To Be Unborable

"The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

- David Foster Wallace, from The Pale King

Syllabus Porn

 IMO, this Katie Rophie article (despite it's caveats) goes a bit too far into DFW idolation, but it's still worth reading for a look at how  refreshing his approach to even mundane topics was. Money quote:

Wallace is bringing to the endeavor rigorous Salingerish standards of not lying, or not being phony, that would reproach other more ordinary people if these standards did not border on parody, and were not expressed in such a good natured and honorable way.
Most of us operate on what Wallace elsewhere calls the “default setting;” we make a calculation about what is the right expenditure of energy for a syllabus; we make a sensible adult decision about preserving analytic brio for other things, and don’t think too much about it; we use the conventions, the years of worn-out tradition, as a shortcut to speed up communication.

The Perils of Face Time

I recently upgraded my iPhone to version 4 (not the version with Suri) and have been loving the new experience. However, one feature that I haven't even been tempted to try is FaceTime. Hell, I don't even like talking on the phone, much less doing it via video.

The FaceTime thing always reminds me of a wonderful riff from Infinite Jest where DFW details the quick rise and demise of video phones. Money quote:

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.

The whole section needs to be read in its entirety - it's easily one of the best portions of that over-long, frustrating, fascinating book - but you can read a brief  excerpt at kottke.org here.

Tab Dump

As always, interesting articles and posts that i've read but haven't had the time to intelligently comment on.

• Yogasm? Really? For women only, alas.
• How to best deal with the inevitable fact that we're going to die someday? Denial! Or, more specifically Courageous Denial:
  "If all our character is a lie, created to keep us from recognizing the circumstances of our existence, then we can choose our own course.  We can choose to love, live, work, and play because those things matter to us.  We need not be bound to scorn, or to roll the Sisyphean rock at all.  We can altogether forget about the absurdity and live happy, well-adjusted lives.  And what’s more courageous than that?"
• Why it's important to log out of facebook, and clear your cookies, to avoid the social media monster tracking your movements elsewhere on the web.
• I, too, dig female voices with my indie rock. And Metric kicks it for me every time.
• The first step towards "reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories"
• Is love an Art? Yes, methinks.
• Amanda Alinehan points us to the Joy of Desire. Money quote:
• "If you’ve ever been in a power struggle with a 5 year old, you know the lengths that kids will go to in order to get what they want.  Children are much more closely connected with their desires than adults are, and have no shame in trying to fulfill them.
  What if you could connect with your desires that way?  To know what you wanted and to have no shame in wanting to fulfill it.  That would make you a powerful force in the world – for yourself and for others."
• An overview of the Transcendental Meditation resurgence, as led by the David Lynch Foundation. Yes, that David Lynch. Never tried it myself, but i'm intrigued.

Last but not least, we visit the tired "9/11 changed everything" department, where we find John Freeman pronouncing the death of the "'Systems Novel' - a novel [that] bulges and hums with a theory of how the world is run: the market economy and the economy of language - the twin broadcast networks of global power." He writes that these types of books from Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo and DFW "create what Fredric Jameson described as ''the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs.'' Freeman claims that "In one hour, Osama bin Laden proved that a spectacle could be more powerful than any narrative, especially in a world in which signs and symbols traveled much faster than words and stories."

It's an interesting claim, I guess, and might explain why there's been a dearth of "big novels" recently, but I do need to point out that DeLillo himself explicitly made this same point in Mao II where he claims that the novelist is being supplanted by the terrorist. To me, this type of hair splitting is meaningless: people will always continue to write in order to make sense of the world, terrorists or not. Whether or not people read them or not is another matter. People may for the moment be paying attention to the terrorist, but i'd be shocked if narrative didn't make a mainstream comeback in the future.

Infinity Squared

I've always had a passing interest in mathmatics, and to this date enjoy thinking about some of the paradoxes that arise when you talk about math theory. Just don't ask me to do any of the math!

One of the questions that arises is infinity. Now infinity is a difficult enough topic to grasp, but - as detailed in DFW's Everything and More (a summary of the infinity) - there are even different sizes of infinity. It's a huge mind-fuck of a concept, but a hell of a lot of fun to ponder.

Or to get a cliff notes version, you can check out The Dish's ongoing conversation on infinity here and here.

Thinking About Literary Irony

Charlie Alderman has a fascinating piece up on HuffPo that analyzes Jonathan Franzen and what critic James Woods labels "hysterical realism." I've always disliked that term, more for the negative connotations that have become associated with it over the years than with the term itself; its what led me to my overcommittment to Tree of Smoke. I also have not read enough Franzen to make an accurate judgement, but am very much looking forward to cracking open Freedom. Anyways, Alterman makes an interesting connection between Franzen and DFW:

...Franzen would need the help of a contemporary in tackling the Black Satirist legacy. While Franzen is the great dramatist of the age of conspicuous consumption and our country's ironic distance towards its effects, his close friend David Foster Wallace is the age's great theorist. In Wallace's non-fiction, [he] contends that, with Watergate as a watershed, post-industrial American youth cannot take politics or their parents' values seriously. They end up mocking everything, including earnestness in relationships, and devolve into self-absorption.

He goes on to make the point that Franzen is more establishment-defending than folks think, which I'm looking forward to finding out for myself when Freedom comes out in paperback.

Quote of the Day

We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
- David Foster Wallace

Does your life approach anything like a linear narrative?

Wyatt Mason has a great article about DFW in the latest NY Review of Books (Smarter than You Think, in the July 15th issue). Starting off by discussing David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, Mason brilliantly dissects what it is that makes DFW so fascinating:

Wallace dedicated his fiction to the asking of that question [in DFW's words, "...a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that?] and to answering it at the aesthetic distance that modernism had imposed. ...
All Wallace’s formal ingenuity would have been for naught if he hadn’t been intent on using these forms to probe at the most injured parts of being. If his work does impose an aesthetic distance, it never sought to do less than bring particular persons as close as possible.

The whole thing is worth a read. At the very least, the piece is full of insightful DFW quotes in that astute voice of his:

Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.

Quote of the Day

One of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy.

- David Foster Wallace

What We Write When We Write About Talking About Writing

While I like DFW's writing, David Lipsky's book about a road trip he took with DFW seems like it's the kind of thing that's more interesting as an idea then an actual book, although this review sez the interaction between the two ambitious authors is fascinating. Feels a bit too meta to me, but I'm also someone who was impressed by Infinite Jest but just couldn't slog thru the whole thing.

It only feels infinite...

Infinite Jest: an endless, infuriating, fascinating, exhaustive book, ultimately done in by its refusal to use one word when 10 sentences would do. And I say this as someone who likes long books! I typically like digressions and following thoughts down fascinating rabbit holes (I am a Steve Kilby fan, after all...)

I'm 500 pages in (only halfway!) and I’ve been alternately impressed, interested, and bored. The book is divided into multiple sections, most of which share continuing story lines, including
1) life in a tennis prep-school academy (boring)
2) a midnight-oil philosophical discussion between a government operative and a double (or is it triple?)-agent in the hills above Tuscon, AZ (interesting)
3) the life of drug addicts and AA members in the Boston-area (impressive)
The setting is the not-so-distant future where some very intriguing events have changed the face of America as you know it, and the description and analysis of these events is insightful and compelling. But all of this is undercut by his verbose prose that keeps circling around upon itself, Ouroboros–like, to repeat itself over and over as he ponderously plods his way towards whatever point he’s making. While at times this approach works, as when he’s detailing the effects of withdrawal, most often, like when describing a supposedly-hysterical game about the end of the world or digressing on tennis, it's just boring. In short, the very definition of hit-or-miss.
DFW actually described the effect of the writing in this book the best when he wrote about a Marijuana-anonymous meeting: "...the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety — the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy – the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from the obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch..." p. 503

Quick Thoughts

Some quick thoughts I've had recently but I haven't had the time to write down:

Been meaning to mention that Bella’s leg is as healed as it’s ever going to get. She doesn’t limp anymore and is able to walk and run – and run away from Hunter - without any issues.

People that dismiss Suzanne Vega as the folkie that wrote Luka aren’t paying attention. Her subsequent work is complex, moving and musically adventurous. The Bound and Unbound songs off of the Beauty & Crime album are excellent examples of songs that could also work as poetry, but are accentuated by the wonderful music that accompanies it. And she sings like an earth angel.

I’ve been enjoying some films that revel in ambience more than plot, such as Blade Runner, Eraserhead, and Solaris.

The disposable nature of Birthday and Thank You cards have always bothered me. Why can’t we take care of this stuff online and get rid of all of the physical waste of the cards themselves?

The artwork on the Hellboy series has been taken over by Duncan Fegredo. Duncan’s an excellent artist (and artist he is: he does his own inks like the best of them) but his does not have the sublime, humble simplicity, of creator Mike Mignola’s work. Put pretentiously, Duncan’s the moon shining off of Mignola’s earth: luminous in his own right but overshadowed by the complexity next to him.

I finally picked up DFW's Infinate Jest these days, and it's everything
that I hoped it would be: smart, verbose, entertaining, and it sticks with me after I put it down. Hopefully, I'll have more intelligent stuff to write about it later, but for now i'm just enjoying myself.

A Pure Late-Date American

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way.

My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful:

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

- David Foster Wallace

DFW's commencement speech

Although the publishing layout is ridiculous (one sentence a page? Really?) DFW's commencement speech really is worth reading. I just wouldn't shell out for the book - i'm certain you can find it online if you look hard enough.

Update: here, for example.

"I hate you"

The good foax at Joy of Sox are big David Foster Wallace (DFW, for those in the know) fans, and pointed me to this (long) summation of his career, including rumors of an unfinished novel that will no doubt be released in a bloodsucking "Last Tycoon" kind of way.

Personally, i've never even attempted Infinite Jest, but, given how much I like his other writing, i'll have to try one of these days.

A commenter on the JoS post relates this hysterical story from her Amherst alumni magazine:

One woman took his creative writing class when he came back to teach at Amherst. She said she continually mixed up further and farther. After correcting her several times, he finally wrote in the margin where she had repeated the mistake, "I hate you".

a way out of loneliness

While a bit overwrought, this DFW obituary has some interesting and brilliant observations, including some tough-to-take facts about DFW's crippling depression.

Anger Over the Dial

Andrew Sullivan reminds me of a great quote from DFW's piece on talk radio that was published in The Atlantic:

"KFI's John Ziegler is not a journalist — he is an entertainer. Or maybe it's better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give."

Ziegler is such a classy guy that he used the occasion of DFW's suicide to publicly blast the newly deceased. Good times.

All Things Feel

An interesting story about taking animal rights to it's logical extreme. (The story starts after the poem.)

Unfortunately, I find most animal flesh to be quite good, and vegetarianism just doesn't have the taste nor the convenience of a lot of meat dishes. However, I've been slowly introducing more veggie dishes to my diet; I just don't ever see them going away completely.

Another interesting take theme on this theme is David Foster Wallace's famous essay Consider the Lobster (PDF link).

Another Remembrance

Here's another good remembrance of DFW for you. I particularly like how this one places DFW and his work in context, that of a post-modernist, his place in adecemia, and also his attacks/analysis of popular culture ("It isn't worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress").

An All-too-Brief Career, Summarized

Here's a good article summarizing up David Foster Wallace's career.