dfw

UPDATE: The folks at The Howling Fantods were kind enough link to this post as part of the general remembrance-of-Wallace phenomenon. The site appears to be swamped at the moment, but in that brief window between Wallace's death and the excession of bandwidth, a number of people came by. Only one Fantod visitor commented, and it was basically a confused mishmash of insults that stemmed from a misreading of my thoughts in this entry (perhaps in honour of Wallace I should have fashioned this update as a series of footnotes?). Even though the commenter seemed more interested in flinging shit than leveling actual criticisms, I freely acknowledge that, since my entry was written pretty much off-the-cuff, it's probably not as clear as it could have been. Commment threads are a bit like retail complaints; for every person who voices a problem, there are a dozen people who just aren't shopping there anymore. So in the interests of providing clarity, I have come up with a few points for guidance:

1) I don't enjoy Wallace's fiction. I find it pretty much unreadable, and of all his (fiction) output, I've only finished Oblivion. If you're here from The Howling Fantods, there's a good chance that you do enjoy his fiction. This is a matter of taste, and I'm in no way impugning Wallace himself or his talent, which was formidable. Also, I love his essays. If you love David Foster Wallace so much that you can't stand to hear a single negative thing about his work or his bandanna, this post may displease you some. Perhaps you'd like an espresso instead?

2) The language he deployed in his fiction, I think, is part-and-parcel with his depression and his suicide. The fertility of his imagination seemed to be an anxious response to the inadequacy of imagination in general, and the deliberate ugliness of his language was part of a project that was, in the end, so difficult as to be impossible (or as they say in French, impossible).

3) Because I haven't read all of Wallace's work, what I write here is provisional. If I argue for X, there may be a thousand Y's to counter. Please point me to a Y. I'm interested in replies that further the conversation. If you just drop a bunch of insults, I will delete your comment or make fun of you, or both. Whichever is funnier.

4) At the end of this entry, I write a couple of paragraphs on my experience of surgical anaesthesia. It was an immediate personal response to the news of Wallace's suicide, and it served as a seed for my ideas about his work and his death. It feels ridiculous to point this out, but I am not comparing my writing to Wallace's or holding up two short paragraphs of prose as a standard to which Wallace should have aspired or adhered. That would be insane. Just in case you were curious, I am not insane.

5) I've also gone through this entry, cleaned it up and taken some care to clarify my theme. I don't usually revise my stuff on this site, because hey, it's a blog, but with a number of readers coming here who have some investment in the subject matter, clarity is the least I can offer. The most I can offer is my entire life savings, which will buy you a PS3 and a decent espresso machine. All I ask is that you think of me, here in poverty, while you steam your milk and run over prostitutes.

6) I do not like lists of six.

7) Okay, let's do this thing.

***

From the book How Fiction Works, here is James Wood's assessment of David Foster Wallace's writing. It is not exactly flattering, but I think he pinpoints something essential about Wallace's preoccupations that renders his suicide a little less surprising. In response to a passage from Wallace's story "The Suffering Channel," he says:

The risky tautology inherent in the contemporary writing project has begun: in order to evoke a debased language (the debased language your character might use), you must be willing to represent that mangled language in your text, and perhaps thoroughly debase your own language. Pynchon, DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace are to some extent [Sinclair] Lewis's heirs (probably in this respect only), and Wallace pushes to parodic extremes his full-immersion method: he does not flinch at narrating twenty or thirty pages in the style quoted above. His fiction prosecutes an intense argument about the decomposition of language, and he is not afraid to decompose - and discompose - his own style in the interests of making us live through this linguistic America with him. "This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl," as Pynchon has it in The Crying of Lot 49. Whitman calls America "the greatest poem," but if this is the case then America may represent a mimetic danger to the writer, the bloating of one's own poem with that rival poem, America. Auden frames the general problem well in his poem "The Novelist": the poet can dash forward like a hussar, he writes, but the novelist must slow down, learn how to be "plain and awkward," and must "become the whole of boredom." In other words, the novelist's job is to become, to impersonate what he describes, even when the subject itself is debased, vulgar, boring. David Foster Wallace is very good at becoming the whole of boredom.

I encountered Wallace first not through his work but through a mid-‘90s cult of English majors at my university, mostly women, some of them ex-girlfriends, who had fallen head over heels for Wallace’s endless teletype of prose. I was asked if I’d read Infinite Jest yet, and assured that I would love it, and that I had to read it, because he was the best writer of our time. Someone even photocopied passages and handed them to me as if they were samizdat and not Viking Press. If they’d been Pynchon fans, they would have told me that Infinite Jest was a Gravity’s Rainbow for Generation X, or Y, or whatever generation we were.

I tried Infinite Jest, I really did. And I gave Broom of the System and Girl With Curious Hair an honest shot. But I think I came to DFW a hair too late, and I couldn’t take the endless, slightly desperate inventiveness, the pervasive sapping check of self-consciousness that spawned those pages and pages of footnotes. It felt as if Wallace, in his mimicry of adspeak and corporate America jargon, was engaged in a manic auction of his own subconscious – Everything! Must! Go! It was all-amusing, all-clever, all-entertaining, and I couldn’t take more than a few pages at a time.

Some years ago my old friend and roommate Tony described the process of overhyping a book or a film as 'Sandmanning'. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics had been so relentlessly praised by his friends that he was unable to enjoy it. David Foster Wallace had been Sandmanned for me, and no amount of footnotes and winking references to the authorial presence could haul me up from those depths to the pure air of innocence.

About a year ago, I found Wallace's essay on David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and it was a genuine pleasure to read. Wallace was thinking seriously and originally about Lynch. Plus he made Balthazar Getty sound like a complete asshole, which was as I suspected. After I finished that piece, I took out his book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and found a sharp, inquisitive, curious and prolific mind at play. His fiction always bent in particular directions, as if his imagination were afflicted with a congenital deformity – all that verdancy of prose concealing a twisted trunk. His non-fiction, splinted into shape by real events, felt stronger and more serene (and a lot funnier). But I've never been able to finish one of Wallace's fictions, except for Oblivion, so I may be completely wrong about all this.

***

This is not the first thing I wrote when I heard that Wallace had killed himself. I sat down with the intention of writing something about his work, but instead I came up with my experience of general anaesthesia when I went for back surgery in November of 2007. I felt that I had little to say about Wallace's fiction, so I started thinking about his death, and what he must have been feeling - not emotionally (at the point of suicide I doubt there are any emotions left, besides an empty, mechanical certainty), but physically:

I remember a gentle reeling, a sensation of falling backwards – vertigo – before the anaesthesia placed a hand on my shoulder and shepherded me down into the narrow chasm of death. In that place I may have been falling, falling forever, in a space of infinite depth but a width to fit a thumbnail. This is what the dead must experience, a lightless timeless drop.

Maybe I’m mistaken, and there is something more feature-laden and timely on the other side of death – in which case, bring it on. But if death is anything like anaesthesia’s utter eclipse of consciousness, then I have no great objections to that either. Time, encompassing the whole of being, is a bother; to be outside of it is to not-be, past all opinion on the matter.

So that's my sunny take on the whole thing. General anaesthetic may be nothing like death, but you get a taste of what the suicidal are craving. No time, no thought, no self, no words - I thought of that state when I heard about Wallace. When you wake up you know that you've been completely gone. You can't experience it, but you have the strangest memory of nothingness, a memory so slight that it probably doesn't exist. There's a crack in your life, so thin that you can't even feel it with a fingertip, but you know it's there. Hard to explain.

***

David Foster Wallace writes about his time on the set of Lost Highway

David Foster Wallace considers the lobster (pdf! O pdf!)

how Ulysses got its name

Thanks to Schmutzie for suggesting this scenario.

Afternoon in Paris, 1922. Harriet Shaw Weaver is reading a manuscript of Ulysses. James Joyce looks on expectantly. She puts down the last page and wipes a tear from her eye.

Harriet Shaw Weaver: That was wonderful, James.

James Joyce: It was years of work.

Harriet Shaw Weaver: This is a brilliant novel. It will tear literature open and sew a glorious, crooked seam into its flank.

James Joyce: That’s high and incomprehensible praise.

Weaver: Have you thought of a title?

Joyce: A title?

Weaver: Yes. You need an appropriate title to sum the book up with a combination of grace and grandeur.

Joyce: You may have something there, Harriet.

Weaver: I was thinking of Odysseus, or Ulysses.

Joyce: Really? That's shooting a bit high, isn't it? After all, it's just some fellow having a day around the city. I had thought of Mr. Bloom’s Grand Day Out.

Weaver: That seems … frivolous.

Joyce: Frivolous? I think it will pull in the right kind of readers.

Weaver: I think people will feel a bit misled. Especially during the brothel scenes.

Joyce: How about Stephen and Leo’s Cracking Dublin Adventure?

Weaver: I really think that Ulysses is preferable.

Joyce: Why would I name my book after some old Greek fellow?

Weaver: I think there are some parallels between the peripatetic Leo Bloom and the long, wandering voyage of Ulysses as he makes his way home to Penelope.

Joyce: I guess so. That never struck me. I think of my novel as a corker of a tale for the young lads. What do you think of Leo’s Annual?

Weaver: You envision this as an annual?

Joyce: Oh yes. I’m planning a follow-up in which our young adventurers go to Berlin and enjoy an afternoon with the Kaiser. From there they travel to ancient Africa to face down the Hottentot and the Zulu, but not before taking a detour over the Antipodes with their zeppelin-piloting medic friend Buck Mulligan. What scamps they are!

Weaver: You’re having me on, aren’t you?

Joyce: And for the young women, a serialized adventure showing that the joys of adventure are not limited to the rougher sex! I’ve already written 700 pages of Molly Bloom and the Guttersnipes of the Hollow Earth.

Weaver: Something to keep Lucia entertained?

Joyce: I've been writing down Lucia's funny expressions in a notebook lately. One day I'll publish them as A Little Treasury of Schizophrenic Ranting, or perhaps Finnegan's Wake.

top 6 novels about work

How do you summarize six novels in under 350 words? Like this, apparently.

Modern-day troubadour Beck once said “I ain’t gonna work for no soul-sucking jerk”. Bemoan your office-drone fate with the following fine reads.

Don Quixote (1499) – The first acknowledged novel in the English language is about a dreamer who lands his dream job – literally. Having overdosed on a diet of cheap romances, the Don decides to become a knight errant. He spends five hundred pages getting beaten up.

North and South (1855) – Elizabeth Gaskell tells the story of Margaret Hale, a young middle-class woman who finds herself sympathizing with the plight of mill workers in northern England. Impoverished and uprooted, the workers’ lives are ruled by infernal machines that occasionally strip stray limbs from the careless.

Bartleby the Scrivener (1856) – Herman Melville captured the alienation of urban office life with this novella about the forlorn Bartleby, who deflects all requests for work with the evasive reply “I would prefer not to”.

The Jungle (1906) – Do you worry that your lean ground beef may contain a small percentage of factory worker? The Jungle is a stirring story of Lithuanian immigrants who come to Chicago looking for a better life. At the risk of spoiling the plot, a better life is not what they find. Upton Sinclair’s exposé pushed reforms that led to the regulation of the meatpacking industry.

Work Is Hell (2004) – Pardon me. Are you suggesting that a collection of Matt Groening comic strips about white collar wage slavery is any less worthy of inclusion on this list than a novel? Well fie on you, sir. I’ll give you a good glove-slapping in the town square.

Then We Came to the End (2007) – Set in a Chicago ad agency at the crest of the late ‘90s tech boom, Joshua Ferris’ novel is narrated by a collective “we” of office drones. As the recession sets in and layoffs tear away at the corporate body, the “we” shrinks to an anxious, paranoid core. One of my favourite new novels of the last few years.

a blockbuster of proust

Every summer I vanish into the depths of a movie watching binge, a hazy period full of dim memories of lineups, neon accents, the burble of arcade machines and a half-panicked stumble through dark theatres. Throughout this last week I’ve managed to temper the movies with my ongoing Proust-reading project, which has forced me involuntarily to compare everything else I read, see or hear with In Search of Lost Time. How does a seven-volume novel about life in France at the close of the nineteenth century compare to today’s hottest blockbusters? I have no idea. But that hasn’t stopped me from writing about it. Or has it?

Live Free or Die Hard: Bruce Willis stops sheriff-turned-cybergenius Seth Bullock from bringing America to its knees.

If you’ve watched HBO’s Deadwood, you can see the rage constantly being stoked in the furnace of Sheriff Seth Bullock’s eyes. It’s no surprise that he finally traveled in time to the twenty-first century and launched a computerized attack on the infrastructure of the USA. It’s the revenge of the wild past on the complacent village of the present. Fortunately, aging movie star Bruce Willis is wise to Bullock’s ways, teaming up with the I’m A Mac guy to outcool Bullock’s old-timey mannerisms. Against vast odds they triumph, although they lose the obscenity-spewing contest.

Resemblance to Proust Past: Tenacity. Marcel Proust spent the final years of his life in his cork-lined bedroom, patiently writing his 3,500 page opus that would eventually become the towering work of literary modernity. Not even The Great War could stop him. In LFoDH, Willis takes down a Harrier plane, at least one helicopter, scores of cars, several French bad guys, and one Asian kickmaster chick.

Transformers: In every adult’s worst nightmare, the toys that they grudgingly bought for their screaming spawn turn out to be gigantic sentient robots. They speechify, they fight, they die, they turn into eighteen wheelers.

There are always multiple considerations in the adaptation of a line of toys to a screen franchise, but the chief one must be How do we make not this not achingly stupid? For example, why would a bunch of alien robots from outer space look like Camaros and Mack trucks? In the highly plastic imaginative landscape of children, this poses no problem. But in a live-action movie, some of the plastic elements have to settle into a fixed shape. In the explanation, or explanations, provided – there seem to be at least three reasons given for the Transformer’s resemblance to Earth technology – Bay ends up exploring the affinity that we have for machines and the way in which we build anthropomorphic elements into the technology that we use every day. The Transformers movie is ridiculous – would you take aliens with names like Bumblebee and Jazz seriously? – but part of the reason for its success stems from the fact that we envision autonomous forms in our machines and long for their emergence.

Resemblance to Proust Past: Like Michael Bay, Marcel Proust understood the complex relationship between humans and their artifacts, and the process by which we imbue our art and architecture with human qualities, and how those qualities in turn influence and shape subsequent generations. As far as I know, Proust did not mention gigantic transforming robots in any of his finished manuscripts, but early drafts of Swann’s Way refer repeatedly to the narrator’s friendship with Optimus Prime.

Ratatouille: Ratatouille is a movie about a rat who wants to be a chef, who, through a series of unlikely circumstances, gets his shot. Ratatouille and Transformers pretty much prove that computer animation is folding the live-action film and the cartoon into one form. Transformers is a live-action film featuring characters and scenes executed almost entirely on a computer; Ratatouille is a cartoon with surfaces and textures so realistic that you sometimes forget, despite the presence of talking rats, that you’re watching animation. Similarly, Ratatouille’s preoccupations, about artistic production versus consumption and the function of criticism, shoot miles higher than the airy speeches about Freedom in Transformers.

Resemblance to Proust Past: Bodies of art tend to reduce to a small collection of images and lines, and usually not very representative or accurate ones. Our memory of Casablanca is chiefly anchored to an image of two men walking into the night on a Moroccan airfield and the mangled line “Play it again, Sam”. Leonardo da Vinci’s monster corpus is now a small dark painting of a woman with an ambiguous smile.

In the case of Proust, the entirety of ISOLT is remembered for a single scene at the close of the first chapter, in which the taste of a madeleine cookie dunked in tea brings on a spasm of involuntary memory, which is Proust’s term for a specific kind of memory that recollects and resurrects a place and time long gone, bringing it so forcefully into being that it slams aside the present, if only briefly. Behold:

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents… and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

It’s a longie but a goodie. You read the whole passage because we’re such good friends, you and I.

To discuss the madeleine moment in Ratatouille would spoil much of the fun that the viewer experiences in getting there, but suffice it to say that taste and memory intersect at the climax of the film. And besides, the movie's set in France. That's all Proustian and stuff.

Palinode's big 5 Harry Potter predictions

There are only two days to go to the release of the latest and last Harry Potter book, and speculation on the contents is still a’brewing. The problem with all the feverish Harry Potter predictions is that the fans are too close to the material. They’ve studied the books, scoured the movies, memorized the characters’ names and generally gotten all crunked over the series. I do not have this problem. I’ve read maybe a page or two from one of the books. I’ve seen the movies but refused to remember anything of what I saw, except for the fact that Ralph Fiennes is made up to look like a big penis. In short, I have no emotional connection to any of the delightful characters at Hog-something academy, which leaves me free to get at the beating, throbbing heart of Harry Potter and the Something-something.

1. It was all a dream.

Harry wakes up in his bed, having dreamed the entire septology after a heated night with a Horcrux. He discovers his wallet has been stolen by the Horcrux and goes to the police station to report the theft. The policeman at the desk asks him to take a seat. Harry gets a Snickers bar from the vending machine and waits around for a while, but after an hour of waiting he gives up and goes in to the office. He doesn’t do much work and ends up thinking about the incredibly involved dream he had the night before. Then he buys some golf clubs online.

This may surprise some readers, but Rowling has cunningly laid a number of clues in the previous books, the chief one being that magic does not exist in the real world.

2. It was all a crazy dream.

Harry wakes up in an insane asylum. The reader finds out that the death of his parents caused a psychotic break from reality, and Harry’s been spending the last seven years calling the psych nurse Dumbledore, screaming in Latin and waving a stick he found in the yard at the orderlies. After a daring attempt to escape from Hogwarts Mental Hospital, he undergoes shock treatment and a lobotomy. Ron smothers him with a pillow, breaks a window and runs away.

3. Harry Potter is Voldemort.

I gather that Harry’s nemesis is some fellow named Voldemort. Time for Boffo Storytelling Rule #5: whenever a protagonist has a mysterious antagonist, they are the same person. At the end of the seventh book, Harry will lead Hermione, Ron and whoever else is important into a dungeon somewhere. Then he will remove his nose and say, “Ah hah! I’m Voldemort after all! Mwahahaha!” Readers are going to love it.

4. Voldemort is the hero.

Boffo Storytelling Rule #7: The antagonist is really the good guy. After Harry tracks down all the Horcruxes and is set to destroy Voldemort, the villain suddenly says, “You don’t understand a thing, do you?” Then he retells the entire story in terms that reverse all the relationships and turn the entire story inside-out. As Harry comes to grips with the realization that he’s been the evil one all along, Dumbledore shows up and starts kicking the crap out of Harry. Hermione and Ron and Draco and the others join in. Then they party with the Death Eaters. They all eat some Death Crepes, some Death Hors d'Oeuvres and big heaping plates of Death Cake a la mode. Those Death Eaters, they know how to put out a spread.

5. Harry goes to the dark side.

Harry has a vision of Ginny or somebody dying in childbirth. Voldemort appears and tells Harry that he can prevent it if he learns the dark side of magic. Based on that brief vision and some hazy promises from a man who murdered his family, Harry becomes a disciple of evil. When Voldemort unleashes his Death Eaters in a coordinated attack on the Ministry of Magic, Harry slaughters the entire student body. In a final battle between Harry and Ron, Harry is horribly burned but ends up starring in a series of inspirational TV movies.

UPDATE: I started reading the latest HP novel and am now up to page 250 or so. So far, all of my predictions have come true. Also, JK Rowling appears to have built in a secret code that, when deciphered, reveals that the entire Harry Potter corpus is a love letter addressed to me. JK, you minx - I'm a happily married man.