Notes

1. Goat really is delicious. Try it.
2. So is rabbit.
3. No, I didn’t do this just to piss off animal rights activists, so lighten up.

I run the main software marketing team for the Learn platform at Blackboard and we were starting down the path of refreshing our platform positioning for the coming year. One of the key messages we had to refresh was our commitment to openness because we really have done a lot to support it in the past year and we are doing a lot more in 2011.

Here’s the problem though. Going out to the software market with an openness message these days is like going out and saying your product is ‘enterprise.’ Just what does it mean? Most software vendors claim to be enterprise just as most claim their products to be ‘easy to use,’ ‘customizable,’ and ‘extensible.’ These terms have become meaningless.

It’s not that these terms describe features or capabilities of software that are not important to users and buyers, but that everyone uses them, and to describe a wide range of capabilities, making them worthless in evaluating a software product. Let me return to the term ‘open’ and show a few examples to demonstrate what I mean.

Recently, Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering at Google overseeing Android development, kicked off his twitter presence with the following tweet:

This may look cryptic to the uninitiated, but to certain technical-minded people, Andy is defining ‘open’ as open source. To the open source community, open means having access to and ability to change the source code and nothing else. He is preaching to the choir though. To those who can’t understand this tweet, a majority of phone users, his definition of open gets them nowhere. In fact, for most device owners, even those who could build their own installation of Android, this definition is meaningless since their carrier doesn’t give them access to install a custom build of Android on their phones.

So, is access to the source code the definition of open? For some, yes. For most, who cares?

Here is another example from a tangential debate. Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen recently said, “Apple would like to keep things closed and proprietary,” referring to Apple’s refusal to let Adobe run its Flash interpreter on the iPhone and iPad. The irony here is that Apple prefers that developers use HTML5, an open standard, but Adobe’s CEO is defining openness as being about user choice: “let me run whatever software I want on my phone, despite the potential consequences.”

So, is the definition of open related to choice, for many, yes it is, but again, not for everyone. For developers who don’t want to be tied to Adobe’s Flash platform, Apple is being more open by embracing and open standard. And here is yet another definition of open, that of embracing and implementing standards.

These are just a few examples from the recent flurry of definitions of open and openness that are raging in the technology world, but they are enough to illustrate the problem. How were we (my team and I) supposed to talk to the market about our very real openness advances without getting lost in the current market ambiguities about the term? The only answer was for us to do some real reflecting on why we, as a company, had committed to being more open. What did we expect our users to get out of it? Why were they asking for it in the first place? What types of changes were we implementing to address it?

The conclusion we came to was that we were removing barriers, removing barriers to using our software, to extending our software, and to using the data generated in our software. We decided to focus on that message, because that is what users care about. How did we achieve the removal of barriers, well, by opening the technology, and what does opening the technology mean? It means supporting standards for content import/export and tool sharing like Common Cartridge and IMS Basic LTI. It means supporting user interface standards for accessibility and working National Federation of the Blind to gain their accessibility certification and open the technology to sight-impaired users. It means documenting our database schema and letting users mine it for learning data. These are just a few ways we are being more open, but each of them removes barriers and that is the primary message.

I pose the same challenge to Google, Adobe, and the other bigger players out there. Don’t just tell us you are open, tell us why and why we should care. What do we get out of it? Andy Rubin’s tweet is for the few, but Android is a mass market operating system. Why does the average Android user care that the operating system is open source?

It is important that software marketers (and anyone speaking on behalf of the company is a marketer) be careful about jumping on buzz words just to give our products “me too” status. Our job is to differentiate our products and to define their value. We have a responsibility to our companies for this work because the market is competitive and we have a responsibility to users for this work because the market can be confusing.

I first visited Berlin in 2006 and found it to be a wonderful city, one whose history was still clearly punctuated by segments of the wall now protected from souvenir hunters by fences. I am sure that I was not the first to contemplate the irony of protecting the wall with fences, but I can see the need. The desire to take a piece home with you is irresistible, “oh this, it is just a stone in my pocket….” I was able to get a piece from an area where there was really nothing but foundation left and it was about to be built over, so I don’t feel so guilty. I took a few versions of the photo above. I waited until I could get a pedestrian framed just right. The first few were inconveniently timed with the passing of cars. It is strange to think that people walk and drive by it everyday without a glance. I came back to these photos today, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall. I was a senior in college when the wall fell and it seemed like that fall was the beginning of an age of eternal piece. No more threat of nuclear annihilation; we had won. Who could have foreseen the world order of the last twenty years during that moment? Certainly not a college senior caught up in the end of the cold war and hopeful for peace. I still hope for peace, but I am a bit more cynical now.

Still, it was an amazing time full of opportunity, even if some of it has been squandered.

I generally have the same approach to talking or writing about books. When I used to teach literature, I would structure my syllabus so that the course would start out with short stories, poems, or essays. The daily reading wasn’t too hard because there would be a novel looming a couple weeks out and when we started talking about the novel, the students were expected to have completed it. Same goes for the next one. While we are discussing and writing about novel #1, they are reading novel #2. It is challenging to teach a book in chunks and I am not convinced it helps the students value the work. It puts the teacher in the role of tour guide, explaining the meaning of things as we pass them.

I think this is why I haven’t been writing about my infinite summer and my reading of Infinite Jest. I am about half way through the book and I still love it. In fact, I think it is going to end up as a favorite of mine, but I would rather not put it on the list yet. After all, I don’t know what is to come in the next half. It might suck. I doubt it, but it might.

I am also not a social reader. I have given guest talks at book clubs, but I don’t participate in any. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for talking about books. The time, is after they are read, the place is usually a bar. Right now much of the online discourse about Infinite Jest is about getting through it, whether people should finish or not, and what the author “meant” by X, Y, or Z. I am not critical of that (ok, I am critical of all the talk of authorial intention), and I hope that the discussions and the tips for sticking with it are helping people enjoy the book.

For those who are not enjoying the book, I say move on. Life is too short to read books you don’t like in your free time. There are plenty of other books to enjoy. For those who plan to complete it, I hope the discussion will really kick in when the book is complete, because that should be the most fruitful time for all this exegesis.

So, unless I am really moved to write about some segment of the book in the next weeks, I probably won’t post on Infinite Jest again until I finish it. I am enjoying the book. I don’t find it to be a difficult book, but it does take time, time that is sometimes hard to find.

Happy Reading

As I expected, this is a funny book.¹ I have been doing lots of my reading on airplanes and have found myself laughing out loud on several occasions, silencing my chuckles as fellow travelers peek out from under their sleep masks to see what kind of lunatic is sitting in 6H. The sheer absurdity of some of the situations is amusing, but it is usually the puns that incite audible cachinnation in this jet-lagged reader.

‘Urine trouble? Urine luck’

Yes, the humor can be scatological, but it is often more cerebral as well.

‘…a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent.”

Wallace is clever without pause. His narrative doesn’t break to let you laugh. It keeps moving and sometimes the jokes are strung together so you risk missing them as you slowly wrap your mind around the one you are currently chuckling at and your eyes continue moving across the page. I am sure that I am missing a good deal of humor in my first reading, but it will be there next time for that deeper appreciation that you get from subsequent readings of such a book.

1. It is probably better characterized as a profoundly sad book. It helps to remember the full context of Hamlet’s Yorick quote to appreciate the sense of forlorn despair that permeates this text:

‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?’ (Hamlet, V.i)

Clearly, his jests were finite.

Infinite Jest is populated by characters suffering with drug addiction, mental illness, and wretched existences beyond their control. They are usually sympathetic, despite their absurdities and extremities of behavior, and in many cases, empathetic to readers who share their sense or circumstance. Death, especially suicide, is often their only exit, but there is also a sense of solace in there being any exit at all.

Perhaps I am reading DFW’s own suicide into the text, but death and suicide are treated as welcome alternatives to the meaningless and torturous circumstances of life. I find myself thinking of Sartre’s No Exit in which “hell is other people.” The characters of this novel treat their fellow sufferers poorly, to say the least, and suicide is depicted as “having Too Much Fun.” The only consolation seems to come in the recognition that it is all finite indeed, the power to end it all is within the grasp of the sufferer.

Unlike Sartre’s characters who never take the exit, Wallace’s do, and sometimes they look forward to it, plan for it, and relish in the prospects of escape. Given the more literal translation of Sartre’s title as In Camera, there might be more to this connection than my simple associative reading. Camera and “cartridge” play important roles in the work as well, but I will save that for another time.

I got through my first significant chunk of Infinite Jest on a flight to Australia. I was seated on the aisle next to a Russian woman and her twelve-year-old son who was continuously airsick. Sleep was not much of an option for me as the woman got up to dispose of the neatly packaged vomit and stock up on fresh airsick bags about every hour and I had to get up to let her out. The flight was packed. There was nowhere to go.

Headphones in to block the sound of retching, reading light on the Kindle, I dove in. In fact, I couldn’t put it down. I can’t wait for my return flight for another long reading session, but I do hope to have less effluent seat-mates next flight. It is certainly a book that favors dedicated reading time.

As I was reading, I kept thinking of Pynchon, specifically of Gravity’s Rainbow, his “unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene” novel from 1973. Surely DFW was influenced by this work, but was I falling into a mode of literary post hoc, ergo propter hoc? After all, it is like Pynchon on one level, but it is hard to explain. On the other hand, it is definitely different. Similar, like the fact that there are numerous characters just dropped into the narrative without transition or immediate relevance. There is the scatological humor. There are the various episodes that only start to show connections as the readers presses on. It just feels a lot like reading Pynchon, but different…

So after arriving in Australia and collapsing into 40,000 winks (equivalent to 12-13 hours of comatose sleep), I decided to do a little research on the connection. It turns out that the comparison was a bit of a sore subject for DFW. The block below is from a February, 1997 Interview with the Minnesota Daily.

So now we see Pynchon scrambling to keep up with the techniques that television stole from him. Pynchon’s another one whom I regard as really kind of old-fashioned. I like early Pynchon. I like The Crying of Lot 49. I like Gravity’s Rainbow. But the Pynchon of Slow Learner and Vineland, which I didn’t like very much, seems to be making the same tired jokes — ‘look how shallow and superficial the culture is.’ All right — I’ve been told — TV itself now tells that to me. It just seems like more of the same. I’m not as big a Pynchon fan as some other people are. The word Pynchon is on every one of you’re book covers as a comparison. Does this drive you crazy? Pynchon was important to me when I was in college. The first book that I wrote, Broom of the System, some reviewer for the New York Times said it was a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49, like that I hadn’t read yet. So I got all pissed, and then I went and read The Crying of Lot 49, and it was absolutely, incredibly good. I think a certain amount of this is marketing, and, you know, the fastest way to tell what something is like is to compare it to something else. And having read Gaddis and having read Pynchon and DeLillo and Coover and McElroy and Sorrentino, I can see that the kind of stuff that I do or like that Bill Vollmann does or that Richard Powers does is certainly more like that than it’s like, you know, Irwin Shaw or John Updike. Writers are bad to ask about this though, because we’re all egomaniacs, and we all want to be utterly unique and, you know, not like anybody else, and so there’s a certain amount of bristling about it, but after a while there’s just no way to help it. Gravity’s Rainbow is a great book, but for the most part Pynchon kind of annoys me, and I think his approach to a certain amount of stuff is kind of shallow, to be honest with you. So I get uncomfortable about that, and when people ask it over and over again I get the sense that they’re saying they think I’m ripping him off or just rehashing stuff he’s done, in which case I get pissed, but if that’s how they’re seeing it, it means I’ve failed. I mean if my stuff’s coming off derivative of somebody else, it means there’s something that I’m doing that isn’t right. But I find myself doing it all the time. I’ll see a movie, and I’ll really like it, and I’ll recommend it to friends, and I’ll say, well, it’s sort of like this combined with this. I mean it’s such a convenient shorthand. And nobody likes to have it done to them. You don’t want to have a friend say to you, ‘You’re just exactly like this other guy we know.’ You say, ‘No, I’m not. I’m me.’ But we do it to each other all the time.

And this one is from a 1997 Interview with Zachary Chouteau of American Booksellers Association.

BTW: You’ve been compared to Swift, Pynchon, and Barth. Who do you think your writing might compare to? DFW: That’s a tough question. The Pynchon thing really annoys me. I haven’t read him for so long. I get tired of it, pissed off by it. BTW: What writers have influenced you? DFW: There’ve been so many different ones during different stages of my life. In college, Donald Bartheleme had a big impact on me. More recently Cormac McCarthy — who did “All the Pretty Horses” (Vintage) — has sent shivers up and down my spine. Manuel Puig is another writer that I really admire. William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Wolfe…

Notice the lack of Pynchon in that final list.

So what do we make of all this? It is dangerous to take an author’s words as gospel. DFW even says all authors are egomaniacs. But he also validates the comparison as a way of talking about his work, using Pynchon as a cultural reference instead of an analog. They really aren’t that much alike, but they are different from a lot of other writing in similar ways, if that makes any sense. It is like saying “the experience of reading DFW is a bit like the experience of reading Pynchon, even though their works are completely different.”

That last point is where the comparison becomes important. It makes no difference whether DFW was influenced by Pynchon or not. A definitive answer would not provide some key to the meaning of the work. But I do think that readers of Pynchon (or Barthelme, or Coover, or Doctorow, etc.) will have an easier time with this work because we have learned to read a certain way that is conducive to tackling works like Infinite Jest.

So what lessons can readers of Pynchon bring to reading Infinite Jest for the first time? (remember, I haven’t finished the novel. This can all turn out to be bunk, but it seems to be working.)

• Don’t sweat the characters: Gravity’s Rainbow has over 400 characters and they are introduced in what seems to be unrelated narratives. It will all come together as you keep reading. All the necessary information is revealed; just be patient. You will figure out how they are all related and who are the major vs. minor characters as the narrative progresses.
• Don’t sweat the seemingly unrelated narratives: See above. It will all come together and discovering the connections is a big part of the fun. Just read it.
• Remember, it’s funny: You just can’t take everything seriously. The complicated stuff is really meant to be absurd. Call it mimesis. Life is absurd. Look for puns.
• Don’t go deep: The text won’t let you. The work resists meta-narratives, keeping you engaged with the construction and evolution of the actual narrative. If you are asking yourself “what does it mean?” make sure you mean “what does it mean to the narrative?” not “what kind of great philosophical point am I missing here?”

That’s enough insight for tonight. I need to take my Kindle down to the bar and get some of that wonderful (and cheap!) Australian Shiraz.

I’ve read Ulysses three times. I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow twice. I read Underworld and Mason & Dixon in the same year. Hell, I read Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors in a single summer. Admittedly, I was studying for my comps and it sucked.

Enough literary muscle flexing though. Let’s just say that big books aren’t necessarily difficult books. Take Moby Dick, for example. Sure there is a lot of symbolism and such, but you can read it as a glorified fishing story (Melville thought the whale was a fish, just read the cytology chapter).

So why is it that everyone cites the length of the work when they talk about the challenge of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? Sure, it is long, but that shouldn’t be an issue unless you are working on your bucket list. When you see it, it is what Lori Anderson would call a “book thick enough to stun an ox,” but I am reading it on my Kindle, so all I have to remind me of my prolonged commitment is a progress bar that is slow to, well, progress.

I suspect the real anxiety is over the nature of the work. It is well known for its convoluted form, endnotes with endnotes, and prankster-like conventions. It is, to use a term coined by Espen Aarseth, ergodic literature. It requires work and commitment, two things that people either have too much of already, or are not very good at anyway.

Frankly, I can’t believe I haven’t read this book yet. I love difficult books. I almost (before sanity struck) dedicated my life to reading and teaching such books. This one has been on my ‘to do’ list for years (just like finishing the built-in seating in the kitchen). Perhaps Pynchon and Delillo distracted me by releasing their big books the following year, or maybe it is just that I read a hell of a lot more non-fiction these days. You know what they say, excuses are like…

So, this summer, the fates have conspired for me to read Infinite Jest. Amazon keeps recommending the book as a Kindle read for me. I need a long book for my trip to Australia this week, and I am intrigued by the group reading project over at Infinite Summer (more on that in a future post).

The book is on my Kindle; I am on my way to Australia. I have publicly stated my commitment to do this.

Bring it on

Ride Statistics

Type: Loop Distance: 32.75 miles Elevation Gain: 4,570′

Map & Elevation Profile

The first thing I do differently than in the route I linked above, is to ride the extra climb up to Boettcher Mansion by taking a right after the picnic area of Lookout Mountain Park. This adds a little bit to the first climb and is a nice extension if you only have time for one climb.

The next change comes as you are riding down Lookout Mountain Rd. to Rt. 40. Before getting to 40, take a right on Mt. Vernon Rd. and ride up past the country club. This is a nice scenic area and there have been lots of elk around this spring. At the top, bare left and head down to I-70. Just before you get to the overpass, take a look to see if the buffalo herd is nearby.

Go over the highway and turn right up Genesee Mountain Rd. This is a pretty easy climb with a nice park at the top. Perhaps the best part is the great view of the clam shell house that was in the movie Sleeper. Come back down the way you came and cross over the highway. Take a right on Rt. 40 and start a long straight descent.

When you get to the stop sign with the next highway overpass, take a right and cross over I-70 again. After crossing the highway, take a left and proceed down a hill with a sharp curve at the bottom. This is where the neighborhood gets tricky. You will be on S. Grapevine Rd, which turns to dirt if you go too far. Bare right onto Shingle Cr., instead and start up Lininger Mt. This will get you to S. Lininger Dr., which takes you to the top.

This road gets steep, real steep. I sometimes don’t make it without stopping and then the only way to get clipped back in is to use a driveway. Sometimes the residents will cheer you on as you suffer to the top. Once (if) you reach the summit, just keep going and there is a less-steep way to loop back to the hill you came up. If you want to cheat, you can go up that way, but you will know you took the easy way up.

After coming down, cross over I-70 the way you came and continue down Rt. 40 to Cabrini Shrine Rd. From here on, you are back on this route, or if Lininger took too much out of you, take a left and head up Paradise for your final climb.

Ride Statistics

Type: Out & Back with a loop Distance: 21.2 miles (15.5 without Cabrini) Elevation Gain: 3,349′

Map & Elevation Profile

Getting There

You can really park just about anywhere in Golden to do this ride, and parking in town adds some of the steepest climbing on the mountain. If you want to be like everyone else though, park just below the gate for Lariat Loop Road. From Denver, take Route 6 West to Golden. After it turns North, follow it down the hill until you see the sign for Lookout Mountain and Buffalo Bill’s Grave. Take the left there and follow the road up the steep hill. After it curves to the left, park in the dirt lot or along the side of the street before the gate.

Description

There is no time to warm up here. You will start climbing immediately, so make sure your bike is in a low gear when you get on it. Head under the gateway and proceed up the mountain for the next 4.5 miles or so. There is no real summit and the true highest point is much farther down the road than the places where most people turn around. The grade is moderate for most of the climb, between 6-10% with a few steeper switchbacks, but also with some flatter areas where you can shift into higher gears. The average grade for the climb is just over 6%.

About 4.2 miles after the gate you reach the last overlook visible from the road and then the ride flattens out considerably for the next .3 miles to Buffalo Bill’s grave. Stop if you want to check it out, or continue on with a few more moderate climbs before you hit the true summit at about mileage 5.75. You then continue down to the stop sign at Route 40, which runs along I-70 for this stretch.

Take a left and head downhill. About a mile down, you will see Paradise Dr. on your left, entering the Paaradise Hills neighborhood. This is where you will turn on your return, and if you only want to do the 15.5 mile loop, turn here and see the description below. Otherwise, continue down for another mile or so until you see the road to Mother Cabrini Shrine your left. Take the left and start climbing.

This road is in rather bad shape, but it is not heavily traveled. Its main purpose is to provide access to the shrine. During the summer, there are a surprising number of visitors up there, so I usually turn around right outside the gate to avoid the tourists (pilgrims?). The climb is fairly short after Lookout Mountain, and the views of the plains and the foothills are quite nice. The bad road is more noticeable on the descent, so be careful.

After returning to Route 40, take a right and go back the way you came. Save your legs. You will need them for Paradise which has a grade between 12-15% for much of it. When you get to Paradise, take the right and get in your lowest gear. I always want one more here, but the hill is manageable. Follow the signs that say “To Lookout Mountain Road” to keep from getting stuck in the neighborhood. If you have to rest, there is a hairpin turn with an intersection about a third of the way up and you can easily get clipped back in at this spot. Continue up the hill until it becomes manageable closer to the top and you will see some nice rolling countryside as you catch your breath. The road rejoins Lookout Mountain/Lariat Loop Road at the top.

Take a right and pedal back past Buffalo Bill’s grave and on to your descent. The descent on Lookout is fast and curvy and there is often gravel in the turns. Be careful here. Also note that I have seen several speed traps on the mountain and they target cyclists as well as cars. The speed limit is 25, but most cyclists, me included, exceed it on the way down. Just remember, you have been warned.

If you have any questions or comments about the ride, please feel free to enter them below or use the personal contact form to email me.