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Thus when Hal says in the book's stark, one-line second paragraph, "I am in here" (IJ 3), rather than a statement of location, it is the cry "I EXIST," familiar from Wallace's Markson review (BF 83). I hear in this remark "I ... in-here" or "I inhere", meaning there is a substantialness to Hal's va…

[...] One resonance of Gately's DG initials is the decigram, a common measure for drug sales, the "tenth of a gram" cocaine customers beg for [...]

To a true chess player, the pushing about of thirty-two counters on 8x8 squares is an end in itself, a whole world next to which that of mere biological or political or social life seems messy, stale, and contingent.

[...] Chomsky saw--and this, I believe, has been his most penetrating insight--that a valid model of linguistic behavior must account for the extraordariny fact that all of us perpetually and effortlessly use strings and combinations of words which we have never heard before, which we have never be…

[...] But Russell's Jacobinism is high Tory; it springs from the certitude that birth and genius are impose both the right and the obligation of moral precept. [...] True politics are the art of securing elbowroom for the best; they will alienate the squalor in the world at large that embarrasses o…