AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

Also diving into some of the critical literature, incl All Things Shining, Zen and the White Whale, Harold Bloom volume, others.

There's a whole chapter in All Things Shining on "David Foster Wallace's Nihilism".

Resonates with Moby Dick and the interp in All Things Shining, The whole (whiteness) is ungraspable.

Coming Into Being - Google Books looks interesting, kind akin to All Things Shining in that it traces evolution of different modes of consciousness through texts, and touches on Orality and Literacy.

If one has an inappropriate vision in the imagination, one generates an inappropriate “phase-portrait for the geometry of behavior” of the self. Our culture, lacking a vision of a multidimensional model of consciousness, simply oscillates back and forth between an excessively reified materialism and a compensatorily hysterical nihilism. This Nietzschean nihilism, in all its deconstructionist variants, has pretty much taken over the way literature is studied in the universities, and it also rules the cognitive science of Marvin Minsky, Dan Dennett, and Patricia and Paul Churchland, in which the self is looked upon as a superstition that arose from a naive folk psychology that existed before the age of enlightenment brought about by computers and artificial intelligence. This materialist/nihilist mind-set controls the universities.

Well that's a pretty standard take, can't say that I'm interested. More interesting is that he talks about The Embodied Mind.

All Things Shining

30 Oct 2021 - 19 Mar 2026

That is the real reason that Wallace and Gilbert are appropriate for this book: not because they sense the lostness of the age—this dark vision was alive already in Eliot’s Wasteland and Beckett’s Endgame, and countless other testimonies from the early part of the twentieth century. No, what makes these contemporary authors worth reading instead is that they are trying to find a way into the light. In seeing how they fail, we will prepare ourselves to search for the sacred possibilities still alive in the modern world.

Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick is, in effect, a monomaniacal pursuit of the final, ultimate truth about the way things are. “If man will strike, strike through the mask!” But there are no such final truths in Melville’s world; no reasoning thing stands behind the unreasoning mask. Ahab’s determination to find such a foundation—that is the wicked core of his monomaniacal monotheism.

Pip and Ahab contain within them the two basic possibilitie4s left to the West if he hang on to the Axial intuition that there is an ultimate truth behind everything that is. Either we becom brazy at the recognition that there is no such truth, or we drive ourselves crazy trying to prove there is. The end of a rotten line indeed, suggests the Maxman. Perahps we had best have a new line a;tioether. (p181)