"The blog is also now unending: you can scroll down indefinitely if you so wish..."

A nice feature at Andrew Sullivan's newly independent blog. This means that the blog is set to have a  number of posts on the page when you click there, but if you want more, you don't have to click to an "older posts" page (as you do here), it automatically provides new posts as you scroll. This gives a vivid depiction of what a blog really is: a pile of posts one on top of the other. For example, my blog is a stack of 32,381 posts.

Sullivan has also moved his archive, which goes back to January 2001: "I have given a sharp dagger for anyone who wants to make me look foolish – so have at it." I don't think the archive makes him look foolish. I read him all the time back then, when he called himself conservative and tried to define conservatism in new ways. Or is the appearance of foolishness not in what those old opinions were, but in the later deviations? Would you read the sort of person who would go 12 years without contradicting himself?

The Dictionary of Received Ideas — my imagined modern American version of it — has this under "contradiction":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

That's the reflexive quotation but you can keep scrolling in that poem, Walt Whitman's tall stack of lines:

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through
with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too
late?

I wait on the door-slab....

David Foster Wallace's essays "could have done with a little judicious pruning."

I laugh out loud at that notion, expressed by Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the new collection "Both Flesh and Not."

Meade asks me what's so funny, I explain, and he cites "too many notes":



"Just cut a few, and it'll be perfect!"

Back to "Both Flesh and Not" — which I just downloaded into my Kindle app. The title seems to grind into our heads that Wallace is not flesh anymore, having hung himself. Anticipating the first or second comment to this post will point that out, I'm pointing it out along with all the references to suicide that appear in the book. There are 4:

1. "What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite everyone’s best efforts, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting? Is this thought experiment monstrous?"

2. "It’s not just that there are [in 'Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession'] long and irrelevant footnotes on, e.g., Gödel’s method of suicide, Poincaré’s theory of the unconscious, or the novel properties of the number 1,729.25." [Gödel’s method was refusing all food for a month, under the delusion his doctors were trying to poison him, which doesn't really sound like suicide, unless you believe "suicide" does not mean self-murder. ]

3 & 4. "... [Edwin] Williamson sometimes presents Borges’s stories and poems as 'evidence' that he was in emotional extremities. Williamson’s claim, for instance, that in 1934, 'after his definitive rejection by Norah Lange, Borges… came to the brink of killing himself' is based entirely on two tiny pieces of contemporaneous fiction in which the protagonists struggle with suicide. Not only is this a bizarre way to read and reason — was the Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary eo ipso suicidal?— but Williamson seems to believe that it licenses him to make all sorts of dubious, humiliating claims about Borges’s interior life: '"The Cyclical Night," which he published in La Nación on October 6, reveals him to be in the throes of an acute personal crisis'; 'In the extracts from this unfinished poem… we can see that the reason for wishing to commit suicide was literary failure, stemming ultimately from sexual self-doubt.' Bluck."

ADDDED; I only searched for "suicide," and, reading the book, I encounter "suicidally" -- a self-regarding "suicidally" -- and the premise of my 4-point list, above, is radically undermined.

"I feel against the stupidity of my epoch waves of hatred that choke me.''

What calls a man to write novels?

"There's no satisfaction to any Madoff loser that the son committed suicide."

"It's just tragedy on tragedy."

ADDED: All the newspapers have to say that Mark Madoff hanged himself with a dog leash. It's like "all the papers had to say was that Marilyn was found in the nude."

When does a single a death detail become irresistibly mentionable?

If only Flaubert were still here, adding entries to his "Dictionary of Received Ideas." At "Mark Madoff," we'd have "hanged himself with a dog leash."

I see Flaubert has an entry for "suicide": "Proof of cowardice."

Hamdan and the arcana of jurisdiction stripping.

Linda Greenhouse writes about the Hamdan case, to be argued in the Supreme Court Tuesday:

In the face of a measure that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in late December to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over cases brought by detainees at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where Mr. Hamdan has been held since 2002, the court must decide whether it retains the right to proceed with this case at all.

For a court that has been highly protective of its own prerogatives, but at the same time notably attentive to the often arcane limits on federal court jurisdiction, the question is one of great delicacy, infused with historical resonance.

In my modern "Dictionary of Received Ideas," the entry for "Federal Jurisdiction" is: call it arcane. Being arcane, it's can be a good way to dispose of pesky problems. If you want to do a little sleight of hand, jurisdiction is a good move. We Federal Jurisdiction lawprofs make it our business to detect the fakery. But it's not all fakery, and the Constitution gives Congress some powers to check the courts, including the power to cut back their jurisdiction. The questions here are whether this statute cuts even pending cases, like Hamdan's, and whether that cut back goes beyond the scope of the power.

If there is jurisdiction, then the Hamdan case will deal with the validity of using military tribunals for the Guantanamo detainees.

More on Hamdan after the oral argument.

ADDED: SCOTUSblog has a good preview, including details about a possible 4-4 split vote and what it would mean. (John Roberts has recused himself, because he participated in the case at the Court of Appeals level. There's also a controversy about whether Antonin Scalia should recuse himself, given some remarks he made about the issue recently.)

MORE: Captain Ed is pretty hard on Scalia. You know, what bothers me the most about Scalia's statement is: "I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son, and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial." Much as I respect the son's service and the father's pride in it, the interests or activities of your friends and family should have absolutely no effect on how you decide a case. Are we to think that if the enemy were only shooting at someone else's sons, he'd take a different view of the issue?

CORRECTION: I've corrected the original text to show that the argument is on Tuesday, not Monday.