May 2011

Posts

Miscellaneous, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5
The antidote to Infinite Jest?
05.16.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | 3 Comments

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.
Week 3
with the same name and mnemonic phone number ending in 3668
05.06.11 | Daren Chapin | Permalink | Comments Off on with the same name and mnemonic phone number ending in 3668

…on one side and the other a huge colored outline of a human foot.

(p. 163, §22).

3668 = FOOT

I just realized this today.
Week 2
What he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse of mirrors of fear
05.05.11 | Aaron Riccio | Permalink | Comments Off on What he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse of mirrors of fear

Skipping briefly ahead to the novella-length §22, we spend time with a first-person narrator who is suddenly struck by his ability to “double”; that is, to not only perceive the world around him, but to be aware of his own participation in that activity, of his choosing to do so. We’ll save deeper discussion of this for the upcoming weeks, but there’s a crucial observation on p. 180 that links the boredom of rote exams to the importance of “the ability to choose what one concentrates on versus ignoring” and which pillories the use of marijuana, an active choice that leads to a passive mental state. Here’s the frightening part: is there a connection, then, between being aware and being bored? That is, does the very act of exerting ourselves to be present exhaust us to the point of being miserable in that present? I hate to consider it, given Wallace’s self-awareness and eventual suicide, but can one know too much (i.e., the curse of the Tree of Knowledge)?

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.
Miscellaneous, Week 2
On Desk Names, the job of identity and the identity of the job
05.05.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | 3 Comments

Take everything ever written, thought or felt about the relationship between work and personal identity. Condense it into a page. That page is Section 18.

‘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.
Week 2
The Average Molecular Weight of Peat
05.01.11 | Edward Raso | Permalink | 2 Comments

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.

All of these facts came rushing towards me at the speed of light and my Mac’s CPU, but they arrived as noise–unwanted bits of information to sort through and serving only as a distraction to the task at hand.

Such is the life of Claude Sylvanshine, now revealed to us as a Random Fact Psychic. Claude, as we’ve read in Section 15, is constantly bombarded by irrelevant facts from an ESP that seems to be more of an affliction than a gift. Because of this, Claude is privy not only to the average molecular weight of peat, but the exact height of Mount Erebus and the length and average circumference of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s small intestine. As Wallace writes, this constant bombardment of information is like “having someone sing The Star-Spangled Banner in your ear while you’re trying to recite a poem for a prize.” Claude seems to spend a tremendous amount of his mental energy filtering these intrusive bits out of his everyday life. This section answers some questions I’ve had about Claude since meeting him on the plane last week. As Section 15 gives us that insight into Sylvanshine, it also entertains. The non sequitur quality of all of these facts interspersed throughout the narrative makes for the funniest reading so far this week.

But behind the character development and entertainment, Section 15 seems to be making a very big statement. Many of you know where this is going. Wallace constantly touched on it in his interviews and writing and does so again here in the fiction of The Pale King: Mindfulness. What I’d like to discuss specifically is Wallace’s worry about the increasing volume of noise in our daily lives and its effect on our ability to sustain long thoughts and the concentration required to absorb and parse serious and complex works of art and literature. Take a look at this interview where he discusses this at 2:10:

DFW on reading and distraction at 2:10

Welcome back. How much time did you spend aside from watching the video? Did you perhaps read the comments? Look at the related videos? Maybe you even went to another website altogether before coming back here.

DFW, for a period of time at least, did not own a television set (as a matter of fact, it’s for this very reason that the short story The View From Mrs. Thompson’s exists; Wallace had to go to a neighbor’s house to watch the unfolding of events of 9/11). He more or less said that he was addicted to television and that if he had one he’d never be able to shut it off. Much like Sylvanshine can’t shut off the intrusive facts that crowd his consciousness. Like I had to wade through those other facts about peat as I looked for its average molecular weight. If DFW was fearful of the information overload of television, one can only imagine how he felt about the Internet and Google, where I imagine someone as hyper-observant as DFW might have sat down in front of and, much like the medical attache’ from Infinite Jest, never get up from; like a dog locked in a butcher shop may eat itself to death.

Is this a realistic concern for all of us? I believe it might be. It is for me. I’m good, on average, for about a novel every week and a half; I take my fiction-reading seriously. Most of it is done on my commute into and out of Manhattan, on the train and if at all possible, in the quiet car. So there I am, speeding along at 75MPH +, Kindle or book in one hand, and more often than I’d like to admit: iPhone in the other. It’s the perfect example of the noisy, un-nourishing, instantly gratifying and easy vs. the harder but more rewarding forms of things to do with the two hours a day many of us spend inside metal contraptions of some sort. With me, It usually goes like this:

Read a page of the book, check Twitter. Read a half a page of the book, check Twitter again. Read a paragraph of the book, send a text, take a turn on one of the twelve games I have going on Words With Friends, IM somebody, wait for a response for fifteen seconds before checking Twitter and then my email, feel disgusted with my attention span and then put the phone in my bag. Read the book until I become unsettled and anxious, check Twitter again, wonder how my iPhone got out of my bag and into my hand, then get a reply from my text and then reply back and then read some more of the book. Tweet something on my iPhone about my iPhone being like Gollum’s ring and the irony of tweeting something like that from the actual iPhone, then put the iPhone back in my bag, this time zipping the bag up and placing it in the overhead rack. Read for the remaining five minutes until I have to get off of the train.

Does this sound crazy? It probably is. Especially considering that I have a choice; every one of us has a choice. Wallace chose not to own a television.
Week 2
Consider the Citizen
05.01.11 | Craig Smith | Permalink | Comments Off on Consider the Citizen

The editor of ‘The Pale King’, Michael Pietsch –

“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.

May 2011

Posts

Miscellaneous, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5

The antidote to Infinite Jest?

Week 3

with the same name and mnemonic phone number ending in 3668

Week 2

What he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse of mirrors of fear

Miscellaneous, Week 2

On Desk Names, the job of identity and the identity of the job

Week 2

The Average Molecular Weight of Peat

Week 2

Consider the Citizen

Pale Spring

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