Yukon ho!

Like Calvin and Hobbes in a Sunday comic strip I’m striking out for the Yukon.

Actually, I’m flying to Alaska to meet a friend from college ( let’s call him …John b/c, well, that’s his name. what are the odds, right) to help him make the drive from AK to St. Louis where’s accepted a new job. He and his wife have been living in AK for about nine years now, I think it is, and finally decided it was time to move back down to the lower 48.

Maybe about 12 or so years ago I had the chance to move to Alaska with John. This was before he was married and I was just out of grad school. I had no real reason not to go, but I balked anyway. Not exactly sure why. Perhaps that shall be the subject of my therapy session today. We shall see…

Anyhoo…I’ve always regretted not taking John up on that earlier offer, even though he was there only about 6 months and I likely would not have stayed on my own, but you never know, right. I could have at least said I’d lived in Alaska for a time. With that in mind, I didn’t want to let this opportunity pass. Fortunately, I was able to get the time off work and my wife was more than understanding about the trip. In fact, she said she’d be pissed at me if I didn’t go, which makes me wonder if she’s just trying to get me out of the house. I wouldn’t be surprised — I learned along ago that I’m the kind of person that others need a break from, from time to time. And John was willing to use his frequent-flyer miles to pay my airfare because there is no way I could have afforded a ticket to Alaska right now.

So I’m pretty much all set. Just need to pack and be on my way. I’m not taking the laptop. If I do any writing it will be with the low-tech method of pen and paper, although John will have his so I may be able to post about my trip. Most of the trip is going to be about driving, though. But I will need something to read, especially since I have a more than three-hour layover in Salt Lake City. Originally, I thought to reread “Girl with Curious Hair,” by David Foster Wallace as well as J.D. Salinger’s “Nine Stories,” but then we got in the new edition of “On the Road.” This is the “original script,” the way it was before it had been edited. Apparently there was content that just couldn’t be pub’d at the time. But it’s in there now.

I have never read “On the Road,” if you can believe that. People are often surprised to discover that I haven’t read it. Not sure why. I guess I just seem like an “On the Road” kind of guy. I’ve tried to read it a few times but there was something about it that I just couldn’t get into. That happens to me with some books. But that was before. Now I think might be the right time to try again.

In any case, I’m now toggling between excitement and nervousness. I don’t travel much, especially on my own, especially on airplanes — my wife is the expert traveler. Hell, my daughter has logged more miles in the air than me, and she’s only soon to be 9. It’s kind of sad really. But that’s a subject for another navel-gazing post.

Yukon ho!

Await your reply

Not the signature, the novel by Dan Chaon, which I have been very eager to read.

Well, my hold finally came up on the one copy we have at library last week and I’ve been deeply immersed every since. I even put down DFW’s “Broom of the System” to take up Chaon’s novel. So he should be very grateful, like free autographed-copy grateful.

I blogged about this novel previously, in a post concerning this notion of people walking away from their lives. In part, Chaon’s novel explores this ….issue(?), which was partly why I’ve been so geeked to read it. The other part is that I’ve been a fan of Chaon’s work for some years now, ever since I discovered his first book, a short story collection entitled “Fitting Ends.”

Since in reply to my post, Mr. Chaon  himself confirmed, to  my surprise and delight, that he in fact does think of himself as a GenX writer, that is how I’m thinking about it. Although, truth be told, I probably would have even had he not considered himself a GenX writer. I mean, unless he threatened to beat me up after school or something.

Anyhoo… All the major characters in this story walk away from their lives, for one reason or another, which was intriguing enough for me, but by part two you realize that what this is leading to is a novel about identity theft, which would not have surprised me had a read the blurb on the back by Jonathan Franzen. Duh. But really, who reads blurbs. Okay. I admit it. I do.

In any case, I don’t think I’ve ever read a serious novel about identity theft. It’s a fascinating subject, and lends a kind of thriller quality to this novel, though at heart it a literary human drama.

The narrative drive is pitch perfect. And the level of invention is superb. Though it is a cliche, it is a page turner, because you’re so eager to find out what happens next, and not just in a plot point way, aka who done it, but in a character development way, aka why characters do what the do.

Not to go on too long (because that is so not like me [yeah whatever]), but an example of Chaon’s invention prowess is the part I am currently at. The character Lucy, a misfit orphaned teenager who has run away with her 32 year old Yale-educated high school History teacher, George. To of all places Nebraska and an old hotel and house that George has inherited.

What struck me first about the hotel/house, was that it made me think of the movie “Psycho.” But what ended up being even more interesting was that it was located next to what was once a vast reservoir, which long since been drained by farmers. The reservoir was originally created by flooding a kind of valley that once contained a small town. Now the town is re-exposed but of course as a kind of ghost town, a drowned ghost town of sorts. The idea, the image, is both eerie and miraculous. Love it! And there is still plenty more to read.

locating the groove of the system

Saturday I marked the 1 year aniversary of David Foster Wallace‘s death by working on my novel and beginning, yet again, the author’s fist book, the novel Broom of the System. This was the 6th or 7th time attempting to read it through. In the past I never got more than 100 or so pages into it. Not sure exactly why. Unlike Infinite Jest it is not incredible dense, although it has a wonderfully dynamic plot, not to mention impressive wordplay and humor, which has become all the more apparent to me this time around; for some reason I seem to have found the groove the story. This happens to me a lot with book. I’ll start them and not be able to get into them only to return later to readily devour them. Of course, in most cases I don’t usually return a half a dozen times or more. DFW is a different case, though. Even though in the past I wasn’t quite getting what I was reading my instinct told me that this was work that was worth coming back to as many times as necessary until I finally got it, which seems to be the case this time.

Reading the book Understanding David Foster Wallace, a critical review of his work up to Infinite Jest, I think helped a lot. No doubt now there will be more books on his work to come. Also, his unfinished novel, The Pale King, is due to be released in 2010.

In any case, perhaps once I get Broom under my reading belt I can finally attempt IJ. Got about 400 page into it this summer before dropping out. But that was my first serious attempt at the monolithic novel. I’ll be back.

Yes. I am still reading Infinite Jest

Lest any of you think I wussed out and gave up. Indeed, I did not.

Currently, I am on page 130-something. It can be dense and slow going, and yet still absorbing. In fact, it’s often exciting, even exhilerating. I realize that probably sounds pretty geeky, but its true. There is so much going on, and I’m sure that I’m only grasping about 10% of it, but still its worth it for what I am absorbing.

In some ways it is a manic experience, reading DFW’s prose, especially the prose in this novel. It seems as if you can feel the author’s intensity via his words. Although, I have to admit that in the evening, after a full day of work, the size of that book can be daunting, and I look for ways to avoid reading it. Such as getting interested in reading his short stories, particularly from Girl with Curious Hair, his first collection. Plus, working at a library I am often seduced by new books coming in.

And just yesterday, I started a new novel, Revolutonary Road, by Richard Yates. I’ve been meaning to read this one for years. I’ve always heard it was very good. Apparently, a lot of writers are fans of it, but it isn’t necessarily widely popular. Written in the early 60s, it is set in the mid-50s and is concerned with a young married couple who seemed to be frustrated by the banality of 50s suburban life. I’ve started this novel a couple of times but never got far. Not sure why. This time is different. I’m getting into. I wonder how much of that has to be do with being married now and living in a suburb. What inspired me to pick it up again? They’re making a movie out of it. I was surprised. Saw the preview last weekend when Colleen and I went to see Ghost Town, with Ricky Gervais, a movie that is better than it appears based on the trailers. Anyhoo… RR is going to star Leo Cap and Kate Winslet. And yeah, my first reaction was: is this a good idea, putthing these two in a movie togther after Titanic? Apparently somebody thought so. I’m pretty confident that Winslet will give a good performance. If anything queers this film, it will be Leo. It will be interesting to see how he plays the role of a married man that works a humdrum job and struggles to keep his life together.

My point: despite the fatigue of daily life and other enticing reading distraction, I am making progress on Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace, the Teacher

A frend of mind sent me this link, a post about what kind of teacher DFW was. He sounds like he was a very good one, tough but fair, and cool.

Interesting note: on rate my prof it was noted that he liked to chew tobacco and spit into a cup during class.

PS: I’m approaching page 100 of Infinite Jest. Woo hoo! Only some 900 pages to go. I’m on fire, baby!

The Best Mind of His Generation

That’s the title of the article in todays’ NY Times about David Foster Wallace.

Some bits and pieces from the article.

The temptation to regard Mr. Wallace’s suicide last weekend as anything other than a private tragedy must be resisted. But the strength of the temptation should nonetheless be acknowledged.

Beyond this, Mr. Wallace was the kind of literary figure whose career was emblematic of his age. He may not have been the most famous novelist of his time, but more than anyone else, he exemplified and articulated the defining anxieties and attitudes of his generation.

That would be Generation X, of course.

“Infinite Jest,” the enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation’s benchmark for literary ambition, is, for all its humor, an encyclopedia of phobia, anxiety, compulsion and mania.

This certainly seems true so far as I can see. I’m currently on page 66.

He was smarter than anyone else, but also poignantly aware that being smart didn’t necessarily get you very far, and that the most visible manifestations of smartness — wide erudition, mastery of trivia, rhetorical facility, love of argument for its own sake — could leave you feeling empty, baffled and dumb.

I know the feeling, although certainly not to the extent that DFW did. Maybe that’s a good thing. Or at least a thing that will keep blissfully stupid enough to not implode.

Mr. Wallace, born in 1962 and the author of an acclaimed first novel at age 24, anchored his work in an acute sense of generational crisis. None of his peers were preoccupied so explicitly with how it felt to arrive on the scene as a young, male American novelist dreaming of glory, late in the 20th century and haunted by a ridiculous, poignant question: what if it’s too late? What am I supposed to do now?

He regarded the lions of postmodernism as heroes, but also as obstacles. “If I have an enemy,” he said in the early 1990s, “a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon.” That’s a lot of fathers for one Oedipal struggle, and Wallace expended a lot of energy trying to assimilate and overcome their influences.

And here, in part, is the quote that resonated most strongly with me:

I suspect that Mr. Wallace’s persona — at once unbearably sophisticated and hopelessly naïve, infinitely knowing and endlessly curious — will be his most durable creation.

It’s the part set off by dashes — at once unbearably sophisticated and hopelessly naive, infinitely knowing and endlessly curious. It seems to go along with something I read in a lit crit book about Wallace’s work entitled Understanding David Foster Wallace, by Marshall Boswell. In the first chapter, Cynicism and Naivete. In this chapter “Wallace himself defines the multiplicity he wants to embody as a joining of ‘cynicism and naivete.’”DFW uses these terms in three of his major works: 1) his essay “E Unibus Pluram”, 2) his novella “Westerward the Course of Empire Take Its Way, and 3) his novel “Infinite Jest.” Boswell suggests that this notion of mering cynicism and naivete may be DFW’s core idea. Specifially quoted from the novella mentioned above, in regards to the character D.L., who is described as suffering from the delusion “that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive.”

Reading that was like realizing an idea that I’d had for a long time but hadn’t yet found the words to articulate it clearly. I read it again and again.

This notion of being both cynicial and naive at the same time seems the very definition of Generation X. Furthermore, it spoke to the piece of writing I am currently working. I realized that this was what I was trying to create in my main character, at least to some degree, without having known that this was what I was trying to do, a person who is both cynical and naive at the same time.

I never would have had that insight if I’d not picked up this book again. And I would not have picked up this book again if DFW had not died. Talk about an ironic bummer.

Anyway, read the whole article. It’s a good one. I agree with it, in as much as I qualified to, that DFW was the best mind of his generation (Generation X), at least as far as writers go.

Examples of DFW’s writing talent

He’s funny:

‘I am going to propose that I tell you a joke, Boo, on the condition that afterwards you shush and let me sleep.’

‘Is it a good one?’

‘Mario, what do you get when you cross and insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic.”

‘I give.’

‘You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally of the question of whether or not there’s a dog.’

— Infinite Jest (p. 41)

I laughed out loud at that.

And I don’t know where James Wood get that Wallace’s characters don’t feel:

Home with the team, no matter how high the AC or how thin the sheet, Orin wakes with his own impression sweated darkly into the bed beneath him, slowly drying all day to a white salty outline just slightly off from the week’s other faint dried outlines, so his fetal-shaped fossilized image is fanned out across his side of the bed like a deck of cards, just overlapping, like an acid trail or time exposure. (p. 43)

The dude is suffering his body into a fossil.

And some ho his ideas, his images, are just unique, it almost makes me want to cry with envy, but I just love them so much. Like this one:

The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses with huge roaches dying inside, stoically, just sitting there, the glasses gradually steaming up with roach-dioxide. The whole thing makes Orin sick. Now he figures the hotter the shower’s water, the less chance any small armored vehicle is going to feel like coming out of the drain while he’s in there. (p. 45)

Of course, his description are particularly apt, and with good reason obviously:

Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest morning start days that Orin can’t even bring himself for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. These worst morning with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light — the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer. (p. 46)

Damn!

And he’s just interesting, just seems to know about a lot of different stuff, like, say, one-hitter pipes and smoking pot:

Plus one-hitteres are small, which is good, because let’s face it, anything you use to smoke high-resin dope with is going to stink. A bong is big, and its stink is going to be like commensurately big, plus you have the foul bong-water to deal with. Pipes are smaller and at least portable, but they always come with only a multi-hit party bowl that disperses nonutilzed smoke over a wide area. A one-hitter can be wastelessly employed, then allowed to cool, wrapped in two baggies and then further wrapped and sealed in a Ziploc and then enclosed in two sport-socks in a gear bag along with the lighter and eyedrops and mint-pellets and the little film-case of dope itself, and it’s highly portable and odor-free and basically totally covert. (p. 49)

That’s just fun to read. It’s cool information.

And he makes these wonderful statements that have the force of truth without coming off as platitudes or cliches or whatever:

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret. (p. 53)

My progress reading Infinite Jest has me on page 55, the chapter entitled: AUTUMN — YEAR OF DAIRY PRODUCTS FROM THE AMERICAN HEARTLAND

Some editors and writers remember David Foster Wallace.

Slate.com has collected some remeberances of David Foster Wallace by various editors and writers who either worked with him or met him or knew him in some way.

Interesting stuff. Except I found the one by Joyce Carol Oates to be annoyingly stock for some reason. I don’t know. JCO just kind of annoys me in general.

My progress on Infinite Jest creeps along. I am on page 37 at present. I’m hoping my progress will pick up not that I feel a bit more acclimated to the territory of this novel. It’s a lot to take in as you first begin to read, at least it is for me. But I have to say that I’m quite enjoying it. There is an exuberance to the prose that is both compelling and a little unnerving. It’s like a curious vibrating thing that I’m a little nervous to touch, and yet want to very much.

There’s an excellent verbal exchange between the main character, Hal Incandenza, at age 10 or 11, with a professional conversationalist that his father has sent him to see based on claims of the father that Hal never speaks. Hal refutes these claims by  Himself, the nickname that he, Hal, and his mother and brother have given to the father/husband. By the end of this chapter, it would seem that the conversationalist is really Himself, i.e. the father, in disguise. A hilarous and heartbreaking scene.

David Foster Wallace’s American ennui

From an article in the New York Times.

In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”

When I read that, I thought, Yeah, I kind of know that feeling. For me it isn’t constant, not as constant as it used to be, when I was younger and single, childlress. I’m still surprised at how much having a family can brighten your world view. But still, there are times, when I feel the return of such a stomach-level sadness, as if lost.

I wonder. Is it a Generation X thing? Or pehrps a writer/artist/creative thing? Or perhaps just an American thing, even merely a human thing?

In any case, it is a thing.

My minimal progress on Infinite Jest

After two days, I’m on page 20 of Infinite Jest. Woo hoo!

But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I read pretty slow. And you’re right. I do. I had a reading comprehension problem in elementary school and I had to really, really hard to get up to the speed now. And if that isn’t good enough for you well then…. I’m sorry. I get carried away. It’s kind of painful memory. But hey, a little salt in that wound always makes it feel so much better.

Anyhoo… I would like to point out that the paperback copy that I am reading is larger than standard, the font is not normal, there is very little white space, and DFW, well, let’s just say, at least at the beginning of this book, is not that keen on a lot of dialogue and prefers paragraphs that run for pages.

But I don’t think that I am entirely lost. Essentially we have the story of Hal, a young, talented tennis player. Of course, his interview to be accepted into a very school for which he is slated to play tennis does not go well. The scene results in a kind of slapstick scenario in which Hal ends up wrangled to the floor because the Dean’s interviewing him perceive him as some sort of threat, although cleary Hal is a pretty passive and easy-going guy. But then isn’t it always the case that easy going people end up with their face pinned to the floor.

More intriguing than that was the chapter that came after, in which Hal (I’m pretty sure anyway) obsesses about the pot that some woman is supposed to deliver to him, but who hasn’t shown up, and in fact is some hours late. Some very frantic, even hysterical narration here that seems to reflect that mindset of a guy jones for a fix.

Something intersting I noted on the wikipedia page for Infinite Jest. And that is it is catagorized as Hysterical Realism, a term I’d never heard of before.

The term was coined by the critic James Wood in an essay on Zadie Smith‘s White Teeth, titled “The Smallness of the ‘Big’ Novel: Human, All Too Inhuman”, which appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Republic and was later reprinted in Wood’s 2004 book, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. [note: the hyperlinks in this quote lead to nowhere. sorry]

I got this book off the shelf yesterday so that I could read this article and frankly I didn’t really ge it. I mean, I understood, sort of, what Wood was getting it, but I just didn’t agree. It seemed less like criticisms and more like griping because books like Infinite Jest do not fit some idea that Wood’s has of what fiction should be. Mainly Woods complains about the lack of real character development and exploration, that these authors don’t give you enough of what the characters feel and too much information about the world in which the characters exist.

I wouldn’t disgree with Woods on this point, but I would disagree that this makes such fiction bad or not as good as other works. Wood even goes so far as to say that such fiction lacks moral intentions or some such bullshit.

Here is a rebuttal essay by Zadie Smith.

I suppose what really bugged me about Wood’s view is that it doesn’t allow for something different. Perhaps Infinite Jest isn’t entirely successful. That’s debateable. But so far as I can tell it is interesting, and quite compelling, even if my wrists do hurt a little from heft the weight of the book. In any case, despite Wood’s bitching, I’m going to keep reading IJ, for now anyway.

Also, one can’t help but imagine how please Wood must be with himself, for coining a new -ism for the literary round table. Kudos to you, sir! Kudos, I say!