Ambition is kicking in (reading list)…

Am getting waaaaaaay ambitious…

My reading list is like ten miles long, and if I manage to get through it before year-end it will be quite a success. What makes it even harder is my addiction to American TV, to which I now have access (Frasier re-runs, old Law & Order, Mythbusters, VH1 [specially the 'history of drugs' and stuff], and my obsession will chick-flicks [as I write, I am watching the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, again]…. I am doomed).

Anyway, the idea is to keep the mix of the lowbrow (countless hours of TV, on which more later) and the highbrow. My brother teased—after I went to watch Night at the Museum 2—that I have incomprehensible movie tastes; that I can own and watch and re-watch Hillary Duff or Kate Hudson or old Anne Hatheway movies, interrupted by reading THE Tractatus, again, or Pynchon, or the physics of David Deutsch…

I will stick to fiction, mostly, except when about water. In piles around my apartment (IJ is a pile of its own) one can find:

Gaddis’s A Frolic of his Own, an annotated Hamlet (am also watching the Branagh film, preparing for IS), Palahniuk’s Pygmy and Snuff, all of de Botton, the (rest of the) Twilight saga, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the other essays in Franzen’s How to be Alone, Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the graphic Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and all my water books (Learn to Sail, The Complete Sailor, Sailing for Dummies, J/Boats: Sailing to Success, The Annapolis Book of Sailmanship, US Sailing’s Basic Keelboat and Sailboat Racing, and the rules of sailboat racing)…

I am thinking of adding Gravity’s Rainbow but with the Gravity’s Rainbow Companion. All I need is to go through P90X simultaneously… Shoot for the moon, I guess they say.

Why blog? Water (big W)/water (little w).

OK, so I finally decided to start a blog…

The trigger was Infinite Summer (IS). I will spend the summer of 2009 re-reading David Foster Wallace’s (DFW) Infinite Jest (IJ) and posting on IS. So now I have something to write about that hopefully will drive other things to write about. As I guess is pretty clear, I am a big fan of DFW. And that’s the source of the title: DFW’s commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, published as This is Water (it gets harder and harder to find on the web). Anyway, I sent it to my brother for his graduation and he just replied “pura pinche agua”. The rough translation is “just fucking water” (even though it doesn’t quite work in English). And that’s the way am seeing things as of this writing, pura pinche agua. The question that will drive the non-IJ postings (and most likely many of the IJ postings too) is “what is Water?” (which I now capitalize when in re: to DFW’s Water). I guess this is the question that drives everything, or should. But I will also spend the summer sailing (well, learning how to sail and race) so that it will all be about Water/water, sailing being the non-capitalized kind. The link, or part of it, is that I will spend time on the water thinking about Water. We’ll see how it goes.

(The picture above, and the cloud pictures that appear through the site are not from an IJ cover, thought they are a pictorial and personal reference. They are all crops from one single photo. The photo was taken in Yagul, Oaxaca, on 13 September 2008 as we were talking about DFW and his death.)