David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer, yet his greatest work, this 484,000-word monstrosity, is somehow independent of that fact (or it had been, anyway, until I finally finished reading it). Infinite Jest is a big, rambly mess. (Intentionally so, from what I've read, so I don't consider this impression to be accidental.) It is intermittently profound, intermittently funny, frequently digressive.
Digression. Do I need to know, for instance, all the details of the weirdly unique lighting system that James Incandenza installed in the Enfield Tennis Academy buildings? No. It makes the world DFW has so carefully constructed more real, but (to extend the metaphor) at the same time I felt like he was showing me the struts and the girders and the rebar of his construction, rather than simply allowing those building materials to bear the weight of the characters and the story invisibly. I was reminded of my time as an editor of comic books, back in the '90s, when a kid pitched me his idea for an incredibly detailed fantasy world, in which he had written out all the histories of his various races, the lineages of all his characters going back hundreds of years, and had practically identified the placement of each tree, rock, and blade of grass. I asked him, "OK, so what's the story?" His response was to look at me somewhat blankly.
This is not to say that DFW and some world-building fantasy nut have anything in common. On the contrary, DFW's Bowellism style of construction (to stretch my earlier building metaphor somewhat poorly) oftentimes made the book the special thing that it is. The mathematical footnote to the Eschaton match, which I didn't take the time to truly understand (which is to say I didn't sit down with a piece of paper, a pencil, and a protractor to do the calculations on my own), nonetheless made the Eschaton match that followed all that much more real to me. But Infinite Jest contains so much of this detail that, as the pages continued to slip by, it drowned out a lot of the stuff I wanted to retain.
Of course the acceptable response to this complaint (if you can call it a complaint--honestly I'm offering it merely as a personal observation) is that Infinite Jest needs to be read twice, at least, to fully grasp its contents. Fine. But I will not be reading Infinite Jest again. Not from start to finish, anyway. Perhaps this means I'm the wrong audience for the book, but even Michael Pietsch didn't want to reread the seemingly endless mountaintop conversation between Marathe and Steeply. Besides, I did enjoy, say, 80 percent of the book.
Still, trying to sum up my thoughts on Infinite Jest is like trying to sum up my thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. The book's sheer scope and inclusiveness is difficult to parse in retrospect. Having read it is like having woken up from a great dream, the details of which are already fading from my memory--but the impression it left behind remains strong and difficult to shake, even if I can't quite remember why. I even highlighted lines in the book (something I haven't done since college), which helped to keep characters and important events in my head, but so much of it continued to leak out.
All of the above seems like preface, however. Let me try to be more specific.
Considered in pieces, the most compelling sections to me were those that starred former addict and Ennet House resident counselor Don Gately. He is a sympathetic, if deeply flawed, protagonist. Those sections alone would have resulted in one of the best books I've ever read. As part of this larger thing that DFW has written, their power is by no means muted.
The Enfield Tennis Academy sections were less important to me. Hal, arguably the book's protagonist, left me cold. For the first 17 pages of the book, I was fully on board the Hal train. And his "professional conversation" with his dad, a few pages later, kept me on that train. But then the story goes back one year in time (ostensibly to answer the question uttered on page 17, "So yo then man what's your story?") where we meet Hal the secret pot "addict" who lives and plays tennis at his family's tennis academy. And this boy is empty. He's the Hamlet of the book, bothered by the suicide of his father four years earlier, perhaps bothered by his mother's indiscreet promiscuousness (with academy student John "No Relation" Wayne, with her half(?) and/or adoptive brother, Charles Tavis, with who knows who else) or perhaps not. Bothered also by his "addiction" to pot (or at least by the fact that the academy's mandatory drug tests make his "addiction" problematic), and by his waning love of the game of tennis. I think. I don't know, maybe not. But he's a boy who is primarily defined by his lack of definition. He wanders around generally bummed out the whole time.
But his presence at the academy seems, storywise, to serve primarily as a generally uninteresting satellite around which the other characters in his vicinity orbit. There's his mother ("the Moms"), his brother (sweet Mario--the one member of the Incandenza family that I enjoyed reading about), his best friend (Michael Pemulis, whose character is more well-defined than the rest of the Enfield kids), his other friend (Ortho "The Darkness" Stice, who is interesting only near the end, when he's being visited by, presumably, James Incandenza's ghost, for reasons unknown), the aforementioned John Wayne, and a handful of other kids who were completely interchangeable and unmemorable in my mind. The frequent group scenes featuring these kids are now a blur to me, and were a blur even when I was reading them. "Struck is putting on his socks in a particular way, Schacht tapes up his knee, Chu cries about something or other," so on and so forth. White noise to me. Though I did enjoy Jim Troeltsch, who reminded me of Yuji Okumoto, the Japanese drag racer who parroted Howard Cosell in the movie Better Off Dead.
Oh yeah, and I hate tennis. Hate it. I hate most sports, actually, but tennis has to be one of the worst. I think I like golf better than tennis. I played tennis (not competitively) during high school at my parents' insistence, and oh my god what a boring sport. So all the tennis mumbo-jumbo in this book (and there is a lot of it!) was very hard for me to get through.
The Remy Marathe/Hugh Steeply conversations in Arizona weren't too bad, actually (despite Michael Pietsch's apparent dislike of them). They contain one of the book's best sections: Steeply's account of his father's terrifying obsession with the TV show M*A*S*H. This section is pure DFW, and a section I will revisit many times, I'm sure. But even beyond that, I found the Marathe/Steeply conversations to be very illuminating. DFW uses them to lay out his thoughts on our culture of entertainment in the most explicit way. There's another scene, where Lyle (the Enfield locker room guru) explains to one of the younger academy students (Chu, maybe? Not that it matters) the pitfalls of chasing fame, but Marathe and Steeply are the primary debaters of American culture and our almost universal worship of entertainment.
However, I found the detail of Steeply cross-dressing as a woman to be a bit eye-rolling. It's funny, but in a pretty dumb way. And later, when "Helen" Steeply interviews Hal's asshole brother Orin, the joke strains believability one step past absurdity into stupidity. Orin, the inveterate ladies' man, would have to be blind to be sexually attracted to such a clearly unattractive and mannish-looking "woman." Likewise, hardly anyone at Enfield or Ennet House realizes "Helen" is a man (though there are notable exceptions--but the exceptions seem intended to be seen as incredibly astute, whereas, from DFW's own description of "Helen," only an idiot could be fooled). So "Helen"'s non-Marathe scenes were not as successful for me.
Likewise, Marathe's non-Steeply scenes were frustrating, if only because they tended to be the scenes that drove the book's plot (i.e., the AFR's search for the master version of James Incandenza's murderously entertaining film, Infinite Jest), which is never resolved, hence somewhat beside the point of the book, hence somewhat pointless, hence yawn. The film itself is tantalizingly described in a secondhand way (as it has to be, since anyone who's watched the film has been transformed immediately into a drooling vegetable), but the search for the film is just an excuse to follow a bunch of paraplegic French-Canadian separatists rolling around ominously in their wheelchairs and "technical(ly) interview(ing)" and/or murdering various incidental characters in gruesome ways.
Here's the aspect of the plot that irritates me the most: The beginning of the book takes place a year after the climax of the book, where the AFR operatives, disguised as the Quebecois juniors tennis team, are in the process of descending upon Boston in the middle of a blizzard to perform "technical interview"s on James's immediate family in an effort to locate the master copy of the film. Either (a) the AFR got stuck in the blizzard or (b) they didn't. If they didn't, how are Hal and CT still alive? If they did, why didn't they continue the mission after the blizzard was over? I understand the plot is extraneous, but Hal and CT's survival, one year later, seems impossible--unless the AFR somehow figures out where James is buried before "interviewing" Hal et al. Furthermore, while I'm on the subject of the credibility of the book's beginning, what on earth led CT and the Moms to believe that Hal, who at that point must have been pretty near the bottom of a year's steady decline, was in any way prepared for college life 3000 miles away from home?
But that's more digression. Where was I? Oh, yes. I was considering Infinite Jest in pieces, since it is a book composed intentionally of pieces. Bottom line, I loved many of this book's pieces: James Incandenza and his father struggling to move his father's mattress out into the hallway; Erdedy's endless, bug-infested wait for his pot dealer; the M*A*S*H sequence; the Eschaton sequence; pretty much all of Gately's fever-dream flashbacks; etc. But that's how I have to approach this book: in pieces. It's not your traditional beginning, middle, end-type of book, which leaves me, ultimately, unsatisfied. But that's fine; it was DFW's intention, I suppose (he originally wanted the novel's subtitle to be "A Failed Entertainment"). And I'm still giving it 5 stars. It's a masterpiece, truly. I had to stop a few times (first around page 321, and then again around page 560) to take long breaks and read some other books in between, but both times I came back to Infinite Jest with a feeling of excitement. I'm just glad that I finally read DFW's greatest work, after having failed to do so back in the year 2000, when I only got through the first 150 pages. As a devoted fan of DFW's nonfiction at the time, IJ wasn't what I was expecting. I wasn't ready for it.
In the spirit of the novel, I could go on and on. This barely scratches the surface, but Goodreads isn't really the forum for endless rambling. I'll post a more thorough breakdown, in another location, later. In the meantime, I'll wrap this up with one question for the other DFW fans out there: Why does everyone talk about how important page 223 is? Perhaps this is part of the whole "must read the book twice" phenomenon, but from what I recall, 90 percent of the book takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (i.e., 2009 probably). The first 20 pages or so take place in the Year of Glad (2010). Some sections reference other Subsidized Time years, but not in any grand revelatory way. The book's timeline is certainly fragmented, but not to the point where a reader must refer back to the Subsidized Time years with any frequency. What am I missing? An honest question. Anyway, that's it for now.
Showing posts with label DFW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DFW. Show all posts
Monday, March 17, 2014
Thursday, February 20, 2014
The Inevitability of Influence
I turned seven years old in the summer of 1980, a few months after The Empire Strikes Back debuted in theaters. I saw that film only twice that year (first with a friend and his parents on opening weekend, and a second time with my own family at a matinee a few weeks later), but it pretty much defined the primary culture of my childhood.*
My younger brother and I spent most of our playtime in the early '80s either setting up epic Star Wars action figure battles in the basement or role-playing Luke and Han--trapped in Cloud City, in Vader's Super Star Destroyer, or, when it snowed, in the trenches of Hoth. In short, we lived a Star Wars life.
Fifteen years later, I wrote an eight-page comic book script for an artist hoping to begin a penciling career at the publishing house I worked for, and one exchange I'd written, between the story's hero and the woman who had betrayed him, went like this:
I love you.
GUY
I know.
The publisher, ten years older than me (and as big a Star Wars fan as one can be without dressing up like a Stormtrooper every weekend), read the script before I gave it to the artist and, in the margin next to the hero's response above, wrote, "OK, Han."
Until reading that comment, it had not occurred to me that I'd lifted a line directly from one of the most important movies of my adolescent life. This line had been so ingrained in my psyche from an early age that I didn't even recognize it for what it was: a scoundrel's cocky response to a sincere declaration of love. To the rest of the world it was one of Han Solo's character-defining moments in the film; to me, it was a valid response to the phrase, "I love you"--just as shooting an expert swordsman with your revolver was the smartest way to win a swordfight.†
Harold Bloom's groundbreaking treatise, The Anxiety of Influence (published in 1973), explores this phenomenon of borrowing in the work of poets--although as Bloom discusses it the borrower isn't quite so oblivious as I was (hence the use of the word "anxiety" in the title).
Regardless of the quality of my fiction writing (about which I make no claims), I believe that the soul of what I write is--as T. S. Eliot pointed out fifty years before Bloom‡--not only largely borrowed from the authors whose work I have subsumed as part of my worldview over the years, but is also, in the words of Bloom, "a misreading...an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation" (30).
David Foster Wallace's work, for example, is such an unavoidable, looming presence in the library of my mind that I cannot seem to help but occasionally parrot his themes as well as his style, all poorly no doubt. And a poor-man's misinterpretive DFW is not worth much when the real DFW's work is readily available. But I have trouble remembering what writing meant to me before I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which isn't even a novel but a collection of the best creative nonfiction ever written. Of course when I do remember the days pre-Wallace, I tend to remember the work of Kurt Vonnegut, whose outlook and style I inevitably borrowed, or that of Salinger, or Kafka, or Carver. All these amazing stylists who shaped me, a shape that is too rigid to re-form, except perhaps through the influence of still other writers I have yet to read.
But what's the alternative? To write in a void? Cædmon did it, allegedly through divine inspiration, but I'm not an illiterate goatherd living in the seventh-century English countryside. I'm a former English lit major whose life, both personal and professional, is surrounded by books. Is it impossible for me to forge an entirely new path? Bloom would say yes.
I suppose my only hope, returning to Eliot, is to improve the way in which I borrow: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn" (72). This is my goal.
Next up: Everyone sits back and laughs as I keep pushing a boulder up a hill.§
* I had seen Star Wars at least once or twice before Empire, during one of its many re-releases in 1978 or 1979, but it did not stick with me the way Empire did. Contra slightly older fans of the trilogy, the key elements for me were Luke Skywalker the apprentice (not Luke Skywalker the farmboy), Han Solo the scoundrel (not Han Solo the mercenary), Yoda (not Obi-wan), Boba Fett (not Darth Vader), Hoth and Bespin (not Tatooine and Yavin), etc.
† As Indiana Jones did in Raiders of the Lost Ark, released a year after Empire. Both of these iconic moments in the films were, famously, suggested by Harrison Ford himself.
‡ Making me, incidentally, one of those "bad poets" that Eliot identified in his essay on Philip Massinger (see Eliot's actual words [not the often-quoted, but imprecise, "good poets borrow, great poets steal"] on Nancy Prager's blog here: http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/). T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921).
§ See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).
Monday, August 1, 2011
Linkdump du Jour: DFW
The Place to Start
The Howling Fantods!Blogs (Sometimes) about DFW
Matt Bucher (custodian of wallace-l listserv)Simple Ranger (also Matt Bucher)
Jason Kottke
Blog Relating to a Class on David Foster Wallace (at Pomona College)
DFW Interviews
With Larry McCaffery (Dalkey Archive)With Dave Eggers (The Believer)
With Charlie Rose (videos)
With David Lipsky (audio)
Articles about DFW
"The Unfinished" by D.T. Max"King of Pain" by Algis Valiunas
"Inside DFW's Private Self-Help Library" by Maria Bustillos
"Smarter Than You Think" by Wyatt Mason
"The Children's Hospital: On DFW" by William Deresiewicz
Roundtable Discussion on Although of Course...
Sven Birkerts on DFW & John Updike
DFW vs. Bret Easton Ellis (biblioklept.org)
On DFW and Bret Easton Ellis (awfulpossibilities.com)
David Lipsky Interviewed by John Hockenberry
Obituaries
From the New York TimesFrom Salon
From The Millions
From the Huffington Post
Reactions to DFW's Death
The Book Bench (on the New Yorker)From Reviews from the Couch
From An Existential Nightmare
DFW Archive (Harry Ransom Center)
DFW Archive at the Harry Ransom CenterInventory of DFW Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
What's In the DFW Archive?
A First Glimpse of DFW's Personal Library
Articles by DFW
"This Is Water""Roger Federer as Religious Experience"
PDF Archive
Infinite Jest Reading Guides
"How to Read Infinite Jest" (Infinite Summer)Index to Infinite Summer
Character Guide to Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest Index
Infinite Jest Wiki
A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest
Poor Yorick Entertainment
Reviews, etc., of Infinite Jest
Infinite Jest: Reviews, Articles, Miscellany"A Baker’s Dozen of My Feelings about DFW’s Infinite Jest"
"Well, Duh" (Dale Peck's disingenuous review)
The Pale King Reading Sites
Pale Spring (Amanda French)The Pale Spring (Shahrzad and Nozlee)
Reviews, etc., of The Pale King
"Too Much Information" by John Jeremiah Sullivan"Death and Taxes" by Garth Risk Hallberg
"Unfinished Business" by Lev Grossman
A Conversation about The Pale King between Jog and Tucker
In the Margins (David Kloepfer)
Miscellaneous
DFW BibliographyChad Harbach's review of Oblivion
The Work of Karen Green
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
The Unfinished
Not only do I love to read, but my tastes in reading material run pretty wide. I’m a sci-fi fan (Asimov in particular), I appreciate a good postmodern novel every now and then (Slaughterhouse-Five, Pale Fire), I like the classics (The Count of Monte Cristo, Huckleberry Finn), the work of the postwar boys’ club (Updike, Roth), not to mention all kinds of nonfiction, and so on.
To someone who loves books, though, nothing is more embarrassing than admitting he or she couldn’t finish one—especially if the book in question has a reputation for being good or an important work in the canon. And yet there are some novels I’ve tried to read but simply can’t finish. Not from a lack of trying, mind you, but I can get only so many pages in before the thought of reading one more paragraph seems too daunting, too—well, not fun. And since I’m no longer a student I don’t feel the need to grit my teeth and drag myself through a book I’m not enjoying (*cough* The Scarlet Letter *cough*). Anyway, below are the books I just couldn’t finish, in order from my most recent failures to those distant, early memories of having given up. Don’t judge me!!
Middlemarch by George Eliot – stopped after 140 (of 838) pages (17% complete)
In February of this year, New Yorker columnist Rebecca Mead wrote a captivating article about her long-standing love affair with Eliot’s Middlemarch. A few weeks later I was in Barnes & Noble, browsing through a book that discusses the greatest novels of all time, and Middlemarch was at the top of the list. A few weeks after that a colleague mentioned that Middlemarch is her favorite book and she rereads it every couple of years. The last straw was discovering (on another trip to Barnes & Noble) that Penguin’s hardcover classics imprint had just released a version of the novel. By this point I was pretty excited about the prospect of reading the book, so I bought a copy of the new hardcover and began reading it that night.
And it’s a great book, clearly (you don’t need me to tell you that). Eliot’s prose is rich and precise without being verbose, I appreciate her gentle sense of humor, the village of Middlemarch is as fully realized as a reader could hope for, and some of the characters are very entertaining. But the book’s principle themes revolve primarily around marriage, money, and the clergy—three of the least interesting subject matters for novels, in my opinion. Reading Middlemarch, I had the odd dual reaction of enjoying the words but not enjoying the journey they created, so to speak. Even as I read sentence after beautifully crafted sentence, I found myself thinking, “This story keeps going in all the directions I wish it wouldn’t.” As with other classic nineteenth-century English novels that focus on marriage/money/clergymen (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Barchester Towers), it took more and more time for me to get through each subsequent chapter. So I put the sewn-in cloth bookmark in the place where I’d stopped and put the book back on the shelf, there to collect dust indefinitely.
Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth – stopped after 120 (of 710) pages (17% complete)
Last summer I was strolling through the stacks of the vast university library in the town where I work, and I came across John Barth’s novels. Being a former English major I’d heard his name and his work mentioned dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. Moreover, the concept behind Giles Goat-Boy (university as universe) had always sounded intriguing to me—and now that I was back in a university environment it seemed like the right time to try it out. Unfortunately, a mere 120 pages later I had to give up. The metaphors in this book seem to be the point of the book, rather than being just the structure of the book. The characters aren’t characters so much as ciphers for Barth’s philosophical construct, which was interesting for perhaps the first 50 pages but not so interesting when I realized the narrative wasn’t evolving but simply restating the same basic idea over ad infinitum. Perhaps if I'd read Giles Goat-Boy when it was originally published, in 1966, I would've appreciated it more, as an illustration of the times. But, circa 2010, the characters are not compelling, the story plods along at too slow a pace, and I have several bookcases full of books I'd rather be reading.
Vathek by William Beckford – stopped after 50ish (of 120) pages (40ish% complete)
I can’t even remember how far I tunneled into this one. I say 50 pages but maybe it just felt like 50 pages. It could’ve been 20. With a book this slim, it’s even more embarrassing than normal to say I couldn’t slog through it. So what was the problem? The synopsis makes it sound awesome: “Perverse and grotesque comedy alternates with scenes of 'oriental' magnificence and evocative beauty in the story of the ruthless Caliph Vathek's journey to superb damnation among the subterranean treasures of Eblis. Underlying the elegant prose is a strong element of self-indulgent personal fantasy on the part of Beckford, youthful millionaire, dreamer, and eventually social outcast. Byron, Poe, Mallarmé, and Swinburne are some of the literary figures who have admired Vathek's imaginative power” (this from the back cover of the Oxford World’s Classics edition). As a fan of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, H. P. Lovecraft, and Lord Dunsany, this book seems tailor-made for me.
But the problem is that the prose drones on and on, with hardly any structure and almost no insight into the characters. The entire story skates along the surface of the plot, focusing on the action without exploring it. The book is one long, uninterrupted, monotonous set piece; that’s all. I’ve read that Beckford, only 21 at the time, wrote this book in just three days and, to be frank, I can believe it. Oddly enough, it’s not unlike Kerouac’s On the Road in that it has that agitated, written-on-a-single-roll-of-paper quality about it that works so well for a novel about Beat-era drifters but doesn’t seem to work as well for a book about a ninth-century Middle Eastern caliph seeking supernatural powers. After reading several pages carefully, I started skipping ahead to see if it got any better; this is the only book for which I’ve ever done that. Not surprisingly I just found more of the same, so back on the shelf it went.
Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow – stopped after 100ish (of 336) pages (30ish% complete)
Oh how I wish this book were written in prose instead of verse! What a shame that Sharp Teeth’s most distinguishing feature is the thing that eventually forced me to stop reading it. Here is where I fail as a former English major: I cannot enjoy poetry. There’s something about a deliberately broken line that causes my eyes to hiccup. Why the artificial break of a line in a regular novel doesn’t cause this same stutter in my reading, I don’t know. But for as long as I can remember I’ve had this problem reading poetry. You know how teachers instruct their students not to get into that sing-songy rhythm when reading a poem? (As in “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock, duh-duh duh-duh duh-duh,” etc.) I can’t stop reading poems this way—even in my head, and even if they don’t rhyme (which Sharp Teeth doesn’t). The first lines of Barlow’s novel should read like this: “Let’s sing about the man there at the breakfast table: brown skin, thin features, white T, his olive hand making endless circles in the classifieds, ‘wanted’ ‘wanted’ ‘wanted,’ small jobs, little money, but you have to start somewhere.” Nice, right? Lyrical, evocative, brilliant. But because the book uses a verse format I read it as “Let’s sing about the man there [pause] at the breakfast table [pause] brown skin, thin features, white T, [pause] his olive hand making endless circles [pause] in the classifieds, [pause] ‘wanted’ ‘wanted’ ‘wanted’ [pause] small jobs little money [pause] but you have to start somewhere.” So you can see how this would make the book seem much more ponderous that it should be—the exact opposite effect the author’s going for, in fact. Because I found the prose (well, the “prose”) and the characters so compelling I stuck with it for as long as I could. But nearly a third of the way through it started giving me a headache. So I quit. But having given up on this one pains me still. [My boss lent me her copy of this book and I’ve already, full of regret, returned it to her, which is why it’s not in the lineup of shame at the top of this post.]
Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison – stopped after 72 (of 432) pages (17% complete)
I have a hard time with fantasy novels, generally speaking. There are exceptions, of course. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a favorite of mine, and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, if you can even call it fantasy, is probably the best series of books I’ve ever read. But often I find that the basic tropes of fantasy don’t appeal to me, no matter how the author may tweak them.
Moreover, I have never liked the mystery/detective story. I’ve read some Sherlock Holmes, some Agatha Christie, and I didn’t like any of it. Unfortunately, Dead Witch Walking is both these things (i.e., a mystery and an urban fantasy novel). It stars a witch detective living in Cincinnati who works with a mischievous little pixy and a vampire. Much of the action revolves around them running afoul of various other witches and vampires, as well as ghosts, demons, etc., with a little bit of sex thrown in. I dunno. I love a TV show like True Blood (not to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer), which is arguably the same kind of thing, but in book form it just makes me roll my eyes. I realize this is a totally unfair double standard; I cannot explain it. [Incidentally, this was another book lent to me by my boss, thus it doesn’t appear in the photo above either. At some point she’s going to stop lending books to me.]
Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem – stopped after 71 (of 271) pages (26% complete)
If Philip K. Dick were alive today, he might’ve written something very much like Gun, with Occasional Music. I’ve never read a non-PKD book more like PKD’s books than this one, and I’m a big PKD fan. So why didn’t I finish it? Honestly, I’m not sure. I bought it off a remainder table in a Washington DC bookstore during the first weekend trip my future wife and I took together. I read the first 71 pages during whatever downtime I found in those few days, but when I got home the book didn’t make it onto my nightstand for some reason. I must have started reading a few other things because by the time I remembered it too much time had passed and I felt that, if I wanted to read the rest of it, I should really start over from the beginning. And who wants to reread part of a book you haven’t even read all the way through? Not me, apparently....
Ooh, this one hurts my heart. And it is the blackest of black marks on my reading life. I’m so ashamed of this that I can’t even believe I’m admitting it. But it’s true. Despite considering DFW one of my favorite writers of all time, I have not finished reading his magnum opus. That’s like claiming David Lynch is my favorite director (he is) but saying I haven’t seen Eraserhead (I have).
What excuse can I possibly provide here that absolves me of this sin? No good one exists, that’s for sure. So allow me to simply explain what happened: In the year 2000 I took a trip to Japan. At that point my only experience with DFW’s work was his flawless A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which remains the greatest nonfiction book I’ve ever read. Knowing ahead of time that it would take hours of uninterrupted concentration to really delve into it, I brought Infinite Jest along with me as my only book for the two 17-hour flights from New York to Tokyo and back. It certainly served its purpose for those flights (taking my mind off the agony of sitting in one constricted seat for nearly an entire day, twice), but it was a disorienting book to read on the most disorienting vacation I’ve ever taken. It will come as no surprise to someone who’s never been to Japan that Japan is nothing like the U.S. Or anywhere in the West, really. Without a doubt one of the most eye-opening trips of my life, but one during which I probably should’ve read Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery or Yamamoto’s Bushido: The Way of the Samurai. But I’d already read those books, and I really wanted to read this DFW novel I’d heard so much about.
When I returned home, Infinite Jest did make it to my nightstand but didn’t get picked back up immediately. Instead, I spent several weeks thinking and reading about what I’d learned in Japan, and by the time I was ready to return to Infinite Jest, I read a few pages but it didn’t feel right. As would happen with Lethem’s Gun, I didn’t want to go backwards but I didn’t feel equipped to go forwards, either. So it sat. And sat. And sat. Finally, I moved it back to the bookshelf. A year later I bought a used copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and read it instead of going back to Infinite Jest. Then I bought and read Oblivion, and The Broom of the System, and Girl with Curious Hair. Then DFW died and I didn’t want to read Infinite Jest. But then I read David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, followed by The Pale King. Now here I am, with nothing to look forward to from Wallace, but something to look back on. I have one last book of his to read. The gargantuan one. The one that, when I’ve finished reading it, will mark not only the pinnacle of my DFW-reading experiences, but will also be the end of my new experiences with DFW’s work. I suppose there may be a few more short stories to surface over the next few years, but they will be things that, I can only assume, he hadn’t planned on publishing, otherwise he would’ve published them already. So Infinite Jest sits, waiting.
Some excuse, huh?
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon– stopped after 113ish (of 760) pages (15ish% complete)
What a slog those 100-some pages were. As with Ulysses (see below), my attempt at reading Gravity’s Rainbow occurred shortly after I’d graduated from college and wanted to maintain my engagement with the “big books” I hadn’t had a chance to read/study as an undergrad.
It turns out I was lucky not to have taken that upper-level class on Pynchon, because Gravity’s Rainbow is a classic example of a book that defies my understanding of it. I would start reading it and, one or two pages later, realize I’d started daydreaming about something else and therefore had not absorbed the material my eyes had just passed over. So I’d go back and try rereading the passage, only to find myself daydreaming again.
Recently, I told a friend (who has read it and whose literary tastes I consider to be trustworthy) about my failure and he said to me, “You know what? It isn’t worth it.”
Well, that made me feel better.
Ulysses by James Joyce – stopped after 51ish (of 783) pages (6% complete)
(Let me preface this section by stating that Joyce’s Dubliners is one of my favorite short-story collections, and “Araby” is in my top 10 favorite stories ever. So I’m not a total heathen.)
A few months after graduating college I landed a job halfway across the country in a place where I didn’t know a single soul. I stuffed my old 1990 Ford Taurus with as many of my belongings as I could, drove to Morgenstern Booksellers where I bought a copy of Ulysses and the June 1995 issue of Rolling Stone, then headed out of town. That 740-mile, two-day trip still lives vividly in my memory, and beginning to read Ulysses sticks out. About a week after I’d arrived and settled in, I remember sitting in a Laundromat with only one other patron, my head stuck in this book. That was the last time I opened those covers. Not long afterwards my reading tastes lashed out by leading me to the nearest Barnes & Noble and forcing me to buy a copy of Peter David’s Q-Squared, which is just about as antithetical to James Joyce as you can get.
The Children of Men by P. D. James – stopped after 143 (of 351) pages (41% complete)
At forty-one-percent complete, this is the runner-up to being the book I read the most of before stopping. In the summer between my junior and senior years of college I worked in the mailroom of my hometown’s newspaper. I packaged and shipped newspapers to readers all over the world who, I presume, had a good reason for reading a paper that reported on news of a region in which they no longer lived. I also delivered these bundles to the post office, sorted the incoming mail, and delivered it upstairs. It was a full-time job, but a job with lots of downtime. My girlfriend at the time lent me several of her books. I read Camus’s The Stranger on my lunchbreaks, as well as a few other short novels. The Children of Men is another one that I started reading whenever I had a few spare moments. I don’t remember why I stopped, to be honest. I’d say because it’s such a bleak novel but surely it’s no more depressing than The Stranger, right? And besides, I like bleak books. Nineteen Eighty-Four is still one of my favorites. So it’s hard to say why I never finished The Children of Men.
I did see the movie, though—so I finally got to find out how it ends. What a gut-punch!
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice – stopped after who knows how many (of 352) pages
My older sister, like my boss, loves these trashy supernatural thriller/romances. When I was a senior in high school she kept hounding me to try these stupid Anne Rice books. I do remember I got pretty far into this first one (probably close to 100 pages or so), but just could not find anything worthwhile in it. When I returned it to her with the news that I couldn’t finish it, she told me she probably should’ve had me read The Vampire Lestat first instead. To which I replied, “Yeah, well, too late now!”
Fortunately, years later, she and I bonded, book-wise, over our mutual adoration of Raymond Carver and John Updike, so our familial tie wasn’t torn irrevocably asunder.
On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony – 220 (of 303) pages (73% complete)
The book that taught me I don’t like urban fantasy novels (a lesson I apparently forgot when my boss offered to lend Dead Witch Walking to me). This one also takes the prize for book I read the most of before quitting. I got 73 percent of the way and then just stopped? Really? Honestly I’m kind of dumbfounded. I couldn’t bother to rip through those final 80 pages? What, exactly, was I doing in high school that was so important that it kept me from finishing a book I was so close to finishing? I can’t recall. But it probably involved a girl.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – 527 (of 1359) pages (39% complete)
The Hobbit? Awesome. The Fellowship of the Ring? Umm, not as fun. To my 13-year-old self, anyway. Too much wandering around, too much talking about things, and, most of all, too much in the way of food description. I understand that many Tolkien scholars consider The Hobbit to be an inferior, indeed juvenile tale within Tolkien’s Middle Earth saga, but I disagree. It may not be imbued with the gravitas of Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom or the pathos of Sméagol’s tragic fall from grace, but it is a well-told story with eminently entertaining characters and nail-biting episodes.
Anyway, that’s pretty much what I’d been expecting when I began The Lord of the Rings, not grim talk of an evil power to the southeast, political maneuverings among various pissed-off humans, and lots of sumptuous feasts. So although I did finish reading The Fellowship of the Ring, I never did start reading The Two Towers. This is one of those books I’m sure I’d love now, but with Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth firmly entrenched in my brain I don’t see the point, really.
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy – 69 (of 267) pages (26% complete)
Have you seen the 1982 BBC production of The Scarlet Pimpernel starring Anthony Andrews, Ian McKellen, and Jane Seymour? It’s fantastic. My dad, my brother, and I watched it when it aired on PBS all those years ago and my dad taped it on our first (top-loading, 30-pound) VCR so that we could watch it again and again (which we did). My dad also had an old hardback copy of the novel, so after having seen the movie, oh I don’t know, a half-dozen times or more, I decided to read it.
As you might expect, the story in the book is not entirely like the story in the movie. Sir Percy Blakeney’s relationship with his wife, Marguerite, is far more strained in the book. And there’s something about Anthony Andrews’s performance (not to mention Ian McKellen’s!) that cannot be matched by the Baroness’s writing. Perhaps that’s a blasphemous thing for an avid reader to say, but I don’t think the Baroness’s prose is particularly good. It’s just an adventure story, really—nothing more (though historically important, of course, as a precursor to Zorro, Batman, etc.).
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott – 91 (of 497) pages (18% complete)
Have you seen the 1982 BBC production of Ivanhoe starring Anthony Andrews, James Mason, Sam Neill, and Olivia Hussey? It’s fantastic. My dad, my brother, and I watched it when it aired on PBS all those years ago and my dad taped it on our first (top-loading, 30-pound) VCR so that we could watch it again and again (which we did). My dad also had an old paperback copy of the novel, so after having seen the movie, oh I don’t know, a half-dozen times or more, I decided to read it.
Did you notice that the above paragraph reads pretty much identical to my first paragraph about The Scarlet Pimpernel? It does, but that’s because it’s basically the same setup. The movie made such an impression on me (and turned me into a lifelong, devoted fan of Anthony Andrews, James Mason, and Sam Neill) that I had to read the book. Or so I thought. Sir Walter Scott was the most popular novelist of his day (and the world’s first living celebrity author), but that day has gone. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that his prose hasn’t quite stood the test of time.
So, what books have you failed to finish?
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
The Pale King (Goodreads review)
Having now finished The Pale King, I can see how it might've been a better book than Infinite Jest if only DFW had found a way to finish it. His editor, Michael Pietsch, wrote in the editor's note that DFW once likened writing The Pale King to "wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind," which is possibly the greatest metaphor for writing a difficult work ever conceived--and also serves as direct evidence that The Pale King was perhaps a truly uncompletable book. Because if the gifted writer who could summon offhand phrases like "wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind" (and who originally modeled the structure of Infinite Jest on the Sierpinski triangle) struggled with it for over a decade with no end in sight, is there any other writer on earth who could have finished it?
As such, The Pale King is a sad book. Not the contents of the book per se (in fact, a lot of it's pretty funny), but rather what the book represents--or fails to represent. There's so much in here that's great--memorable characters, fantastic situations, that dry, inimitable brand of Wallacian wit, quotable lines ("Every love story is a ghost story"), moments of exquisite pathos, philosophical head-slappers, etc. Yet as with Kafka's The Castle , I can't help but feel that the book is incomplete. True, one of DFW's notes to himself read that he intended the novel to be "a series of setups for things to happen but nothing ever happens," and many readers have expressed disappointment that DFW's other novels (Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System ) intentionally lack what one might consider to be traditional resolutions to the story, but in this case I really get the feeling that DFW had much more in store for the characters working at IRS Post 047.
Still, despite this feeling of incompleteness I nonetheless enjoyed every moment I spent reading this book. I like to think of it as a glimpse into another DFW world, only this one still in progress, and its fragmentary nature allows me to think of Chris Fogle, Shane Drinion, the "real" David Wallace, and all other wigglers as still out there in Peoria, Illinois, sitting at their desks, turning pages, with Blumquist sitting silently, encouragingly by their sides.
I don't think you need to be familiar with DFW's other work to enjoy this novel. It wouldn't be my first recommendation to someone who hasn't read any of his work before (that would be A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again , for the record), but it's by no means impenetrable.
My one wish is that, someday, Little Brown will publish the heretofore unpublished fragments related to The Pale King (or, what the heck, any fragments written by DFW, related or not). His work is too important for the odds and ends to remain available only to those who can make the trip to DFW's archive at UT Austin....
OK, that concludes my thoughts on the book. What follows is a brief, superficial outline of each chapter in the book, which I always find helpful when I want to revisit one of DFW's books. But be warned that they do contain what some might consider spoilers, so if you haven't read the book yet please stop reading here. Otherwise you'll make me feel terrible about ruining something for you, and you wouldn't want that, would you?
***SPOILERS FOLLOW***
Ch. 1 (pp. 3-4) - Setting the stage, so to speak. A description of a field in Illinois.
Ch. 2 (pp. 5-24) - Claude Sylvanshine flies on a puddlejumper from Midway to Peoria.
Ch. 3 (pp. 25-26) - Two IRS employees, one less enthusiastically than the other, discuss masturbation habits.
Ch. 4 (pp. 27-28) - Newspaper article on Fred Blumquist's death.
Ch. 5 (pp. 29-35) - Stecyk, as a child, irritating the crap out of absolutely everyone.
Ch. 6 (pp. 36-43) - A young Lane Dean Jr. and his newly pregnant girlfriend at the park.
Ch. 7 (pp. 44-52) - Sylvanshine trapped in a van with several other IRS employees.
Ch. 8 (pp. 53-65) - A young Toni Ware and her mentally ill mother.
Ch. 9 (pp. 66-85) - Author's foreword, in which the "real" David Wallace discusses the "real" impetus behind writing this (ostensibly nonfiction) book.
Ch. 10 (p. 86) - On bureaucracy.
Ch. 11 (pp. 87-88) - List of syndromes/symptoms associated with Examinations postings lasting more than 36 months.
Ch. 12 (pp. 89-90) - The adult Stecyk, continuing to confound/annoy the hell out of people.
Ch. 13 (pp. 91-99) - David Cusk and his bouts of excessive sweating as an adolescent.
Ch. 14 (pp. 100-117) - An explanation of the PR documentary headed by Stecyk, and fourteen interview transcript excerpts.
Ch. 15 (pp. 118-121) - Claude Sylvanshine's curse of being a fact psychic.
Ch. 16 (pp. 122-126) - Lane Dean Jr. on a fifteen-minute break, and the crushing effects of job-related boredom.
Ch. 17 (p. 127) - An IRS employee on the concept of the unsung hero.
Ch. 18 (pp. 128-129) - An IRS employee talks about the return of Desk Names, courtesy of Glendenning. (As opposed to Mel Lehrl, a.k.a. the Pale King.)
Ch. 19 (pp. 130-149) - Glendenning, Stu Nichols(?), and Drinion (a.k.a. "X") stuck in an elevator, discussing '70s-era civics.
Ch. 20 (pp. 150-151) - Toni's next-door neighbor feels her wrath.
Ch. 21 (pp. 152-153) - An IRS employee explains to a taxpayer how he has caught him defrauding the IRS.
Ch. 22 (pp. 154-252) - The longest (and, to my mind, best) chapter in the book, in which "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle explains (or tries to explain, but mostly digresses from) why/how he decided to work for the IRS.
Ch. 23 (pp. 253-255) - Someone recounts a dream about his childhood, which he believes his psyche is using to teach him about boredom.
Ch. 24 (pp. 256-309) - The "real" David Wallace recounts, in prolonged detail, his excruciating arrival at Post 047 and his orientation (based on his mistaken identity), courtesy of F. Chalah "The Iranian Crisis" Neti-Neti.
Ch. 25 (pp. 310-313) - Turning the pages.
Ch. 26 (pp. 314-316) - The phantoms and ghosts of Post 047.
Ch. 27 (pp. 317-345) - Cusk, Sylvanshine, and other GS-9s attend the Rotes orientation seminar, while the "real" David Wallace (mistakenly) attends the GS-13 presentation on the minimum tax on preferences.
Ch. 28 (p. 346) - Ten laws of IRS personnel.
Ch. 29 (pp. 347-355) - Gaines, Bondurant, Gestine Hurd, Lumm, Todd Miller (and others?) on a stakeout, trading (two) stories about poop.
Ch. 30 (pp. 356-370) - A phone conversation between Reynolds and Sylvanshine, discussing what Sylvanshine has learned about Glendenning and the office politics at Post 047.
Ch. 31 (pp. 371-372) - Shinn in the IRS van, thinking about birds.
Ch. 32 (pp. 373-375) - Nugent gets his sister, Julie, to do the "Exorcist" voice over the phone for his coworkers.
Ch. 33 (pp. 376-385) - Lane Dean Jr. experiences a phantom.
Ch. 34 (p. 386) - AMT formula for corporations.
Ch. 35 (pp. 387-393) - An employee watches Gary Manshardt's infant.
Ch. 36 (pp. 394-407) - About a boy's desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
Ch. 37 (pp. 408-409) - Dialogue between Russ and a date/coworker(?) at a restaurant.
Ch. 38 (pp. 410-414) - The IRS data system glitches, which led to the conflation of the two David Wallaces arriving at Post 047.
Ch. 39 (pp. 415-422) - Sylvanshine's continued "remote fact acquisition" on Glendenning, and the story of Stecyk saving his shop teacher's life in high school.
Ch. 40 (pp. 423-424) - Cusk in the psychiatrist's office.
Ch. 41 (p. 425) - A brief discussion about Cardwell, who was sent to pick up Reynolds(?).
Ch. 42 (pp. 426-430) - An IRS employee recounts his time with the Rescue Rangers in the '60s.
Ch. 43 (pp. 431-436) - The threat of terrorism, and an IRS employee fantasizes about giving Glendenning a solution to a problem, which will get Lehrl out of Glendenning's hair.
Ch. 44 (pp. 437-438) - A former cart boy muses on boredom.
Ch. 45 (pp. 439-443) - How Toni's life was saved (continuation of ch. 8).
Ch. 46 (pp. 444-509) - At Meibeyer's bar, Meredith Rand tells Shane "Mr. X" Drinion the story of how she met her husband when she was a patient at the Zeller psyche hospital.
Ch. 47 (pp. 510-516) - Toni at the Quik 'n' Ez gas station/convenience mart.
Ch. 48 (pp. 517-526) - Glendenning is interviewed by Inspections Agents Taylor and Norm Clothier (from Post 1516 in Chicago) about the "tactical incursion" and iced tea spiked with some sort of hallucinogen at the annual picnic, during which Glendenning continues to hallucinate.
Ch. 49 (pp. 527-536) - Sylvanshine and Reynolds conduct a preinterview with Fogle outside Glendenning's office (which is currently being used by Lehrl).
Ch. 50 (537-538) - "You" visit the same psychiatrist Cusk visits in ch. 40(?).
As such, The Pale King is a sad book. Not the contents of the book per se (in fact, a lot of it's pretty funny), but rather what the book represents--or fails to represent. There's so much in here that's great--memorable characters, fantastic situations, that dry, inimitable brand of Wallacian wit, quotable lines ("Every love story is a ghost story"), moments of exquisite pathos, philosophical head-slappers, etc. Yet as with Kafka's The Castle , I can't help but feel that the book is incomplete. True, one of DFW's notes to himself read that he intended the novel to be "a series of setups for things to happen but nothing ever happens," and many readers have expressed disappointment that DFW's other novels (Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System ) intentionally lack what one might consider to be traditional resolutions to the story, but in this case I really get the feeling that DFW had much more in store for the characters working at IRS Post 047.
Still, despite this feeling of incompleteness I nonetheless enjoyed every moment I spent reading this book. I like to think of it as a glimpse into another DFW world, only this one still in progress, and its fragmentary nature allows me to think of Chris Fogle, Shane Drinion, the "real" David Wallace, and all other wigglers as still out there in Peoria, Illinois, sitting at their desks, turning pages, with Blumquist sitting silently, encouragingly by their sides.
I don't think you need to be familiar with DFW's other work to enjoy this novel. It wouldn't be my first recommendation to someone who hasn't read any of his work before (that would be A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again , for the record), but it's by no means impenetrable.
My one wish is that, someday, Little Brown will publish the heretofore unpublished fragments related to The Pale King (or, what the heck, any fragments written by DFW, related or not). His work is too important for the odds and ends to remain available only to those who can make the trip to DFW's archive at UT Austin....
OK, that concludes my thoughts on the book. What follows is a brief, superficial outline of each chapter in the book, which I always find helpful when I want to revisit one of DFW's books. But be warned that they do contain what some might consider spoilers, so if you haven't read the book yet please stop reading here. Otherwise you'll make me feel terrible about ruining something for you, and you wouldn't want that, would you?
***SPOILERS FOLLOW***
Ch. 1 (pp. 3-4) - Setting the stage, so to speak. A description of a field in Illinois.
Ch. 2 (pp. 5-24) - Claude Sylvanshine flies on a puddlejumper from Midway to Peoria.
Ch. 3 (pp. 25-26) - Two IRS employees, one less enthusiastically than the other, discuss masturbation habits.
Ch. 4 (pp. 27-28) - Newspaper article on Fred Blumquist's death.
Ch. 5 (pp. 29-35) - Stecyk, as a child, irritating the crap out of absolutely everyone.
Ch. 6 (pp. 36-43) - A young Lane Dean Jr. and his newly pregnant girlfriend at the park.
Ch. 7 (pp. 44-52) - Sylvanshine trapped in a van with several other IRS employees.
Ch. 8 (pp. 53-65) - A young Toni Ware and her mentally ill mother.
Ch. 9 (pp. 66-85) - Author's foreword, in which the "real" David Wallace discusses the "real" impetus behind writing this (ostensibly nonfiction) book.
Ch. 10 (p. 86) - On bureaucracy.
Ch. 11 (pp. 87-88) - List of syndromes/symptoms associated with Examinations postings lasting more than 36 months.
Ch. 12 (pp. 89-90) - The adult Stecyk, continuing to confound/annoy the hell out of people.
Ch. 13 (pp. 91-99) - David Cusk and his bouts of excessive sweating as an adolescent.
Ch. 14 (pp. 100-117) - An explanation of the PR documentary headed by Stecyk, and fourteen interview transcript excerpts.
Ch. 15 (pp. 118-121) - Claude Sylvanshine's curse of being a fact psychic.
Ch. 16 (pp. 122-126) - Lane Dean Jr. on a fifteen-minute break, and the crushing effects of job-related boredom.
Ch. 17 (p. 127) - An IRS employee on the concept of the unsung hero.
Ch. 18 (pp. 128-129) - An IRS employee talks about the return of Desk Names, courtesy of Glendenning. (As opposed to Mel Lehrl, a.k.a. the Pale King.)
Ch. 19 (pp. 130-149) - Glendenning, Stu Nichols(?), and Drinion (a.k.a. "X") stuck in an elevator, discussing '70s-era civics.
Ch. 20 (pp. 150-151) - Toni's next-door neighbor feels her wrath.
Ch. 21 (pp. 152-153) - An IRS employee explains to a taxpayer how he has caught him defrauding the IRS.
Ch. 22 (pp. 154-252) - The longest (and, to my mind, best) chapter in the book, in which "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle explains (or tries to explain, but mostly digresses from) why/how he decided to work for the IRS.
Ch. 23 (pp. 253-255) - Someone recounts a dream about his childhood, which he believes his psyche is using to teach him about boredom.
Ch. 24 (pp. 256-309) - The "real" David Wallace recounts, in prolonged detail, his excruciating arrival at Post 047 and his orientation (based on his mistaken identity), courtesy of F. Chalah "The Iranian Crisis" Neti-Neti.
Ch. 25 (pp. 310-313) - Turning the pages.
Ch. 26 (pp. 314-316) - The phantoms and ghosts of Post 047.
Ch. 27 (pp. 317-345) - Cusk, Sylvanshine, and other GS-9s attend the Rotes orientation seminar, while the "real" David Wallace (mistakenly) attends the GS-13 presentation on the minimum tax on preferences.
Ch. 28 (p. 346) - Ten laws of IRS personnel.
Ch. 29 (pp. 347-355) - Gaines, Bondurant, Gestine Hurd, Lumm, Todd Miller (and others?) on a stakeout, trading (two) stories about poop.
Ch. 30 (pp. 356-370) - A phone conversation between Reynolds and Sylvanshine, discussing what Sylvanshine has learned about Glendenning and the office politics at Post 047.
Ch. 31 (pp. 371-372) - Shinn in the IRS van, thinking about birds.
Ch. 32 (pp. 373-375) - Nugent gets his sister, Julie, to do the "Exorcist" voice over the phone for his coworkers.
Ch. 33 (pp. 376-385) - Lane Dean Jr. experiences a phantom.
Ch. 34 (p. 386) - AMT formula for corporations.
Ch. 35 (pp. 387-393) - An employee watches Gary Manshardt's infant.
Ch. 36 (pp. 394-407) - About a boy's desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
Ch. 37 (pp. 408-409) - Dialogue between Russ and a date/coworker(?) at a restaurant.
Ch. 38 (pp. 410-414) - The IRS data system glitches, which led to the conflation of the two David Wallaces arriving at Post 047.
Ch. 39 (pp. 415-422) - Sylvanshine's continued "remote fact acquisition" on Glendenning, and the story of Stecyk saving his shop teacher's life in high school.
Ch. 40 (pp. 423-424) - Cusk in the psychiatrist's office.
Ch. 41 (p. 425) - A brief discussion about Cardwell, who was sent to pick up Reynolds(?).
Ch. 42 (pp. 426-430) - An IRS employee recounts his time with the Rescue Rangers in the '60s.
Ch. 43 (pp. 431-436) - The threat of terrorism, and an IRS employee fantasizes about giving Glendenning a solution to a problem, which will get Lehrl out of Glendenning's hair.
Ch. 44 (pp. 437-438) - A former cart boy muses on boredom.
Ch. 45 (pp. 439-443) - How Toni's life was saved (continuation of ch. 8).
Ch. 46 (pp. 444-509) - At Meibeyer's bar, Meredith Rand tells Shane "Mr. X" Drinion the story of how she met her husband when she was a patient at the Zeller psyche hospital.
Ch. 47 (pp. 510-516) - Toni at the Quik 'n' Ez gas station/convenience mart.
Ch. 48 (pp. 517-526) - Glendenning is interviewed by Inspections Agents Taylor and Norm Clothier (from Post 1516 in Chicago) about the "tactical incursion" and iced tea spiked with some sort of hallucinogen at the annual picnic, during which Glendenning continues to hallucinate.
Ch. 49 (pp. 527-536) - Sylvanshine and Reynolds conduct a preinterview with Fogle outside Glendenning's office (which is currently being used by Lehrl).
Ch. 50 (537-538) - "You" visit the same psychiatrist Cusk visits in ch. 40(?).
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Index to David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up
Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
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.)
Saturday, July 10, 2010
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:
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.
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.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Life Filter
-Jill Lepore, “Untimely”
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,’”
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”),
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,
(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):
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,
[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 YorkerVanity Fair
Journals
The Paris ReviewMcSweeney’s Quarterly Concern
Granta
Tin House
Indiana Review
Annuals
Pushcart PrizeThe Best American Short Stories/Essays/Comics/Nonrequired Reading
The Year’s Best Science Fiction
Websites
The New York TimesSalon
New Scientist
Wikipedia (trust but verify)
Amazon
Goodreads
The Comics Journal
Pitchfork
Television without Pity
Netflix
Internet Movie Database
Apple Movie Trailers
Gamespot
Television
ChuckGlee
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)
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