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[I could not figure out how to hack Tumblr chat post + markdown integration. See this passage from Infinite Jest here to get what I’m talking about.]

Wallace’s semi-pseudo-psychoanalytic babel rhetoric got much sharper between Broom of the System and Infinite Jest. Like, one of those plateaux-hopping level-ups he describes with such relish his characters undergoing or not undergoing at the tennis academy. This passage has to do with lots of things.

For one, it gets to the fact that Otho Stice’s bed moves around of its own volition, which is discussed a few hundred pages previously and culminates (there) with Lyle the guru telling Stice a story (a little Diotima-esquely?) about a man who could hop up on a chair and pull himself + chair up in the air, winning bets and causing existential crisis in his crowds’ presence. I can’t recall if the bed-moving-around situation gets explained any more.

The scene further characterizes Rusk—who was more well introduced a bit earlier in the context of the Eschaton fallout, which Eschaton fallout serves as one of the best narrative set-pieces in modern literature. The Eschaton match is hilarious and tragic and makes up one of the big narrative rocks—a nice, anchored, solid place to refer to/from—of the novel, and if you pay attention to the dates, is like most history both absolutely integral to the unfolding of the novel and also kind of humorously accidental in the scope of its causes/effects.

It gets Pemulis moving toward the resolution of his story, which has so far involved potentially disseminating the Entertainment, obtaining the DMZ, interfacing with the Ennet House (sic) residents, and discovering the John Wayne/Avril Incandenza affaire de coeur. (And more, I’m sure, which I’ve forgotten.)

The scene also serves as an exemplary meta-commentary (like Wallace telling himself to pump his breaks and drive slow homey) on the book itself, and its themes of emotional/social maturation versus struggling with omnipotence in variously related, yes to use Rusk’s word, cathected leitmotif of the book itself, viz. various method of control, all of which are outstripped by the actual act of imagination and will in creating the book itself and its polyphonous psychological argument for, well, a reasonable kind of zen plus empathy.

The title of this post is clearly a bad pun that refers to a no matter how you reckon it lesser Beck jam. But if we keep calling into question the parameters of the task itself, how can we ever complete the task? Even start it?

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this: a bodega at nine am in the heart of Queens, trying to figure out the best value-for-nicotine ratio of the store’s not limited behind-the-counter offerings. So let me tell you. Most smokers are poor. I believe I could be wrong about this, but smoking or non is a great predictor—better than you’re self-identification as, say, red or blue—of your income level. I imagine there’s also a correlation between education and smoking, and education and income. I’m one of those educated smokers, though. I’m also poor. Well, it feels like it. I’m probably not that poor.

Anyway, even if I were extravagantly wealthy, I’d still be a price shopper. I’ve noticed after the latest round of vice taxes in New York City that the cigarettes I smoke cost about $12. Sometimes you can get them for $11, though. As a baseline, Marlboros cost like $10 or $11 everywhere. So I’m at the bodega this morning trying to figure out what to buy. Should I get a pack of American Spirits? (That’s my brand.) Those are $12. But you only get 20, so that’s not a great deal. You know what’s only a dollar more? Dunhills! Dunhill makes one of the best widely-available-in-the-US tobacco products. Seriously nice, robust, good-tasting, slow-burning. They’re like American Spirits but better. And they are now only a dollar more. That’s crazy. Where I’m from, American Spirits are like $7 now, and Dunhills are still like $10 to $12. So the price difference is practically nothing. It’s like the taxes increased, and store owners just brought up the cheapest-priced cigarettes without raising the ‘luxury’ cigarettes. The more interesting thing is that rolling tobacco, which used to cost a lot less than pre-made cigarettes, and later came to cost more, now cost less again. So I got a package of American Spirit rolling tobacco for $11—a dollar less than a pack of them. The 40g package yields about twice as many cigarettes.

I don’t know if taxing tobacco results in a lower adoption rate. I suspect it does, but not in an obvious way. To call back an example of Wittgenstein’s, the man falling over the side of the boat doesn’t cause me to jump in to save him. At least, not in the same way that applying 100C degrees of heat to water causes it to boil. And not, again, in the (differently) same way that my hypothalamus causes me to feel thirst. It is, I think, a great secular example of the ought-is dichotomy. Obviously, legislation is the will of the body of the country that tries to map isometrically its desires. But it’s a kind of sham will, I think, because it counts on the principles of desert and punishment—negative impulses. The real sea change in smoking cessation has to do with positive impulses, impulses that I have. For now, though, I’d prefer to smoke. And I prefer to smoke in a market made up of options: Do I want to spend a lot on high-end cigarettes like Dunhills? Do I want to go the worse-tasting, DIY route of hand-rolled cigarettes? Marlboros or American Spirits? Spirits are definitely a better cigarette, so they should cost more. This taxing the hell out of tobacco shit has made everything cost basically the same. It seems like the opposite of a market-driven plan to influence consumer spending. I don’t like it. I’m poor and I’m educated, and I’d rather make my own decisions within the realm of tobacco-buying that don’t all involve me being even poorer. Start taxing stock trades or something. Just let me smoke and pay rent in peace.

Because we care about our readers, from time to time B Michael Tumblr Post Industries likes to release an informal ‘programming note.’ This text post is one such ‘note.’ Given these past few alternately too-hot and too-rainy weeks—combined with our ongoing struggle with solvency and, well, trying to remain unvanquished by ennui—we have not posted at anything nearing an annoyingly too-frequent rate. Our upcoming post forecast calls for an increase in per-weekly posts upwards of 250%. We’ve determined that this sharp growth will be driven by our increasing dominion in the books-read resource column, which has resulted in the slow-but-increasing-in-pace formation of new thoughts and ideas. Coupled with our recent geographic expansion into the New York City metro area, and our increasing comfort with venturing beyond the Astoria district, we see the reasons for a perhaps-too-frenzied uptick in ‘post velocity’ as more than supporting our projected 250% per-weekly post rate.