Time for some more gushing and praise for DFW

It's been awhile since I obsessed about DFW, so I figured now is a good time to check in. :) I'm working on reading The Broom of the System right now . . . though I don't have anything to say about that just yet. But I figured I'd clean out some of my old notes and ramblings . . . so here goes.

Just some things I love.

Really really incredible, moving essay on "The View from Mrs. Thompson's"
"LOCATION: BLOOMINGTON< ILLINOIS
DATES: 11-13 SEPTEMBER, 2001

SUBJECT: OBVIOUS"

I love this short essay. I want it.


Quote in Up, Simba (which was overall fantastic) . . . ."'catered lunches' which today are strange bright red ham on Wonder Bread, Fritos, and coffee that tastes like hot water with a brown crayon in it. . ." this made me laugh out loud

and this wonderful description

"Even the network techs, practically Zen masters at waiting around and killing time, are bored out of their minds at today's F&F, where after racing back and forth to get all their gear off the bus in the bad neighborhood and making a chaise of it (the gear) here in the back there's nothing to do but they also can't really go anywhere because their field producer might suddenly need help feeding tape. Te way the techs handle deep boredom is to become extremely sluggish and torpid, so that lined up on the ottoman they look like an exhibit of lizards whose tank isn't hot enough."

!!! :)

And now a long one.

david Foster Wallace p 95 in "Authority and American Usage" about words. I LOVE HIM.

"Take, for example, the Descriptivism claim that so-called correct English usages such as brought rather than brung and felt rather than feeled are arbitrary and restrictive and unfair and are supported only by custom and are (like irregular verbs in general) archaic and incommodious and an all-around pain in the ass. Let us concede for the moment that these objections are 100 percent reasonable. Then let's talk about pants. Trousers, slacks. I suggest to you that having the "correct" subthoracic clothing for U.S. males be pants instead of skirts is arbitrary (lots of other cultures let men wear skirts), restrictive and unfair (U.S. females get to wear pants), based solely on archaic custom (I think it's got something to do with certain traditions about gender and leg position, the same reasons girls' bikes don't have a crossbar), and in certain ways not only incommodious but illogical (skirts are more comfortable than pants; pants ride up; pants are hot; pants can squish the genitals and reduce fertility; over time pants chafe and erode irregular sections of men's leg hair and give older men hideous half-denuded legs, etc. etc.). Let us grant — as a thought experiment if nothing else — that these are all reasonable and compelling objections to pants as an androsartorial norm. Let us in fact in our minds and hearts say yes — shout yes — to the skirt, the kilt, the toga, the sarong, the jupe. Let us dream of or even in our spare time work toward an America where nobody lays any arbitrary sumptuary prescriptions on anyone else and we can all go around as comfortable and aerated and unchafed and unsquished and motile as we want.

And yet the fact remains that, in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a U.S. male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and dream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More to the point, if you are a U.S. male and also have a U.S. male child, and if that child were to come to you one evening and announce his desire/intention to wear a skirt rather than pants to school the next day, I am 100-percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Steven Pinker himself — you're going to stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbitrary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequentially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, because in modern America any little boy who comes to school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a Total Geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him. In our culture, in other words, a boy who wears a skirt is Making a Statement that is going to have all kinds of gruesome social and emotional consequences."

Anyway, I guess I was pretty focused on the fact that he is dead when I was writing all these thoughts below . . .

For most people who die when they still have loved ones left to mourn them, people are sad for the loss of that human being. But there is another kind of mouring which comes for people whose life work is so significant that we must also mourn what we will all miss by them not being alive anymore to contribute. David Foster Wallace is such a person. I am genuinely sad at what we will never hear.

When I read Shakespeare, I don't think "God, I cant' beleive he's dead," nor do I think "When I finish Midsummer Night's Dream, there will no more Shakespeare left to read!", but for people who might ostensibly be comfortably alive at this moment (John Lennon, for example, who could still have been writing music and touring even today) there is a certian kind of tragedy to their non-existence. What MORE could they have done during this time? What will we never hear. What books are not written, essays not published, opinions not shared. And it occurs to me that this is perhaps a sign of real artistic success -- that if you were to stop making what you make, there would be peole who would deeply mourn the loss of your contribution. To have a contribution that is so meaningful, and so unique, and so singular that it must come from you alone, and that what you gave people is something they will miss when there is no more of it, seems like the highest compliment that you can pay to a creative person. It is not the kind of success that means you are necessarily famous, or wealthy, or in history books, though the people that come to mind mostly were, at least famous. But it is more that the person you are and the work you did were so . . . unique and individual and dare I say personal that people will miss what you made, because it means that they cared about what you did, they loved it in a much more personal way that left them wishing for more, for the next thing. To never run out of new essays to read or new songs to listen to. I imagine what it might be like for someone (not even a lot of someones, but just some stranger who doesn't know the full you, but just your work) to await my paintings because they are in love with what they do or what they say. This is how I have felt about so many others (though mostly writers, comedians, etc.) that it seems like a fairly decent goal. It sounds like I'm aspiring to something really . . .I don't know . . . cheesy maybe . . . but I think I like this marker of success more than others because even though it sounds like a very very self-aggrandizing aspiration, but I think its actually kind of a humble thing, or at least I'd like to think it is, because it's about being so genuine and so real to who you are and making some kind of connection with another human being through your work.

---

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 "On Looking" by Lia Purpura

Potentially my future Creative Nonfiction writing teacher, in a brief "let's get to know you and see if I can let you into my class" meeting, recommended to me that I read a short book of essays by Lia Purpura called "On Looking." And so I did.

The thing about it is that it is hard to read, or much harder, much less accessible, in it's short paragraphs. The paragraphs and sentences are like little gems, wonderfully selected descriptions that are sort of at once lavish and very simple and believable . . . unique and fresh ways of describing something that immediately paint a vision in your mind. It is very much like poetry. and yet you struggle as a reader to connect these paragraphs, to see what she is getting at overall, and to hold all the images in your mind long enough to see how they belong together. I like it because even if I can't quite pin my finger on just what it is that emerges from these small treasures of writing, I do feel that something more significant is being said. And that makes me want my artwork to follow that model -- that a collection of gemlike pieces might somehow begin to generate, together, and hum and make a nicer thing that is more complex and more elusive than the parts alone. There is sort of an undercurrent of sadness or ominous warning or seriousness, by the mention of death so often in the pieces . . . like when she interjects a paragraph stating that all this was going on while her friend was dying. It lends a gravity and narrative to otherwise object-focused descriptions of things. She uses very small, very discrete narratives to make her point, but the whole of the essays begins to reveal something about her, about her life, about her family and friends, that makes it compelling, and she seems very present. I think this is important because the descriptions, were it not for her being so present, might be just lonely objects without this person to connect them and give them significance. Some of it was boring to read and it took longer and was significantly slower to finish, this book, than the other book I was reading simultaneously (a shamelessly dramatic novel with sex and suicide and mystery that i could barely put down), but this reminds me that the push to make art more "difficult" is actually not just an asshole move, but really does make some difference. I mean to say that there is something perceptibly better about her writing, so that even though it is more demanding of me as a reader, I feel more energized or alive by engaging with it, in a way that the novel cannot do. Anyway, it helps that I like HER, or the person she reveals as an author, and am continually amazed and surprised and pleased by her choices of words.

Said better than I, here are the publisher comments about her book

"Publisher Comments:
Lia Purpura's daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura's hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson's words: "I like the silent church before the sermon begins."

In "Autopsy Report," Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the "dripping fruits" of organs and the spine in its "wet, red earth." A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in "On Form," where she notes that "in order to see their particular beauty...we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction." Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual."

And an example of that writing:
"Purpura describes single objects beautifully: Chinese lanterns are 'those orange, papery pods gone lacy in fall, with a dim, silver berry burning inside.'"

Benevolence

The following quotes are from Ira Glass in his introduction to the New Kings of Nonfiction.

10
"One thing i love about Weschler and Orlean (and, come to think of most of these writers) is their attitude toward the people they're writing about. Weschler is clearly skeptical of his protagonist, Akumal. Orlean is not in argument with her ten-year old. But they try to get inside their protagonist's heads with a degree of empathy that's unusual. Theirs is a ministry of love, in a way we don't usually discuss reporters feelings toward their subjects. Or at least, they're willing to see what is loveable about the people they're interviewing. (Weschler's an ineresting case when it comes to this, because he's mildly annoyed by his main character for the early part of his story, and then comes to have an ovious and real affection for him.)

14
In that environment, these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing. They make the world seem like an exciting place to live. I come out of them feeling like a better person -- more awake and more aware and more appreciative of everything around me. That's a hard thing for any kind of writing to accomplish. In times when the media can seem so clueless and beside the point, that's a great comfort in itself."