Sorry loyal readers it has been a long arduous reprieve from my writing duties but things are not all candy canes and lolly pops in the Old Country right now. Whereas this time last year the fearless protagonists of grenoblewmd were constantly cycling in the mountainous regions of ecto-Grenoble, basking in the warm springtime sunshine of the French Riviera, and photographing their food, this year the weather is cold and rainy, the principals are now injured and defeated, and the battery in my camera is so dead that it can't even hold a charge (the rise of Instagram also ruined the lost art of gastronomic photography). Plus things also really haven't been the same since DFW's death in 08... But then the WWW conference also said again that they didn't want my garbage contribution and so I couldn't go to Rio in May but then my officemate's workshop paper did get accepted but it seems they might not even let him go because there's some sort of travel freeze all of a sudden because we had to pay the leaving CTO a 500 billion dollar severance package for forcing him to resign after 6 months on the job for trying to have sex with his secretary (probably closer to the truth than not). At least I didn't have to think YES!!! I'm going to Brazil suckers!!! Then a few days later find out NO!!! You're not going to Brazil sucker!!! But instead I do get to go here:
Which isn't quite as exciting as Rio but Delft looks rather quaint wouldn't you say? I'll hopefully be able to do some early morning running along the water:
But unfortunately both of us are injured!! Injured, really.. can you believe it? Both of our egos wrote cheques that our bodies couldn't cash. How about that? I am having some major knee and foot problems... KNEE and FOOT problems! And Sandra is living with some nightmarish douleurs related to the leg of some sort. What a horror. But who knows... maybe 8 hours on the train this afternoon/evening will do me good and I'll be right back at er (and hopefully Sandra too will be better soon too).
For the BIG trip to Delft we (me and a work colleague) take the train from here to Paris at 13h and then from Paris to Rotterdam and then from Rotterdam to Delft. It will be a long time on the train! But I have my computer and a book (I know you were worried for me until I wrote that... so don't worry any longer). When we get to Paris we arrive at Gare de Lyon and then have approximately 40 minutes (depending on the lateness of the train) to get to Gare du Nord which is where our train to Rotterdam leaves from. This could prove to be difficult and/or problematic and/or disastrous. BUT, hopefully things will work out fine and we can get on to the next train for more relaxing hours of reading and/or computering.
Oh ya, we went snowshoeing in the Vercors a few weeks ago. Here is a view and some of us:
Prologue
Pemulis never really should have been called Pemulis but we couldn't have known that at the time because no one could have guessed how his story would have taken off and developed into something so richly structured with interesting parallels to real-life, specific pre-existing fiction, and the persona that the new Pemulis has developed into (current, ongoing fiction). The True Eventual Adventures of Pemulis lay a lot of the foundation for what we now think of as the personality traits that make up this character. With that seminal work, the development of Pemulis as a person has now been ingrained in our consciousnesses and we can't exactly just go and change his name now. But the fact is that Pemulis never should have been called Pemulis. I mean, he could have been and everything would have been fine, but then the true connections to IJ with Joelle clearly being the PGOAT are further strengthened with the clear allusions to the deadly Jeu du Prochain Train, and now we, as readers, start to look for stronger connections between the true person that Pemulis may or may not be loosely based on, and the Michael Pemulis (who shares a first name with the true father of the character's inspiration in the latter incarnation of Pemulis who is the same as the author of the TEAP) of the late DFW. Interestingly, originally Michael Pemulis's name was allegedly based on the folk-rock singer Dr. Michael Pemulis (according to Wikipedia). Now, Pemulis is Hal's best friend, and so forming a tenuous connection to the better analogue (Hal) through his best friend Pemulis might make sense in a tangential decompositional post-modern approach to meta story telling, but really what should be clear by now is that though a priori there was no specific reason for or against naming Pemulis (v. 2) Pemulis, his complexities that have grown out of the rich body of literature that has sprung up around him and his exploits make it such that, a posteriori, Pemulis should have been called Hal. Sure, Michael Pemulis is a mathematical genius just as it seems that Pemulis is as well (c.f. solving the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture in TEAP). However, Hal was never a poor mathematician either and he clearly more closely fits many of the described idiosyncratic actions from TEAP such as counting backwards in French interspersing each number with the name of a French philosopher. This perfectly fits within the context of Hal's eidetic memory and is along the lines of his recounted memorization of the Oxford English Dictionary. Pemulis (v. 2) also seems to possess a quick mind and a strong wit. Hal learning how to fake despair without actually suffering from it fits well with the Pemulis that we have come to know.
Despite all this, there are problems that would have sprouted up if the proposed nomenclature had been adopted as well. First, Joelle could never be Hal's wife because she was once very happily involved with Orin (Hal's older brother) and we're led to believe that the relationship ended at least partly because of a potential affair between Joelle and Hal and Orin's father James O (though I think it remains ambiguous with respect to whether this actually happened or if it was simply related to Joelle being featured in all of Jim's later films including, of course, The Entertainment. This of course would then also suggest that Tom is a professional American football punter, Catherine is a severely deformed homodont (has just one tooth) named Mario, Dad was an alcoholic film maker who inadvertently (?) created a film that, if it falls into the hands of evil wheelchair-bound Quebec separatist terrorists, could be used to destroy the world, Mom is an agoraphobic 2m tall Québecois, and my friend LaMont is a 14-year-old tennis prodigy obsessed with success on the professional circuit which obsession leads him to not be able to perform as well as he should be able to perform and thus ultimately prevents him from attaining the success that he so desperately yearns for. So, I guess what I'm saying is, you shouldn't look too carefully into the connections / history / inspirations for fake names.
Chapter 1
Pemulis and Joelle had a nice weekend snowshoeing in the Vercors mountains last weekend and another nice weekend the weekend before last in sunny Marseille where it snowed for the first time in something like 15 years. This coming weekend they will have a birthday party for Pemulis and hopefully, if the weather is nice enough, go for the first bike ride of 2013.
