The Penguin

Things have certainly been weird, but exciting. And crazy. Unbelievably crazy. If you recall in one of my posts from March , I mentioned that I'd lost my job at LCC. Automated out, as it were. Here's the sequence of events which have occurred since getting laid off: 1. I got a job at Capital Prime Steakhouse, as a dishwasher. I held this position for a month. 3. Applied for Unemployment. I was rejected. 3. I then quit the dishwashing job because I assumed I had a job back at LCC (I interviewed well). 4. I did not get the LCC job. 5. I then worked Mother's Day weekend for Capital Prime, on a contract basis. 6. I asked for, and got, my dishwashing job back. So a pretty circuitous failure, right? Not necessarily. In the two weeks I was unemployed, I managed to: 1. Publish my personal website,  rickschlaackarts.wix.com/art-design  (Yes, I know it's a clunky URL); 2. Put together several hundred dollars in art-commission work. 3. Suffered through th...

Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace My Big Book series continues. Having already chewed my way through Gravity's Rainbow,  I figured I'd better start on that other edifice of (post)modern literature, Infinite Jest.  With the experience of the former literary doorstop still heavy in my brain, I was wholly prepared to be disappointed by another hyperintellectual slog through Smugland. So imagine my surprise when Infinite Jest  turned out not only good, but in many ways transcendent. Like many postmodern works, IJ  holds a rather liberal interpretation of "plot" and "narrative"; you'll start out fairly disoriented before things coalesce into a readable form. The story follows three main characters: Hal Incandenza, tennis prodigy at Enfield Tennis Academy and son of brilliant filmmaker Jim Incandenza; Don Gately, former criminal and opioid addict, who now staffs the Ennet House halfway home; and Rémy Marathe, member of the radical Quebecois separatis...