride but more with some sort of weird shame. Because it's really just masochism. I can tolerate buckets of absurdity for tiny drops of magnificence or even just long pages of details about some obscure corner of human knowledge. I'm a bit strange.

Ever since I started thinking more about my health I find that I am allocating much more time (and slightly more money) to food. I've always cooked, but now I cook much more and when I'm not cooking I'm often thinking about my next cooking adventure. When I buy meat or eggs or fish I now spend more money to get versions of those things that are produced in a more natural way. I spend time researching new foods and recipes and means of preparation on the Internet. I read blogs and watch videos about food.

Last night I came to the realization that not only is there nothing wrong with these changes, they are almost certainly changes for the better.

For most of human history almost everyone in the world would spend most of their time and a huge percentage of their money just to get enough to eat. This meant people were much more aware of what their food was and where it came from. Now, at least in North America, people spend a comparatively miniscule proportion of their income on groceries and most people have little to no contact with the means of food production. And cooking? That's a dying art in the average North American home.

More than anything it seems to me that this increasing dissociation from food is the main cause of our society's numerous food related issues (obesity, diabetes, etc.). My own personal changes have suggested to me that the best dietary change one can make is to just eat real food. Lots and lots of vegetables. Some fruits and nuts. Non-gluttonous amounts of meat and eggs and fish that were produced in healthy natural ways. A bit of healthily produced dairy (hard to do in Canada, damn Canadian Dairy Commission). Extremely limited sugar and processed food (including bread).

However to make those changes one needs to know what real food is. It's not hard, but if no one ever tells you how do you figure it out? If you grow up in a home where your parents didn't cook and if your school does not teach you about food (do any??) why would you ever think to question what you eat?

My point is that I think it is right that I am spending more time and money on my food. It means I'm more actively engaging with it. I'm thinking about it and being conscious of it. If it means I have less money for more frivolous things then that is fine as such things don't really make a person happier anyway (more on that in a later post). And thinking larger, I'm starting to wonder how I can help improve the world through my passion for food.

Although this topic has been bubbling around in my brain for a while it solidified recently after watching a few TED Talks on Netflix about food. If you want to check them out then the ones I found most interesting were as follows (note interest does not always imply total agreement):

• Allan Savory: How to green the desert and reverse climate change
• Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food
• Carolyn Steel: How food shapes our cities
• Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish
• Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat
• Dan Barber's foie gras parable
• Ann Cooper talks school lunches
• Pam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapes
• Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA

I get most of my books from a used bookstore and so I'm rarely up to date on the latest offerings of the publishing world (with the exception of a few authors I follow more closely). Just before Christmas I read an article about Will Ferguson's latest, "419" and then the next day it won the Giller Prize. So I asked for the book for Christmas and I just finished reading it a couple weeks ago. I'm feeling so current and trendy!

Anyway, the book starts out following a Canadian family whose father commits suicide after losing all his money in a 419 Scam. The daughter starts to investigate it and eventually goes all the way to Nigeria to confront the perpetrator. For me that whole plot line was interesting enough but nothing special.

The novel really shines in its three other plot lines. Each follows a different Nigerian, filling in their back stories while also providing history on the country itself (particularly its involvement with international oil interests). It's a work of fiction so I have no idea how accurate Mr. Ferguson's depictions are, but they are very engaging and more than redeem the mediocre "419" part of the book.

It seemed like Mr. Ferguson was most interested in the Nigerian part of the story and just didn't have a good way to set it up. The "419" stuff is a convenient cross-over point with the western world but there was too much of it. It felt condescending. Like he thought his audience would suffer culture shock unless the "bizarre" Nigerian society was framed through a familiar context.

I don't mean to sound harsh, it is an excellent book (although major literary prize good...I dunno). I just wish it spent less time on the scam and more on the country that gave the scams their name.

This past weekend Rob, Jeff, Simone and I all went to Mont Tremblant for some awesome snowboarding times and it was awesome. We flew Porter from the Toronto Island Airport direct to a teeny tiny airport near Tremblant. Then we rode all day Saturday and half the day Sunday at which point we collapsed into our hotel lounge area from exhaustion.

Much like climbing, snowboarding is mostly about confidence. Once you realize that you can perform the required movements or motions you can make so much progress. This trip definitely raised my confidence level. By the end the only reason I was falling was due to fatigue.

I would really really like to get out once more this season, but that will only be to Blue and so the weather will need to stay cold for another two weeks. I still can't believe I'm hoping for snow and cold weather.

Rob and the plane arriving at Mont Tremblant International Airport (YTM)

Arrivals lounge at Mont Tremblant International Airport (YTM)

View from part way down my first run of the trip

View from part way down my second run of the trip

Snowy frosty stuff on the trees

Awesome view from the top of 'Edge Lift'

Boarding the return flight home

The Academy Awards are tonight, right now actually. As much as the event itself is a fairly crass commercial spectacle celebrating crass commercialism, I do like movies and many of the movies nominated are often pretty good. So each year I make the effort to watch the best picture nominations before the awards and then skip the awards show itself and read the results the next morning. This got harder after they bumped the best picture category to ten nominees from five but it's still fun to try.

This year I saw all the movies I wanted to see, eight of the ten. I have no interest in Zero Dark Thirty and I've already seen Les Miserables...as live theatre...on Broadway, I don't need to see it as a movie (I've also read the novel by Victor Hugo).

Of the nominees my favourite movie for best picture was "Beasts of the Southern Wild." "Django Unchained" was tons of fun and I loved it immensely, but I don't want to live in a world where Quentin Tarantino can win best picture. It would mean either that he had abandoned his trademark style or that the world had become seriously demented.

Regarding the other nominees; "Silver Linings Playbook" was excellent but the ending was wrapped up way too neatly given the very real mental health issues faced by the main characters. "Life of Pi" was visually stunning and superbly acted. I don't have any real criticism for it, but I just enjoyed "Beasts" more. "Amour" was also outstanding but the subject matter and some of the events hit too close to home for me to really enjoy it. I liked "Lincoln" but it felt more like a documentary to me and as a movie I liked "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" more. I'm not sure what that means. Finally "Argo" had a great story and they did a good job, but it seemed to fall a bit flat, not sure why. I'm obviously not a proper critic.

Of course the movie I like is not necessarily the one that will win. If I had to guess which would win, I would probably pick "Lincoln."

Two other categories are close to my heart: best animated feature and best visual effects. For animated feature I have to go with "Brave." It may not be Pixar's best ever, but it's still really good. For effects I like "Life of Pi." The effects in "The Avengers" are definitely state of the art and set a new bar for action movies. But the effects in action movies have always been stunning and cool. "Life of Pi" applies the technology in a very different context and in many cases is able to make you forget that almost none of the setting or characters are real. Also, the company responsible for the effects, Rhythm and Hues, recently filed for bankruptcy. The effects industry has been a rough place for small and medium size studios lately and a win by this company might help bring some of the issues to light.

After two staggeringly epic sized reads I decided to change things up with a small collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling.

Growing up I participated in the Scouting movement for many years (Beavers, Cubs, Scouts and Venturers) and this movement was heavily influenced by Kipling's well known works "The Jungle Book", "Just So Stories", and "Kim". So when I was last browsing at BMV and noticed a collection of horror stories by Kipling I snapped it up right away. I had no idea that his range was so broad and I was intrigued to see his take on the genre.

The stories were mainly influenced by his time spent in India but there were a few that took their inspiration from the first World War. I preferred the ones set in India. Most seemed to be based on local myth and folklore, twisted and shaded by Victorian, colonial overload ideology. A lot of the dialogue is frightfully condescending and racist, but it also seems historically accurate given what I know of the history of Britain's rule over India.

As for the "horror" aspect, having grown up reading Stephen King I didn't find any of the stories particularly frightening but there were a few good skin-tinglingly creepy moments.

I missed out on comics as a kid; they were not part of my cultural consumption. Given my nerdy disposition they easily could have been, but for whatever reason it just didn't happen. Until The Sandman the only comic I'd read was The Watchmen and that was just a couple years ago.

Of course comic is not the right word for either work. Graphic novel is the accepted appellation among the community of people who follow this sort of thing closer than me. According to Peter Straub The Sandman actually qualifies as literature (or nothing else does).

I wholeheartedly agree.

The Sandman is a series of graphic novels with 75 issues that consumed Neil Gaiman's life from 1987 to 1996. He estimates it at over 2000 pages and considers it the largest thing he's ever written or ever will write. I recently acquired the whole set collected into ten volumes contained in a fancy slip-cover case. I read them all in extremely short order. I just couldn't stop.

I love Neil Gaiman's novels and short stories, but none of that matches The Sandman. He put everything he had into it and it shows. The choice of graphic novel as the format is irrelevant, it's way up there with my favourite books of all time.

I'm interested in reading other "literary" graphic novels, however I suspect that having read The Sandman and The Watchmen may have spoiled me. I'm hopeful for Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" though.

I had a great day today. That's kind of a big deal for me as it could be argued that I've had a a rather shitty go of it (I'm a tad inebriated now so you'll have to forgive the cusses in this post). To distinguish from other days this day was great on it's own and was not at all about that. I've had other great days since then (along with so many bad days), but at the end of them they're still about that because despite outward appearances I'm still (and probably forever) rather damaged. Today was different though. It was great on it's own.

I went snowboarding for the third time ever today and decided that it is a thing I like enough to invest money in buying equipment. I had a good lesson and a fantastic afternoon where I made real progress with my skills. It was too warm out, and the snow was imperfect and the atmosphere was typical dreary grey Ontario winter, but it was also awesome. Because the world is pretty fucking awesome when you think about it.

Despite having had a shitty go of it I also recognize that I'm absurdly privileged. Absurd isn't nearly a strong enough adjective but it's the best I've got right now. I'm a white straight male with a high IQ who grew up in a middle class, nominatively Protestant household in a first world country as the child of parents who both pursued and encouraged post-secondary education. All of that made it easy for me to obtain a Computer Science degree that has enabled me to get a job which pays me enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle as an independent adult without any debt. When the shitty thing did happen to me, it happened in a country where we could access excellent health care without incurring financial disaster. The only anti-privilege I can think of in my life was the divorce of my parents when I was in grade seven. But around half my friends at the time came from "broken" households so it's hard to argue that I was part of some oppressed minority. Plus my parent's divorce was mostly amicable from my point of view so I'm even privileged within the group of children of "broken" households. All these things put me ahead of such a large portion of the population of the world that it isn't worth coming up with an actual number. It rounds up to 100% in all contexts.

So yeah, a bad thing happened to me, but the world is still awesome and I am in a position where I feel like I must strive to acknowledge that. What on earth could I possibly complain about? There is so much to see and do and there is stuff that is basically magic happening all the time. My iPhone 4S is a super-computer in my pocket. Magic. In May my brother and I are taking my mom to France. We'll travel over 6000km and it will only take about 8 hours and we'll do it by FLYING and the flight will cost less than $1000 each round trip. Magic. I'm free to post my thoughts to a blog on the Internet which is just millions of piles of Magic. I spent a whole day today doing controlled falls down a really big hill in glorious nature instead of fighting bears and struggling to survive the winter. Not magic, but still pretty awesome that I not only have the spare time but that western society has oriented itself in such a way that it was not hard or prohibitively expensive for me to spend my spare time in such a frivolous way.

Maybe it's the endorphins from a day outside exercising, or maybe it's the four pints of medium-strength (~6%) beer enjoyed in the company of happy fun people but I'm in a good mood this evening because today was a great day.

It's not that I haven't been reading lately, or even that I've been skipping blogging about the books I read. The reason I haven't posted about a book since the end of October is that the book I was reading since then was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It is an epic-sized book in every sense. 981 pages of small type (in trade paperback format), followed by 96 pages of endnotes in even smaller type (which are required reading to actually understand what is going on). Beyond the physical size (and weight!), the actual text is daunting and challenging. It takes place in the near future but much has changed in the world and the book doesn't waste much time explaining the lay of the land. You just sort of pick it up along the way. Add invented slang, a large cast of characters (who are never thoroughly introduced), intense non-linearity, and obscure self-references and you get a book that requires significant attention while reading if you want to make progress.

I am glad I read it, but it was hard work and took a long time is what I'm saying.

I don't even know how to talk about it here, so I'm going to defer to the comments of smarter people than myself. One remark I quite liked came from Jay McInerney in his review of the book for the New York Times: "While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences." The writing is spectacular but sometimes it goes off on tangents, and those tangents grow their own tangents and you find yourself so far from where you started that you're not even sure you're reading the same book. Like the endnotes, of which there are 388, some of them have their own footnotes!

Fortunately for me, I think, I enjoy tangents. Even when whole chapters pass that have nothing to do with the plot of the book, it's all still fascinating and engaging. I loved the language and words he used, like cardioid and demapping, but most of all the idiom "howling fantods," defined perfectly by Urban Dictionary:

A stage 4 case of the heebie jeebies.

Realizing that, after all this time, as I approach the end of this 981 page novel with 96 pages of footnotes, as much as I have loved every run-on sentence and obscure pharmacological reference I still cannot coherently answer the frequently-asked and painfully-simple airplane-seatmate question "what's it about?" has giving me a serious case of the howling fantods.

There is much reference to Québec separatism, despite being an American novel written by an American. In the near-future world of the novel (remembering that it was written pre-referendum in the 1990s) the cause of separatism has escalated rather than calmed, with multiple Québec terrorist groups causing problems all over North America (including the assassination of Jean Chrétien apparently). Although that all sounds serious, it's presented in a pretty ridiculous, slap-stick manner that is endlessly amusing (to me at least). The chief terrorist group of the book is Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (AFR), the wheelchair assassins, whose back-story consumes eight pages of endnotes and is far to involved to cover here. It's all great stuff though and any book that spends time discussing Canada in any way always seems more engaging to me.

The book finishes at a strange point with many unanswered questions. Upon completion I remembered that the very first twenty pages or so take place about a year after the events at end of the book. I went back and re-read them, only to realize that that section has a whole different meaning than my first interpretation. This is a book that must be read multiple times in order to extract all it has to offer, but I'm not sure I'll be up to trying again for a couple years. I poked around online for interpretations and it appears to be an activity of some interest on the Internet, piecing together what may have happened in the year between the end of the novel and the events of the first twenty pages.

This hasn't been a very coherent blog post. Despite my attempts to improve my writing skills I do not have the talent necessary to discuss a book of this magnitude in any meaningful way. It is just too big. If you're interested in learning more, check out the introduction to the tenth anniversary edition written by David Eggers; it's spot on.

Myself, I will close with the synopsis from the original edition in an attempt to at least convey what the book was about.

Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch it. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and the halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie - as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel. On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do.

As usual, the holidays were a busy time for me this year. I failed at all my relaxation goals (like finishing the epic-sized book I've been reading for the past month) and spent the whole break in a constant state of activity. Fortunately the activity was all fantastic and normally involved spending time with amazing people. I saw old friends and family and also enjoyed the company of a surprising number of new people, all of whom were awesome too.

Using as few words as possible my holidays went roughly like this: The Hobbit, board games and scotch, full-day Civilization game, Christmas with my mom's side (ultra special guests: Shannon, Gareth and little monster), Christmas with my dad's side, family Christmas in London and then in Toronto (with Django), Christmas in Ottawa with lots of snow and hatchets, Christmas in Caledonia with pizza and marbles, market in London, Life of Pi, New Year's Party at my place, hanging with Mike in Toronto, hummus, Yerba Mate, more scotch and amazing beers.

I totally abandoned all my recent health changes for the holidays and I definitely notice the effects. I'm sluggish and five pounds of fat that magically melted off my body over the last three months has completely returned. I'm eager to get back to "standard operating procedure" and kicked it off this evening with a big-ass salad piled high with avocado. Gonna focus on large quantities of veggies for a bit while I wait for my body to once again stop craving sugar and flour.