Mindfulness

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Company, 2011)

Talking about DFW is something I do quite a bit, but that I find intensely difficult. (And I'm far from the end of the bell curve of his most devoted fans.) So I'm gonna skip all a whole bunch and go straight to an attempt to make some sort of sense for myself of this unfinished work.

I found myself wondering how long this novel would have been if finished. There's so much... it stands up well as it is, but then I think about Infinite Jest, and I start to think that maybe these 538 are really only about half. And that's.... well, it is. We can leave it there.

What DFW had in mind only really became clear at the end, in the notes, where I was like: ohhhhhh, so that's why everyone was so ... what's the word? They were all gifted. But these quirks all seemed to make sense in middle of the mind-numbing bureaucracy of an IRS building in the middle of a Midwestern field in the middle of the 1980s. It's as much about being present, and paying attention, and breaking through that wall. Thus.... a big long list.

• "It was true: The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not." (Esp, in the case of the character thinking this, when you are inundated with extraneous information.)
• This unbelievable passage, too long to quote in full here, about the power of interrupting a conversation and asking "what's wrong?" which will shock the other person into wondering how you know. "He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. ... He doesn't know everybody's always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they're exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing's ever wrong, from seeing it."
• §13 is a really quality depiction of the thought process in panic attacks, and the way anxiety about having anxiety becomes the central source of the anxiety.
• This is (naturally) a footnote: "There are secrets within secrets, though--always."
• The 100-page mega-chapter has several thought-provoking moments, although it becomes funny when you realize later one what its function is.
• A callback here to that first quote I mention: "It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it's a choice." Different speaker, same idea.
• Oh, and that guy's mom becomes a lesbian in the mid1970s and opens a feminist bookstore called Speculum Books. I loved this.
• Advice often merely points out "the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of [the advisee's] own situation and path."
• Wallace, as a character: "What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point - otherwise we might as well just be computers downloading raw data to one another."
• Back on the point of paying attention, there's another lovely long passage (by the DFW character) about concentration and studying and how most paying attention is done in "jagged little fits and starts" and is mostly all the things we do to distract ourselves.
• Oh, and then we get to the uncomfortably true observations about the banality of certain immaturities... that no one truly understands and loves you for who you are and "you're also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you're feeling it, the loneliness, so you don't even have any sympathy for yourself."

And this doesn't even get at how interested and funny and annoying and actually quite tragic most of the characters are. At how fascinating and extraordinarily rich and DFWian. This book is a treasure, partially formed. And that, unfortunately, has to be enough.

It's a choice, mindfulness. It's a choice what we pay attention to. And everything about David Foster Wallace makes me want to remember that. And to make choices that I find satisfying. It's so difficult; it's unbelievably and maddeningly difficult. But still worth the trying.

Festival of Books + DFW

Before I tackle The Pale King in full, I thought I would start with a quick and dirty overview of the panel I attended yesterday. Times book critic David Ulin moderated a panel with Wallace's biographer D.T. Max, agent Bonnie Nadell, and editor Michael Pietsch.

The discussion began with Nadell's and Pietsch's experience in the weeks and months following Wallace's death, compiling the thousands of pages of work and going through it to see how much of a book was there. It moved on to an exploration of some of the ideas he explores in the work and, for lack of space to consider it more fully, why the work remained unfinished.

Of our threesome, we had just finished the novel, were halfway through, and were about to start. But the discussion I think worked for all of us, although we were distracted by what appeared to be some tension between Nadell & Pietsch, who knew DFW much longer and more intimately, and Max.

A couple interesting lines I picked up from each:

Max mentioned the struggle of "pushing away extraneous noise and thoughts." Nadell noted that Wallace found non-fiction easier and more fun, and "he didn't trust how much fun it was." Pietsch formulated maybe my favorite question: "Is the plot what's happening while you think you're looking for the plot?"

Festival of Books - Trojan Edition

It's that time of year again where I brave the ridiculous sun and crowds to celebrate books with tens of thousands of other people. This year, the LA Times Festival of Books moved to the University of Southern California, which totally worked for me, although I really missed my excuse to get Diddy Riese. On the other hand, this year there was free Ben & Jerry's! (Yay volunteerism!)

My friend, her bro, & I wandered around, checking out booths, ducking into shady spots, and filling out the group crossword puzzles. We also added our reads to the giant "What are you reading?" wall. There is nothing quite so awesome as putting both The Pale King and Goodnight Tweetheart. (Do I contradict myself? ....) I was totally gratified to see several references to Beverly Cleary on there. Hurrah.

We also went to the DFW panel on The Pale King, but that's for another post...

This is water.

I have started DFW's The Pale King. As a result, he is much in my mind lately. (He is also much on the Twitter. Everywhere. Goodness.)

So I am listening to the Kenyon commencement speech from 2005. So powerful. Watch.

Part 2

National Library Week

I enjoyed the heck out of this NPR blog post about how awesome libraries are. It's a lot about how it's free, but there was also this:

In particular, I found that all those cheap romance paperbacks were beaten, mangled, shaken and stirred. Not so that you couldn't read them, but just so you knew they'd been read a lot. Oddly, I found this ... comforting. I picked up some of those horribly abused books and felt like I was putting my hands on tangible populism. Those books are there because they're read, and it actually made kind of a good reminder that the library was trying to help, that the idea was to serve readers.

And anyone who manages to check out DFW's Infinite Jest and three Nora Roberts novels on a single visit deserves applause for sheer awesomeness. (Also for being quite a bit like me, although I needed my own IJ copy, and have different guilty pleasure authors.)

Best of the 00s

(Reposted, a bit late, from Facebook, b/c clearly I have my priorities straight.)
This list was impossible to put together. In the end, I just went back through my blog, which only covers the second half of the decade. So it's my favorite books that were published 2000-09 that I read in 2005-09, with one exception, which was my favorite book of the decade and thus had to be included. It ended up being a slightly surprising list, because some of these I didn't particularly seem to like that much when I first read and posted about them. Who knows how favorites are made?

10. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
9. Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (which prob benefited from an Infinite Jest bounce)
8. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
7. The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta
6. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
5. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
4. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
3. The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
2. The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver (2)
1. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk (no review, but here are a couple other posts...)

DFW lives on

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1999

First and foremost, I am still sad that Infinite Summer is over. Although happily it is living on in the reading of more and new books. (I already own 2666 and am ready for January! Skipping Dracula.) And secondly, I am so grateful that LA has Skylight Books, and even more grateful that Skylight hosted an Infinite Summer party so we could all celebrate. (Plus, John Krasinski! see above for blurry proof)

I will skip my musings on how sweet Krasinski was and how much I am looking forward to seeing his film adaptation of the book. I will get right to the book, which I read in a hurry so that I could go see the film.

Here's the thing. With Infinite Jest, I knew what I was getting myself into. I gave myself lots of time, expected it to be hard. Why didn't I expect this with Brief Interviews? I guess because I had already battled through his fiction once, and thought I had the process down. And besides, this was less than 300 pages. And there was a lot going on in my life. What I had forgotten is that DFW never made things easy. So I blame myself for not liking this book all that much. And that said, it had some moments that blew me away. Here they are...

An adolescent boy at a community pool:

And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt inlight into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

And it is, of course, that last sentence that makes that whole paragraph amazing.

B.I. #14 (pp. 14-15) - it's the ones that understand that are the worst, that bring out his contempt. Because his affliction, you see, Is. Not. Understandable.

All of Pop Quiz #9 (pp. 123-36) and its call back to the ambiguity of PQ #4. And the fucking sincerity of DFW, that breaks your heart and makes you want to be a better person.

At any rate it's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe [you are]. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure [...]

With a different writer, that could just be meta and pretentious and everything else. But with Wallace, for whatever reason, you believe him. You believe that he's really had these feelings and these moments of self-doubt, and is sharing them with you because he really wants you to understand, not as some sort of cute exercise. And that's why he means so much to so many people.

Nothing lasts forever, not even an Infinite Summer

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1996

I finished the book three weeks ago, but wasn't ready to write about it, to really be finished with it. But it seems like there's no better day that on the first anniversary of Wallace's death to take a stab at wrapping up my time with the novel. For now anyway. I won't try to memorialize DFW here, since Infinite Summer (and others, I am sure) have already done a far better job of that. But know he's been very much on my mind.

But the novel. My book is battered and bruised. It was a little roughed up before, since it was a borrowed used copy. But now I'm a little embarrassed to give it back. I also don't want to have to return it. This is the physical copy that I read. That means something. (I also feel this way about my copy of Fall of a Sparrow, which is why I spurned my mom's gift of a nice hardback edition.)

I have run my mind ragged trying to figure out what happened and what it all means. I'd come close to an epiphany, and then it would shimmer and disappear. And that's okay. I don't really mind anymore. I'll read it again someday, and maybe I'll see something new. I'm sure I will see something new. But it won't offer all the answers either.

I mainly just read and read. And didn't stop and note funny quotes or moments that I particularly wanted to go back to. So when I did write on my bookmark, you would figure those moments would be important. And they are, except now I look at them and I don't know what I wanted to say. What I do know is that they are all about Hal. Hal through the lens of Mario. Hal and sadness and irony and and Avril's awesome definition of existential ("vague and slightly flaky"). And Hal & Mario talking almost past each other.

'I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it's right to.'
'Marvelous.'
'I feel like you're the only one who knows when it's right to tell. I can't know for you, so why should I be hurt.'
'Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.'
'I wasn't hurt. I don't want you to be sad.'
'You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It's called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go away.'

It's so.... it's too big to talk about. I wish I could, and it makes me crazy a little that I can't. If I had specific questions to answer - if this were an essay exam where someone asked me something like "Compare and contrast the archetypal roles that mother- and father-figures play for the main characters" I would have something to say. But to just try to get over 1000 pages into a single post, or even several posts, it's too much.

Three: something important is about to happen. Pay attention. Yes, you.

How to Buy a Love of Reading - Tanya Egan Gibson
New York: Dutton, 2009

The gimmicky premise: Nouveau Riche Long Islanders decide to show up their neighbors and serve their chubby and anti-intellectual daughter by becoming patrons of the arts. That is, they hire an author to move into their home and write a novel to their daughter's specifications. Needless to say, things don't entirely go as planned.

The cast:

• Carley is the daughter, overweight and addicted to reality television. But she may be way more perceptive than she seems. She also is in love with...
• Hunter, her best friend. Also super hot and popular. Also an alcoholic who pops pills, worships Fitzgerald, and cries more than I ever knew any boy to. He's the only one who has actually read the first novel by...
• Bree, whose postmodern trickery (and footnotes! footnotes everywhere!) makes her the unlikeliest of candidates to write a Arthurian novel (the theme of Carley's upcoming Sweet 16, selected by her parents) for a teen girl. She's a former classmate of...
• Justin, a successful novelist and Hunter's idol and neighbor technically, although he's been gone since being shot by a deranged fan.

There are other characters too, obviously. I can leave them aside for now. And I will not even try to get into the web of relationships just among these four. Suffice it to say that love shows itself in strange ways. And sometimes we love someone not because of who they are, but who we are for loving them. And do those lies and misperceptions - the fault of love - matter, in the end?

I waited a week to write about this book because I had SO much to say. I still do, particularly about love and how desperately selfish it can be. How maybe we would be happier if we loved people for who they were instead of ghosts or mirages. How a "happy" ending can still be the wrong one. And how a father holding a bouquet of flowers can be the trigger that makes me cry. I honestly don't even know if I liked this book - it was ambitious, that's for sure, but that's doesn't necessarily make it successful. But like it or not, it made me think far more than I expected.

And a few miscellaneous thoughts: did I feel like the parody of pomo literature was at the expense of DFW? Not sure, but considering my other summer reading, it was on my mind. Also, the line that turned into the title of this post. It made me happy. Gibson's descriptions of Justin's panic attacks weren't entirely convincing, but perhaps close enough. And Aftermemory. When you go back and relive events the way you wished they could be. But none of this is as important as the rest of it. So go back and re-read the previous paragraph.

This is water

(aka an update on Erin's own Infinite Summer)

I'm a member of that generation that has a hard time with sincerity. Whenever feelings get a little too real, we need to say something caustic, ironic, to back away. Is this a generational thing, or a cultural thing, or just part of being young? I'm not sure. Anyway, I found it again yesterday while reading about Mario Incandenza:

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. (p. 592, btw)

And that's the thing about Madame Psychosis for him (and prob not just him) - she talks about "stuff that is real."

Because I suspect we all secretly crave that sincerity, even as we are embarrassed by it.

So this is the real thing I read 2 pages before, about Mario, that just pulled and pulled at me:

He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's states of mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn't have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

Oh, and the title for this post? That's from here.

I really cannot believe I read this.

The Hopeless Romantic's Handbook - Gemma Townley
New York: Ballantine, 2007

I am really enjoying Infinite Jest. A lot. But it is hard work. (Lots of testimonials to this fact over at the Infinite Summer site.) Instead of giving up, I am taking brain breaks. I have also been fighting off a cold.

All of which led to reading this. Believe me people, I KNOW. And I'm not even going to go into the story of how I came across it. What has been fun - and more fun than reading the book, which was fine, I guess - has been casting the actors in the film version. I've gotten as far as NOT Keira Knightley thankyouverymuch for Kate (maybe Natalie Dormer? or Jacinda Barrett?), Martin Freeman for Tom. I'm having more trouble with Joe, perhaps b/c I can totally picture him but can't think of the actor who is most "him." Leaning toward someone like Teddy Dunn. Anyway, I am back to the tome and on track to finish before my semester starts.

Characters I Love

Memories are slippery, so I can't be sure exactly how dramatic this moment actually was, but I remember sitting, at 17, in a waiting room at Kaiser. I was there with my grandmother for some appointment or other, and I was reading War and Peace. (Isn't this how everyone spends the summer after their high school graduation?) Anyway, I had a thing for Prince Andrei. In fact, I'm looking forward to re-reading the book just so I can see how he holds up over a dozen years. And so there came a moment where another character acts in a way that will hurt him, and I exclaimed, to the whole room, "You whore!" Um, that was embarrassing.

Anyway, he's not the only character I have gotten too close to. And if you add in tv shows and movies, I am over-empathizing with characters all the time. But he's still the one that matters the most.

And now, reading Infinite Summer, I find myself (like Avery Edison) liking Hal Incandenza just a little too much. And fearing for him. Avery says anxious, and since I have such a close personal relationship with anxiety, it goes without saying that that's the best word for it. I just... I want it to be okay. But I don't think it will be.

I've always liked to root for the bad guy and tried to create antiheroes where they didn't exist. And I was down with my ex who, we joked, only liked movies where people died at the end. And yet.... A co-worker was telling me something he heard about ways in which women conceive of fairness differently than men. And really, when it comes down to it, as much as I don't want to be like everyone else, man do I crave the happy ending. I want things to be the way they are supposed to be. Which isn't always happy per se. But is the way I feel like it should be. It's unoriginal perhaps, and quite possibly is pretty unhealthy, but it's me.

All that said, I can't imagine DFW giving me what I want. And probably I'd respect him less if he did.

Did I mention I am doing this?

Infinite Summer

Which is not quite what it sounds like, the long lazy summers of my youth. Or at least, the ways we choose to remember the summers of our youth.

Anyway, I am reading DFW's Infinite Jest, alongside a cast of thousands. And as could be expected, I started late, then got ahead, and now have stopped to read another book. But it's fantastic. I don't think I know how to talk about it. I tried, a little, yesterday, and ended up mostly speechless. All I could really say was that his mind worked in a way that we, as mere mortals, can't really understand. Which is what made him a genius. And also what must have been such pure torture.

Vote! (or else I'll footnote you to death)

Among other things in recent days, I've been reading Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace's collection of essays about random cultural phenomena that he has been contracted by some magazine or another to write about. He's an interesting guy - I'd like to know a little more about him. (Probably googling or wiki-ing him would work. If only I weren't too lazy to do that before writing this...)

Anyway, DFW has a reputation for being ridiculously smart and for loving the footnotes. As a tangential, full-of-asides thinker, I like this. But I still think it's a gimmick. Plus, it sometimes works better than others. In "Big Red Son," the footnotes are hilariously juxtaposed against the topic, which is porn. In "Host," the footnotes are actually placed within boxes within the body of the text, with arrows from the referring point (and sometimes more arrows to fn's about fn's, etc.) Visually kinda cool. The Dostoyevsky article, on the other hand, is too academic for footnotes, even if it seems ironic to write that. And "Up, Simba," a 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain, would completely flounder if it had footnotes at all.

Which reminds me, "Up, Simba" is perhaps the most interesting article of the bunch. (Speaking as a historian.) It's an amazing reminder of how quickly political history can move. McCain's primary opponent is "the Shrub" and the journalists are in thrall to their cell phones (with pull-out antennae) and the occasional Palm Pilot. Imagine political wonks now without their Blackberries. And DFW's commentary on voter apathy and politician sincerity and the staged artifice of the whole campaign trail is like crack for this post-West Wing viewer. And since political engagement is near and dear to my heart, I was particularly impressed by this passage:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary [replacable with Election - ed.] day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

And this is backed up by all sorts of anecdotal evidence, btw. Anyway, I'm planning to use this argument whenever I can. It's the kind of thing that you know on some level, but sometimes need spelled out for you. At least I think so.

I'm going to put Infinite Jest, DFW's novel, on my reading list. I need the extra information to determine what exactly I think of this hyper-erudite writer.