June 2011

Posts

• Miscellaneous, Week 6

  The unboreable lightness of being

  06.23.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | Comments Off on The unboreable lightness of being

  “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.”

• Miscellaneous

  Infinite Joyce

  06.16.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | Comments Off on Infinite Joyce

  It’s Bloomsday. Literary New Year’s Eve for some of us in the macronovel fan community. (Yes, I know, certainly only some.) Season’s greetings from the Dept. of Great Minds Thinking Alike:

  “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)

• Miscellaneous

  Man On First

  06.02.11 | Edward Raso | Permalink | Comments Off on Man On First

  Q: What on Earth do you do to follow up when somebody hits it out of the park?

  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.

• Week 3

  Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist, Marcus the Moneylender and the Top Five College Nicknames

  06.02.11 | jbalaschak | Permalink | 3 Comments

  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.

   

   

• Miscellaneous, Week 3, Week 4

  The ghost in Wallace’s machine

  06.02.11 | Genno Kane | Permalink | Comments Off on The ghost in Wallace’s machine

  “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.

   

   

   

Pale Spring

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all posts

• The unboreable lightness of being
• Infinite Joyce
• Man On First
• Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist, Marcus the Moneylender and the Top Five College Nicknames
• The ghost in Wallace’s machine
• The antidote to Infinite Jest?
• with the same name and mnemonic phone number ending in 3668
• What he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse of mirrors of fear
• On Desk Names, the job of identity and the identity of the job
• The Average Molecular Weight of Peat
• Consider the Citizen
• The Author’s Forward and the truth in fiction
• When you were inside them; they ceased to be clouds at all
• Cheery Slo-Mo
• Spring Forward
• Yaw was way in a mirror, it occurred for no reason
• We’re reading The Pale King this spring.