JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

“There is a real sense in which we are what we are called, at least from the Old Testament onwards, when God renamed Jacob Israel, which means that he struggled with God. Tolstoy, with his usual practicality, wrote an early draft of War and Peace in which Count Rostov was simply named Count Prostoy: prostoy means ‘simple, honest’ in Russian. So we have Becky Sharpe (in Vanity Fair) and Miss Temple (in Jane Eyre) and Felicite (in A Simple Heart) and scores of characters in Dickens like Crook and Pecksniff. . .Fiction is not being very fictional, really, when it resorts to such tricks. After all, in life people do seem uncannily to have become the names they have, or to be the opposite of those names (but still in some strange relation to the import of their names): Wordsworth is surely worth his words, and Kierkegaard means churchyard in Danish, and the late Cardinal Sin was Archbishop of Manila. . .”

From How Fiction Works by James Wood, a very practical guide to the novel. 

My name means “God is watching the sugar harvest” or “Behold muck” or “Clairvoyant drip-jar”. (Jessica is Shakespeare’s variation on the Hebrew Iscah, Abraham’s niece; zafra is a Cuban agricultural term).

Sucker-punned again. Could never resist funny food names, and today it was as hot as Arrakis in the daytime with a sandworm on your tail. Cold Rock Creamery makes ice cream specials “inspired” by movies currently showing in theatres. A couple of weeks ago it was The Cone Wars. This week: Hellboysenberries. Boysenberry ice cream with marshmallows, graham crackers, boysenberries, and an extra topping of your choice. The picture doesn’t look very appetizing, but it’s tart, not too sweet, and it helped my brain reboot.

There probably won’t be an ice cream tie-in for Righteous Kill, a.k.a. the PaciNiro pension plan. Al and Bobby have brought us so much joy over the years. . .Maybe not since the mid- 90s. Okay, The Fokkers was pretty bad. And just about everything De Niro’s done in the last decade. And Scent of A Woman reeked. But they were in lots of fine movies in the 70s and 80s. So we’ll allow this tired, predictable clunker in memory of The Godfather part II and Heat. I was hoping Al would overact the hell out of the movie—Hoo-ah! You’re out of order! Attica! Attica!— but they wouldn’t let him. Anyway, I don’t think there’s a market for a Righteous Kielbasa sundae.

The Flip Reader, an anthology of essays from Flip magazine, has just rolled off the presses and will hit bookstores soon. To get an advance copy, visit the Anvil Publishing booth at the Book Fair, or join this matching type quiz. All correct entries join the raffle. The winner gets a fresh, gleaming copy of The Flip Readers, to be mailed to a Philippine address.

Who said what in their Flip interviews?
1. “Diyos lang ang puedeng magpabagsak sa akin.” (Only God can take me down).
2. “We have too many lawyers, and we can’t even export them.”
3. “Unfortunately, I think there’s no escaping the family name. So they’re doomed.”
4. “Hindi ka snatcher? Bakit ka nandito?!” (You’re not a snatcher? What are you doing here?!”
5. “Look at that. Young love. Walking hand in hand on a Saturday night. Don’t they know it’ll end badly?”

a. Imee Marcos
b. Washington SyCip
c. Mar Roxas
d. April Boy Regino
e. Bayani Fernando

The raffle will be held on Friday morning so post your entries pronto.

On one hand my ten-year old Krups coffeemaker is about to go kaput. On the other hand I have a topic for my tech column. Could you recommend a good coffeemaker? A small one, say 4 cups, easy to operate and locally available. Not one of those ridiculously pricey Italian espresso makers that operate by nuclear fission. And I don’t want a French press. Thanks.

This 2008 election map colors each state of the Union according to the book-buying habits of its residents on Amazon.com in the past 60 days. To calculate each state’s red and blue percentages for the map, Amazon has classified books as red or blue if they have a political leaning made evident in book promotion material and customer classification. They’ve also prepared a list of “purple” books—materials that have both blue and red appeal.

If reading choices predict voting patterns, aiiiieeeee! 

Don’t forget to visit the 29th Manila International Book Fair at SMX Convention Center (beside the Maul of Asia), Bay Area, Pasay City. It opened Friday, and will end on Tuesday evening. Exhibit hours 10am to 8pm. If you plan on buying a lot of books, turn up on Tuesday before closing time. The exhibitors will want to get rid of their stocks, so they’ll probably offer bigger discounts.

From the LA Times:
“David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome “Infinite Jest,” was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

“Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself. Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in such books as “Girl with Curious Hair” and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” In 1997, he received a MacArthur “genius” grant.”

Apart from his fiction, DFW wrote brilliantly about mathematics and tennis. Here is his 2006 piece on Roger Federer.

To the person who borrowed my hardcover copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: It’s been years. Give it back.

Tributes:
“He wrote about the maddening impossibility of scrutinizing yourself without also scrutinizing yourself scrutinizing yourself and so on, ad infinitum, a vertiginous spiral of narcissism — because not even the most merciless self- examination can ignore the probability that you are simultaneously congratulating yourself for your soul-searching, that you are posing.” Laura Miller in Salon.

“David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless” facets of contemporary life.” Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times.