Some quotes and my thoughts regarding "Although of course you end up becoming yourself"

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A road trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky

I am thrilled to see that this book is almost entirely just long paragraphs of unrehearsed DFW conversation, I'm sure edited down though it reads as though it was unedited at all, and that everything he said was just transcribed from the tape recorder into this book. I am going to buy it, because the sheer number of the post-it notes that I have stuck to almost every page of my library copy means I probably should.

I can't help but read what he says as direct advice about how to be a creative person - "w/r/t" painting or writing or, at the risk of being too sincere and therefore sounding like a sap, the rest of my life. Anyway, he talks like this is a conversation, he talks about writing as a conversation with the reader, and I'm going to converse back.

38
"Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff -- this is gonna get very abstract -- but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So the reader feels less lonely."

This is exactly how I feel about you, DFW. That is exactly what I felt when I read you for the first time (and to a different degree, Dave Eggers but that's probably a true statement most of the time.) I have been trying to articulate that's how you made me feel since I read you, and there you go, saying it yourself.

You say "the way it feels on your nerve endings." Yes. That is exactly right too. That's what it is about you that is so true most the time -- especially the sad stuff that I can't even read. It feels way too much like how these things really feel.

41
"What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit--to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. . . . It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop . . . and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person."

Again, you have described what it is that you do so perfectly well. People keep describing you as an unusually awake person, a very aware person (probably to the point of too much self-awareness, or self-conscious self-awareness which I of course find so appealing). You DO make me feel smarter for having read what you say. You let me IN on the insights somehow. And all I wish I could do is be more AWAKE all the time. And I think the few times when I have felt connected to other human beings, and therefore alive by that connection, was when I felt like they and I were both equally perceiving what was going on around. Like, we are on pace with one another. People who make me feel smart and funny when I talk with them because we both get the jokes at the same time, both find the same things interesting or funny.

62
"'Cause see, by this time, my ego's all invested in writing, right? It's the only thing that I've gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for, to the extent that I wanted."

FOOD PELLETS FROM THE UNIVERSE.

71
"Because a good book as to teach a reader how to read it." Were you the first one to say this? Who said this?
Later
"You teach the reader that he's way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you're dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you're the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy.When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think-- and I'm not saying I'm the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we're smart. And that there's stuff that TV and movies--although they're great at certain things --cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, you know, to get these other kinds of art. And I think you can see it in the visual arts, I think you can see it in music."

I get the feeling that if I could live like this all the time, I'd be a better person. This is what I mean by that comment before about you possibly giving advice on how to live, as grandiose as that seems.

72
"There's a thing in Lester Bang's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, about certain music giving you an erection of the hart. And that term really resonates for me. "The Balloon" gave me an erection of the heart. ["The Balloon", a Donald Barthelme short story.] For me a fair amount of aesthetic experience is -- is erotic. And I think a certain amount of it has to do with this weird kind of intimacy with the person who made it."

I love that you get this - that you feel this way - and that it doesn't sound insane to say it. I have always had what amounts to crushes on people for this kind of thing, and always felt a little weird for it, for feeling this attraction to someone because of what they made or wrote or said. Like I am imagining too much between me, a nobody, unseen, at the receiving end of the work, and this person.

73
"I'll bet, I mean, I don't know you, but I'll bet there'll come a time when you realize you're always gonna have about as much success as you need, and that's fine."

I love this. I love that way of seeing success. Seems awfully wise.

94
"I always feel that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me."

160
"I'm talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don't believe in politics, and don't believe in religion. And believe that civic movements or political activism are either a farce or some way to get pwoer for the people who are in control of it. Or who just . . . who don't believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific. ironists and pokers of holes. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just, it doesn't seem to me that there's just a whole lot else."

Pokers of holes.

174
"I mean, it was all -- and I was so arrogant. I would have this defense, that when the professors would say they didn't like the stuff, I would think it was because they didn't understand the grand conceptual schemes I'd laid on it. But I was not willing to realize that I'd laid the grand conceptual schemes on a substance that was essentially, "How will this enable me to show off in way X?""

180
"Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there's nothing like--there's no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older."

It's the same way with a crush, with "unrequited" love, I think. It is, to use your word, devastating to desire someone that doesn't desire you back, but the feeling of being desired by someone else in no way matches it in intensity.

215
"I doubt I'm all that different from other like you know, seriously overeducated, intellectual kids. I really had this -- I think I really had a very difficult time believing that anybody else, um, was at all like me. Or was anywhere as smart as me.
And please, if you put this in, make it clear that I'm talking about really how I was, like twelve, fifteen years ago. That I mean I, that I'm real embarrassed by that, you know? And I'm sayig it only 'cause I pray that other people will, like--that other people will have been the same way."

273
"And I remember in college, al ot of even the experimental stuff I was excited by, I was excited by because I found reproduced in the book certain feelings, or ways of thinking or perceptions that I had and the relief of knowing that I wasn't the only one, you know? Who felt this way. Who had, you know, worried that perhaps the reverse of paranoia was true: that nothing was connected to anything else. I remember that early on in Gravity's Rainbow and really getting an enormous charge out of it."

I looked for this at the library, by the way, and it is like an enormous book. I don't think I'm ready to commit to reading this just now. But someday I will. :) Because all this stuff is like laying out a curriculum, I feel like, so that I can see what it is that you saw when you read this stuff and understand this history and context that makes what you say so true. If that makes any sense at all. And sounds weird.

275
"I think with writing it's really feeling that, their brain voice for a while becomes your brain voice. And that you feel -- the Vulcan Mind Meld perhaps is a better analogy.
That just, they feel intimate with you, in a way. Or that you'd be, not just that you'd be somebody that id' be great to be friends with, but that they are your friend. And you know, one reason why I've got an unlisted number, and why I really try to hold down on the mail, is that, is that stuff is difficult to deal with. Because I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings. But it's also a delusion, and it's kind of an invasive one. But then I realize that I set up it by doing just what I did, and so it all gets very . . ."

293
"I think if you dedicate yourself to anything, um, one facet of that is that it makes you very very selfish. And that when you want to work, you're going to work. And you end up using people. Wanting people around when you want them around, but then sending them away. And you just can't afford to be that concerned about their feelings. And it's a fairly serious problem in my life. Because, I mean, I would like to have children. But I also think that sort of life that I live is a pretty selfish life. And it's a pretty impulsive life. And you know, I know there's writers I admire who have children. And i know there's some way to do it. I worry about it. I don't know that I want to say anything much more about it-- I mean, there's jokes about getting laid on tour and stuff."

305
"It'd be very interesting to talk to you in a few years. My own experience is that that's not so. That the more people think that you're really good, um, actually the stronger the fear of being a fraud is."

On Albert K. Bender

There is a really excellent radio piece by Paul Tough which he presented on the pilot episode of the Little Gray Book lectures in which he recounts his father's attempts to communicate with intelligent alien life forms. Through this story, which is both funny and touching and poetic in the way it deals with the irony of a person who has trouble communicating with people of this planet reaching out to beings from another, Tough also shares a lot of interesting history of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. He includes the story of Albert K. Bender, the editor of "Space Review."

I'm pretty sure, though I can't place it in my brain, there have been episodes of the X-files devoted to this man, if not at least alluding to him.

This lead me to want to know more about Albert K. Bender.

From the website: Global Windows

"The Men in Black are beings who appear anywhere major UFO sightings take place. They threaten people who claim to have seen UFOs, and intimidate them into silence. They wear sunglasses. They wear black suits. They have olive complexions. They drive black mint-condition vintage luxury cars, or sometimes they fly in black helicopters. Some think that they are government agents. Some think that they are alien agents."

"In his book, The UFO Silencers, Timothy Beckley has attempted to provide an overview of important and representative MIB encounters. According to Beckley, MIB have been with us for many hundreds of years, speculating that such diverse characters from the history of witchcraft and folklore as the Elizabethan "Black Men", the Native American "Black Man" and late nineteenth century reports of malevolent traveling salesmen, might have been manifestations of what we now know as Men in Black."

"An odd incident in the history of the Men in Black is the strange case of Mr. O. H. Krill. 

Mr. Krill's writings first gained publicity some time in the late 1980's when a text file called "The O.H. Krill Papers" was placed on the ParaNet B.B.S. The file told the story of shadow governments in cooperation with gray aliens, secret underground bases, exchanges of human organs for alien technologies, and the like. He offers the following information on the Men in Black:


All things considered, UFO research has become pretty much of a circus today, and the most intriguing and controversial sideshow skirting the edges is the question of the "silencers," or the mysterious "Men in Black." There is a strong subliminal appeal in these accounts of visits by mysterious dark-suited figures (I have been visited myself, as have others I've known) attempting to silence UFO witnesses. A typical situation would be that a witness has a UFO sighting or UFO-related experience. Shortly thereafter he is visited by one or more "odd"-looking men who relate to him the minutest details of his experience, even though he has as yet told no one for fear of ridicule or other reasons.

The men warn him about spreading the story of his experience around and sometimes even threaten him personally, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly. Any evidence, if it exists, is confiscated in one way or another. Sometimes the visit is for some totally meaningless reason and the subject of UFOs is hardly mentioned, if at all. But again, the men all seem to look alike.

We actually seem to find ourselves in close proximity to beings who obviously must be directly connected in some way with the objects themselves or the source behind them, yet they seem to be functioning unobtrusively within the framework of our own everyday existence.

The classic conception of an MIB is a man of indefinite age, medium height and dressed completely in black. He always has a black hat and often a black turtleneck sweater. They present an appearance often described as "strange" or "odd." They speak in a dull monotone voice, "like a computer," and are dark-complected with high cheekbones, thin lips, pointed chin, and eyes that are mildly slanted.

The visitors themselves are often on absurd missions. They have reportedly posed as salesmen, telephone repairmen or representatives from official or unofficial organizations. Their mode of transportation is usually large and expensive cars -- Buicks or Lincolns, sometimes Cadillacs, all black, of course.

I might note at this point that their physical appearance also has included beings that have pale-grayish skin, and that some of them have been seen to have blond hair, yet they wear the clothing and drive the cars previously described.

Their cars often operate with the headlights off, but ghostly purple or greenish glows illuminate the interior. Unusual insignia have been seen emblazoned on the doors and the license plates are always unidentifiable or untraceable.

The fabric of their clothes has been described as strangely "shiny" or thin, but not silky -- almost as if they have been cut from a new type of fabric.

Their often mechanical behavior has caused them to be described by some as being like robots or androids.

A lot of descriptions of some of these "folks" are pretty bizarre. A businessman's family in Wildwood, New Jersey, was visited by an unusually large man whose pants legs hiked up when he sat down, revealing a green wire grafted onto his skin and running up his leg.

There are other cases of MIB appearing on the other side of a wet, muddy field after a heavy rain, but having no mud whatever on their brightly shined shoes and in the bitter cold, out of nowhere, wearing only a thin coat. Their shoes and wallets all seem new and hardly broken in."

First of all, I like this sort of writing. "He is warned. The men leave, their squeaky clean black shoes oddly unscuffed and unmuddy. And he never publishes again." :) so ominous and odd. I like it :) It's very truncated and dramatic.

Anyway, the website continues:

"Though Krill proved to be a fraud, the Krill documents are still valuable as an illustration of the Men in Black legend. Lear and Grace did not pull the incidents described in the Krill files entirely out of thin air. The Krill files were really a parody of the most extreme and bizarre UFO stories that circulated among the circles of UFO enthusiasts, and it was the resemblance between the Krill files and supposedly legitimate reports of UFO-related  phenomena that made the Krill hoax so successful.

Among UFO enthusiasts, the Krill files were accepted as legitimate documents for many years. Copies of the files are still to be found on the Internet, often presented as legitimate documents from a legitimate source. These files have had an influence on the Men in Black legend in the imaginations of all that have read them, and certainly must have had an effect on many fabricated account of Men in Black phenomena. For this reason,   sections of the Krill document remain on this page."

All this stuff is about legitimation and reality, and something being real and provable or not, and belief . . . and to what extent we need proof of something, and all of it is great. :) It's also kind of dangerously overwhelming -- that you can go so far down the rabbit hole, and that so many people do and loose sight of what might be reality.

Here is some more, from http://realmib.tripod.com/bender.html

"Men in Black encounters are genarlly said to have begun in 1953 with the case of UFO Investigator Albert K. Bender. Bender was the founder of the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB) and editor of a small publication called the "Space Review," that was dedicated to news of flying saucers. Late in the summer of 1953, Bender made a series of discoveries, which led him to believe that he had finally found the truth to the UFO cover-up. He had planned to reveal his findings in the October issue of the Space Review, but before the issue was published, Bender was visited by three "men dressed in black," who had already read the unpublished report and confirmed his findings. The "silencers" as he called them, scared Bender to the point where he did not publish the report, but left a warning: "We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious." Bender then suspended publishing on his publication and dissolved the IFSB."

More: (http://obscurantist.com/oma/bender-albert-k/

Associate of Gray Barker, whom he asked to be IFSB’s West Virginia chapter head and chief researcher.”It is suspected that Gray Barker pranked Albert Bender, dressing up with two friends in all black, warning Bender to stay away from UFOs. Barker persuaded Bender to go public with his story, resulting in the book Flying Saucers and the Three Men (1962).

And finally, this snippet, from - http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/jessup_marinov_einstein.htm.

In September of 1953, Albert K. Bender claimed that he had received certain information that provided the missing pieces for a theory concerning the origin of UFOs. He wrote it all down and sent it to a trusted friend. Shortly after, he received a visit from "Three Men." One of them held the letter he had written in his hand. They told him that he had, indeed, stumbled on the answer, and then they purportedly filled him in on the details. He became so ill he was unable to eat for three days. A couple of other UFO researchers, Dominick Lucchesi and August C. Roberts, tried to persuade Bender to talk. He would only repeat "I can't answer that."

Finally, in 1962, Bender declared that he would tell the story and wrote a book entitled Flying Saucers and the Three Men. It described astral projection to a secret base in Antarctica inhabited by male, female and bisexual creatures. Researchers were perplexed and wondered if the whole thing was just contrived to hide something more sinister. Lucchesi said that Bender was a "changed man" after the three men had visited him. He said "it was as if he had been lobotomized." Bender was obviously frightened, and suffered from extreme headaches whenever he even thought about speaking about his experiences and what the three men had told him. He withdrew completely from UFO research, and went to work managing a hotel, and refused to discuss anything about such matters ever again.

Not too many months after Bender's silencing, Edgar R. Jarrold, organizer of the Australian Flying Saucer Bureau, and Harold H. Fulton, head of Civilian Saucer Investigation of New Zealand, had received similar visits and disbanded their organizations. Just recently, I was informed of a fascinating case where another UFO discussion group was broken up by the arrival on the scene of a psychopathic "contactee" who later involved the leader of the group and several members in a murder. I hope to get a full report on this case soon and will keep the readers posted.