I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.
2666 (#2)
There’s no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.
From Roberto Bolano’s 2666.
I don’t think this is true. But it’s funny.
So, a few posts back I promised to discuss my current obsession with David Foster Wallace. Here it is:
The Start
I first read Wallace in 2006, when my friend Jon sent me a link to an article in Harper's where Wallace reviewed Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage (I'm a usage geek and big Garner fan). [n.1] I read a little bit of it and decided I wanted to read the full thing (the Harper’s article was cut significantly), so I went out and bought Wallace’s book Consider the Lobster, which contains the full essay. I loved the essay, very much. I read the rest of the lobster book in a couple days and decided Wallace was wicked smart and he wrote about interesting things, but I wasn’t sure that I really liked Wallace’s style.
Wallace is known for his long digressions, use of numerous explicatory footnotes, and footnoting footnotes. This was totally new to me outside of law/academic stuff. As I read Consider the Lobster, I considered reading Infinite Jest, Wallace’s massive magnum opus, but decided I couldn't handle 1100 wild pages with 400 endnotes. I don't read very fast (purposefully), so the idea of going to that book to try a little more Wallace did not appeal to me at the time.
I didn’t read anything else by Wallace until after his suicide in September of 2008. I read an excerpt published in The New Yorker of his unfinished last novel, and I enjoyed it. Then, near the end of the summer of 2009, I finally tackled Infinite Jest thanks to the motivation provided by a large “group read” called Infinite Summer. And I'm so very, very glad I did.
Infinite Jest
Reading Infinite Jest was almost certainly the most profound reading experience I’ve ever had, but I’m not exactly sure why. What touched me so was undoubtedly what it was about, what it dealt with, but I think that was also aided significantly by my reading it as part of Infinite Summer.
First: Infinite Jest is widely considered to be a very hard book. And it is. Not only is it long, but its narrative structure is also challenging. The first 17 pages are the last things that happen chronologically. There are two main plots and a third somewhat lesser plot, all of which intersect, to some degree, by the end, and the book jumps around from one to the other, seemingly randomly [n.2]. There is an endnote that’s 8.5 pages (of six point type) that is nothing more than a filmography of one of the characters who is a sort of Avant-garde filmmaker (that you really can't get away without reading). There is another endnote that’s 15 pages (of six point type), an endnote that’s dropped in the middle of a ten-line sentence in the middle of the main narrative. There’s a four-page paragraph in a section that is narrated by an illiterate drug addict who can’t spell. And so on.
My wife, who hasn’t read anything by Wallace [n.3], does not like Wallace’s writing. Her opinion of his work, as best as I can remember, is something like this: he hates his readers and likes to show off. My opinion of Wallace’s work was much more favorable than Anne’s even before I started Infinite Jest, but, even still, Infinite Summer helped me keep such thoughts at bay. Some of the first things I learned from the folks at Infinite Summer were: (1) lots of people start this book and stop before they finish; and (2) if you get past the first 200 or 300 pages [n.4] you’ll be glad you stuck around. This was welcome encouragement to “keep coming back.” [n.5] And it’s true. That’s not to say the first 300 pages are torture, but once you begin to see it coming together all the work and prior confusion feels validated. Infinite Summer had several official “guides” who would write about each weekly section of the book and they also had guest writers who would write about all sorts of things, from Wallace as a person, individual parts of the book, to the book as a whole. All of this was extremely helpful. I understood the book better because they’d point out things I missed, and at times I could feel less alone in my confusion.
Second: The back cover of my copy says this about the book: “A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America.” This is maybe somewhat accurate. The book has plenty of very funny parts, but it is by no means a comedy in my mind (or Wallace’s, he intended to write a very sad book). It’s kind of about the pursuit of happiness in America, but that’s not how I’d put it. The two main plot lines involve: (1) an elite tennis academy in Boston, particularly a student named Hal, his friends, and members of his family; and (2) a halfway house located just down the hill from the tennis academy, particularly a staff member and former resident named Don. The third, somewhat lesser, plotline involves two “secret agent men” who are begrudgingly working together to locate a video (of sorts) that is so entertaining it basically turns everyone who sees it into mindless, useless vegetables (a film that just happens to be made by Hal’s father, the founder of the tennis academy, and stars Hal’s brother’s ex-girlfriend who later becomes a resident of the halfway house).
The larger summary on the back of my copy says:
Set in an addicts’ halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring one of the most endearingly screwed-up families in contemporary fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to dominate our lives, about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people, and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human—and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.
Again, I would never call it any kind of “comedy” much less a “screwball comedy,” but otherwise that summary is reasonably accurate, especially considering it’s a hard book to summarize in a few words.
The book deals with pursuits: filmmaking; academic and athletic excellence; interfamily communication; understanding; love and acceptance; a way to get by; and a high. The look into the world of addicts and AA was particularly interesting and enlightening to me.
While the book is hard, it is loaded with beauty and insight. There were plenty of times I was exasperated, but that was the point. I haven’t read much “post-modern” or “post-post-modern” fiction [n.6], and one of the things I really enjoyed about Infinite Jest was that it showed me there was a reason behind some of the “tricks” or “theatrics.” The book is hard for a reason. There are nearly 400 endnotes (rather than footnotes) for a reason. There are four-page paragraphs for a reason. And when you make it through it all, it is so, so worth it. [n.7]
The Aftermath
So after reading Infinite Jest, my respect for Wallace turned more into a love. And, being by nature a very obsessive person generally, I became mildly obsessed. I have since watched, listened to, and read every interview Wallace did that I can find on the Internet—I’ve watched/listened to/read several of them more than once. I’ve also read more of his stuff, from articles he published in periodicals to his other books. And that experience has deepened my love and respect. It would be easy for the casual observer to think that Wallace was unsympathetic, that he was making fun of certain people or sorts, that he was a snob, but the more I learn the more I come to understand that he wasn’t any of those things. While his eye was unblinking, and he never pulled a punch, he was as sincere and as compassionate as they come.
Note 1: My first exposure to Wallace was actually from Bryan Garner. Garner has these videos on his website where he talks to judges, lawyers, professors, and writers about language and usage. One of the videos is of Wallace, and, frankly, he kind of comes across as a disheveled nutjob (though I totally agree with his opinion that “before” is vastly superior to “prior to”):
Note 2: The structure of the book was not random. He wanted it to be like a Sierpinski gasket, a sort of fractal (if you don’t want to follow the hyperlink, think of it as a triangle full of smaller triangles, and smaller triangles, and even smaller triangles, et cetera).
Note 3: I don’t hold this against her. I know she would absolutely hate it, or at least most of it, and life is too short to read stuff you hate.
Note 4: There are some people who say 200, others say 300, others say something else.
Note 5: An AA catch phrase of sorts, at least in Infinite Jest.
Note 6: I hate to use such labels but I didn’t know how else to put it.
Note 7: Though I would never recommend Infinite Jest to someone unless I knew a great deal about their reading history and habits. It is a not a book most casual readers will enjoy. I will take the opportunity here to give a shout-out to my mom who read it at about same time I did. I was reading it when I went to visit her, she saw it, read the beginning, and decided to get her own copy. She made it through the book (much faster than I did) without having any prior experience reading Wallace, and without the Infinite Summer sort of encouragement and help—it’s a great testament to her prowess as a reader.
I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.
2666
The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border.
From Roberto Bolano’s 2666.
Yes, that was one sentence. My favorite part is “…more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape….”
There are clearly many people who do not like Dodge’s “Man’s Last Stand” ad that ran during the Super Bowl. I am one of them. Here’s the ad:
If you look at the comments posted for the YouTube video (which is rarely a good idea if you want to maintain faith in humanity) you’ll see: some mad women; and a bunch of men who think the video is awesome and the women need to just chill out. But, as at least one commenter noted, the ad is offensive to both sexes. It makes women out to be unreasonable nagging shrews, and it suggests that men are such brutes that they should be rewarded for maintaining their hygiene and mustering a bare minimum of civility.
My breakdown:
“I will get up and walk the dog at 6:30am.”
If it’s your dog, you better. If it’s not your dog, don’t do it if you don’t want to.
“I will eat some fruit as part of my breakfast.”
Is this some sort of punishment? Fruit is tasty. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it.
“I will shave.”
I’d bet good money you do it for several reasons, at least some of which have nothing to do with your lady friend. Not to mention, she probably shaves, at least in part for you, and I bet you’d rather she not stop.
“I will clean the sink after I shave.”
I’d certainly hope so. You made the mess, you lazy bastard.
“I will be at work by 8:00am.”
My guess is you do this so you can keep your job, so you can have a home and eat and make your car payments. And so on.
“I will sit through two-hour meetings.”
Ditto.
“I will say yes when you want me to say yes.”
If you want to be a “yes man,” that’s no one’s fault other than your own, you gutless loser.
“I will be quiet when you don’t want to hear me say no.”
Ditto.
“I will take your call.”
How gentlemanly of you. If this is too much, perhaps you shouldn’t be in a relationship.
“I will listen to your opinion of my friends.”
Difficult, I’m sure.
“I will listen to your friend’s opinions of my friends.”
Remember when I called you a gutless loser? Yeah.
“I will be civil to your mother.”
Is civility too much to expect? Do your knuckles still drag?
“I will put the seat down.”
Always a good decision. And so much work, right? Being considerate is so trying.
“I will separate the recycling.”
If you’re doing this to be eco-friendly, that’s nice. If you’re doing it only because your lady friend is making you, then that’s your own problem.
“I will carry your lip balm.”
How sweet. And such a burden. You big strong man, you.
“I will watch your vampire TV shows with you.”
If you don’t want to, don’t. For the fourth time: gutless loser.
“I will take my socks off before getting into bed.”
Why is this a bad thing?
“I will put my underwear in the basket.”
Who else do you think should do it?
“And because I do this, I will drive the car I want to drive.
Charger. Man’s last stand.”
The car you want to drive is a Charger? Really? It isn’t a 911 or an M3, or, perhaps more reasonably, a Camaro?
Dodges are the official cars of assholes. [n.1] I believed this long before the Man’s Last Stand commercial. My dad once complained to me about how watching a USC football game (a game my dad would only watch to hope that USC loses) was very painful because he had to sit through an endless barrage of Dodge ads. And I said something like, “Well, Dodge is just trying to reach their target audience. Dodges are sold primarily to assholes, and USC fans are almost all assholes, so there you go. It’s a match made in Heaven.”
Note 1: This is, of course, a generalization. There are some non-assholes who drive a Dodge, and there are certainly assholes who drive something other than a Dodge. But it is a solid generalization.
Anne, Carver, and I went to the auto show yesterday afternoon. Here are some comments, in list like form:
(1) The auto show is held at McCormick Place, Chicago’s main convention center. I’ve heard that the Place hasn’t been doing so well financially, that they aren’t attracting the number of conventions they’d like, and such. I’ve now been there twice (the first time was for my “swearing in” for the Illinois bar), and I now know why it isn’t doing well. It is poorly designed. I’ll spare you the details.
(2) The show was incredibly crowded today. I guess that’s what we get for going on a Saturday afternoon.
(3) At the VW space we saw a woman and man, clearly a couple, and the woman was insisting that the man sit his ass in the passenger seat of a CC (a snazzy VW sedan) so she could take his picture. So he got in and did his best badass pose. I saw them a few minutes later at the BMW space and the woman was asking the people at the information desk if there was an X5 that was open that they could get in for pictures. I then was pretty sure that these people just went from MFG to MFG to take pictures of themselves in cars they can’t afford. Part of me wanted to scoff at such ridiculousness, but there was a time when I did the same thing.
(4) The Porsche (which is pronounced por-schuh) space was not where it was supposed to be. So I missed it, and I am pissed off about it.
(5) Some auto museum and a company that makes replicas of cars from movies had a small space. That was fun. They had a ’69 Roadrunner, and it was sweet. They also had a replica of a car from The Great Race, and I was reminded that it has been far too long since I last saw that awesome film.
(6) Toyota had this extremely lame rip-off of Stomp where the group sang about how great Toyota is. It was cringe worthy, but I felt compelled to get close and stand through the whole thing because I figured Carver would enjoy watching the action and listening to the noise.
(7) The Army had a recruiting center, including a “hiring office.” And I feel really sorry for whatever poor souls start their day thinking, “Hey, let’s go to the auto show!” and then that night are wondering how they signed their life away to the Army.
(8) The winner of Trent’s most-awesome car of the show award goes to the Mercedes Benz SLS. It’s so awesome they need to come up with another word to describe how awesome it is. Here’s a picture:
(9) While I believe that car is very beautiful, of the long-nose, short-back look of the Jaguar XKE and BMW Z8, I also recognize that I am also probably moved by nostalgia for the ’55 300SL, one of the coolest cars of all time, which can be seen here:
Yes, that’s the new ZR1 Corvette. Buy that rather than an SLS and you save a 100 grand and 500 pounds, and get an extra 150+ horsepower.
I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.
Dem Professors Don’t Write So Good
“The truth is that most of U.S. academic prose is appalling—pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargonridden, empty: resplendently dead.”
David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 81.
[Soundtrack for this post: Neil Young’s Harvest]
[Beer for this post: Goose Island’s India Pale Ale]
Old Man Look at My Life, I’m a Lot Like You Were
“I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity.”
The quotation above (which is not a “quote”) is something David Foster Wallace said in an interview in 1991 (which is discussed in a New Yorker article that can be found here). He killed himself when he was 46.
I had a -life crisis on my 19th birthday, but, apparently being more optimistic than Mr. Wallace, I called it my “quarterlife crisis.” And that’s partly what the crisis was about: it occurred to me that my life was likely at least one-quarter over—I didn’t have just a foot in the grave, I had a whole leg in there.
I turned 19 a few months after I started college. I was living in a dorm room with my friend Brian, who I had known all through high school. My birthday was midweek, if I recall, and going home was not an option. I was out at a class, or something, when my dad’s good friend Garn, who lived about 10 miles away, dropped off a cake at my dad’s request. The cake was a lovely gesture, and in the end probably made things better for me that day, but my heart sank when I saw that thing. It was an object I associated with celebration and being with friends and family. That object, absent the celebration, friends, and family, was depressing.
So that was part of it, the whole being-alone-and-away-from-home at a time when I really wanted to be home. I imagine this is a typical moment for freshmen who have gone away for school. But there was more to it—the cake and the feelings of aloneness were just the start. It got me thinking, and that’s when I realized I was much closer to death than I wanted to be. I was a very young man, in most ways still a boy, but my life was a quarter done. This was not a happy realization.
Recognizing my rapidly impending demise, I got to thinking about the ages and approximate remaining life years of those close to me. After ruminating for a few hours, lying awake in the middle of the night, I resolved to have all the kids I was going to have by the time I was 30.
I had my first child at 31, am currently 33, and will likely have another kid. So obviously I failed my 19 year-old self. But I still think I was right in a way. My thinking was something like this: at 19 I still had three of my four grandparents, two of whom lived to see me graduate from college, and one of whom made it to see me enroll in law school nearly eight years after my little crisis. I thought that was a good thing, and I figured if I wanted my parents to be around to see my children go to college, and for my children to really get to know my parents, I couldn’t put it off too long.
As it stands now, my dad will need to live to 79 (or so) to see Carver start college, my mom will need to make it to 76 (or so). These days, that’s certainly possible, but it’s also quite possible that they won’t. And if I have another kid, the odds become even longer.
And given that I’ve experienced what I find to be the extremely common sensation that time moves faster and faster as we get older, those days will be here before I know it.
I don’t think I ever came to a happy resolution to my crisis—I just managed to stop thinking about it.
“Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” – S. Beckett
. . . I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
One night [David Foster] Wallace met the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose depression memoir, Prozac Nation, had recently been published. She thought he looked scruffy — jeans and the bandanna — and very smart. Another night, Wallace walked her home from a restaurant, sat with her in her lobby, spent some time trying to talk his way upstairs. It charmed Wurtzel: "You know, he might have had this enormous brain, but at the end of the day, he still was a guy."
Wallace and Wurtzel didn't really talk about the personal experience they had in common — depression, a substance history, consultations at McLean — but about their profession, about what to do with fame. Wallace, again, had set impossible standards for himself. "It really disturbed him, the possibility that success could taint you," she recalls. "He was very interested in purity, in the idea of authenticity — the way some people are into the idea of being cool. He had keeping it real down to a science."
When Wallace wrote her, he was still curling through the same topic. "I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I'm not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me?"
That’s from The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, published in Rolling Stone.
The last paragraph is what I’m interested in (I thought the rest was necessary and interesting context). I’ve been trying to decide how much more I want to say—part of me wants to just say “Yeah, what he said.” But I guess I’ll draw it out.
For as long as I’ve been aware enough to think about it, I’ve found that I possess what strikes me as a strange blend of superiority (perceived) and humility. More than one person has told me that I initially came across as kind of a smug, arrogant bastard, but over time it became clear that I am actually nothing of the sort.
This blend that I am is odd, and hard for me to wrap my head around. I have little doubt that I am more honest, trustworthy, sincere, caring, considerate, well-rounded, and others-centered than most other people (note that me having “little doubt” doesn’t mean it is true). [n.1] But I also recognize that I am so loaded with faults and failings that the mere idea of beginning to list them is exhausting, and in whatever way I may be superior, there are also many ways in which I am hideously weak. Nevertheless, like Wallace, I think points are in order for recognizing my failings and caring about them.
What is probably at work here is the combination of my hatred of pride with the extremely high expectations I have for myself. I hold myself to a very high standard, one that I rarely meet, and I do not forgive failure. When it comes to me, I am entirely unforgiving. I have a list of the things that I most regret, and I will not forgive myself for them. Many of them are things I did as a child, most of which would seem like minor childhood indiscretions to most people, but they matter to me. One of my girlfriends and I used to argue about this, about how it wasn’t good to not forgive yourself. Since then people I have paid to tell me what’s wrong with me have suggested the same thing. But I still won’t do it. If I forgive myself it would be like conceding that those things were OK, that I could go ahead and forget them. But they weren’t OK, and I don’t want to forget them. I need the shame and self-loathing to remember to try to be better. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself. That’s worth something, right? [n.2]
Note 1: I also believe very strongly that pride is an ugly vice, if not a sin, and therefore I work at not being proud of anything. So when I note these things it is only that I see them as matters of fact. I am not boasting.
Note 2: You may have noticed that the heading to this part of the post doesn’t really make much sense. But so what?
I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.
David Foster Wallace on Fiction
From a March 8, 1996, interview in Salon, responding to the question: “What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?”
Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you’re thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what It’s like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that’s just the first level, because the idea of mental or emotional intimacy with a character is a delusion or a contrivance that’s set up through art by the writer. There’s another level that a piece of fiction is a conversation. There’s a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that’s very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I’m sitting in a chair. There’s real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn’t make me feel less lonely.
There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.
I’m in the process of putting together a “mixed tape,” one that, depending on how you look at it, could be considered long overdue. But in my defense these sorts of things are not easy for me. The first “draft” is going to have easily more than 20 hours of music. I’m guessing the whole thing will take me way, way more than 40 hours to put together. If you think I’m joking, you don’t know everything about me as well as you might think you do.
Just now I added some Tom Petty and some Eddie Money to the draft playlist, and I want to share a couple things:
Tom Petty
Old Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers stuff is just awesome. Unfortunately, Tom Petty seems to have had totally lost his mind by the late ‘90s. I blame it on what I assume is his totally out of control drug use. I don’t know how to feel about this. Can I damn the drugs that killed his brain, and thus ruined his later musical output, when I think the drugs probably had a lot to do with his earlier production in a positive and possibly necessary way?
An aside: One of my sisters once ran into him at a gas station in the Valley and shared a joint with him. I just heard this story and for some reason feel grossly slighted for not having been told such awesome news earlier.
Here’s one of my favorite Tom Petty songs and definitely my favorite TP&tHB video:
Don’t Come Around Here No More
Eddie Money
Eddie Money is the man.
One of my sisters died a little more than 12 years ago, when she was 29. It was undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve suffered. She really liked Eddie Money. One of the most precious memories of my childhood—of my entire life—is of watching Eddie Money and Ronnie Spector perform Take Me Home Tonight on David Letterman’s show. It aired when I was 10 or 11, but I remember it like it was a couple years ago. My sister and I were simultaneously rocking out, and also laughing hysterically at the fact that Ronnie Spector spends about half the video facing away from the camera, shaking her butt. Never ending is the butt shaking. This moment was, seriously, one of the top-five most memorable moments of my entire childhood.
When I was thinking about this, just now, I thought, “I bet that video is on YouTube.” And sure enough, it is. In a few important ways I think the Internet is ruining my life, but this is one of its magical, wonderful, amazing properties. In less than 30 seconds I was transported back to the late eighties, was instantly taken back and offered the chance to live in one of my most precious memories. YouTube, with all the ridiculous crap on it, has allowed me to relive a moment, has allowed me to relive a brief few minutes with the memory of my sister, and for that I say God bless you Internet.
(Check out Paul totally rocking the keyboards! and I’m pretty sure that’s David Sanborn on the sax—who knew?)
If I could walk on water, and if I could find some way to prove—if I could walk on water, would you believe in me? My love is so true.
