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.
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:
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.
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.