PALE SPRING: When You Were Inside Them They Ceased To Be Clouds (§1 - §9)

[The first in a series of posts that I'll be making for the blog-through of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, all of which can be found, in the future, at Pale Spring.]

If we are what we eat, then we are also what we read (or devour, in the case of David Foster Wallace), and so it is that §1, which only seems to be a simple (but rich) list of descriptions, dictates what we can expect of The Pale King, and what we can expect The Pale King to do to us. This opening is a shell-game of perspectives, far more than "coins of sunlight" sparkling on a "tobacco-brown river." It is, almost immediately, a series of contradictions, for while it is a "very old land" shaped with "quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs," it is also a place with a singular moment in which "an arrow of starlings [fire] from the windbreak's thatch," and a place newly anointed with "dew that stays where it is and steams all day." It is an "untilled" place, but it is processed enough to look like "flannel plains."

The ground from above is "blacktop graphs," the sky from below is "ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow" (and thereby the two never touch). From where you stand (note the second-person intrusion, the reader joining the author), things are defined and definite: "insects all business all the time." And yet, down the road from where you find "Your shoes' brand incised in the dew," we have the unshaped: "The horizon trembling, shapeless." In a moment, we will join Claude Sylvanshine en-route to Peoria via plane (§2); we shall then eavesdrop on two GS-9s in their "mindless monochrome drive up to Region HQ in Joliet" (§3); catch up on some IRS-related news (§4); flashback with Leonard Stecyk (§5), Lane A. Dean Jr. (§6), and Thomas Bondurant (§7); sit for a spell in a trailer park with Toni Ware and her mother "abroad again in endless night" (§8); and catch up with "the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona" (§9), and in this notably un-annular way, we will stress the kicker of that opening paragraph, which states that for all that we may see, experience, or be, "We are all of us brothers."

Anything can happen when we play with perspective in this fashion: the worms baked (and then unbaked) in the earth each day will constantly make new shapes in the ground; the "core accounting equation A = L + E can be dissolved and reshuffled into everything from E = A - L to beyond." The word "illiterate," repeated with the frequency of a oscillating propeller, can cease to mean anything and yet still be lovely in itself. So as we travel, let us pay closer attention to the things we do share in common with one another -- the worms themselves, and not the shapes they temporarily make up -- and consider the twins of entertainment and boredom that we so often use in casual conversation to connect us. Let old stalwarts like "How 'bout them Yankees?" or "Lovely weather today, no?" give way to the underlying mindlessness they represent in our "safe" interactions; as Wallace puts it: "The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not" and "The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception's objects."

So what is it that we all have in common? What it is that Wallace wants to show us as he moves from the aerial overview to a slow decent ("mainly a heightening of the specificity of what lay below") toward a parking lot, "Each car not only parked by a different human individual but conceived, designed, assembled from parts each one of which was designed and made, transported, sold, financed, purchased, and insured by human standards, each with life stories and self-concepts that all fit together into a larger pattern of facts." If it is the anxiety that comes with being unable to recognize ourselves (or ourselves in others, thereby leading to distrust), then let us listen to these fears; let us see them and in seeing them, be unafraid.

The unnamed GS-9 makes me worried that others will not understand me. Frederick Blumquist makes me worried that no-one will notice that I am gone. Leonard Stecyk makes me worried that I will never be good enough, and worried that, in realizing this, I will never really try to be good enough. Lane A. Dean Jr. makes me worried that I am not a good person, simply because I worry that I may not be a good person. (He worries that "He might not even know his own heart or be able to read and know himself.") Additionally, worried that I, who have only rarely been in love, might have "no earthly idea what love is." Worried that, like Toni Ware, I have become so accustomed to life the way it is that I have limited myself from what might or should be. Worried, like Sylvanshine, that man is nothing more than "the exact pocket of space that he displaces," and terrified, like Wallace, that there is "some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us (whether or not we're consciously aware of it) spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least feeling with our full attention." But hopeful, too, in that we are all brothers, and that there is more than mere distraction. That as I stand here, in the dew-stricken pasture, affirming that everything is affixed, there lies change -- or the potential for change -- down the horizon, where none of us can entirely see.

Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, The Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon"

From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 91.

My dutifully proud -- wear a mask and your face grows to fit it. Avoid all mirrors as though -- and no, worst, the black irony: now his wife and girls are bewitched this way now as well you see. As his mother -- the art he perfected upon her.

Written as a monologue (complete with humorously bleak medical stage directions) from FATHER to a "you" that starts out as a deathbed confession to a priest (a Father) and his divine sister, this story is filled with mid-sentence pauses and shifts like the ones above, and rich with a sense of this narrator's unreliable character, a fact that emphasizes the broader point Wallace is making (in his work) about perception and (I'll say it again) empathy. The key phrase here is "Wear a mask and your face grows to fit it," because for years, the father has been living a lie, refusing first to tell his wife that he detests their son, and then never admitting to his son -- with whom he awkwardly interacts -- that he's a detestably selfish hindrance to the father's own happiness. In this, the story shares unhappy secrets with "Adult World" and, more accurately, "Suicide as a Sort of Present," which, if you assume to be talking about the mother from this story, is really kicking things up a notch, for it says that both the father and mother detested the child, but both hid it -- the father, out of love for the mother, and the mother, out of her outward attempts to face her inner emotional difficulties. Even on its own, however, the story is a gripping piece, and yes, one that demands to be performed in a theater.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person"

From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 75.

Here's the most emblematic story of Wallace's c. 2000 fiction-writing style: a clinically written, circuitous, and emphatic third-person narrative about the self-torture that comes from losing an ability to empathize with and trust in the world around oneself. "The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror," begins the story. We hear of the various medications she's been on, without effect, and learn of the horrifyingly petty Blame Games her divorced parents played over the costs of raising her, a childhood that has vestigially shaped the way she is now, with specific regard to her inability to blame anyone but herself. This is true to the extent that when she calls her Support Group -- her long-distance "friends" -- she spends as much time apologizing for her interruptions and pitiable behavior as she does attempting to talk about the formative traumas in her life, a vicious circle in which she feels demeaned by her attempts to feel less demeaned. (For example, she is mortified by the amount of money she spends to "force" her therapist to listen to her -- not because she doesn't have the money [and this reminds her of how her parents haggled over the principle of raising her] but because it re-enforces that she is the type of person who has to pay someone to be her best friend.)

So far as stories go, it's an excellent mood piece: we feel clutched at by the depressed person's intense needs, in the sense that we are almost dragged down with her, reaching the point at which we want -- like her friends -- to hang up the phone and stop listening. And yet we are also fascinated by the intricacies of her thought process, in which everything has a coded secret meaning; we are forced to wonder what it might be like to worry so much about how others see us, to be unable to forgive or forget or simply Be There (the code that she ignorantly uses to describe her Support Group's support). The unappealing nature of the story, which is really dryly written, in the flat tones of the depressed -- i.e., those who cannot feel/connect with themselves or others, but do, sadly, realize and fret over this (as opposed to psychopaths) -- shows that the story is having a successful effect on the reader. You sort of have to judge/see for yourself:

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 86.

Creativity now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon, the C-sharp siren Foretold, this would itself be acknowledged, this apotheosis of static flux, & be itself put to the cynical use of just what it acknowledged, like a funnel that falls through itself. "Soon, myths about myths" was the sirens' prophecy & long-range proposal. TV shows about TV shows. Polls about the reliability of surveys. Soon, perhaps, respected & glossy high-art organs might even start inviting smartass little ironists to contemporize & miscegenate BC [before cable] mythos; & all this pop irony would put a happy-face mask on a nation's terrible shamefaced hunger & need: translation, genuine information, would be allowed to lie, hidden & nourishing, inside the wooden belly of parodic camp.

So yeah, don't get hung up on whether or not you'll be able to follow the many in-jokes Wallace makes here about Agon M. Nar (Agamemnon) or the titular "Tri-Stan" and "I Sold" (Tristan and Isolde) or the blatant Nar(cissus) and Ecko (Echo) -- our humble author is quite upfront about his recombinant sources and parodic intentions, and so while the story isn't particularly deep -- beyond pointing out flaws in our relentless entertainment cycle that Wallace has made, better, elsewhere -- it is followable and, more importantly, funny, even in the weird non-poetic and well-endowed vocabulary of the semi-shorthand that the narrator, "the fuzzy Hensonian epiclete" Ovid the Obtuse, uses.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Forever Overhead"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 95.

And so but here's the story that's almost the total opposite of "Church Not Made with Hands": it's poetically written, sure, but in a familiar and intimate second-person that thrusts us into what is an easily recognizable situation: a pubescent thirteen-year-old boy ("Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning"), on his birthday, decides to grow up by plunging off a local swimming pool's diving tower. Time slows for him in this formative moment and his senses flare to life: there is nothing too small to be detailed as he climbs out of the pool, stands in the line that snakes past the "SN CK BAR," and prepares to climb the ladder, feigning the boredom of waiting that comes to those who have done something before, who can no longer appreciate the experience with fresh eyes.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Adult World (I) & (II)"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 76.

You may have noticed by now that many of Wallace's stories don't exactly end. After watching the author struggle within the fiction of "Octet," the logic behind this becomes clearer: to end a story is to, in some way, resolve it; in turn, this can be said to then absolve the reader of any obligation to come to terms with it, much in the same way that when an answer key is provided to a student's mathematics homework (when it is presolved), the student has less motivation to derive a logical/fitting answer. For this reason, Wallace splits "Adult World" into two stories. (I) is a three-part exploration of an "immature, inexperienced, emotionally labile young wife" who, after three-and-a-half-years of worrying that she's hurting his "thingie" when they have sex, has an epiphany that accounts for all the subtext in her dream images and for her husband's peculiar quirks. (II), on the other hand, is the fourth part of the same story, written as a schema (a formal outline often done in shorthand, as Wallace was wont to do), the part that actually explains the nature of the epiphany and details what happens next -- a sort of "ending" that Wallace was apparently unable to force himself to seriously write (as in, as an actual story segment, and not just as the writerly, self-conscious outline of such), and throughout which there are bracketed notes reminding the author to "avoid ez gag."

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Octet"

Originally published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 92.

As a fiction writer myself (specifically an unpublished fiction writer), I am RIGHT THERE with Wallace's self-professed "honest" struggles to salvage the metabelletristic fiasco of these eight pop-quiz interrogations (only three of which he's actually included, a fourth of which is a revision of one of the earlier pieces) by introducing a "ninth" pop quiz that begins as such: "You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it happens are not contes philosophiques and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as 'short stories'..." Through the duration of this lengthy and heavily annotated "final" quiz, Wallace stresses the importance of honesty, that being the key that will save the story from being simply a "cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext." He also points out the thin thin line on which the story skates, that it must be

...both grotesquely funny and grotesquely serious at the same time, [lest] any real human urgency in the Quiz's scenario and palpations is obscured by what appears to be just more of the cynical, amusing-ourselves-to-death-type commercial comedy that's already sucked so much felt urgency out of contemporary life in the first place...

Yes, this point's been made in Infinite Jest, but given how raptly readers have been poring over interviews with Wallace's editors and colleagues circa that 1994 publication, they might just as well hear it from the self-conscious author himself, some five years later. The internal struggle of the author is on full display here, and although it does sometimes tip too far into manipulation or "ironic undercutting" -- particularly in the footnotes warning us about the use of terms like "relationship," "to be," and "feelings" -- these flaws are what we're being asked to empathize with in the first place, re: the whole interrogatory quiz structure, and the more he (= Wallace) contorts to himself understand what he cannot find a way to write, the more he, in his unclear clarity, succeeds in convincing us that there is in fact something to be salvaged from his failure.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace \ Short Shorts (Exclusively) from "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"

And now, the best micro-story that you'll ever read:

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never know, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

This is the page-zero opener of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, entitled "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life." Consider this the follow-up to Girl with Curious Hair's "My Appearance," in which although sincerity has long been shown the door, we soldier on with grim humor. These two potential lovers don't talk about themselves: if they did, they might not be liked, even if it can only be the appearance of being liked (considering that, not actually knowing anything about one another, there is nothing to like). And there's something funny and sad in saying "She laughed extremely hard," for laughter should be free, not forced. As they leave, alone, focused entirely on their own narrow strips of pavement, we can imagine their faces twisted up into a smile and down into a frown. And, of course, the kicker: even the man who introduced them doesn't like them; will we ever be able to take anything at face-value again? [100/100]

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace \ Short Shorts (Mostly) from "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men"

At the tail-end of Girl with Curious Hair (ironically, just before his longest story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way"), Wallace makes a sudden shift toward shorter fiction -- pure anecdotes or vignettes that briefly distill an idea, leaving the wrestling mainly up to the reader. And that's fine, but only when it's really intensely done: there's not enough room in these shorts for Wallace to wander or play at vagueness.

That's precisely the problem with Curious Hair's "Everything Is Green," which opens in media res after our first-person narrator, Mitch, has apparently accused his younger girlfriend, Mayfly, of cheating on him. She's denied it, but "It is for sure that she is lying. When it is the truth she will go crazy trying to get you to believe her." In their rundown trailer, Mitch confesses that "Every thing that is inside me I have gave you" and that he feels "like there is all of me going in to you and nothing of you is coming back any more." All this is fine, and familiar in tone to his previous stories "Here and There" and "Say Never," but then Wallace takes a poetic turn, has Mayfly spout this: "Look how green it all is Mitch. How can you say the things you say you feel like when everything outside is green like it is." The idea, perhaps, is that even in the face of betrayal, we should recognize that life itself goes on, unaffected, and we should find comfort in that, not sorrow, this realizing of how small we are in the world, how minute our problems are . . . even though Mitch observes, wisely, that there are plenty of things that aren't green. There's something to be said for perspective -- having it, that is -- but the point is unconvincingly made here. [6/100]

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Say Never"

Originally published in Girl with Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 48.

I mentioned yesterday that Wallace's characters were sometimes criticized for appearing to be shallow constructs with which the author can demonstrate a point -- for instance, in this story, that humans are abruptly changeable things (hence the title, playfully modeled after the axiomatic never say never). I added, too, that when Wallace is dealing with the shallowness of Media and its insistence on appearances, this isn't really much of an issue: the characters are magnified by their proximity to that great magnifying glass of a television set. (Likewise when Wallace is writing specifically of General Characters, like the Account Representative, for then they are pared down to the titles which we ourselves may then more directly assume, and don't we all have a secret wish when reading to assume those roles, at least vicariously?) But for stories like "Say Never," which end abruptly, before the climax, and which flit between a variety of narrative styles as a shorthand for character (a bit like Faulkner, though not as developed), I can understand the complaint, even if I soldier through it out of love and respect for the artist at work.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "My Appearance"

Originally published in Girl with Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 94.

When it comes down to media, particularly television -- or video in general -- and the ways in which it was influencing (and would influence) culture, David Foster Wallace was a genius writer. You can see this in his essays (from David Lynch to John McCain) and throughout Infinite Jest, whose essays on the rise-and-fall of the videophone and evolution of the hero still seem remarkably prescient. This is part of what makes "Small Expressionless Animals" such a potent piece down the road, for it talks about the meaninglessness of trivia (and what we sacrifice in order to fill ourselves with this nothingness) in equal strides with how all data have import, depending on their use. In turn, this is what makes "My Appearance," which turns away from Jeopardy and toward late-night "anti-shows," particularly David Letterman's, so effective: he uses the veneer of a remarkably fake talk-show ("hokeyness," he calls it) to comment on the place (or lack thereof) for sincerity in a media saturated world. Look, really look at what you're watching on these programs, or the so-called "reality" shows -- which I'm disappointed DFW didn't have more of a field day with -- and all you'll see is smugness sandwiched between self-satire, as we mock ourselves lest we ourselves be mocked.

And so but then, "My Appearance" begins as a well-employed forty-year-old television actress (who has recently been shilling for Oscar-Meyer), the mother of four children, is prepared for her upcoming appearance on NBC's Late Night With David Letterman, citing previous appearances by Teri Garr (fictitious, or at least unavailable on YouTube) as cautions for how she will be "savaged" and "ridiculed." It gets to the point that they actually give her an earpiece -- her husband and a television professional -- and attempt to give her directions during the actual interview, which rather feels like prepping for the SAT, in that you may have short-term gains, but will, in the long-term, not really exhibit much of anything. That is, by trying so hard to appear "real," she cannot help but come across as anything but fake, though she avoids this fate largely by ignoring the "advice" of her husband and living sincerely on stage: she is, after all, "a woman who acts." The tragedy, of course, comes afterward, as she cruises in a limo to dinner with her husband, who insists that things aren't what they seemed:

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Here and There"

Originally published in Girl With Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 28.

[Okay, I've received my copy of The Pale King, but since I haven't finished my taxes yet -- or my catching up on Wallace's earlier work -- I'm going to hold off on starting it, difficult as that is, until the "official" release date.]

At first glance, it's a simple He Said/She Said chronicling of a breakup, with separate monologues spliced together so as to feint at actual communication, a thing that the two of them -- along with emotion, connection, actual presence -- seemed to have issues with. Then, as a doctor introduces himself, explains that "fiction therapy in order to be at all effective must locate itself and operate within a strenuously yes some might even say harshly limited defined structured space," and we learn a bit more about Bruce, a mathematical poet, the story feels as if it may be a thinly veiled attempt at autobiography. Ultimately, the story comes across like the anecdotal self-fulfilling prophecies of Infinite Jest -- with a slight glimmer of self-revealing hope -- in which a character is so afraid of something that their actions lead to the fear, which in this case is loneliness, caused because of Bruce's distance, first linguistic, then (cunni)lingual, then actual, which leads back to the title's supposition of the obvious otherness between here and there.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "John Billy"

Originally published in Girl With Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 68.

Was telling the dust-watcher how C. Nunn Jr. passed up multitudes of come-hitherish cheerleaders and oriental princesses to return to Minogue and enter into serious commitment with his childhood sweetheart, the illegally buxom and tall Glory Joy duBoise, closest thing to femininity and pulchritude that to date exists in Minogue Oklahoma, eyes like geometry and a all-around bodily form of high allure and near-religious implication, and just as I was commencing a analogy relating the shape of Glory Joy's hips to the tight curve of the distant Big Dirt horizon, the door to the Outside Minogue Tavern busted inward and there against the dusty sunlight was framed the tall, angstified, and tortured frame of Glory Joy duBoise, hand to her limpid and Euclidean eyes, hips (that was similar to horizons) brushing the trauma-struck frame of the busted-inward door.

Language-wise, this is a beautiful and inventive story. Simply from the section quoted above: "illegally buxom," "eyes like geometry," "angstified," "hips (that was similar to horizons)." But at the same time, it raises a valid complaint about post-modernism's weakness for style over substance, and again, from the section above, you've got improper grammar ("Was telling the dust-watcher") right alongside highfalutin (irony intentional) words ("femininity and pulchritude"), to say nothing about the repetition of descriptions ("eyes like geometry" and "hips [that was similar to horizons]" are great; "limpid and Euclidean eyes" and "relating the shape of Glory Joy's hips to the tight curve of the distant Big Dirt horizon" aren't very good). I don't mean to dwell on the technical, because I do believe that Wallace does usually work toward something more -- particularly in his essays -- this tale which seems to get away from him. While "Lyndon" was stifled by its realism, "John Billy" is over-amplified by its increasingly surreal elements. 

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "In the Arcade at the Beginning of the End (Today)"

Originally published in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men*. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 75.

[Heavily footnoted story; for the sake of quoting, I've simply put the footnotes in brackets.]

He had inserted the quarter, or was about to; the silvered disc clung to those final pale inches of his fingers, fleshy whorls brushing metallic ridges, the token more than half-spent, quivering now (the hand, not the object) from the vice-like effort with which he held to those last precious seconds between deposit and purchase [the irony was not lost to him, the Player, for it was the purchase of those ever-slickening betrayers of fingers with which he prolonged the physical purchase]. Mean-mean-meanwhile, the other hand, the Claw, gripped, with its not inestimable oligodactylic strength, the vulcanized bulb of a joystick [joy, and yet it was a fist you made to hold it, he mused, the quarter slipping another millionth of an inch], lethargically sweeping it through the paces as if it were an inverted miniature music-box dancer (Beauty), and the Claw (Beast) the filigreed gear spinning along to the empty orchestra pinging through the speakers.

The novelty of this story, itself originally disseminated in novel (literal and figurative) form, has always struck me as showing a side of Wallace's playfulness -- despite the tragic ending, involving the inevitable asphyxiation of the boy's baby brother, trapped within the machine -- that we don't often see in his other work. The wordplay is admittedly more showy than in Wallace's other shorts, particularly by the final, terser, more removed stage of his writing, but in many ways, that's a necessity of the theme and setting -- an arcade on its final legs -- and one whose gaudiness helps to reflect the disfigurements of the characters and machinery (all of which, it can be said, are stand-ins for the larger city itself, in the midst of a depression that may remind modern readers of Detroit).

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Lyndon"

Originally published in Girl With Curious Hair. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 22.

[Continuing the countdown to whenever my copy of The Pale King arrives from Shipping Limbo.]

An odd semi-history of a story that doesn't feel like Wallace at all, mainly because so much of the story is spent dealing, in a straightforward fashion, with a sidelong depiction of the actual Lyndon B. Johnson, through the eyes of an invented, gay confidant, David Boyd. There's no identification of which supposed aphorisms in this story were actually used in later speeches, nor is there any distinction between actual news quotes and made-up "transcriptions" regarding the curious relationship between Boyd and LBJ; as a result, this story is likelier to have a greater effect on those who knew the man (and for whom this could be seen as a "peeling back of the curtain"), as opposed to someone like me, who is coming into this story with a character-based handicap. Complicating things, or perhaps complicated by one's lack of familiarity, is the downright cryptic final section, in which Boyd visits Lady Bird at Lyndon's deathbed, and the two share words on love, distance, loneliness, and their husbands, with some allusions being made to Lyndon's sexuality through the disease he, Boyd, and Boyd's husband, a Haitian named Duverger, all share (and which is probably AIDS).

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Girl With Curious Hair"

From Girl With Curious Hair (1989). Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 61.

[Apparently, The Pale King has already been released through some online pre-orders. Regardless, I will continue to count down to my own encounter with the novel by re-reading Wallace's short stories.]

It's a curious thing; not the curious girl with the curious hair whom the punkrockers and their disturbed yet well-dressed Young Republican friend obsess about in "Girl with Curious Hair," but curious in that Wallace would choose Girl with Curious Hair as the title of his collection, given how different this story is from most of his other work (though he will play with altered first-person narrators in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and, memorably and successfully, in the yrstruly section of Infinite Jest). Curious, too, in that it's not a particularly good story, so much as it is a means for Wallace to show us some far-out characters (in what should be a rigid setting -- the upscale Irvine Concert Hall -- that has been given over, for the night, to pianist Keith Jarrett and his improvisatory music), one of whom -- the narrator, called Sick Puppy by the group, because he likes being fellated and lighting things, including stray dogs, on fire -- we'll gain some small level of empathy for, when we learn that his military father caught him imitating some porn magazines he'd found as a eight-year-old . . . on his ten-year-old sister . . . the punishment for which involved his penis being slowly burned with a gold lighter.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR"

From Girl With Curious Hair (1989). Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 91.

[The Pale King will be released in 17 days. I'll be re-reading Wallace's short stories until then.]

Though many of Wallace's ideas recur -- and you'll see thematically similar stuff to this story as we pass to Oblivion -- the mode of each story is fresh; knowing what's going to happen, he seems to be saying, doesn't make the need to hear it or seeing the how and why of it and less important. So yes, while the title basically describes the entire story -- in which the junior, newly divorced Account Representative and the senior, still married Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production, leave their Building after a late night -- it also hints that there is far more to this story than the actual event itself. No, what this story speaks to is the extreme circumstances that must occur in order to bring two people together, or as Wallace puts it with his mathematical elegance: "There were between these last two executives to leave the Building the sorts of similarities enjoyed by parallel lines." People as parallel lines -- similar, but never intersecting: the thought is devastating, especially considering the similar, quiet pains each one is filled with:

He was preparing to feel that male and special feeling associated with the conversational imperative faced by any two men with some professional connection who meet in nighttime across an otherwise empty and silent but fragilely silent underground space far below the tall and vaguely pulsing site of a long and weary day for both: the obligation of conversation without the conversational prerequisites of intimacy or interests or concerns to share. They shared pain, though of course neither knew.

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Short-a-Day: David Foster Wallace's "Little Expressionless Animals"

From Girl With Curious Hair (1989). Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 97.

[In honor of David Foster Wallace's pending, posthumous novel, The Pale King, I'll be spending the weeks until then re-reading his short stories. Read a lengthy excerpt of this story in The Paris Review.]

Griffin whispers and the shiny man rises. "Merv posits that this force, ladies, gentleman, is the capacity of facts to transcend their internal factual limitations and become, in and of themselves, meaning, feeling. This girl not only kicks facts in the ass. this girl informs trivia with import. She makes it human, something with the power to emote, evoke, induce, cathart. She gives the game the simultaneous transparency and mystery all of us in the industry have groped for, for decades. A sort of union of contestantorial head, heart, gut, buzzer finger. She is, or can become, the game show incarnate. She is a mystery."

Actually probably definitely maybe one of my favorite stories of Wallace's, and that quote above helps to capture the essence of what he does here, and in all of his writing (essays included). He takes mere facts, poignant observations about the world, what have you, and gives it import. He is a man obsessed, from his tennis and mathematical and philosophical days, with limitations, and the ways in which we might step outside and escape them. It is no surprise that Julie Smith and Faye Goddard, the central lovers of this story, one a three-year Jeopardy winner (take that, Ken Jennings) and the other a question researcher for the show, both love the straightedge: "It makes worlds. I could make a world out of lines. A sort of jagged magic." These are women who have been trapped, the latter in a literal house of glass, but who are looking for a way to transcend or escape their fears. And over the course of this story -- which jumps from 1976 to 1970 to 1988, where we know Julie will be unseated by her autistic brother, before going back to connect the dots -- we will come to understand, to realize along with them, the ways in which they have been caught up and shaped by events that they could not control. 

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Infinite Summer: A Year Later, or Postscript, or Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

It's been a long time since I marathoned my way through a book, but I've just crossed the finish line that is David Lipsky's five-day transcription of his 1996 Infinite Jest book-tour road trip with David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Couldn't put the book down, save to solve a few crossword puzzles and write a brief blog/tweet about a particular line of his that resonated w/r/t the other stuff I do on this site (re: criticism). At the best moments, Lipsky vanished from the book--his stuff is very much showmanship, because, as he himself points out, it's not about him--and it felt like actually being on the other end of a conversation with Wallace. Which is all the more simultaneously uplifting and depressing, since of course Wallace--after a long battle with depression--took his own life on September 12, 2008, so I'll never be having a conversation like that with him.

But the great thing about books--words, really--is that they live on, even if our ability to grok them fundamentally shifts. And what's key for me about reading is something Wallace touches on very early in his interview:

 There's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader might feel less lonely.

And his point proves itself, so far as I'm concerned. Fiction, when it's done properly, is an active conversation between the writer and the reader, and as I've posited before, doesn't really exist without both people, the one laying down symbols, and the other translating them, working together to create a unique experience for each participant. In this sense, it's totally unlike film, which is processed and edited to within an inch of its life to provoke a universal experience, or theater, which is looser and liver, but still designed with a specific and unavoidable goal of repetition (of that experience, from night to night, which is why I think I tend to love the work of the New York Neo-Futurists--who break that mold--so much). But back to Wallace: reading even this years-old interview opens up a connection between his worldview and mine, and in this case, helps me to realize something fairly obvious but also extremely reassuring: that I am not the only person to think this way. (And no, not in a paranoid "everyone's out to get you" way or a smug "I'm better than everyone else" way, but more in a "These insecurities that I don't feel comfortable sharing have now been aired by someone else" psychotherapy sort of way.)

In this particular section of the interview, Wallace is talking about his dislike of "really really shitty avant-garde" stuff, which is "coy and hard for its own sake," and yeah, I can see that in my own fiction. What I want to be writing is what Wallace describes as "stuff that's about what it feels like to live" and not stuff that's "a relief from what it feels like to live." And it's great to hear that Wallace came to some of the same conclusions I reached (at the same time, too): "When I was twenty-two or twenty-three, I pretty much thought every sentence that came off my pen was great. And couldn't stand the idea that it wasn't." Except that because he'd soon publish A Broom of the System and Girl With Curious Hair and then check himself into a rehabilitation center, I can skip straight to the wisdom of his/my future self, his insights into letting it be about the work itself, not about the perceptions or the outside stuff about it:

I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.

Wallace would speak about stuff like this later on, most notably in his commencement speech at Kenyon University in 2005 (anthologized by Dave Eggers in the "Best Nonessential Reading" series, and later turned into a book-Zen pamphlet, This Is Water), which spoke about how the real importance of college wasn't necessarily in the over-learning of classes, but in the education of empathy, in the ability to find and truly connect to the bigger and more important things of your life, as in What Are You Really All About? But it's crucial stuff, at least for me, this avoidance of distraction and nitty-gritty focus on Excuses Aside, Why Are You Not Doing What You Really Want? And but then suddenly realizing that you're living a life of fear, in which you've convinced yourself you want other, safer things, and prescribed yourself routines and safety nets as a way of masking the possibility of an unhappiness that lurks and wears the mask of dissatisfaction, if you should slow down enough to really consider it.

That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we're so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we're here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we're not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay... Well for me, as an American male, the face I'd put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing's enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough.

No wonder people choose the complete Entertainment of Infinite Jest, eh? Or perpetually assault themselves with the temporarily filling emptiness of television and film. But a novel, in my posited case in that it exists as an active conversation, isn't a dead-end loop. It's a propellant, something that pushes the engaged reader to actually pursue the things they wanted to do, mainly by reminding them that there are things they want to do and that there are reasonable ways in which to achieve those ends. (Small caveat: television and film can do this, too, but they require the participant to choose to get a whole lot more active--the irony is that their ease of viewing actually requires a lot more effort of thought if you want to get something permanent out of it.)

I don't want to leave off with such heavy stuff, though, so I'll end with a post-script/blog-confession: I rather enjoy his insight into his own shyness and relationships with women. I don't think I share all of his hang-ups--partly because I haven't had to deal with his success--but I get a kick out such human observations as "Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move." DFW, you will be missed.

Infinite Jestation: A Blogthrough (p. 808-896)

Like Mr. Paris over at Infinite Tasks, I find myself actually slowing down my read as we near the end of this terrific novel, a novel which I'm glad to see that Matthew Baldwin of Infinite Summer is now attributing to being about Sincerity, which I spoke about a few weeks back. (His phrasing of it, of course, is a lot neater than mine, in both senses. I particularly like his description of Sincerity Deflector Shields, which reemphasizes the importance of the book's length, or at least gives the DFW-Needs-an-Editor detractors something to think about.)

So this week, I found myself thinking about the progression of time in this novel--and in my own life--that is, the way in which time seemed to speed up, slow down, and occasionally stop for me. This, in turn, made me think about another thematic device Wallace uses--that is, Subsidized Time. Now, if we consider that Wallace isn't making jokes *just* to be funny, then maybe there's something hidden in that calendar, particularly in its progression from America's B.S., which, if you'll recall from last week, bullshit is the Monster that Hal has finally identified (to Mario): "I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away." (p. 774)

So, referring back to the list of years on page 223, America starts out full of shit. It then starts projectile shitting at Quebec, creating the Great Concavity (on our side) and Convexity (on their side). But you know, at least we're up front about it: it's very obvious what we're doing. It's not until the Year of the Whopper that things start to change--not that people never lied before, but now those lies are being stacked, sandwich-like, and people are attempting to sustain themselves on a diet of nothing but lies. We are losing US, and becoming ONANists.

It's no surprise that next up is the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, and by now we hopefully understand that Geoffrey Day was actually right--though not to be excused--in identifying that *everyone* belongs in AA, seeing as how we're all addicted to something, and that that something we're addicted to serves as a type of self-medication. A spoonful of sugary lies helps the medicine go down, to put it another way.

And now comes the Trial-Sized Dove Bar: things do seem pretty arduous, particularly for those attempting to wean themselves off one substance (only to find that this means they need to addict themselves to another, even if that other is as innocuous as a Higher Power). I don't think there's a single character we've met who hasn't gone through some sort of transformative trial.

Of course, there are consequences to our actions. The Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken refers to genetically engineering "better" chickens, a food source which is then designed to be frozen, which could show the way in which Jim-as-E.T.A. (and he's only following in his own father's shaky footsteps) raises students to be Wonder athletes, all of whom learn early on to deep-freeze their emotions if they want to join the Show.

Another side-effect is in the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster. Not only does Wallace make silence a visual thing in his dialogue, but he has long stretches of narration that make you acutely aware of sounds--particularly squeaks, which have infiltrated many of the seemingly serene sections of the novel. And these are just the acknowledged silences, to say nothing of the fact that both Orin and Hal are clearly not saying the things they really feel inside--like most of the world, they're bottling it up. (Infinite Zombies cast the paranoid homeless man's "people-are-robots" delusion in this light, that is, our brains--rewired in the ONAN age to be even more Entertainment-seeking than usual make a whirring sound that is whisper-quiet.)

We've covered lies, addictions, medications, and their consequences--the big thing we haven't touched on yet is the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard..., which, it's been pointed out, is not only phonetically funny but also has the largest name--it obtrudes into our minds. (Not for nothing, it's also got the word "Mother" in it.) But come on, Hal's father has died, and now we're in a year about a computer that is able to project a lifelike image ("So hi-def you might as well be there"), and we're talking about people not even bothering to go anywhere anymore, to the extent that they now indulge in Spect-Ops? This is just one more thing that's eating us up inside... and we have the temerity to devote a year of our lives to this? To brand ourselves so?

Well, sure. That's what takes us to the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland. And not for nothing, but are there any chapters that really take place during this year? We've pretty much given away everything that would make us "real," anything that would give us true substance or sustenance. No, the year we're most focused on--most predictably, given a culture filled with people who just sit there shitting themselves because they assume that they can always just get someone else to clean up the mess, is....

The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. It's a shame that nobody can actually vocalize their needs; it isn't until Gately becomes unable to communicate that we see what he's really after; and of course, when we first meet Hal, he's the clearest he'll ever be--and is of course, unable to communicate. Why is it so hard for us to simply reach out and talk to someone? Joelle thinks that Orin dumped her because of her face, but there is a sincere point at which Orin explains (to us, a figment of his imagination, really) that he's terrified of that trinity, that is, the ability to Know another person so closely that you can just reach out. There's also an element of Lyle's "Success" speech to LaMont Chu: we're afraid of ever getting what we actually want, because we may find out that it's not what we want. We depend on our ability to depend: what are we without need?

What are we? Perhaps we're in the Year of Glad, because Hal, at the start of the novel, has no more need. He doesn't seem to care about what he knows will happen, he takes it all in stride. It has happened before, it will happen again, but no single second--as per Gately's revelation--is unbearable. Of course, there are dark twists to this connotation: Glad (as the footnotes constantly remind us) is a Flaccid Receptacle Corporation in Ohio, which means that happiness is really just the ability to seal up and jettison our sorrows--for a time (that's what annular fusion does, see, it always comes right back around). There's also Gately's re-revelation:

Gately wants to tell Ferocious Francis how he's discovered how no one second of even unnarcotized post-trauma-infection-pain is unendurable. That he can Abide if he must. He wants to share his experience with his Crocodile sponsor. And plus, now that somebody he trusts himself to need is here, Gately wants to weep about the pain and tell how bad the pain of it is, how he doesn't think he can stand it one more second. (p. 885)

If I had the tears, I'd shed them for poor ol' Bim. But back to this whole chronology, a chronology that is in someways reflective of the process that these characters have undergone (albeit in a fractured, out-of-sequence narrative), is it any wonder that Wallace introduces the whole timeline to us as an "organization" of time? That is, a cold transcription ("Urgle urgle") of the way we file our emotions away, ready for mass-disposal and "clean" happiness, the Gentle way? Well, it's a thought.

PS. As of page 851, Hal has shifted into first-person mode, as if giving up drugs has allowed him to return to his body (even though he feels as if there's a hole). However, he's not quite connected to it, as the janitors point out on page 875, his face is "open-ly cach-inated" and "mirthful" (at Stice's situation) and he's not even aware.

PPS. Of course ONAN gets a burro to be its anti-Entertainment spokesperson. Only an ass would want to deny someone pleasure.

PPPS. I know that it turns out to have been a dream, but what's up with the Pakistani doctor having 112 teeth? Dental-related imagery is already pretty big in this novel, but how does one go from 32 teeth to 112?

PPPPS. Last one, I swear, but Gately was on a roll. "Because what if God is really the cruel and vengeful figurant Boston AA swears up and down he isn't, and He gets you straight just so you can feel all the more keenly every bevel and edge of the special punishments He's got lined up for you?" (p. 895) The God-as-figurant image is mighty interesting, no?