“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, unboreable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

- p. 438

What you’ve just finished is an unfinished novel. Says so right on the title page, though at least one astute reader has a problem with calling it even that. Essentially, you’ve just read 500-odd pages of middle.

Obviously.

But after reading through the “Notes and Asides,” I kept coming back to this one line: “Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.”

So a Frankensteinian thought experiment: If this book had been finished, might it still, deliberately, have felt unfinished? Given an author who wrote one novel that ends in the middle of a sentence and another in which the end is, if anything, the beginning, and still leaves pretty elephantine blanks for readers to fill in. (Never mind how much The Pale King’s hypnotic final section feels like the way Infinite Jest calmly but ominously slipped away.) In other words, might The Pale King have as much of an “ending” — though surely not as much complexity, texture, dimension — as it was ever going to get?

After all, nothing actually happens.

Though we can pretty much guess, given Wallace’s appetite for dystopia and the fact that we’re talking about the trajectory of computing in the 1980s, how the story ends.

Still, if The Pale King ends up being only a series of set-ups for stuff happening, it’s an intricate and elegant set-up. I kept noticing how many of the wheels Wallace set in motion locked snugly into gear, from the footnote in Section 24 that casually identifies the monologuist of Section 22 as “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle to the way we find out in the final notes what makes Drinion the way he is.

Sometimes I sit around and imagine, especially when I’m stuck on a bus for 2 ½ hours or something like that, that however The Pale King might ultimately have ended, it still would have ended up being about being in the middle. About being able to pay attention to the fullness of the world right now in front of you, instead of sort of jiggling your leg and looking ahead to the end. I still do think this book was to some extent meant to be, for readers and maybe its author as well, an antidote to the relentless jones for entertainment that drives Infinite Jest. I’m thinking of the levitating Drinion, with his unboreable lightness of being _ his ability to look past externalities and pay true attention, to be happy. To overpower boredom to get to the “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”

Me, though, I’m still on the bus. Bored. Watching cars roll rotely down a highway through somewhere not worth noticing. I start thinking about The Pale King. About the middle, since there’s no real end. Sort of mentally stare at it like a magic eye poster, waiting for the picture within the picture to present itself.

And while I’m waiting, I notice that the guy in the Lexus is passing people on the right like a guy who either doesn’t realize he’s a stereotype or doesn’t care, and about 50 percent of the people are texting while driving, and I’m willing to bet that at least some of them are texting about driving…

And the picture that presents itself is that scene in American Beauty of the plastic bag blowing in the breeze. You remember: the intense stoner-aesthete kid videotaped this bag, he’s showing it to the hot-and-susceptible girl next door. He says, “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world.” And you said stuff like this in high school, too, when you were trying to get over, but the thing is, he’s right.

And so is Wallace, I’d like to think, in the very last words of  The Pale King’s notes: “It’s the ability to be immersed.”

“Although of course you end up becoming yourself.”

– David Foster Wallace (see Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky)

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”

–James Joyce, Ulysses (in a passage about, of all things,  Hamlet)

A: You play small-ball.

Genno Kane seems to have taken a cue from her new interest and our national pastime and drilled one over the left-field fence with her post ‘The Antidote To Infinite Jest?‘*. People are just now sitting back down in their seats.

I had heard a lot about The Pale King in the months leading up to its release. I read all about its major themes and ideas, and because of this, I had a lot to say early on. Lately, however, I’ve been struggling to put together a post that’s thought provoking and that isn’t repetitive. When I expressed this to my friend Daren a couple of weeks ago at one of our Pale Ale / Pale Spring meet-ups, he suggested that not every post has to be some elaborate, metaphor filled, interpretive essay of what I had just read. Play small-ball. Just put something up worth reading and don’t worry about its scope.

So for this entry, I’ve decided to simply let The Man himself speak and list some of my favorite quotes from the book thus far. Hopefully I’ll get on first and someone will be kind enough to move me over.

“It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave your attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.”

“Men who cannot bear to wait or stand still forced to stand still all together and wait.”

“One of these, Mother Tia, told fortunes, leathery and tremorous and her face like a shucked pecan fully cowled in black and two isolate teeth like a spare at the Show Me Lanes, and owned her own cards and tray on which what ash collected showed white, calling her chulla and charging her no tariff on terms of the Evil Eye she claimed to fear when the girl looked at her through the screen’s hole with the telescope of a rolled magazine. Two ribby and yelloweyed dogs lay throbbing in the smoke tree’s shade and rose only sometimes to bay at the planes as they harried the fires.”

“The Sun overhead like a peephole into hell’s own self-consuming heart.”

“…at which there was no answer after three rings and a shave-and-haircut knock.”

“The average molecular weight of peat.”

“If you think of the locusts as actually screaming, the whole thing becomes much more unsettling.”

“Doesn’t the term corporation itself come from body, like “made into a body”? These were artificial people being created.”

“He stood very still–noticeably stiller than most people stand when they stand still.”

“For those who’ve never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it’s about as soft and romantic as someone’s abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.”

“The bus had a lavatory in the wayback rear, which no one ever made any attempt to use, and I remember consciously deciding to trust that the passengers had good reason for not using it instead of venturing in and discovering that reason for myself.”

“I can remember hearing one middle-aged man who sat nearby saying ‘Simmer down, boyo’ to another older man seated kitty-corner to me across the doorway to one of the hallways extending out from the waiting area, except when I looked up from the book both these men were staring straight ahead, expressionless, with no sign of anyone needing to ‘simmer down’ in any conceivable way.”

“Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist”

“Gaines blinked slowly in a stony mindless way that reminded Hurd of a lizard whose rock wasn’t hot enough.”

*At the time this was written, her latest post, ‘The Ghost in Wallace’s Machine‘ wasn’t up yet, but having now read it confirms my suspicions that she’s ‘juicing’ in the locker room. Genno, Genno, Genno, please turn me on to your connection.

Didn’t anybody in your school have names like Joe or Bill?

One of the things that makes me happiest is when DFW let his hair down wrote some super-gross, scatological stuff. Shit chapter (or Section 29, as the more formal amongst you may refer to it), ftw!

I don’t really have anything constructive or insightful to say about it, but since I re-read High Fidelity not too long ago—in the couple of weeks when it looked like I’d blow through TPK in no time at all without a distraction—I’m feeling all list-y. So, in that vein, I present the Top Five College Nicknames of People I Actually Know (In No Particular Order):

• Dirt
• Grabby
• Colonel Pajamas
• “Shitty” Bill (as opposed to regular, non-shitty Bill)
• Rick Schmadel, Sears Underwear Model

More ridiculous nicknames in the comments, please.

“Every love story is a ghost story.”

I’m not into ghost stories. I’ve never had the reputed pleasure of being freaked out by tales of psychotic spirits, or spirited psychotics, who are about to lop my head off with a power tool as soon as I drift off to sleep at this backwoods campsite right here. I’ve got a long history, dating to Heaven Can Wait or arguably “Thriller,” of failing to see movies about people who come back from the dead, zombies, mummies, vampires, ghouls, hulking corpses or anyone else on this list of the types of the undead.

Yet I really dug the wraith in Infinite Jest, and not just for telling us what James O. Incandenza’s fatally enjoyable film was really made for. Whatever you make of that,  I’ve never thought about TV scenes in public places — or actual scenes in public places, for that matter — the same way since reading the wraith’s lament about life as a figurant. And the image of the spectral father explaining the horror of seeing “a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening to him, becoming a figurant” (p. 837) is, well, haunting. #nootherwaytosayit (A presentation I’d like to find out more about apparently posited that the wraith is in fact the narrator of the entire novel.)

I felt quite clever figuring that IJ’s ghost was there as a Hamlet echo, so I was intrigued to see the spirit world return in The Pale King, starting with the phantom, half-glimpsed references in the workaday litany of Section 25 (“Jay Landauer feels absently at his face. Every love story is a ghost story”).

I could blow an entire weekend thinking about that last line alone, and did. Spent some of it canvassing for wisdom on the function of ghost stories in literature (#therewentSaturday). Suffice it to say you can run into ghosts that teach religious lessons in stories written by medieval European monks, horny women ghosts in 17th-century Chinese literature who have something to say about female freedom and the power of desire, some 18th-century Japanese stories with spirits who agitate for language reforms, and ghosts that allow oppressed people to reclaim and recreate their cultural history in modern literature by minority American writers and writers in post-Franco Spain. But perhaps overall, according to people who  teach classes in these matters, literary ghosts serve to prompt reflection on the soul, the afterlife, and how life should be lived. As a University of Georgia English professor put it in a 1999 story in the Charlotte Observer, “Ghost stories explain the values of the groups telling the stories.”

For his part, Wallace takes pains to distinguish the tax-return examiners’ “phantoms” from the wiggle room’s two true ghosts. The phantoms, we learn, are Freudian taunts from the subconscious, while the ghosts are straight-up folkloric ghosts, the spirits of on-the-job forebears. This would be a great place for a savvy footnote instead of what’s going to top out at an arm-waving allusion to the parallels between this phantom/ghost dichotomy and Gately’s/the reader’s struggle to distinguish among reality/hallucination/the apparently, possibly or at least in-some-sense “real” wraith in I.J., but #movingon.

Among The Pale King’s true ghosts, then, one is a paranormal pain in the ass straight out of an office-park version of The Amityville Horror: Garrity, the implacable echo of the decorative-mirror quality-control inspector who killed himself at work after 18 years of staring into his own face to look for distortions. (I have to guess we’re supposed to note that even in its prior incarnation as a factory, this IRS post housed workers doing detailed, draining but rote examinations. And that Garrity, who writhes repetitively in “a complex system of squares and butterfly shapes” to scrutinize every part of the mirrors, could plausibly be described as a “wiggler” himself. #anotherunderdevelopedaside) “Chatty and distracting” to the examiners, “the yammering mind-monkey of their own personality’s dark, self-destructive side,” (p. 316) Garrity is the cynical spirit who later proves that etymology of “boredom” is far more diverting than boredom itself.

The other ghost, Blumquist, is the soul of the blameless employee — the one so “focused and diligent,” we learned back in Section 4, that no one noticed he had died at his desk. (If you think such stories are the stuff of workplace legend, take a look at this California TV station news report about a county auditor who perished in her cubicle about a day before anyone realized she had died). Blumquist haunts as he had lived: Silent and unassuming, “he’s no bother…. You get the sense that he just likes to be there. This sense is ever so slightly sad.” Accepted or even welcomed by most of the examiners, he is perhaps more appreciated in death than in life; certainly, no less so.

I think it’s fairly safe to imagine The Pale King’s ghosts aren’t subtly getting at medieval religious values, Japanese language reform or burying Franco’s regime. What I think they’re trying to tell us is something about the values of the teller of the story. About how not to die, for one thing, and so a bit about how to live.

Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience…. Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one.

– The Pale King, p. 229

I’m sure everyone else has already mined this irony: We’re reading a book about the extremes of boredom because we loved a book about the extremes of entertainment. At first, it was tempting to me to imagine The Pale King, with its I.R.S. employees doing literally rote work, as a study-in-contrasts companion to Infinite Jest, a story about anything but ordinary people. But the more we read of The Pale King, the more I’m thinking about the possibility of a more nuanced dynamic between the two novels. I think The Pale King might be the antidote to Infinite Jest.

One of the many powers of the Internet is its ability to stick a nice, sharp pin of non-originality into a person’s little thought balloons, so I’ll note immediately that D.T. Max’s masterful March 2009 New Yorker piece about Wallace, and about what would become The Pale King, observed that “properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment, the book suggests.” But I think there’s a way to unpack/explore/pointlessly riff off that concept and the synergy between the novels, if you’re in the mood. Which is already seeming like something of a sophomore-English-discussion-section mood, I know.

I’m thinking not only of Infinite Jest, the novel, but “Infinite Jest,” the monstrously entertaining opiate of a movie lurking just outside the narrative’s reach. There’s a smattering of talk in the novel about a potential “‘anti‘-Entertainment the film’s director supposedly made to counter the lethality: does it really also exist…. As some kind of remedy or antidote.” (p. 126). But Joelle, one of few characters in a position to know, suggests there’s no such thing: James O. Incandenza made the thing in (infinite) jest, and “even in jokes he never talked about an anti-version or antidote for God’s sake,” she says (p. 940). So we have to imagine that if there’s a way even to try to resist this fatally compelling movie, it’s by sheer force of will and concentration — by choosing to pay attention to something else. Something, comparatively, boring.

If only there were a book about people managing to knuckle down and concentrate on something boring.

Of course, Infinite Jest itself has plenty to say about the importance and difficulty of choosing what to pay attention to, from Marathe’s warning to “choose your attachments carefully” (p. 107) to the hospitalized Gately’s realization that “he could choose not to listen” to his fears (p. 860).

But The Pale King goes farther: It’s important not only to choose what you devote your mind to, but to be able to choose something that’s not compelling, seductive, interesting — in a word, not entertaining — at all. As the “substitute Jesuit” puts it in the thoroughly kick-ass “called to account” speech, which strikes me as ripe for comparison to the sermon in Moby-Dick by someone who’s got more Melville game than I do*:

Exacting? Prosaic? Banausic to the point of drudgery? Sometimes. Often tedious? Perhaps. But brave? Worthy? Fitting, sweet? Romantic? Chivalric? Heroic?…. gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.” (p. 229)

Of course, there’s an obvious, probably-shouldn’t-have-waited-until-the-eighth-paragraph hitch in this notion. For all that it extols boredom, The Pale King is damned entertaining. Even when it’s stuck in traffic for 12 pages. Even Section 25, in which characters do little more than turn pages, becomes, well, a page-turner. (“Rosellen Brown turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Devils are actually angels.” Excuse me?) As Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch, put it in an interview with Canada’s National Post, Wallace aimed “to write a novel that looks straight at all of life’s most difficult, repetitious, tedious, overly complex minutiae, and try to make a novel that is powerful and hilarious and moving that’s about the subject matter that almost all writers just brush aside in order to get at the drama.”

I keep coming back to the passage in the Author’s Forward positing that “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there … and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling….” (p. 85). It doesn’t seem like an accident that this latent pain sounds a lot like the “great transcendent horror (of) loneliness” that Infinite Jest’s characters are eternally giving themselves away to something to avoid. I do think The Pale King is pointing to an antidote — a prescription for plugging your ears against the siren call of Too Much Fun in all its forms, a formula for making the difficult choice to focus instead on the dull, the necessary, the real. It’s just that, being Wallace, he’s making it easy for us.

*No pressure, Daren.

(p. 163, §22).

3668 = FOOT

I just realized this today.

Let’s drop back, then, to the subject of this week’s title: the unlucky §13 protagonist, a k a, The Sweater: “As a child, he’d always been a heavy sweater. he had sweated a lot when playing sports or when it was hot, but it didn’t especially bother him.” That innocence, that “something particular about him” is soon lost, however: “In his seventeenth year, though, it started to bother him; he became self-conscious about the sweating thing.” Mirrors (and the “doubling” they suggest) begin to pop up; our hero begins to find himself influenced not by his own thoughts, but by his thoughts regarding other people’s thoughts — the reflections of his peers upon himself. (This is a common theme of many of the stories in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, particularly regarding the adjective “hideous,” a totally relational term that means nothing without comparators.) Whereas he was fine before, it is his awareness of his own place in context to others that is so self-shattering. Note, too, that this “didn’t happen in private, at home in his room, reading — in his room with the door closed it often didn’t even occur to him” and that his inability to verify the appearance he dreads — “he could never get a real attack to happen when he wanted it to, only when he totally, totally did not” — is what causes him to assume the worst.

It is here that he sucks himself into that common David Foster Wallace nightmare: the self-fulfilling cycle. (No surprise to hear that Adult World (I) and (II) were intended as parts of The Pale King: those stories focus on a woman so concerned with giving a proper blow-job that she becomes incapable of giving a proper blow-job; meanwhile, her husband becomes so obsessed with self-pleasure that he becomes incapable of receiving pleasure.) The Sweater attempts to become “unself-conscious” — mindlessness at its most literal — and instead ends up infecting his subconscious: “Without letting himself be wholly aware of it, he had started hurrying a little bit between periods to get to the next class early enough that he wouldn’t get stuck in a desk by a radiator, which was hot enough to jump-start a sweat.” He is doomed by consciousness, and again, Wallace warns us that while we are born to repress certain truths, the expenditure of psychic energy — i.e., focused awareness — allows it to break free. And once free, you cannot “re-repress” it; it cannot be shaken: “Consciousness just doesn’t work this way.” As this circular trap pinches shut around him, he has gotten to a point at which he is trying “to keep from conscious thought as much as possible without being wholly aware of why he was doing this.”

[If you'd like to go out on a limb here -- and I'd argue that there's little point in blogging a book into the collective unconscious (pun intended) unless you intend to do just that -- then we could loop this closed system back to the ambiguous conclusion of §10, which defines things as closed (bad) and worlds as unclosed (good). Facts/things are dangerous in that they limit us; worlds/words are wonderful in that they are open to exploration/interpretation.]

The more we enter and participate with the world around us, the harder it becomes to no longer care what others think about us. For instance, when I was bullied in elementary school and felt alone, it was easy to shut out a world that seemed to reject me, but when I started feeling comfortable enough in college to have a reputation, a set of responsibilities, it was impossible for me to not care. And so the Sweater “absorbs” himself in other activities — similar to the distraction technique in which one pinches themselves to temporarily shut out the persisting itch of a mosquito bite — in an attempt to blot his consciousness and unconsciousness, though the “greebles” of awareness persist in him perspiring. Wallace ends with a bleakly hopeful premise: that although the Sweater’s condition has been provoked, arguably, by his doubling, it is actually “his true self trying to leak out,” and that the only cure or balance for awareness may be acceptance.

‘And Desk Names are back…. Instead of your name. There’s a plate on your desk with your Desk Name. Your Name de Gear as they say…. If you’re smart, you’ll use it as a tool. We rotate; seniority chooses the plate.’

Of course, Wallace’s IRS agents aren’t the only people who adopt different names on the job: just ask Francois-Marie Arouet, Norma Jean Baker, Curtis Jackson, your friendly global-neighborhood customer service call center employee or the Waldorf-Astoria waiter who says he was forced to wear name tags that proclaimed him to be John or Edgar instead of Mohamed because bosses didn’t “want to scare our guests.” His Name de Fear, as they say.

(Never mind this fellow’s situation — I, for one, could happily dispense with name tags for anyone over 7. None of those gummy peel-the-back buggers that left a chalk-body outline on a certain suede jacket. Nor the conventioneer’s pinned-on plastic sheath, with its cheap glint and oddly sharp edges. No more lanyards with a laminated plaque the size of a birthday card doing a do-si-do with your shirt buttons. And I realize the New Jersey Department of Transportation might disagree with me, but being vaguely invited to read a grown person’s name off her chest actually doesn’t improve the customer experience, for me.) (#it’snothingimpersonal)

But in describing a “Service” that replaces its employees’ names and even their Social Security numbers (p. 66) — for Americans, virtually the DNA of official identity — Wallace is showing us work that literally becomes its employees’ identity.

Here’s where a well-documented and learned analysis of the development of the post-industrial blur that is professional-as-personal identity clearly should go. And by all means, if you’ve got one handy. (#notasociologist) But it can’t hurt to mention The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, right, or this 2009 Wall Street Journal column about “the unmitigated identification of self with occupation, accomplishment and professional status,” and how the loss of a job can amount to a loss of a sense of self. Or this personal-meets-professional medical journal article by a British physician, who reflects on his own retirement while tracing the evolution of the western world’s fascination with work and discussing the pros and cons of linking what you do with who you are. For many people, he notes, work isn’t just about money but “may be the principal source of personal identity, mediating the sense of being a valued person necessary for self-esteem.”

But I get a feeling The Pale King might ultimately be pointing to the opposite of what it might seem on the surface to be saying about work and identity. The IRS of The Pale King might take names and treat you like a (reissued) number. It might bore and confine you to the point of paracatatonic fugues and “unexplained bleeding.” (p. 87-88) But this bureaucracy — so far — isn’t the cynical ONAN of Infinite Jest. The Service is portrayed as a place full of Leonard Stecyks and Lane Deans, an agency someone can describe as as full of “institutional heroes … trying to stitch or bandage the holes that all the more selfish, glitzy, uncaring, ‘Me-First’ people are always making in the community….” (p. 127). There’s a purposeful and honorable quality to it, a world of people who pay attention to details and see a bigger picture in them, the way taxes reveal societal and personal priorities. A wiggler? Not an identity that anyone might want, but one that might not be so bad to have.

I think it’s probably best if I go ahead and tell you, right up front here, that the title of this post is a little misleading. I do not know the average molecular weight of peat. It’s not like I didn’t try to look it up. I did. I spent over an hour on-line researching the subject before becoming slack-jawed by all the scientific jargon I had to navigate. For instance, I learned that peat covers about two percent of the land on our planet. I discovered that the estimated potential energy of all of this peat is about 8 billion terajoules (126,984,127 Hiroshima bombs). I learned that it is used as fuel and also in agriculture. Most importantly, peat is used in the production of Scotch whisky.

“Would you agree to revisit that scene in the elevator and help us understand who those people are and why they’re there, and, for God’s sake, cut some of the civics? There’s a reason people didn’t enjoy civics class in high school.” http://bit.ly/mAYR6B

From a 2003 ZDF Mediathek interview with David Foster Wallace –

“The idea of being a citizen would be to understand your country’s history, and things about it that are good and not so good, and how the system works, and taking the trouble to learn about candidates for a political office, which means often reading stuff, which isn’t fun, sometimes its boring.”

In this same interview, Wallace laments the decline in civics education in American schools. In ‘The Soul Is Not A Smithy’, the protagonist sits in a “4^th grade Civics class”.

“It was 1960, a time of fervent and somewhat unreflective patriotism. It was a time that is now often referred to as a somewhat more innocent time. Civics was a state-mandated class on the Constitution, the U.S. presidents, and the branches of government.” {pp. 68, The Soul Is Not A Smithy, Oblivion}

The centerpiece of this second week of reading has been the nearly twenty page essay for three voices that starts with “something very interesting about civics and selfishness” {pp. 130} and ends with “the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt”, {pp. 149}, as 1984 looms near and the capitalist dream is soon to take on a range of new suits and calling cards. The role of citizenship for Wallace took on, in his last books, the role of an antidote to the insular solipsism that characterises the essence of the existentialist human.

When some readers (i.e. myself) of Wallace read for the first time about his church group membership, and his creating with Magic Markers his U.S Flag after the events of September 11 (both discussed in ‘The View From Mrs. Thompson’s’ in Consider the Lobster) it resonated a peculiar feeling – Wallace was so clever, why the need for church and nationalism, regardless of the trauma of September 11? Had he forgotten Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, the past century with its science and its history and its cool and valid cynicism of Everything?

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?” {pp. 257, Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky, Consider the Lobster}

The battle against the selfishness of being alive, that “dithering, pathetically self-conscious outline or ghost of a person” {pp. 181, Good Old Neon, Oblivion} we spend our time, like Sylanshine, the comically afflicted ‘fact psychic’, living “in the world of the fractious, boiling minutie” {pp. 120, The Pale King}, consumed by consuming the world as it relates immediately to us.

“But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?” {pp. 262, Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky, Consider the Lobster}

More than simply the mantra of public health services that it is access to community that is the best support for our times of mental anguish, Wallace uses the characters in §19 to, through three filters at the start of the 1980s, tap into some of the precipitating factors, approaching consequences and paradoxes that citizenship in the face of rebellious consumerist voter anti-symbolising and the “rule of image” {pp. 149} that were to manifest in the decades that Wallace came to write his novels in, right through to our biggest rule of image yet, the Internet and its promise of global citizenship. The very particular role that the IRS plays in U.S. civic duty is well chosen in ‘The Pale King’ – what if, as Pietsch lightly remarks, Wallace had the opportunity to discuss editing §19 and had “cut some of the civics”, had injected some more candy, had listened to the advice of 928874551, the IRS employee who explains that “using less sugar than the recipe calls for produces what’s known as a dry cake. Don’t do that” {pp. 105}? Perhaps the point isn’t to make fun that which is not typically fun to learn – the lesson is that it doesn’t need to be fun, it is important, it has consequences, and this is the dry cake that feeds the responsibility and awareness of daily citizenship.

My favorite part of The Pale King so far is the Author’s Forward. I’m a sucker for fiction that messes with your head about the relationships among authors, characters and readers — two of my favorite novels are Don Quixote and Pale Fire. If I were smarter, I probably could write a whole post about the fact that the author’s “forward” purports to starts on page 79 of the narrative but in fact appears on page 62. (#inyourfacemetafiction) (#Iknowyoudon’tblogwithhashtags #andbutwhynot)

But it’s Wallace, so, of course, nested in this thing that very pleasantly messes with your head is something that insists on very pleasantly messing with the thing that just messed with your head: his (or “David Wallace’s,” or his by means of the character “David Wallace,” or the author’s as “the author’s” — #stopme #fortheloveofGod) decision not only to tell you that what you’re reading is a “memoir,” but to discuss with you his motives for writing it as a “memoir,” and what that says about truth, fiction and you.

Take this passage:

“One disadvantage of addressing you here directly and in person in the cultural present of 2005 is the fact that as both you and I know, there is no longer any kind of clear line between personal and public, or rather between private vs. performative. Among obvious examples are web logs, reality television, cell-phone cameras, chat rooms … not to mention the dramatically increased popularity of the memoir as a literary genre.”

First things first: I enjoy reading people’s accounts of their lives as much as much as does the next person who hasn’t had the life of say, Malcolm X. I also understand the place of the lyrical, meditative little memoir that doesn’t change the course of world events but stays with you; as far as I can tell, it helps to be French if you want to write this sort of thing (#jenesaisquoi). And I totally get the democratic appeal of the idea that everyone has a story to tell, a life that deserves attention. The New York Times Book Review can declare that the fact “that you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir,” and I might want to put that on a T-shirt, but I can’t dismiss people feeling touched or helped by others’ experiences precisely because they aren’t extraordinary.

I can even appreciate the place _ a place I picture like the literary equivalent of a cunningly laid out studio apartment _ of “memoirs” in which the writer has the premise, and maybe even the advance, before the experience (#premoirs). I’ve got no inherent beef with people setting out to spend a year in Botswana/skydiving school/the lotos position/a basement listening to P-Funk so they can write about it. All I’d ask of them is the same question I’d ask of virtually any book: Is this an unusual, important or interesting story that tells a truth about life, and is this the best way to tell it?

Obviously, the idea that a memoir is guaranteeing you a truth about life has been exploded into a million little pieces. (There’s a litany of famous fudgers, dating back centuries, in this excellent New Yorker review of a history of the memoir genre.) It’s worth noting that James Frey has said he couldn’t get a publisher for “A Million Little Pieces” when he pitched it as fiction, so it was  recast as a memoir — a (#presumably) true story about the publishing game that is stranger than fiction, indeed. Frey would eventually say he plumped up his actual experiences because he “wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all great stories require.” Then there’s the intriguing, and tragic, theme that runs through the remarks of several memoirists caught faking: that the life story they made up was the one they wanted to believe or even convinced themselves was true.

So, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Wallace is really trying to get us to accept the Author’s Forward as an entirely “true” story. I think he’s trying to use the device of “truth” to make a point about the enduring ability of fiction to illuminate the truths that life doesn’t quite live up to. (A better way to put this, courtesy of rock singer-songwriter Stew: “Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”)

Consider that The Pale King is all about attention and making conscious choices about directing it. And that the Author’s Forward is certainly an attention-grabber, abruptly blurring the borders between “personal and public, personal and public, or rather between private vs. performative” even as it’s describing them. It seems to me he’s saying that even readers of a book about paying attention could stand to be conscious about where they’re paying it, on what terms and why.

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.

Much of the book so far appears to have been aligned with Oblivion, both in terms of style and of content. Before The Pale King was published there were discussions about how the story The Soul Is Not A Smithy described a world with similar considerations to this novel. I think this is especially true after reading what we have read so far – besides the obvious content comparisons, §5 (‘this boy who dons the bright-orange bandolier’; pp. 29) carried the tone of this story quite closely, Leonard and Cuffie the dog appearing to face similar destinys.

To keep on with the Oblivion theme, Good Old Neon and §9 certainly appear to share the same voice, the David Wallace character, speaking of memories we can’t be sure of, motivations that break away from our immediate impressions (‘I, like so many other Americans, have suffered reverses in the volatile economy of the last few years’; pp. 81) and, considering how personal Good Old Neon felt at the time and the subsequent passing of DFW, it feels very significant that he would risk ‘cute, self-referential paradoxes’ and ‘some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher’ [pp. 67] to have his voice resound in the novel in this way.

It must be said just how much of a joy it has been to read the first §9 and feel the exhilaration of DFW’s prose again – the beautiful nature references,

‘the panoramic vista…old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot’ (pp. 24)

‘the sun overhead like a peephole into hell’s own self-consuming heart’ (pp. 56)

the post-traumatic moments of being human,

‘the child’s mouth wide open and eyes looking up at the man with the camera in trust that this made sense, this was how right life occurred’ (pp.62)

‘going home to a woman who treated him like an uninteresting stranger’ (pp.45)

and the fun that can occur when language meets life

‘ – a BLOWOUT BASH – in balloon-shaped font as the caption to an illustrated explosion of good cheer and -will and no-holds-barred-let-out-all-stops FUN’ (pp. 33)

And how.

So, spring. Poets rave about it; baseball fans revel in it, and here we are at its wet and sluggish onset, beginning to read together the last novel that we’re ever going to see from one David Foster Wallace: The Pale King, his posthumous and unfinished curtain call. To me, there’s something beautiful and hopeful about reading this book at this time of year. It seems to accentuate the newness of the material while taking some of the sting out of the dread of the finality of page 538. I will discuss the actual book in a second–at least the first eighty-five pages or so that I’ve read hitherto–I promise. But first, let me tell you a little about how I got here. A forward of sorts.

Infinite Summer in 2009 was my first exposure to DFW, and I only caught the tail end of that. Compared to most of my Infinite Summer NYC buddies (we still meet every week, by the way), I’m one of the newer kids on our postmodern literary block. They have so much patience with me.

I came to serious literature in general, and Infinite Jest in particular, in kind of a time of need. The last few years of my life had been filled with upheaval followed by what I’m choosing to look at as a necessary vernal reinvention–a personal spring. The upheaval was from my leaving the music business. The music business has, if you ask just about anyone involved in it, pretty much shit the bed in recent years. Recording budgets have plummeted, recording studios have gone out of business, and recording engineers (like myself) have a hard time finding work. And when work is found, good luck trying to get paid. So I’ve moved over to television, where I am now a fairly unimportant and non-creative cog at one of the networks.

Music, you see, was my life’s early calling. I worked side by side with some of the biggest artists of this era. I was granted an up-close view while being an important part of the music’s creation; I even created a little myself. It was thrilling. I would mix a song that I knew I would hear on the radio, often several times a day. With the music-making, there came international travel, entourages, all-night recording and mix sessions, and of course, celebrities all the time. I have seen bags of pot the size of which would have caused Jerry Garcia to raise an eyebrow. I have seen people wearing, over their twenty dollar tee shirts, sets of chains of gold and platinum that cost literally as much as a middle-class home. I have heard Jennifer Lopez make a joke about the size of her own posterior. I have critiqued a mix I was working on while listening to it with the artist in their just-flown-in-from-New-York powder-blue Bentley at a Miami mansion-turned-studio. I have had a gun pointed at me by a now-deceased rap superstar as a “joke”. I can tell you that Mariah’s dog has its own fan club. I know that P.Diddy’s dog, Honey Combs, was a member of a doggie-gym and sometimes defecated on the studio floor during recording sessions. I have seen Tony Bennett draw amazing portraits of people in only a few minutes. I have heard a popular R&B girls group talk about their favorite kinds of porn. I have seen Foxy Brown whip out a pocket-sized Karma Sutra and point out which positions she enjoys. I have recorded in NYC, Toronto, Miami, and London and I miss most of it pretty much most of the time. And although I still would have loved it had it been just the music-making by itself, I would be lying if I told you that the opulence wasn’t also a big and magical part of it.

But so the middle of the business began to crumble, and a move to television began to look like the wise and responsible thing to do.

I know what it must sound like to complain about landing on my feet in television at a major network with a good job, but that doesn’t change the fact that giving up my first love–my first calling–had left me restless and unfulfilled. And so I found comfort and fulfillment in literature. I had always been a reader of popular fiction, but the search for writing with meaning and importance and skill led me to Infinite Jest. I started reading it in 2009, and serendipitously, found out that not only was there the Infinite Summer movement on the Internet, but that there was a chapter meeting weekly right in New York City. It was started by Amanda French, the person who put this blog together. I finished reading the book with the group, and gained a lot more insight to it than if had I just gone at it alone. After we finished Infinite Jest, we decided to continue the weekly meet-ups, reading other great and difficult books. And we wrote. And we drank. And we discussed writing while we drank when we were supposed to be writing. And pretty soon I have these great new friends who have opened their homes to me and whose children have befriended mine and who have inspired me to write and who never even knew me in the music business. All because I decided to read a book. And while music may yet play a role in my life in the future, I’m finding that I’m actually much more excited about this new love of mine: writing. I know if it had not been for Infinite Jest and Infinite Summer and Amanda French and all of my Infinite Summer NYC friends (who are now my Pale Spring NYC friends), that I might still be waiting for that first spring day.

Now, to the book, the first week’s selection:

Section 1 gives us a more mature sounding Wallace with a more patient prose, except that there is more than enough of that hyper-description that you’re sure you’re reading a DFW novel. Someone, Pietsch, I think, has called it a love-letter to the Midwest. I think that’s a good description. I’ve read this two-page chapter quite a few times already.

Then in section 2, we’re suddenly thousands of feet above those flannel plains, in an airplane and because of DFW’s writing prowess, we’re also in the head of Claude Sylvanshine, the self described “dithering ninny”. This entire section is a stream of consciousness that at first reminded me of Erdedy’s drug binge in Infinite Jest, but after reading it a second time, I now see how much more cleverly crafted it is. I can tell, for instance, that although C.S. is a little afraid to fly, it’s a much more pedestrian level phobia–maybe just more of an unease. You see that the real issue here is the character’s self doubt and feelings of inadequacy playing to his anxiety regarding his upcoming accounting exam. Throw in some accounting jargon (which I’m sure is all on point) and also a little comedy relief (“The woman’s claw on the steel armrest between them was a horrible sight that he declined to attend to.”) and you have a circular stream of consciousness narrative that’s vintage Wallace. And as you realize that these thoughts aren’t just random hops from subject to subject–that one thought leads to another inter-connectedly–and then understand that he’s worked in some metaphor in many of these thoughts (Daren has already nailed this in the first post), you are only just getting to the beginnings of Wallace’s brilliance because then you realize that the plane is beginning to land, not so much by the author telling you per se, but by the way that C.S.’s thoughts begin to speed up, almost like the cars going from an underwater crawl to real, close-up speed as in the text. You can totally feel the tense moments of a landing.

My favorite section so far would be 8, the trailer park section. I’ve mentioned this on Goodreads: the high prose describing ugly things in a really beautiful way, the detached writing style, the grim and surreal setting (ashes raining down and two dogs throbbing in the heat), and finally the lack of direct dialog so as not to break the spell of all of it totally reminds me of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

But there’s so much more in just this first week’s selection that you can tell the rest of the book is going to spark a lot of discussion. I’m looking forward to every bit of it.

You’re moving. Look around you. The book opens:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust

This feels immediately like gliding over a vast cinematic expanse, like the opening of a film where we’re suddenly flying fast and low over a flat, gridlike landscape, the horizon stretching thinly and stereographically out to our left and right beyond our peripheral vision, two-point perspective lines converging on a fixed, unknown destination point, but the ground at the bottom of the frame rushing beneath us in deep motion blur. The perception of motion depends entirely on where you fix your gaze.

But if you close your eyes–or fly into clouds–can you feel it, this motion? Physics says that you can’t, as long as you’re not accelerating. You’re in an inertial reference frame, which to the observer inside is indistinguishable from standing still:

Sylvanshine then spent some time trying to feel the fact that his personal body was traveling at the same speed as the craft he was inside. On a large jet it felt like merely sitting in a loud narrow room; here at least the changes in the seat’s and belt’s pressures against him allowed him to be aware of movement.

As the first sections of the novel unfold it feels as if we, and the novel’s initial characters, are caught inside in this sort of stasis-in-motion. It’s an uncomfortable, invisible sort of movement that loops back onto itself and is experienced like stasis because there’s so little personal agency: someone else is always driving. We are like the 13-year-old Ware girl from the trailer park, riding up front but sitting in the passenger seat. Where are we heading? “All the world beyond the reach of the headlamps’ beams was much obscured.” (Note also maybe: Ware-where.) All that’s visible between her knees is the first piece of the moving road, telegraphing some sort of message about their destination (“the broken centerline shot Morse at them”), but the content of the message is unknown.

Like much of Wallace certain words recur prominently and seem almost pre-underlined, and one of them in this first week’s reading is yaw. Sylvanshine muses over it in mid-flight (“He briefly tried to remember the definition of yaw”) and then later as the mother of the trailer park girl is driving, “the winds of oncoming rigs struck the truck and its shell and caused yaw the mother steered against.” Yaw is a term in avionics for angular rotation on one of the three principal axes of an airplane in motion, the other two being pitch and roll:

For the passenger who is riding in the airplane in order to get somewhere else, yaw is paramount among the three axes because it represents rotation around the Z (up) axis, which from the cockpit’s perspective is left-right motion, or “heading”. Meaning navigation, the process of steering toward where you are going, finding your way. “Yaw was way in a mirror,” thinks Sylvanshine.  The mirrored yaw|way juxtaposition feels like Wallace is signaling something important, maybe even a bit forced. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to parse Yahweh out of yaw|way given how much the author tees it up, setting up some sort of man-vs-deity dialectic. Sylvanshine is looking down out of the airplane window as the interstate drifts in and out of view:

What if it felt as slow to actually drive as it looked from this perspective? It would be like trying to run underwater. The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception’s objects.

The airplane can pitch and elevate us to a prosaically more godlike view, but it’s a 35,000-foot false perspective. Up here it’s still heading that matters to us. Our business on highways, which we had convinced ourselves was so urgent and fast and important on the ground, looks like stasis from this high. Even being up here and attaining that perspective is a letdown: “Above and below were a different story, but there was always something disappointing about clouds when you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all.”

This early in the novel it’s not clear that there’s anything grand or unifying that knits together the disparate stories of Week 1, but I worry for Sylvanshine, the trailer park girl and even Lane Dean (from §6) all because they seem stuck in their motion toward futures over which they have no control, and always in the real-or-metaphorical passenger seat. (Dean: “felt sun on one arm as he pictured in his mind an image of himself on a train, waving mechanically to something that got smaller and smaller as the train pulled away.”) Maybe this is what boredom–something we’ve heard is going to be a central theme of the book–is going to end up being later on: the experience of the mind being locked in a kind of loop of the moment-to-moment present as we are in constant, intangible motion toward our uncertain future.

Like most broad cinematic beginnings, the motion of the opening passage in §1 slows and narrows and comes to rest on the small and specific tableaux that will sit with us for the rest of the book:

the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by  the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in  rows and inset curls that do not close because the head never quite touches the tail. Read these.

I find this image chilling. Initially from all the soil and stasis and death, like the creepy stillness of the deceased, undiscovered IRS worker we learn about in §4. Ultimately though it’s the almost-closed circles that stay with me, the imperfect frozen unfulfilled loops that the camera rests on.  Of all the images we’ve just seen it says: read these.

But lots of novel to come, this is only Week 1.  It’s Spring. Think Farm Safety. Here we go.

We’ve also got a GoodReads group; join on in. If you’d like to join in as a blogger, please write Amanda French at amanda@amandafrench.net.