Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, J. G. Ballard on "The Art of Fiction, No. 85" (1984):
...I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work ... I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes.

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

...for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality...

...if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

I’m never happier than when I can write about drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels. But I’m not sure if that’s decadence or simply an attempt to invert and reverse the commonplace, to turn the sock inside out. I’ve always been intrigued by inversions of that kind, or any kind.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements. By the eighteenth book, one has a sense of having bricked oneself into a niche, a roosting place for other people’s pigeons. I wouldn’t recommend it.

With short stories I do a brief synopsis of about a page, and only if I feel the story works as a story, as a dramatic narrative with the right shape and balance to grip the reader’s imagination, do I begin to write it.... In the case of the novels, the synopsis is much longer. For High-Rise, it was about twenty-five thousand words, written in the form of a social worker’s report on the strange events that had taken place in this apartment block, an extended case history. I wish I’d kept it; I think it was better than the novel. In the case of The Unlimited Dream Company, I spent a full year writing a synopsis that was eventually about seventy thousand words long, longer than the eventual novel. In fact, I was cutting down and pruning the synopsis as I wrote the novel. By synopsis I don’t mean a rough draft, but a running narrative in the perfect tense with the dialogue in reported speech, and with an absence of reflective passages and editorializing.

...I haven’t taken any drugs since one terrifying LSD trip in 1967. A nightmarish mistake. It opened a vent of hell that took years to close and left me wary even of aspirin.... It convinced me that a powerful and obsessive enough imagination can reach, unaided, the very deepest layers of the mind. (I take it that beyond LSD there lies nothing.) Imagination is the shortest route between any two conceivable points, and more than equal to any physical rearrangement of the brain’s functions.

The sixties were a time of endlessly multiplying possibilities, of real selflessness in many ways, a huge network of connections between Vietnam and the space race, psychedelia and pop music, linked together in every conceivable way by the media landscape. We were all living inside an enormous novel, an electronic novel, governed by instantaneity. In many ways, time didn’t exist in the sixties, just a set of endlessly proliferating presents. Time returned in the seventies, but not a sense of the future. The hands of the clock now go nowhere.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, Margaret Atwood on "The Art of Fiction, No. 121" (1990):
In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

We have fallen very much into the habit of judging books by their covers. “Authenticity” has become a concern. I tend to side with creative freedom. Everyone should write as she or he feels impelled. Then let’s judge the results, not the picture of the author on the back flap.

The unique thing about writers is that they write. Therefore they are pickier about words, at least on paper. But everyone “writes” in a way; that is, each person has a “story”—a personal narrative—which is constantly being replayed, revised, taken apart, and put together again. The significant points in this narrative change as a person ages—what may have been tragedy at twenty is seen as comedy or nostalgia at forty. All children “write.” (And paint, and sing.) I suppose the real question is why do so many people give it up. Intimidation, I suppose. Fear of not being good. Lack of time.

All writers feel struck by the limitations of language. All serious writers.

The novel is not merely a vehicle for self-expression or for the rendition of one’s own personal life. I’m quite conservative in that way. I do see the novel as a vehicle for looking at society—an interface between language and what we choose to call reality, although even that is a very malleable substance. When I create characters in novels, those characters aren’t necessarily expressing something that is merely personal.

I think the focus [of my work] has become wider, but surely that happens with every writer. What you do first is learn your craft. That can take years. In order to do that, you have to pick subjects that are small enough for you to handle. You learn how to do a good job with that. Of course, in the larger sense, every novel is—at the beginning—the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space. I mean, it’s just as terrifying every time. But nevertheless, having made the journey a few times, you have little guideposts, little signposts in the back of your mind.

I still get a few young folks who want to make their reputations by shooting me down. Any writer who has been around for a while gets a certain amount of that. I was very intolerant as a youthful person. It’s almost necessary, that intolerance; young people need it in order to establish credentials for themselves.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, Anthony Burgess on "The Art of Fiction, No. 48" (1973):
[The afternoon is] a quiet time. It’s a time when one’s body is not at its sharpest, not at its most receptive—the body is quiescent, somnolent; but the brain can be quite sharp. I think, also, at the same time that the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. The morning is the conscious time, but the afternoon is a time in which we should deal much more with the hinterland of the consciousness.

I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror.

I do feel that the author has to know best about what he’s writing—from the viewpoint of structure, intention, and so on. The critic has the job of explaining deep-level elements which the author couldn’t know about. As for saying where—technically, in matters of taste and so on—a writer is going wrong, the critic rarely says what the author doesn’t know already.

I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.... I chart a little first—list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren’t overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

I despise whatever is obviously ephemeral and yet is shown as possessing some kind of ultimate value. The Beatles, for instance. Most youth culture, especially music, is based on so little knowledge of tradition, and it often elevates ignorance into a virtue. Think of the musically illiterate who set themselves up as “arrangers.” And youth is so conformist, so little concerned with maverick values, so proud of being rather than making, so bloody sure that it and it alone knows.

[Y]ou can’t be a genius and sexually impotent. I still think that inspiration comes out of the act of making an artifact, a work of craft.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

One has to wait, I’m afraid—a long time sometimes—for the experience one’s had to present itself in workable form, as a form that can be shaped into something like a work of art.

I think there’s more artistic pleasure to be gained from the ingenious circumvention of a taboo than from what is called total permissiveness.

Literature ... thrives on taboos, just as all art thrives on technical difficulties.

I don’t ... think that the job of literature is to teach us how to behave, but I think it can make clearer the whole business of moral choice by showing what the nature of life’s problems is.

Comedy is concerned with truth quite as much as tragedy; and the two, as Plato recognized, have something fundamental in common. They’re both stripping processes; they both tear off externals and show man as a poor forked animal. Satire is a particular kind of comedy, limiting itself to particular areas of behavior, not to the general human condition.

I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, John Fowles on "The Art of Fiction, No. 109" (1989):
...it’s often through personal diaries — however embarrassing they are to read now — that the novelist discovers his true bent — that he can narrate real events and distort them to please himself, describe character, observe other human beings, hypothesize, invent, all the rest.

Students nowadays seem to want to “place” precisely, to locate precisely, everything about a writer’s work: what he is, what has made him or her what they are, and so on. It seems to me that to imprison it is to deny something very essential about writing.... [I]t is very important we stay free.

This relation, between man and nature, is far more important and real to me than that between man and God, even between man and other men. I also find it intensely pleasurable, endlessly rich. Men often bore, books often bore, all things human can bore; nature, never.

That ours is in general a heroic age seems to me ridiculous. We are near stifling and exterminating our planet. What scientific and technological advances we have made are flagrantly not paralleled by any moral or ethical ones. By and large men are never moral; they always let themselves be pressured into the amoral or the immoral. In terms of history men have failed; it is time we tried Eve.

One Reason Why I Preferred Picard to Kirk

The Unseen, the Loved, and the Hated

Inspired by Ms. Baroque (who was, apparently, inspired by Political Umpire), I present ten movies I’ve never seen but should have, by now:

1. The Tenant
2. Rosemary's Baby
3. Martin
4. Network
5. Diabolique
6. Under the Volcano
7. Carnival of Souls
8. Phantom of the Paradise
9. Man Bites Dog
10. Pretty Poison

Followed by a list of (only) ten movies I really love:

1. Blade Runner
2. Some Like It Hot
3. Mulholland Dr.
4. Henry Fool
5. Ghost World
6. THX-1138
7. Buffalo '66
8. My Dinner with Andre
9. Kicking and Screaming (Noah Baumbach, not Will Ferrell)
10. Fight Club

And finally, why not? Ten movies I hate:

1. Pretty Woman
2. Pearl Harbor
3. Cursed
4. Fame (2009)
5. Synecdoche, New York
6. Kill Bill, vol. 1
7. Mallrats
8. Daredevil
9. Velvet Goldmine
10. Star Wars, Episode 1 (and 2, and 3)

Toppling the "Masters"

B. R. Myers, a contributing editor for the Atlantic, is a bit of a grouch. As far as I can tell he hasn't liked a single novel published in the last forty years, and most of his favorites were originally published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His book titled A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose (2002) is exactly what it claims to be. Though several reviewers (including Laura Miller on Salon.com and Meghan O'Rourke on Slate.com) have pointed out a few of the flaws in Myers's arguments, I have to admit that his jeremiad is useful to me as a writer--and admittedly fun to read.

What's interesting about Myers's tirades is that he equates the prose of every late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century novelist with the same terrible, Dan Brown level of artlessness*--particularly that written by the most well-respected of contemporary authors: Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, David Guterson, Jonathan Franzen, etc. All their work is crap, apparently.

Some of Myers's criticisms are hysterical enough (and intentionally so, I have to assume) that it's hard not to picture him sitting in a comfy chair in his den at home, reading the latest novel by Jonathan Safran Foer and railing aloud, to no one in particular, at the utter incompetence of the adjectivally overstuffed sentences that offend his eyes, then rushing over to his desk to type up a sternly worded assault on the poor author. I also can't help picturing little cartoon-expletives shooting out of his head à la Donald Duck in one of his pissier moods.

Personally, I liked DeLillo's White Noise and Underworld, Auster's New York Trilogy and Timbuktu, and consider McCarthy's The Road to be one of the most beautiful books I've ever read (despite its [comparatively] upbeat ending). But I can appreciate Myers's willingness to take contemporary literature's brightest stars to task for what he considers sloppy writing. It's one thing to read a scathing critique of Dan Brown's sophomoric prose (which is a lot like trash-talking the New Jersey Nets--even I can do it and I don't know a thing about sports); it's something else to take down one of the pillars of postmodernism, Don DeLillo, for utilizing clumsy tautologies and being guilty of writing banality masked as profundity, among other things.** He deconstructs the sentences and scenes written by his targets with such minute care that, even if his criticisms are a bit unfair (not seeing the forest for the trees and all that), he does have a valid point: Sentences are the building blocks of fiction and as such they should be written in the service of the whole.

I also appreciate Myers's willingness to be reviled by so many uptight fans of the books he trashes. He is not a popular guy in the realm of his chosen profession, and that takes guts.

I read Myers's essays to help me avoid writing sloppy prose. With that in mind, here are a few of my favorites:

1. Scoffing at the most celebrated novel of the year (so far anyway), Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.

2. Bravely heckling Toni Morrison's A Mercy.

3. Rolling his eyes over Denis Johnson's National Book Award winner, Tree of Smoke.

4. Gleefully kicking sand in the face of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

5. Myers reviews Ian Robinson's Untied Kingdom, in which he finds a kindred spirit (sort of).

6. The Atlantic article on which Myers's A Reader's Manifesto was based.

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*There are exceptions, of course. Myers seems to have a slight appreciation for Stephen King, recommends the Houstons' memoir Farewell to Manzanar (though this is not a novel, you'll notice), and at least likes David Lodge's literary criticism, if not his novels. But nearly every other book Myers references in a positive light was written before 1960.

**He also accuses DeLillo of being unfunny, which I just don't get. The "Toyota Celica" sequence, which Myers excerpts in his book for other reasons, is one of the funnier moments in White Noise.

Clayton Cubitt

Have you ever stared into someone else's eyes, without speaking, for five minutes? Not in a staring-contest way (which is about something else entirely) but in a windows-to-the-soul way? It's surprisingly hard to do, even with someone you know intimately well. Such naked attention can be unsettling.

That's why artist/photographer Clayton Cubitt is a genius. A few years ago he filmed a handful of what he calls "long portraits," which are videos of a single person looking into the camera for approximately five minutes. Unlike a photograph or a painting, the long portraits give you the sense of looking at the subject not just for one moment in time, but of looking into the subject's inner world over a span of time (and believe me, five minutes feels like an eternity when you're looking into someone else's eyes). At the end, you feel as if you understand the subject better, somehow. Certainly moreso than you would after having looked at a still photograph of him/her. It's a fascinating experience.

Below is the first one I watched, and as such it remains the most powerful (at least as far as I'm concerned). I highly recommend watching it on Vimeo's site instead, since it's larger there than it is here.

Long Portrait: Lambchop from Clayton Cubitt on Vimeo.

Clayton Cubitt's blog, Constant Siege (occasionally NSFW), is also pretty cool.

Captain Couch Potato watches After.Life

For me, the release of new work by certain directors, screenwriters, and actors is cause for celebration. I'm not talking about the people who work all the time whose movies I like; Hollywood practically guarantees at least two Woody Allen movies a year, some great, some not so great.

No, I'm talking about the folks who don't work as often as I'd like them to (whether by choice or because no one wants to hire them): David Lynch, Noah Baumbach, Hal Hartley, Crispin Glover, Winona Ryder, the list goes on.

And that list also includes Christina Ricci.

I liked her in her film debut, Mermaids, though as a 17-year-old boy at the time I was far more interested in the aforementioned Winona Ryder. Christina's screen-presence was far more intense in her next film, The Addams Family, in which her deadpan portrayal of the creepy Wednesday Addams pretty much set the tone for a significant subset of her career choices thereafter.*

I lost track of her for a few years until she turned up for a tiny but cute role in the so-so comedy/drama Summer Fling. As an American high school cheerleader visiting Ireland, she made a big impression on me. And of course her memorable but stone-faced role in The Ice Storm made an even bigger impression. But it wasn't until I spent one Saturday afternoon in New York City, circa 1998, watching two Christina films (Buffalo '66 and The Opposite of Sex) back-to-back that I decided she was one of my favorite actors.**

Now that I was hooked, I was rewarded with four years of not-very-good movies (though there were a few almost-gems [Pecker, Prozac Nation] among the duds [Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Desert Blue, 200 Cigarettes, No Vacancy, Sleepy Hollow, Bless the Child, The Man Who Cried, The Gathering]). Then came Pumpkin.***

And that's pretty much the cycle Christina's movie career goes through: an occasional good movie (Monster, Black Snake Moan) surrounded by duds (Cursed, Speed Racer)--but even the duds are pretty spread out. So I take what I can get.

My feelings about After.Life are pretty well summed-up in that previous sentence. It is, in other words, not very good.


Christina is Anna Taylor, an elementary school teacher who dies in a car accident. Or did she? Die, that is. I suppose this is the question we're meant to believe is at the heart of the movie.


But really, it seems more like an excuse to film Christina in a skimpy blood-red slip and, later on, completely naked (not just for a scene or two, but for the final third of the movie). If the writer/director weren't a woman I'd be highly suspicious of the entire endeavor.


The movie had lofty aspirations, but in execution these aspirations devolved into pretensions. I can see how Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo wanted her horror film to be the next Sixth Sense, but it's just too sloppy to operate on a higher cinematic plane. After.Life is rife with gaping plot holes, silly dream sequences, fuzzy internal logic, pointless chase scenes, and minor characters who were clearly meant to serve as important clues to the central mystery but instead serve as unnecessary dead-ends.


The cinematography is nice, though.


___________________________________________________
POINTLESS FOOTNOTES

*Many of the films she chooses to star in are, if not downright creepy, at least a bit odd (e.g., Penelope, Pumpkin, etc.).

**Ten-plus years later, The Opposite of Sex doesn't hold up so well on repeat viewings (a disappointment, particularly because I'd also put Christina's costar, Martin Donovan, on my list of actors who work seldom enough that I tend to receive his new projects with glee), but Christina's performance in that movie remains one of her better ones. And though I'm loath to admit this, my relationship with my wife (who, coincidentally enough, looks like Christina Ricci and Alexis Bledel's long-lost sister) in some ways mirrors the Billy-Layla relationship of Buffalo '66 (though not in a creepy way, I swear), so that movie remains close to my heart despite my mixed feelings about Vincent Gallo.

***Eight years later, I still don't know what to make of Pumpkin. Is it an indictment of vain sorority girls or an ill-conceived attempt to poke fun at our society's P.C. attitudes toward the handicapped? Or, worse, does it make the timid mistake of trying to be something in-between? (Probably the latter.)

Captain Couch Potato watches Remember Me

'Spoiler' warning: If you plan to see this movie at any point in the future, please don't read this posting. Although the movie doesn't have a "twist" ending in the traditional sense, the following is primarily about the events at the end of the film.


Remember Me begins with the murder of one person and ends with the murder of some 2700 people, but--in the context of this movie, anyway--we are expected to care about only one of the latter.

Nearly a decade after the events of 9/11, I suppose it's now OK to appropriate those events in the service of art, as long as the end result isn't overly exploitative or sensationalized. However, the terrorist attacks of that day remain terrorist attacks, and as such they were acts of a political nature, but Remember Me is not a political movie. In fact, if politics can be defined generally as the overarching bureaucratic relations among the citizens in a given society and its governing body, then Remember Me is the exact opposite of a political movie. It deals, primarily, with the intimate, personal interactions between family members and loved ones.

On the other hand, perhaps the movie is a close approximation of what it must have felt like to have lost a loved one on 9/11. The individuals in and around the World Trade Center towers, and those on the planes, were not political agents, they were civilians. In this way, Robert Pattinson's character, Tyler Hawkins, mirrored hundreds of other people who died that day: They lived their lives, as varied as those lives were, and then they were killed for reasons that had nothing to do with them personally. Their lives up to that moment had no authentic relation to the despicable political actions that led to their deaths. As such, the movie's denouement is pretty effective as a portrayal of this senseless loss of life.

But although the death-toll from that day is staggeringly large when compared to other events of this nature, the victims and their immediate families comprise a relatively small portion of the population. One could argue that, because the movie harnessed the terrible power of 9/11 only in its last few minutes of screen-time, it appropriated the pain of a few individuals for the sake of a story that was not about 9/11 at all (except inasmuch as the movie was a story about the loss of loved ones, and how such losses affect those left behind).*

Imagine From Here to Eternity if, instead of a private in the Army, Montgomery Clift played a civilian boxer who was merely visiting his father on an Army base, which turned out to be Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941--but the audience didn't find this out until the last two minutes of the film.

When Titanic was in theaters I remember some people complained that it exploited its subject matter. The RMS Titanic had a finite number of victims (1517), yet the movie focused on two fictional people who were not actually on-board the vessel when it sank. Why didn't James Cameron focus on some of the actual victims or survivors of this historical event? Personally, I don't share this objection to the film, primarily because of some of the ways in which its approach differs from Remember Me: First, Titanic is a movie about the disaster and deals directly with the people and events that caused the disaster. True, these events are subplots to the primary (and completely fictional) plot of the movie, but it also deals with the people who were on-board and who lost their lives--even if the portrayals of those individuals were mostly fictional as well. Finally, Titanic was released 85 years after the actual sinking of the Titanic, at which point there were only a few remaining survivors--all of whom had been less than a few years old when the Titanic sank and had no memories of the event.

September 11, 2001, however, is still very much in everyone's minds. In addition to the thousands who lost their lives, that day eventually led to two wars that are still taking place,** which have each resulted in thousands of additional lives lost. Perhaps even moreso than Pearl Harbor, the attacks of 9/11 irrevocably altered the course of history. It's such an awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) event that, even nine years later, it's hard to completely wrap my mind around exactly what it means. Is an event of such incredible power well-served by being tacked onto an otherwise personal story about a young man seeking to reconnect his family with his estranged father? Was it essential that Tyler Hawkins be killed in the north tower for his death to have the impact that it does within the context of the story?

Regardless of this nagging question in the back of my mind, I did enjoy the film. Much was made of Robert Pattinson's performance in the film (even if its box-office numbers were not particularly impressive), and I'm not the first to say that he reminded me, perhaps intentionally, of James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. More enjoyable, though, was his chemistry with costar Emilie De Ravin (best known for her role as Claire on Lost). In my opinion it's rare these days for romantic leads to seem like they really belong together onscreen,*** but I believed them as a couple. As Roger Ebert noted in his review, the film would have been much better if it had focused more on their relationship and less on the melodrama surrounding Hawkins and his family.

_____________________________________________________________
*Though if the writer, William Fetters, lost someone in the 9/11 attacks, then this is of course a moot point.

**Despite the "end of combat operations" in Iraq, scheduled for August 31, 2010, the combat isn't over quite yet.

***Several contemporary romances (e.g., Valentine's Day, Leap Year, When in Rome, etc.) seem to have been cast strictly for the appeal of their stars as individuals, rather than as a couple.

Overrated Writers, Underrated Books

Huffington Post contributor Anis Shivani unleashed his scorn on a handful of novelists, poets, and literary critics last weekend in his article "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers."

Because he picked on literary luminaries such as John Ashbery and Amy Tan instead of hacks like Dan Brown (whose exclusion from the list presumably had something to do with shooting fish in a barrel), Mr. Shivani stirred up quite a shitstorm on the ol' Internet (which was, no doubt, his plan; and it worked, since the article is currently one of the most popular pages on the Huffington Post).

Anna North over at Jezebel takes Shivani to task for indulging in the same species of "bad" writing of which Sharon Olds, Junot Diaz, et al., are supposedly guilty (in the aptly, and hilariously, titled article "Literary Critic Hates Vaginas, 'Ghetto Volume'"). As she ironically points out at the beginning of her article, "People are obviously reading too much these days. That must be why one critic felt the need to list the 15 writers (9 of them women) we should all stop reading right now." Though I enjoyed Shivani's spiteful putdowns (particularly of William T. Vollmann, who seems to have had it coming) in the same way I shamefully enjoy visiting What Would Tyler Durden Do? every once in a while to see what crazy antics Lindsay Lohan is up to, I have to agree with North that, in this era of the screen (be it television or computer) prevailing over the page (be it book or magazine), there's not really that much to be gained from dismissing writers with any amount of literary worth, or perhaps even from discouraging reading of any kind. Despite knowing with certainty that The Da Vinci Code is the worst-written book I've ever read (yes, I read it, and yes, it's written in a style even worse than most young adult novels of the silly Gossip Girl, Twilight variety), I can't in good conscience begrudge people who would just as soon read it as watch an equivalent amount of TV. On the contrary, more power to them!

Alison Flood, a blogger at the Guardian, provided one of the more measured reactions to Shivani's diatribe with "Who Are the Most Overrated Contemporary Writers in the World?" But what I really appreciated was her more constructive follow-up posting: "Who Are Your Favourite Underrated Writers?"

Since she asked, I'd make a case for Tibor Fischer (particularly because of his hilarious novel The Thought Gang) and at the top of my list is Gene Wolfe, whose Book of the New Sun tetralogy is possibly the best book(s) I've ever read. Beautifully written, with a vocabulary that requires a conscientious reader to have the OED on-hand (since Merriam-Webster's won't cut it in this case), The Book of the New Sun rivals any book in which language is a centerpiece, without being too flashy (a no-no in Shivani's eyes, who derides "showboating" as a sign of bad writing). The primary reason it's underrated is that it's been undeservedly relegated to the sci-fi ghetto. This is a shame, because a writer like Margaret Atwood (another favorite writer of mine, who's fortunately not underrated) often uses science-fiction elements in her novels (such as The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood) to address larger issues--as the best sci-fi novels often do--yet still manages to get her books onto the best sellers lists. As Alison Flood (her again?) points out, the series does have its champions (including, perhaps most notably, Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin), but hardly the widespread adoration it deserves. I don't know, maybe it's the misrepresentative heavy metal album art on the covers that's to blame:



In any case, covers aside, The Book of the New Sun is better than C. S. Lewis's Narnia series and just as good as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, each of which have their places of honor in the larger arena of literary fiction.

Index to David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

As far as I'm concerned, the only thing missing from David Lipsky's excellent book-length interview with one of the greatest novelists and essayists who ever lived is an index. A few days after devouring the book in two epic sittings, I wanted to reread a passage that had particularly resonated with me, only to spend several minutes flipping through half the book to find it. This resulted in me unexpectedly rereading a lot more of the book than I'd planned to, so I decided to read through the entire book a second time and take some notes. Twenty pages in I realized I was creating an informal index, so I decided to go all the way.

The result is below. I'm not an indexer by profession so it's far from perfect, but I hope (re)readers of the book may find it useful. There are a few formatting oddities,* so anyone who would prefer a nicely formatted two-column PDF should leave me a comment and I'll happily email it to you. Comments suggesting corrections and/or additions are also welcome (and in fact encouraged). Enjoy!

Index

Adler, Renata, 187, 216
African Americans, 45, 309-310
airline safety guide, 94-95, 98. See also flying
alcohol, 59-60, 62-63, 65, 137, 139, 142-143, 146-147, 189, 227, 229. See also
MMdrugs
Alcoholics Anonymous. See twelve-step program
Alien (film), 67
Allen, Woody, 165-166
Always (film), 167, 201
Amherst College, 46, 51-52, 60, 123, 165, 223-224, 265
Amis, Martin, 31, 102
Amos, Tori, 306
Angels (novel), 200
antidepressants, xvi-xvii, 65, 236
“Anonymiad” (story), 187
anxiety, 129, 155
appearance, physical, xv, 284-285. See also attractiveness; bandannas
Appointment in Samarra (novel), 98
Arachnophobia (film), 205
Arizona, 47-48, 60, 224, 225. See also University of Arizona
art, 71-72, 91, 167-168, 199, 203; versus entertainment, 80-81, 174, 199. See also
MMentertainment
Art Fair, The (novel), 206
athletics, 52, 55, 56, 63, 120, 152, 262. See also tennis
Attenborough, Richard, 205-206
attractiveness, 89, 93-94
Auburndale Health Club, 234
Austin, Tracy, 53

“Balloon, The” (story), 72
bandannas, 295-296
Bangs, Lester, 72
Barth, John, 4, 63, 226. See also “Anonymiad”; “Lost in the Funhouse”
Barthelme, Donald, 72, 259
Batman (TV show), 148, 149
Baywatch (TV show), 199
Begley, Adam, 58
Bell, Madison Smartt, 21
biography, 46
Birkerts, Sven, 223, 253
Blade Runner (film), 197, 198
Bloom, Harold, 127
Bloomington, Illinois, 44-46, 106, 193, 198, 220, 266-267, 297, 300, 308
Blue Velvet (film), 169, 170-171, 172-173
Blues Brothers, The (film), 181
Blythe, Will, 24, 193-194
Bolin, Tommy, 210
book tour. See public readings
Boston, Massachusetts, 239
Boswell, Robert, 47, 264, 265
Boyle, T. Coraghessan, 282
Braveheart (film), 168-169, 208
Brazil (film), 172
Broadcast News (film), 201
Broken Arrow (film), 122-123, 203-204
Brooks, Albert, 201
Brooks, James L., 201
Broom of the System, 10, 22, 34, 35-36, 46-47, 64, 110, 115, 126, 227, 248,
MM258-259, 260-261, 262-263, 264-266
Buchanan, Pat, 158, 162
Burns, George, 269
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 51
Bush, 210, 222

Caan, James, 69
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (film), 170
Cameron, James, 166
car, 266, 302-303
Cavell, Stanley, 236
centered temperament, having a, 187-188
Chabon, Michael, 109
Chapman, Tracy, 212
children, 303, 307
Childress, Mark, 250
civic responsibility, 161
Clapton, Eric, 210
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 167, 205
Cobain, Kurt, 213
colleagues, university, 9
comic books, 169
Conn, Charis, xxi, 29, 99, 178, 249, 251, 272
Conroy, Frank, 282
consciousness, 37-38; fractured, 39-40, 290-292
Costello, Mark, xix, xx, xxv-xxvi, 25, 140, 150, 178, 213, 226, 230, 247, 249, 251,
MM258, 259, 260, 272, 279, 280
Crimson Tide (film), 207
Crow, Sheryl, 211, 212

Dalkey Archive Press, 140
dancing, 309
“David Lynch Keeps His Head,” 169, 173, 288
DeLillo, Don, 40, 104, 251, 273, 287
Die Hard (film), 80
DiFranco, Ani, 306
Diner (film), 272
dipping tobacco, 100, 126, 145, 291-292
disingenuousness, 23, 41-42, 59, 69, 144, 173, 183, 264
Dixon, Franklin W., 169
dogs, xviii, xix, 1, 4, 88, 97, 106, 120, 219-220, 222, 225, 227, 233, 234, 238,
MM241-242, 243, 244, 250-251, 268, 269, 275, 278, 287-288, 290, 291-292,
MM297, 301
Donner, Richard, 166
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 82
Drew, Nancy (children’s book character), 169
drinking. See alcohol
drugs, 54, 57-58, 60, 81, 137-139, 145, 189, 262. See also alcohol;
MMantidepressants; pharmaceuticals; vitamins
Dune (film), 171-172

electroshock therapy, xviii, 65, 67
Ellis, Bret Easton, 22
Emerson College, 235, 236
emotional states. See anxiety; centered temperament, having a; fear; loneliness;
MMself-consciousness; selfishness; shyness; suicide, thoughts/mention of;
MMunhappiness
English Patient, The (novel and film), 202
Eno, Brian, 210, 222
entertainment: addiction to, 81-82, 145, 147, 155-156, 274; as it defines his
MMgeneration, 86; purpose of, 79; seductive quality of, 79-80. See also art;
MMInternet; television
envy of other writers, 23-24, 32, 179-180
Enya, 222
Eraserhead (film), 172
Erickson, Steve, 22
escorts, for public readings, 12, 107-114, 280, 283. See also public readings
exhibitionism, 16
experimental/avant-garde fiction, 31, 36, 38-39, 63, 70-71, 91, 141, 170-171,
MM172, 173-174, 175, 231-232. See also writing

fame and celebrity, 6, 18-21, 24-26, 32, 44, 179-180, 183-185, 194, 297-298, 304;
MMas a result of hype, 13; benefits of, 11-12, 126, 133, 307; difficulties of, 3, 132,
MM191, 275-276, 283; hollowness of, 25, 74, 231, 256; lure of, 19-20, 74, 130,
MM132, 186-187, 188, 190-191, 196; other peoples’, 225, 307-308. See also envy
MMof other writers; hype; success/achievement
fantasy fiction, 51
fashion magazines, x, 26, 211
fate, tempting, 94
fear, 291-292
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (film), 208
fiction, 289-290. See also reading; writing
film, 71, 72, 77-79, 121, 163, 176-177, 181, 199-209, 236, 267; directors, 16,
MM203-204
Firm, The (film), 204
flying, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97-98; catalogs on airplanes, 97, 101
food, 20-21, 48-49, 84, 85, 136, 142, 174-175, 221, 267-268. See also soft drinks
Four Rooms (film), 206
Franzen, Jonathan, xvii, xviii, xxi-xxii, 25, 27, 93, 104-105, 239, 249, 250, 272
Freeman, Morgan, 209
Friends (TV show), 106

Gates, David, 31
Generation X, 86, 158, 159-162, 211, 296; not feeling like a part of, 162
“Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from It All,” 242, 243
Gilligan’s Island (TV show), 75
girlfriends. See relationships, romantic
Girl with Curious Hair, 26, 60, 64, 224-225, 226-227, 228-229
Glengarry Glen Ross (film), 202
Glory (film), 208-209
Graham, Nan, 202, 251, 279
Gravity’s Rainbow (novel), 259, 273
Griffith, Melanie, 127
Guggenheim Fellowship, 265
Guy Named Joe, A (film), 167

Hamlet (play), 6
Hardy Boys, the, 51, 169
Harper’s essays, xxi, 41-42, 52, 126, 215, 223, 231. See also “Getting Away from
MMPretty Much Being Away from it All”; “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A
MMMidwestern Boyhood”
Hartz, Louis, 159
Harvard University, 60, 68, 139, 226, 227, 228, 229, 236
Harvey, PJ, 306
Hawke, Ethan, 98-99
Hawkes, John, 54
Hayek, Friedrich August von, 158
Heinlein, Robert, 98, 306
Henry, DeWitt, 235
“Here and There,” 263-264
Higgins, John Michael, 123, 308
Hill, Fred, 264, 265
Hill, George Roy, 181-182
Hill Street Blues (TV show), 150-151
Hit, The (film), 206
Hobbes, Thomas, 88
Hogan, Hulk, 121
Holmes, Amy, 184
homosexuality, 44-45, 97, 176, 181, 268
Hopkins, Anthony, 176
hotels, 280-281
Howard, Gerry, 226-227, 248, 265-266,
hype, 13, 18, 26-28, 129, 186, 193-195, 212, 250, 255, 278; the author’s paradox
MMof, 30-31, 90, 305; participation in, 89-90, 165;. See also fame and celebrity;
MMsuccess/achievement

ice scrapers, 77, 302
Illinois State University, 6-9, 192, 242, 243-244
impressions, vocal, 258-259
Infinite Jest: and addiction, 80-82, 138-139, 144, 156, 157; autobiographical
MMaspects (or lack of) in, 143-144; as a book about America, 81-82, 156, 270;
MMcharacters in, 54, 55-56, 65-66, 112, 138-139, 146, 156, 157-158, 179, 189,
MM242, 254; copyediting of, 248-249; cover of, 95-96, 250, 253; as a difficult
MMread, 29, 30-31, 270, 271, 273; editing of, 27, 103, 140, 180, 245-247, 250,
MM252-253; events in, 67; film of, 14-15; as a fun read, 36, 79, 271, 272-273;
MMfuture setting of, 56, 136-137; ideas within, 82-83, 191; imagining ideal
MMreaders of, 272, 273; interacting with fans of, 274-276; length of, 78, 103,
MM245-246, 270-271; monetary advance for, 240-241, 242; pride in, 26, 34;
MMprintings of, 103; process of writing, 9-10, 24, 32, 33-35, 69, 70, 77-78, 100,
MM134-135, 222-223, 235, 237-240, 241, 242, 244-245, 271-272; quality of,
MM30-31, 92, 186-187, 232; quotations from, 254-255; reasons for writing,
MM252; reviews of, 24, 29-30, 92, 136, 185, 193-194, 223, 253, 271, 286, 299;
MMstructure of, 40, 78; success of, 26-28, 69, 101-102, 184-187, 298-299, 305
insomnia, 65
intelligence, 214-215, 216-219
Internet, 85-86, 87-88, 221. See also entertainment; television
interview process, xi, 12, 69-70, 74, 89, 182-184, 187, 191, 215-216, 218-219,
MM239, 253, 299; no control over, 17-18, 164
INXS, 2
Iowa State University, 94

Janowitz, Tama, 223, 255
Jaws (novel and film), 203, 205
Jaws II (film), 205
Jenks, Tom, 265
Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon (TV show), 152
Johnny Mnemonic (film), 134
Johnson, Denis, 58, 200
“Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky,” 248
Joyce, Michael, 53
Jurassic Park (film), 166-167, 199

Kael, Pauline, 162-163, 168, 173, 197, 199, 202
Kakutani, Michiko, 29, 92
Karr, Mary, xx
Keene, Carolyn, 169
King, Stephen, 83, 273
Kirn, Walter, 29
Klu Klux Klan, 45

Lang, Fritz, 95, 197
Last Boy Scout, The (film), 177
Last of the Mohicans (film), 200-201
Lego toys, 122
Leithauser, Brad, 126, 260
Lelchuk, Alan, 260
Letterman, David, 160, 161, 218, 224-225
Lewis, C. S., 84
Lewis, Huey, 10
Leyner, Mark, 112, 174
Limbaugh, Rush, 158, 160
Linklater, Richard, 98
literary scene, as part of the, 24-26, 193-194, 209-210, 283-284
Little, Brown, xiv, 2, 18, 20, 26, 28, 31, 41, 69, 75, 115, 124, 133, 190, 191, 192,
MM248, 279, 281, 313
“Little Expressionless Animals,” 225
Little Romance, A (film), 181-182
loneliness, xxii, 12, 34, 38, 68, 72, 218, 273, 276, 295
Lord of the Rings, The (novel), 221-222
Lost Boys, The (film), 267
“Lost in the Funhouse” (story), 63. See also Barth, John
Lost Weekend, The (film), 146
Lotus Software Corporation, 230, 232-234, 243
Love Boat, The (TV show), 199
Love Connection (TV show), 90
Lynch, David, 28, 169, 170-173, 175
“Lyndon,” 225

MacDonald, Jeffrey, 164-165
Mailer, Norman, 304
Majors, Lee, 149
Mall of America, 121
Mann, Michael, 69
Mao II (novel), 287
marketing. See hype
marriage, 76, 293. See also relationships
Martone, Michael, 236
masturbation, 84-85, 128. See also pornography; sex
maturity, 84
McInerney, Jay, 185, 194, 195, 286
McLean Hospital, 65, 66, 227, 228, 230, 236, 241, 250
McMillan, Kenneth, 172
Merchant, Natalie, 211-212
metafiction. See experimental/avant-garde fiction
Miami Blues (film), 205
Midwest, the, 77. See also Bloomington, Illinois
Miller, Mark Crispin, 236
Miller’s Crossing (film), 46
Mitsubishi Group, 267
Moby-Dick (novel), 49, 205
money, 2-3, 13-15, 31, 66-67, 80, 86, 124-125, 176, 192-193, 227, 240-241,
MM242, 246
Moody, Rick, 250
Moonlighting (TV show), 177
Moore, Lorrie, 194, 195
Moore, Steve, 140, 246
Morissette, Alanis, 127, 210-211, 212, 301, 306-308
music, 71, 72, 198, 209, 210-214, 222, 294, 306, 309
“My Appearance,” 218, 224-225
My Dinner with Andre (film), 164
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (TV show), 123

Nabokov, Vladimir, 126, 141-142, 187, 216, 258, 259, 273. See also Pnin
Nadell, Bonnie, xiii, xiv, xxxi, 27, 230, 240, 245, 249, 250, 265, 279, 286,
MM288, 293
New York City, 223
New York Times, 29, 73, 129, 228, 273, 283, 299
New York Times Book Review, 256
Nirvana, 213, 222

O’Connor, Flannery, 81, 198
O’Hara, Frank, 169
Osborne, Joan, 211, 212
O’Toole, Peter, 109-110, 111

Palance, Jack, 237
Parker, Andy, 261
Passaro, Vince, 31
Penner, Jonathan, 263-264
Peoples, David Webb, 197
Pepsi/Diet Pepsi, 6, 50-51, 91, 188
pharmaceuticals, 119
Phillips, Jayne Anne, 24
philosophy, study of, 35-36, 48, 62, 214, 226, 229, 236, 260, 261, 302
Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR), 54, 119
Pietsch, Michael, xiv, 27, 56, 70, 78, 95, 103, 140, 180, 192, 240, 245-246, 247,
MM248, 249, 250, 251, 271, 293, 299
Pink Floyd, 210
Pnin (novel), 126-127
poetry, 36, 91, 117
popular culture. See entertainment; television
pornography, 83, 226, 281. See also masturbation; sex
postmodern fiction. See experimental/avant-garde fiction
power (political), 88, 158
Powers, Richard, 94, 246
Princeton University, 60, 226
puberty, 55, 56, 128
public readings, xxix-xxx, 5, 98-99, 106-117, 130-131, 228, 274-275, 276-287
Puig, Manuel, 261
Pulp Fiction (film), 177

Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 205
Ratner’s Star (novel), 273
Rawls, John, 68
reading, 68, 91-92, 155, 209, 260; decline of, 288-289; as entertainment, 79;
MMexperimental fiction, 71-72; father’s effect on his, 51; other people, 51-52;
MMparents, 49-50; as a youngster, 51, 52
readings. See public readings
Reagan, Ronald, 159
realism, 36-37
Reed, Ralph, 161
relationships, 85, 134, 135, 275-276; romantic, xx, 76-77, 96-97, 154, 155, 190,
MM239, 244, 251, 259, 264, 278, 293-294
religion, 82, 83, 295
R.E.M., 125, 212, 219
Reservoir Dogs (film), 206-207
Rice, Anne, 273
Road to Serfdom, The (book), 158
Robinson, Marilynne, 260
Roth, Philip, 78
Roth, Tim, 206
Ryan, Michael, xxxii, 234

Salinger, J. D., 83
Saturday Night Live (TV show), 213
Schindler’s List (film), 167-168, 202-203
science fiction, 51. See also Heinlein, Robert
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (TV show), 148, 150
Screwtape Letters, The (novel), 215, 216
Scribner (Charles Scribner's Sons), 202, 265
Scrooged (film), 162-163
Seinfeld (TV show), 106
Seven (film), 204
self-consciousness, 1-2, 18-19, 129, 131, 178, 184, 218, 284, 296
selfishness, 293
sex, 5, 11-12, 34, 156. See also masturbation; pornography
Shane (film), 237
sharks, 267
shopping, 122. See also money
shyness, 97, 111, 150, 152, 305; as form of self-absorption, 16
Signifying Rappers, 110, 213, 226, 247
Silverblatt, Michael, 31
Six Million Dollar Man, The (TV show), 149
Sizemore, Tom, 203
Slap Shot (film), 181
smoking, 10, 43, 54, 70, 104, 109, 117, 125-126, 136, 145, 190, 200, 269,
MM277, 281
Sodom and Gomorrah (film), 123, 155
soft drinks, 221, 267, 269. See also Pepsi/Diet Pepsi
solitude, 77
“Solomon Silverfish,” 173-174
Spacey, Kevin, 176
Spark, Debra, 235
Spielberg, Steven, 166-167, 169, 203, 205
State Farm Insurance, 46, 267
Sting, The (film), 181
success/achievement, 73-74, 101-103, 130, 142-143, 161, 179, 184-187, 192,
MM257, 274, 298-300, 305-306; benefit of, 131-132. See also envy of other
MMwriters; fame and celebrity; hype; Infinite Jest, success of
suicide, thoughts/mention of, 57, 61, 66, 67-68, 70, 147, 188, 196, 217, 227-228,
MM230-231
Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, A, 30, 299
“Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, A,” xxviii, 247, 255-256, 280
Swift, Tom (children’s book character), 51, 169
Syracuse, New York, 239-240, 242, 244

talent, 23
Tarantino, Quentin, 207
Tartt, Donna, 23
teaching, 3, 4-5, 6-8, 47; discussing students’ stories, 8; good writers versus
MMgood teachers, 3
television, 37, 51, 71, 83-85, 86-87, 91, 106, 118, 120, 123, 144, 145, 147-156,
MM175-176, 199, 308; advertising on, 86-87; cartoons, 148. See also
MMentertainment; Internet
tennis, 52-53, 54-55, 56, 151, 153, 179, 221, 223, 235, 254-255, 261-262
“Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood,” 52, 236
Thatcher, Margaret, 127-128
Thief (film), 69
tipping, 23
Tolkien, J.R.R., 51, 222
Tolstoy, Leo, 37-38
True Romance (film), 176-177, 200, 207
Turner, Alice K., 195, 224-225
twelve-step program, 59, 139, 189, 235
Twilight Zone, The (TV show), 98
Twin Peaks (TV show), 171
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (film), 171

Ulysses (novel), 49
Unforgiven (film), 197
unhappiness, 23-24, 59-60, 61, 64, 82, 146-147, 228-229, 237, 259-260, 274
University of Arizona, 46-48, 60, 170, 197, 264, 266
Updike, John, xxxii, 92-93, 111, 118, 132, 163, 170, 187, 257, 285, 301

vampires, 267
Vietnam War, 148
Viking Press, 225, 226-227, 265
vitamins, 221, 269
Vollmann, William, 21, 58, 250

Walken, Christopher, 176
Wallace, David Foster: works discussed. See Broom of the System; “David Lynch
MMKeeps His Head”; “Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from It All”;
MMGirl with Curious Hair; Harper’s essays; “Here and There”; “Joseph Frank’s
MMDostoyevsky”; “Little Expressionless Animals”; “Lyndon”; “My Appearance”;
MMSignifying Rappers; “Solomon Silverfish”; Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do
MMAgain, A; “Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, A”; “Tennis,
MMTrigonometry, Tornadoes: A Midwestern Boyhood”; “Westward the Course of
MMEmpire Takes Its Way”
Wallace, James (father), xviii-xix, 48, 49-50, 51, 52, 60, 73, 140, 146, 153, 229,
MM240, 260, 261, 304
Wallace, Sally (mother), xviii-xix, 48, 49, 52, 60, 73, 140, 149, 153, 229, 240, 249,
MM260, 304
Wallace Havens, Amy (sister), xvi-xvii, xix, xxiv, xxxi, 49, 52, 152, 153, 210, 230,
MM245, 249, 251, 302
Washington, Denzel, 207
Welty, Eudora, 234
“Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” 61, 62, 63-64, 223, 224,
MM225-226, 229
Whiting Writer’s Award, 234
Who, The, 32
Wild Wild West (TV show), 148, 149
Wild at Heart (film), 171
Willis, Bruce, 177
Wittgenstein’s Mistress (novel), 226
women’s magazines. See fashion magazines
World War Two, 86
writing, 15, 41, 42, 64, 71, 133-134, 170-171, 213, 214, 229, 252, 294-295; advice
MMon, 7, 8; arrogance in his, 47, 174, 214-215; arrogance of, 16; cerebral nature
MMof his, 141; confidence in his own, 32-33, 261, 298-299; and consciousness,
MM37-38, 290-291; crisis of, 61-63; desire (or not) to be a writer, 52; detail in,
MM126; dislike of his own, 62; and drugs/alcohol, 57, 58, 59, 62-63; earliest, 257-
MM258, 259-260; fame’s effect on, 20, 255; habits, 135; illusion of knowledge
MMwithin, 144-145; joy of, 33, 196; pop culture references in, 75-76; process of,
MM151, 218, 236-237, 240; and shyness, 17; worrying (or not) about public
MMreactions to his, 129-130, 252. See also experimental/avant-garde fiction;
MMInfinite Jest, process of writing; reading
Wurtzel, Elizabeth, 5, 65, 67

Yaddo, xiv, 24-25, 32, 59, 60, 142, 194, 197, 223, 224, 256, 295
YMCA, 53
_____________________________________________________________
*I could not for the life of me figure out how to add hanging indents to the index entries that are longer than one line (without altering the CSS code, that is), so I cheated by adding two Ms to the front of each soft-returned line and then changing their font color to white. So if you cut and paste this index (which you're welcome to do) you'll find that it requires some cleanup before you print it out. (And no, this footnote probably isn't strictly necessary, but this being an entry about DFW its presence seemed appropriate, if a bit clichéd.)

Where to Store Your Kramers Ergot 7

So if this book is so big, where's the best place to keep it? Try one of these two spots:

With your manga

(Please pardon the use of terrible perspective in the above drawing.)

On/as your coffee table

The beauty of my book is, if you don't have a coffee table,
it turns into a coffee table!
-Cosmo Kramer

Actually, I still don't have a good spot for this book. Suggestions are welcome, but in the meantime I should mention that the book's publisher will be at the San Diego Comic-Con with some of the few remaining copies of Kramers Ergot 7 for sale. If you can't make it to the show, I'm sure you could contact him directly to order a copy (if they don't sell out). In all honesty, this book is worth every penny.

Which Is Bigger?

So just how big is Kramers Ergot 7? Pretty big:



It's certainly the biggest book on my shelves (and by "on" I mean "near" because there's no way this thing would fit on any kind of shelf in my library). Allow me to demonstrate:

Which is bigger...?

KE 7 or Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Library?

Winner = KE 7

KE 7 or Art Spiegelman's Breakdowns?

Winner = KE 7

KE 7 or Seth's George Sprott?

Winner = KE 7

KE 7 or Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary?

Winner = KE 7

KE 7 or the Klencke Atlas?

Winner = Klencke Atlas

KE 7 or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest?

Winner = I call this one a tie

KE 7 or the Empire State Building?

Winner = Empire State Building

So, y'know. It's big.

How to Read Kramers Ergot 7

The heartbreaking news that Alvin Buenaventura had closed down Buenaventura Press, the publisher of Comic Art magazine and the last few volumes of Sammy Harkham's Kramers Ergot (the greatest comic book anthology since Spiegelman's Raw) inspired me to revisit my copy of Kramers Ergot 7.

When I bought my copy of this book I was excited to take it home and start reading it. But that's easier said than done since the book is 16 inches wide, 21 inches tall (about the size of an unfolded newspaper), and weighs about 7 pounds. I put it on my bed and stood over it while I flipped through every gorgeous page, but this awkward method didn't lend itself to actually reading the book. So I closed it up, propped it against one of my bookshelves, and didn't open it again for over a year.

In all that time, though, I spent some time thinking about Kramers Ergot 7 and how one might best go about reading it. Below are a few of the methods I've devised.

How to read Kramers Ergot 7...

...on the subway:


...at the post office:


...in class:


...at the amusement park:


Well, you get the idea....

But seriously, my thanks to Alvin Buenaventura for publishing some of the best comics and comics-related materials of the last ten years. I wish him the best of luck and look forward to seeing what he has in store for us in the future.

Life Filter

The Age of Efficiency is over. This is the Age of Immediacy, faster than the speed of thought. A week is an eternity; four hundred words is too many; yesterday is ancient. Stories aren't only sorted by category; they're ranked by popularity.

-Jill Lepore, “Untimely”

Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane

-The Police

I.

How do you filter your life? Narrowing the focus of one’s cultural intake is something we all do, simply out of necessity. I don’t know anyone capable of indiscriminately watching every show on television, or every movie that appears in theaters, or reading every book on the New York Times Best Seller list, or listening to every album on the Billboard charts—much less anyone who would want to. Not only would it require every hour of every day, it would be exhausting—and not very much fun. And having “fun” is why we indulge in our cultural products of choice.

Lately, I’ve discovered that I don’t find the Internet as “fun” as it used to be. In fact, a few years back I realized that the Internet was driving me crazy. Not in an “Ooo! You’re driving me crazy!” way but in a literal, “I now have access to such an endless amount of information, and I’m perpetually absorbing so much of it, I think my brain may be losing its grip on its mental parameters” kind of way. This was different from what I expect the mind-expanding experiences described by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell would be like, so no—it wasn’t very fun.

A typical instance of this mental slippage would begin with me visiting a random webpage, clicking on a link within that webpage, following a few more links from that page, trying to backtrack to the original webpage, but instead stumbling upon another interesting link to click on, following that link (and the inevitable chain of links from that page), generally spending several hours reading pages that have little to do with what I’d originally started reading about, and finally stopping (without even remembering where I’d begun) only because I’ve given myself eyestrain and need to go stare at some trees and flowers for a while. But while I’m staring at those trees and flowers I’ll reflect on what I’ve “learned” from my most recent foray into the ’net--and decide it isn’t much. So I have, in effect, wasted my time.

I’m not alone, clearly. Some people react to this loss of time by deciding to go cold turkey and swear off the Internet completely (though often only for a while, as in the case of James Sturm). I’m not nearly that radical. I see the Internet as a valuable resource and acknowledge that it has enriched my life these past fifteen years. I just want some order in my life so I don’t spend too much of my time reading shit I don’t actually care about.

Besides, the problem is more than just time wasted. Every time I fall into the trap of clicking from link to link like a madman, spending hours at a time reading about the Domesday Book and William the Conqueror and the coats of arms of the English monarchy and the House of Hanover, or looking at funny pictures of lol cats and photos of 74 unusual giant trees, and on and on, I feel afterwards like I’d been wading around in a shallow puddle of information that stretches as far as the eye could see, without said information ever achieving a depth of more than a few inches. True, I now know that William died from injuries he sustained while falling off his horse (not the first iron-fisted ruler to die in an anticlimactic way), and that Prince Albert had stupid-looking sideburns, but I hardly have a deeper understanding of the Battle of Hastings or what effect, if any, the role of “king consort” has on England’s contemporary monarchy. Which, since I’m not even British, has very little impact on my life anyway.

The result of standing around in this shallow puddle is that my brain begins to operate on that same level. When it comes to subjects I’m not previously familiar with, I know a little about “everything” but not a lot about anything. (And of course by “everything” I mean lots of things, because in this Age of Immediacy it’s impossible to know something about truly everything.) After all, what’s the point of committing a deep well of knowledge to memory if a lot of that knowledge is readily available in bits and pieces online? But the problem with this approach is that ultimately one ends up knowing nothing. The seeker becomes a receptacle of trivia instead of someone with a profound understanding of whatever it is he or she is passionate about. As Richard Foreman wrote in “The Pancake People, or, ‘The Gods Are Pounding My Head,’”

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate—especially during the final period of “Romanticism-Modernism”—to cut down, like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land— this was the ploy of the avant-garde.

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become “pancake people”—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
In my junior year of high school, circa 1989, I took a class called “World History” taught by Mr. Beaver. Mr. Beaver was an old-school, Don Draper type (if Don Draper were in his fifties, pudgy, and bald). He referred to all women as “chicks,” had no problem calling a student an idiot if he said something stupid in class, was involved in a nasty love triangle with two other teachers on campus, and had won so many free pizzas from 92.3 FM’s daily call-in trivia game that they changed the rules so the same caller could win only once a month.

When I applied to the University of Chicago that year I met with an alumnus who talked to me about all kinds of things, including which high school classes I was taking. When I told him I was taking world history he was baffled. “Is that just a two-semester class?” he asked. It was. “How can you learn the entire history of the world in just two semesters?”

The answer, of course, is that you can’t. “World History” brought a whole new level of meaning to the phrase “survey class.” If I recall correctly, it began with the Stone Age and ended with World War II eight months later. That’s about a century’s-worth of history every week. Though Mr. Beaver was a captivating teacher and dogmatically focused on the epochs he considered particularly noteworthy, the class was patently incapable of doing more than scratching the surface of its purported subject. If faithful advertising were required for high school class names, this one would have been called “World History from Mr. Beaver’s Perspective.” (Of course I realize this is the case for any class on a more or less subjective topic in the humanities, such as history, literature, political science, sociology, etc. But my point here is that this was an extreme example of a teacher cherry-picking the “important” material from a span of 5000+ years.)

In the end, I would have served my mind better if I’d taken Mrs. Allison’s class on the French and Indian Wars. Less ground covered, but with enough depth that I would know much more about that period in history than I do (which, 20 years out of high school, is that it was the colonial counterpart to Europe’s Seven Years’ War. The end).

Similarly, as a result of wading in that shallow pool of Internet knowledge for all those years, I had in some ways forfeited my “complex inner density.” As Nicholas Carr wrote in the Atlantic (“Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”),

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

II.

In truth, I’m probably overselling this “problem” a bit. I have no trouble reading a book. I’ve even read a few recently! But how do you find the ones that will appeal to you most? As Gabriel Zaid wrote in So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,

The human race publishes a book every thirty seconds.... Books are published at such a rapid rate that they make us exponentially more ignorant. If a person reads a book a day, he would be neglecting to read four thousand others, published the same day. In other words, the books he didn't read would pile up four thousand times faster than his knowledge. (22)
(Perhaps a defeatist view of reading, but fortunately Zaid goes on to write, “Maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we've read, but the state in which they leave us . . . what matters is . . . whether reading makes us, physically, more alive” [24]. Agreed!)

So what’s the solution? There are many, I’m sure, but I prefer David Foster Wallace’s calm approach (as outlined in “Deciderization 2007 - a Special Report,” his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007):

Professional filtering/winnowing is a type of service that we citizens and consumers now depend on more and more, and in ever-increasing ways, as the quantity of available information and products and art and opinions and choices and all the complications and ramifications thereof expands at roughly the rate of Moore's Law. (xv)
True, this opens one up to all kinds of biases, particularly on the Internet (which Nicholas Carr, again, points to in his book The Big Switch: “[Google] impose[s] homogeneity on the Internet's wild heterogeneity. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences” [161]. As a result, according to New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, “Carr believes that people will narrow their frame of reference, gravitate toward those whose opinions they share, and perhaps be less willing to compromise, because the narrow information we receive will magnify our differences, making it harder to reach agreement” [54]) but people everywhere have been taking sides and refusing to consider counterarguments for centuries now. Otherwise there would be no such thing as political parties, philosophy departments, or war. So let’s not sound the end-of-civilization alarm quite yet, OK? As Wallace goes on to write,

I suspect that part of why “bias” is so loaded and dicey a word just now—and why it's so much-invoked and potent in cultural disputes—is that we are starting to become more aware of just how much subcontracting and outsourcing and submitting to other Deciders we're all now forced to do, which is threatening (the inchoate awareness is) to our sense of ourselves as intelligent free agents. And yet there is no clear alternative to this outsourcing and submission. It may possibly be that acuity and taste in choosing which Deciders one submits to is now the real measure of informed adulthood. Since I was raised with more traditional Enlightenment-era criteria, this possibility strikes me as consumerist and scary . . . to which the counterargument would be, again, that the alternatives are literally abysmal. (xvi)

[M]any Americans are worried that what appears to be the reality we're experiencing and making choices about is maybe actually just a small, skewed section of reality that's been pre-chosen for us by shadowy entities and forces, whether these be left-leaning media, corporate cabals, government disinformers, our own unconscious prejudices, etc. (xvi)

Part of our [American] emergency is that it's so tempting . . . to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the 'moral clarity' of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it's continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. (xxiii)
Ah, a refreshing beacon of sagacity, isn’t he? Where will we be in the coming years, without DFW to guide us? I shudder to think, but with any luck he left us with enough insightful knowledge to get by. So far so good.

III.

To bring us back to the point of this post, then: How do I filter my life? I read a few magazines and journals, browse a few annuals, visit a few websites, watch a few TV shows and movies, and call it a day. It’s all about what you like. Here’s what I like:

Magazines

The New Yorker
Vanity Fair

Journals

The Paris Review
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern
Granta
Tin House
Indiana Review

Annuals

Pushcart Prize
The Best American Short Stories/Essays/Comics/Nonrequired Reading
The Year’s Best Science Fiction

Websites

The New York Times
Salon
New Scientist
Wikipedia (trust but verify)
Amazon
Goodreads
The Comics Journal
Pitchfork
Television without Pity
Netflix
Internet Movie Database
Apple Movie Trailers
Gamespot

Television

Chuck
Glee
Men of a Certain Age
The Office
Parenthood
Southland
So You Think You Can Dance
True Blood

IV.

Even with this short list to guide me, my days still pass by too quickly. Maybe that's another provocation of this crisis of mine: at age 37 my sense of time wasted is far more acute than it was when I was 25. Back then I was convinced I'd have enough time to read and (even more naively) reread everything I wanted to. I used to keep my back issues of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, convinced that somewhere down the line I would revisit the articles that resonated with me. Needless to say, I've thrown out those boxes of magazines and no longer keep the new issues after I've read through them. Books still get reshelved because I do reread some of the great ones, but in general the optimism of youth has given way to the cynicism of middle age.

Anyway, that's what this blog is supposed to be about (avoiding wasted time, I mean, not cynicism). I don't expect anyone besides me to read it, necessarily (none of my previous blog's readers are aware of its existence), but as long as it serves its purpose to me, then it's done its job. For anyone else it can only pose this question: How do you filter your life?

Bibliography

Auletta, Ken, "Searching for Trouble," the New Yorker (October 12, 2009)

Carr, Nicholas, The Big Switch (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008)

Carr, Nicholas, "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," the Atlantic (July 2008)

Foreman, Richard, "The Pancake People, or, 'The Gods Are Pounding My Head,'" Edge: The Third Culture (March 8, 2005)

Lepore, Jill, "Untimely," the New Yorker (April 19, 2010)

Wallace, David Foster, "Deciderization 2007 - a Special Report," The Best American Essays 2007 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007)

Zaid, Gabriel, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2003)