Leads this morning on the SMH website:

• Police car crash: one dead
• Run over by a taxi: man fights for life
• Pair seek to use dead son’s sperm
• Tourist dies after buttock implant jab
• ‘Child locked in bathroom for years’

Appalling sensationalism. And this site represents an (allegedly) quality broadsheet.

Step-by-step breakdown of a single (clever) play from the San Antonio Spurs. So much precision for 2 points.

Live at the Sydney Opera House.

Tarantino’s Superbowl, among others

I don’t even know where to start. Or finish. In fact while reading this I twice had to turn away and read entire other books - William Gibson’s Zero History and Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing. Because to read IJ through from cover to cover in a single sitting was simply too much.

It’s impossible to really describe, other than to say it’s about addiction. And being human. And obsession - particularly the obsession of the man who wrote it. You can’t read it without desperately wondering about DFW’s mind, mental state, brilliance, breakdown, death. As David Edder’s writes in the introduction:

At no time while reading Infinite Jest are you unaware that this is a work of complete obsession, of a stretching of a young writer to the point of, we assume, near madness.

It’s got 100 pages of crazy footnotes, minute breakdowns of life in a tennis academy, political and artistic intrigue combined with high farce, and, most convincingly, detailed and depressing spirals into the world of the hard core drug and alcohol addict.

Those long sections about AA/NA are crushingly compelling, and an insight into a terrible world most of us know nothing about. Where getting through a single day, a single hour, is a victory. There’s a fantastic passage toward the end where a character realises that if he just takes each second, if he can just bear one second at a time, he can get through. But if he lets his mind project longer than that, he’s gone. It’s incredibly moving and heartfelt.

It’s not an easy read, it’s exhausting, but also exhilarating and rewarding. It almost demands post-reading meta research - and there’s plenty out there to support further investigation, from critical summaries to infographics to posters. People love it, and hate it, often at the same time.

It’s also a long book, and I was glad to finish, but the more I read the more enthralled and awed I became. It took around 300 pages before I started to click into the rhythm and pacing (and where I had to take the first break), which reminded me of Shakespeare: until you settle into the language and meter it’s a struggle to stay afloat. But once you do find that zone it’s wonderful. The closest comparison in terms of novels is probably Ulysses, which is equally tough to break into but equally rich once you do. Ulysses too drives the reader to further research, and leaves you incredulous at the skill of the author, 

Edders again:

DFW was already known as a very smart and challenging and funny and preternaturally gifted writer when Infinite Jest was released in 1996, and thereafter his reputation included all the adjectives mentioned just now, and also this one: Holy shit.

Bang on. Holy shit.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies: Bespoke and Everyday Items for the Living, Dead, and Undead.

Incredibly tense and beautifully shot exploration of the hidden byways of New York City. Things you don’t want to hear when in a subway tunnel with the screech of a train fast approaching:

Explorer guy: There it is…fuck.

Camera guy: Fuck?!

Scarier than a scary film.

George Plimpton tries 5 plays as QB for the Detroit Lions in 1964:

“Set!” I called out, my voice loud and astonishing to hear, as if it belonged to someone shouting into the ear holes of my helmet, “16, 66, 55, _hut _one, hut two, hut three,” and at “three” the ball slapped back into my palm. The lines cracked together with a yawp and smack of pads and gear, and I had the sense of quick, heavy movement as I turned for the backfield. Not having taken more than a step, I was hit hard from the side, and as I gasped, the ball was jarred loose.

Short, but nicely put together and researched.

The Idler:

Batman can’t be written as totally crazy, because the sense of right and wrong is so essential, but Batman is so hell-bent on rightness, on structure because of something missing inside of himself.