It's Hot Outside

Roy is watering the lantana in the back yard and I am sitting on the picnic table facing the pool. There is a hot breeze blowing, it must be about 102 degrees - that's Roy's guess from the cool deck, and the sun has pretty much set and he has occasional back spray from the hose! We won't be going for a walk together anytime soon.
The girls have gone to Walgreens, you have to have fun by going from one indoor place to another. The Arizona Republic "Arizona Living" section suggested having ice cream sundaes for dinner :D

My Beautiful Girls!

Dad with hat

Here is Dad/Big Roy getting ready to work in the yard. He says he looks like Tata Alejandro :)

Friday and IJ

I checked the Infinite Summer site to read the Blog updates for Friday, and I'm a little more than a third of the way through the book. Last night I had to look up "Lyle" on wikipedia because I thought he was the "sweat guru" in the workout room at ETA1, but for some reason I felt unsure so I browsed the characters until I found Lyle and was reassured. I read the links at the end of the wiki entry and saw David Wallace sites I haven't yet visited and made a mental note to look at the links on my laptop computer today2 (2 end note, I read IJ before bed on my Kindle which also goes online to Wikipedia and Google for me, and I really need resources for reading this book and looking up words :) while I am all tucked in for the night. (1 end note there are so many characters I sometimes have trouble keeping everyone in my head)

Anyway, after time with Infinite Summer I went to the wikipedia IJ links, read through an interview with Wallace about Infinite Jest and how the book is sad, and about the loneliness of movies and TV and addiction, and how reading is intimate between the writer and the reader in a way that other forms are not. And I thought about David, sad and lonely. And, I re-visited the Howling Fantods blog and found more tribute articles and photos. I read a post from one of his students upon learning of his death. She talked about how he had trouble remembering names at first, but once he learned each name he promised never to forget for as long as he lived.

Did I mention he is mourned the whole world over as one of the best and most original American writers?

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/dfw-1962-2008.html

DFW interview 1996

Here is a link to the David Foster Wallace interview by Michael Silverblatt:

David Foster Wallace - Bookworm on KCRW

And here is the part of the interview that really astonished me in light of where we are headed right this minute in 2009:

"So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you're willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it's a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it's very high-tech and it's very "become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z," but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he's really the only one there who to me is saying anything that's even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he's a fascist. And part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we're really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we're creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing about fascists is they'll tell you what to think, they'll tell you what to do–they'll tell you what's important."

Mining Museum

Today we went to the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum to get ticket stubs that Alyssa and Marissa can use to get 10 points for the GCC Geology summer class they are taking together. We all went and even though the heat was intense and we were about to go inside, I got a picture of everyone in front of a big bucket for a really huge shovel for scooping up ore.
We saw lots of really beautiful rocks including black obsidian (Marissa's class paper) and shiny silver galena (Alyssa's class paper), amethyst (thought of my mom and my favorite too) red garnets (thought of my grandmother) topaz (Roy's birth stone) fossils, and the gift shop!
Earlier in the day we went to the 6th Harry Potter movie - the Half Blood Prince. Gabby, Paul and Chris came with us. Roy Samuel and Marissa slept in because 9:00 am is a really early time to leave the house.
Important Note: I have embarked on the summer challenge of reading Infinite Jest on my Kindle, which is at the moment recharging on the bedroom dresser for my next read. I set it "wireless on" when reading so that I can use google and wikipedia; the Kindle dictionary is too Limited for DFW's expansive vocabulary and ideas. All of this uses up the battery quickly! I also regularly visit the Infinite Summer website, I started reading a week behind the IJ online community but have caught up, I'm at 30%! I listened to an interview David did at the time IJ was released, archived at Bookworm, which is now one of my google bookmarks. I am involved with this book and this incredibly gifted writer. When David stated in the Bookworm interview that America is on a path to becoming vulnerable to fascism I nearly shrieked. He foresaw Obama and the "progressives" the growth of huge, huge government and our loss of freedom 10 years ago!
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