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David Foster Wallace: "Wiggle Room"

From the latest New Yorker, "Wiggle Room", an excerpt from David Foster Wallace's unfinished third novel The Pale King, as well as a long & really, really sad essay/profile about DFW, "The Unfinished", that talks about his depression and his attempts to fight it, as well as this unfinished novel:

The novel continues Wallace's preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, "The Pale King" suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel's idea: "Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."

A walk and a bottle of wine

I've never read any of Ian McEwan's novels, but I enjoyed the profile of him in last week's New Yorker nonetheless, particularly this part:

Perhaps the one thing that McEwan shares with his more Romantic peers is a love of the long walk. At sixty, he has probably rambled more miles than any English writer since Coleridge. For four decades, he has canvassed the Lake District and the Chilterns—the chalk hills between London and Oxford. Outside England, McEwan has conquered swaths of the Bernese Oberland, the Atlas Mountains, and the Dolomites. Usually, he walks slightly ahead of a companion, and his knapsack contains two stainless-steel cups and a very good bottle of wine.

That sounds pretty much like the perfect way to enjoy a walk.

Safari

The new Safari beta is, indeed, quite speedy:

Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.

That said, my Top Sites are far less interesting than Apple's examples (this very blog, Google, and our internal FogBugz are in my top sites, for instance), and I'm not sure that I share Apple's fascination with Cover Flow-style interfaces, but I can ignore that--I've been a devoted blank-page-in-new-window browser user for years, now. And the new tabs, well--I'm still adjusting, to say the least. I keep feeling as though I've lost all of my open tabs, because they're not where I expect them to be.

But: new stuff!

Knowing your stuff

From Michael Ruhlman:

I repeat, a few of the best ways to improve your skills in the kitchen is, one, to use really sharp knives, two, to buy grapefruit in February, and three, to know why you buy grapefruit in February.

What I love most about this--as with a lot of things that Ruhlman writes--is the focus on technique, the right (simple) tools, and knowing your stuff.

Angel Deradoorian: "High Road"

I'm eagerly anticipating a new Dirty Projectors album this year, but Angel Deradoorian's The Mind Raft EP should help me to be patient (Deradoorian has been the bassist in the DP traveling band since the release of Rise Above in 2007).

You can hear "High Road" on Stereogum.

Vistoso Bosses: "Delirious"

I've been listening to this obsessively the past couple of weeks, and it may be my favorite new song of 2009, so far! It's so charming & lovely. Buy it from Amazon.

Coconut Cupcakes

I've blogged about coconut cake; now, coconut cupcakes.

I made Mini Coconut Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting for a super bowl party the other day, and they were delicious.

If you're going to make these cupcakes from the recipe, note that the frosting recipe seems to make way more than the cupcakes require. Or, maybe, I just applied the frosting in a really miserly way. But so I halved the frosting recipe, and it still made more than enough frosting for 24 mini cupcakes and a 9x9x2 inch cake. Which was, of course, fine with us.