April 2011

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Miscellaneous, Week 1
The Author’s Forward and the truth in fiction
04.28.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | 1 Comment

What gets me about David Foster Wallace is how he gets into your head: “That’s what I was thinking! Only better. OK, that’s what I thought about thinking. Make that ‘had a thought that could have led to, given a very generous estimation of my intellectual horsepower.’ ” A concept that seems to be crying out for a word of its own, no? Partception, maybe? Dimtuition? Anyway.

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.
Week 1
When you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all
04.27.11 | Aaron Riccio | Permalink | Comments Off on When you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all

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.
Week 1
Cheery Slo-Mo
04.27.11 | Craig Smith | Permalink | Comments Off on Cheery Slo-Mo

It goes without saying the difficulty in discussing a book that the author had not the opportunity to edit, or finish. Reading §9 was harrowing – he seems so optimistic, over-explaining what he considers a finished text, on the shelves, bought (he hopes) and enjoyed. But what a joy it was to read this chapter and hear DFW’s voice clear and straight.

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.
Week 1
Spring Forward
04.26.11 | Edward Raso | Permalink | 2 Comments

I won’t be breaking any news here–meteorological, agricultural, or metaphorical–in saying that spring is a time of rebirth. I know that. I also know that choosing such a potentially trite and banal subject like The Seasons to begin a blog post about one of the greatest writers of our time might be grounds for, as Wallace probably would have put it himself, literary (or perhaps even actual) defenestration. But god help us, that’s just what I intend to do. Hey, I’m breaking my blogging cherry here; it was bound to be awkward and messy anyhow.

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.
Week 1
Yaw was way in a mirror, it occurred for no reason
04.24.11 | Daren Chapin | Permalink | 1 Comment

[spoilers thru §8]

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.
Miscellaneous
We’re reading The Pale King this spring.
04.23.11 | Amanda French | Permalink | Comments Off on We’re reading The Pale King this spring.

Daren Chapin has put together a schedule, to which you can subscribe with iCal or Google Calendar.

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