I just put down A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again--a book of David Foster Wallace's essays--and after an exhausting process, I only managed to read two of these brain-beasts. I feel somewhat defeated, but more wistful that for the forth time, I am unable to finish one of his books.
A brief timeline of my relationship with the work of David Foster Wallace:
2007, Summer - Colleen Koeppel seems to enjoy my dialogue, and claims that I have a stylish manner of expression; she recommends me Broom of the System and Infinite Jest (the latter of which I attempted first, since it was on Time Magazine's "Top 100 Novels written in the English Language" list)(oh, and she lent me her copy. I lost it, then borrowed one from the library). I am fascinated and excited because Colleen frames this recommendation as something I'll really connect with, based presumably on what she sees is some sort of similarity between myself and DFW either linguistically or thematically.
That summer I plug away at Infinite Jest, but I am unable to even breach the third chapter. DFW's gymnastic juggling of the mundane IS something that appeals to me, but his grammar is too mathematically complex, his attention to detail too limitless and exhausting. I don't really remember being able to get past the Tennis agency meeting without going crazy. They say (correctly) that Infinite Jest is not about tennis, but that can't possibly be correct. [It'd be like aliens coming to Earth and zooming in initially on a dog's nose with a telescopic lens that can magnify it thousands of times, and after visually exploring the cell-membrane topography of a dog's nose for 5 hours--try to tell them that earth is not about dogs' noses.]
2008, Autumn- DFW dies. I read about it on Patton Oswalt's website, and he shares a link to a commencement speech DFW had given to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. I read the speech, and my life will never be the same. Oliver Wendel Holmes says, "A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions". Well DFW's speech had articulated all of the feelings I had held about the world, and arranged them in thought form. I was instantaneously a more effective thinker, and I was in love. Swept off my feet by a modern philosopher who was able to arrange my own notions in a fully relateable way. And I was heartbroken, because he had just hanged himself.
Part of me knew it was for the best. Not that he had hanged himself, but that (if he was destined to do so) he did so prior to my reading his commencement address. If I had communed with him on this level, and then later he would have went on to commit suicide--after his words had time to marinate with me... Well that would have fucked with my head in a way that would have been personally tragic, although in an oddly fun nihilistic rush (like when I read about Hunter Thompson's suicide--except this would have been way more potent and would probably have yielded negative affects on my behavior, to the inconvenience of my close friends and family members).
There's something obviously inconsistent with the words in his speech and the very concept of despair (let alone suicide). I won't expand on this here, but it's thrillingly scary to re-read his speech, weaving in the context of the author's pending suicide. It's like relistening to "Come As You Are" shortly after Kurt Cobain's self-erasure and letting "...and I swear that I don't have a gun" really sink in... *shudder*
2009, (Summer) - I go to the library and borrow Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. I am excited as all get-out to read it, for a number of reasons. 1) Ever since college I've been a more active fan of nonfiction than novels, so I ought to click with this better than his 9000 page Infinite Jest 2) The very concept of abstracting mathematical principles into philosophy appeals to me, well.. infinitely! [comparing math and philosophy ought to make each one more relevant; it's the sort of cross-breeding that--I think--all things can benefit from] 3) A literary look at mathematic concepts (especially when intended for the non-math scholar) should perhaps get some blood flowing to the dormant-since-birth numb3rs-region of my left-brain.
So I read the introduction, and DFW explains that this examination is meant to be readable by the lay-thinker (huzzah!) and that endless footnoting will be provided as training wheels for anybody who needs to slow it down and catch up with the back-knowledge required to grasp the concepts. I have to say, this is one time where (unlike with Infinite Jest) I truly can't blame my failure to get past the fourth chapter on my ADHD. Because, my attention span is modeled after a bicycle chain, and if I can get snagged by the cogs of interest, I'm generally on-track for a balanced attention budget (hence my ability to recall and even recite many things that would seem less significant than my wife's cellphone number, which is inaccessible to me due to the vast canvass of meta-atrophy that accompanies cell-phone ownership).
The problem with being unable to follow Everything and More is not pathological in nature, and the interest/willingness was there in greater strength than just about any purely intellectual endeavor I can recall.
The problem is that I am simply not intelligent enough.
Same reason I (while solid) will never be great at chess. I'm outstanding at processing small, linear nuggets of logic, especially where strategy or any form of psychology is involved. This is why I can beat every "casual" chess player I meet even though I play just as "rarely" [noted, I got it] as they. But any time I play a "Chess Player", I inevitably get outmaneuvered, simply because I can't handle as many data strings as they.
Okay so I reluctantly succumbed to the beautiful but incomprehensible spiral shape that is Everything and More, I think I retired somewhere around chapter four or five. I was disappointed that I had failed to achieve intercourse with one of the great minds that even my other biggest heroes worshipped (you should have seen me when I met Patton Oswalt). I figured, "Okay, I blew it with the non-fiction, let's gear-down back to fiction with his college philosophy paper-turned published novel, The Broom of the System.
2009, (Autumn) - The Broom of the System sucks. I can't say whether or not it really sucks, mostly that was just me throwing a tantrum. Truth is, it's pretty easy to read, but the story (about a girl whose grandma gets lost at her senior citizen's home) is a combination of things a) I don't really care about b) that are so opposite in scope to Everything and More's goals c) I'm disillusioned. I quit the book a third of the way through, telling people, "I just can't get into his fiction". (read: I just don't want to get into his fiction badly enough, but I'm upset because I litterally CAN'T get into his nonfiction).
(by the way, I still have The Broom of the System which I got out of the library a summer and a half ago. There may be ramifications for hijacking a library book for two years. I didn't even lose it either, I just haven't brought it back to the library because: how often do I pass my old township branch?) [actually, somewhat often]
2010, (Today) - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. This is a collection of essays he's done, which seems perfect for me. Non-fiction, journalist/memoir style essays from fancy magazines. Take a look at these essay titles:
A brief timeline of my relationship with the work of David Foster Wallace:
2007, Summer - Colleen Koeppel seems to enjoy my dialogue, and claims that I have a stylish manner of expression; she recommends me Broom of the System and Infinite Jest (the latter of which I attempted first, since it was on Time Magazine's "Top 100 Novels written in the English Language" list)(oh, and she lent me her copy. I lost it, then borrowed one from the library). I am fascinated and excited because Colleen frames this recommendation as something I'll really connect with, based presumably on what she sees is some sort of similarity between myself and DFW either linguistically or thematically.
That summer I plug away at Infinite Jest, but I am unable to even breach the third chapter. DFW's gymnastic juggling of the mundane IS something that appeals to me, but his grammar is too mathematically complex, his attention to detail too limitless and exhausting. I don't really remember being able to get past the Tennis agency meeting without going crazy. They say (correctly) that Infinite Jest is not about tennis, but that can't possibly be correct. [It'd be like aliens coming to Earth and zooming in initially on a dog's nose with a telescopic lens that can magnify it thousands of times, and after visually exploring the cell-membrane topography of a dog's nose for 5 hours--try to tell them that earth is not about dogs' noses.]
2008, Autumn- DFW dies. I read about it on Patton Oswalt's website, and he shares a link to a commencement speech DFW had given to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. I read the speech, and my life will never be the same. Oliver Wendel Holmes says, "A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions". Well DFW's speech had articulated all of the feelings I had held about the world, and arranged them in thought form. I was instantaneously a more effective thinker, and I was in love. Swept off my feet by a modern philosopher who was able to arrange my own notions in a fully relateable way. And I was heartbroken, because he had just hanged himself.
Part of me knew it was for the best. Not that he had hanged himself, but that (if he was destined to do so) he did so prior to my reading his commencement address. If I had communed with him on this level, and then later he would have went on to commit suicide--after his words had time to marinate with me... Well that would have fucked with my head in a way that would have been personally tragic, although in an oddly fun nihilistic rush (like when I read about Hunter Thompson's suicide--except this would have been way more potent and would probably have yielded negative affects on my behavior, to the inconvenience of my close friends and family members).
There's something obviously inconsistent with the words in his speech and the very concept of despair (let alone suicide). I won't expand on this here, but it's thrillingly scary to re-read his speech, weaving in the context of the author's pending suicide. It's like relistening to "Come As You Are" shortly after Kurt Cobain's self-erasure and letting "...and I swear that I don't have a gun" really sink in... *shudder*
2009, (Summer) - I go to the library and borrow Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. I am excited as all get-out to read it, for a number of reasons. 1) Ever since college I've been a more active fan of nonfiction than novels, so I ought to click with this better than his 9000 page Infinite Jest 2) The very concept of abstracting mathematical principles into philosophy appeals to me, well.. infinitely! [comparing math and philosophy ought to make each one more relevant; it's the sort of cross-breeding that--I think--all things can benefit from] 3) A literary look at mathematic concepts (especially when intended for the non-math scholar) should perhaps get some blood flowing to the dormant-since-birth numb3rs-region of my left-brain.
So I read the introduction, and DFW explains that this examination is meant to be readable by the lay-thinker (huzzah!) and that endless footnoting will be provided as training wheels for anybody who needs to slow it down and catch up with the back-knowledge required to grasp the concepts. I have to say, this is one time where (unlike with Infinite Jest) I truly can't blame my failure to get past the fourth chapter on my ADHD. Because, my attention span is modeled after a bicycle chain, and if I can get snagged by the cogs of interest, I'm generally on-track for a balanced attention budget (hence my ability to recall and even recite many things that would seem less significant than my wife's cellphone number, which is inaccessible to me due to the vast canvass of meta-atrophy that accompanies cell-phone ownership).
The problem with being unable to follow Everything and More is not pathological in nature, and the interest/willingness was there in greater strength than just about any purely intellectual endeavor I can recall.
The problem is that I am simply not intelligent enough.
Same reason I (while solid) will never be great at chess. I'm outstanding at processing small, linear nuggets of logic, especially where strategy or any form of psychology is involved. This is why I can beat every "casual" chess player I meet even though I play just as "rarely" [noted, I got it] as they. But any time I play a "Chess Player", I inevitably get outmaneuvered, simply because I can't handle as many data strings as they.
Okay so I reluctantly succumbed to the beautiful but incomprehensible spiral shape that is Everything and More, I think I retired somewhere around chapter four or five. I was disappointed that I had failed to achieve intercourse with one of the great minds that even my other biggest heroes worshipped (you should have seen me when I met Patton Oswalt). I figured, "Okay, I blew it with the non-fiction, let's gear-down back to fiction with his college philosophy paper-turned published novel, The Broom of the System.
2009, (Autumn) - The Broom of the System sucks. I can't say whether or not it really sucks, mostly that was just me throwing a tantrum. Truth is, it's pretty easy to read, but the story (about a girl whose grandma gets lost at her senior citizen's home) is a combination of things a) I don't really care about b) that are so opposite in scope to Everything and More's goals c) I'm disillusioned. I quit the book a third of the way through, telling people, "I just can't get into his fiction". (read: I just don't want to get into his fiction badly enough, but I'm upset because I litterally CAN'T get into his nonfiction).
(by the way, I still have The Broom of the System which I got out of the library a summer and a half ago. There may be ramifications for hijacking a library book for two years. I didn't even lose it either, I just haven't brought it back to the library because: how often do I pass my old township branch?) [actually, somewhat often]
2010, (Today) - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. This is a collection of essays he's done, which seems perfect for me. Non-fiction, journalist/memoir style essays from fancy magazines. Take a look at these essay titles:
"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" (Harper's, 1992, under the title "Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes")
"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)
"Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" (Harper's, 1994, under the title "Ticket to the Fair")
"Greatly Exaggerated" (Harvard Book Review, 1992)
"David Lynch Keeps His Head" (Premiere, 1996)
"Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" (Esquire, 1996, under the title "The String Theory")
"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (Harper's, 1996, under the title "Shipping Out")
Okay so needless to say, I was excited because I'd be getting reasonable doses of DFW's worldview, personal history, opinions on media, sports, etc... How could I go wrong?
I muscled through the first essay, an interesting retrospective about using his tendencies as an over-analytical math nerd to over-come the jocks at highschool tennis, and despite using the chaotic nature of Illinois wind to his advantage, actually got swept up by a tornado for a few seconds. It seems like the perfect essay for me, and almost was, if for no other reason than I barely managed to trudge through the circular prose, convoluted grammar, and vocabulary that made my 700+ SAT verbal score seem like the back of a Crayola carton. Getting to the end, I felt like Ladanian Tomlinson chopping his feet after contact, just moving that pile across the end zone. Victorious but likely warranting a booth review.
I started the second essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", excited that it was about mass-media theory and the psychology thereof. I thought, I'm gonna read the shit out of this essay. After trudging through incredibly challenging syntax that's clearly suited for a NASA manual, I had to quit six pages in and felt as if I had been trying to run through two feet of un-packed snow.
I skipped to the next essay "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All", which was about covering a state fair for Harpers, and I won't bore you with the details about how I couldn't finish it.
Desperate, I skipped to the last, essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again", which is probably his most famous essay after "Consider the Lobster" (which is found in a different book of same name). I said, "I don't give a shit, I will read every last word of this..."
..And I did, successfully. And I loved it. But it took me a week and a half to read this ONE ESSAY (to thorough comprehension), and doing so felt like what I imagine it would feel like to actually sleep with Beyonce Knoles: Cautiously grateful for the opportunity, but so over-whelmed by intimidation and the Sisyphean challenge of making it worth everyone's while for showing up that it'd be almost unenjoyable as anything more than a tentative bragging right.
Now I'm clearing the mental palate by reading some Dan Brown (The Lost Symbol). Now here's an accessible guy. Three or four pages per chapter, nice large print. Masons. Take me away for a mysterious adventure! Maybe DFW and I weren't meant to be. I'll always have Kenyon College! (Of course, the one thing he did that was specifically writen for college kids)... But I couldn't even finish a book of his magazine articles... there's no way Beyonce is going to keep me on full-time. All I really got was to say I've been there, and to tell others, "you better get your game-face on, dude".
I muscled through the first essay, an interesting retrospective about using his tendencies as an over-analytical math nerd to over-come the jocks at highschool tennis, and despite using the chaotic nature of Illinois wind to his advantage, actually got swept up by a tornado for a few seconds. It seems like the perfect essay for me, and almost was, if for no other reason than I barely managed to trudge through the circular prose, convoluted grammar, and vocabulary that made my 700+ SAT verbal score seem like the back of a Crayola carton. Getting to the end, I felt like Ladanian Tomlinson chopping his feet after contact, just moving that pile across the end zone. Victorious but likely warranting a booth review.
I started the second essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction", excited that it was about mass-media theory and the psychology thereof. I thought, I'm gonna read the shit out of this essay. After trudging through incredibly challenging syntax that's clearly suited for a NASA manual, I had to quit six pages in and felt as if I had been trying to run through two feet of un-packed snow.
I skipped to the next essay "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All", which was about covering a state fair for Harpers, and I won't bore you with the details about how I couldn't finish it.
Desperate, I skipped to the last, essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again", which is probably his most famous essay after "Consider the Lobster" (which is found in a different book of same name). I said, "I don't give a shit, I will read every last word of this..."
..And I did, successfully. And I loved it. But it took me a week and a half to read this ONE ESSAY (to thorough comprehension), and doing so felt like what I imagine it would feel like to actually sleep with Beyonce Knoles: Cautiously grateful for the opportunity, but so over-whelmed by intimidation and the Sisyphean challenge of making it worth everyone's while for showing up that it'd be almost unenjoyable as anything more than a tentative bragging right.
Now I'm clearing the mental palate by reading some Dan Brown (The Lost Symbol). Now here's an accessible guy. Three or four pages per chapter, nice large print. Masons. Take me away for a mysterious adventure! Maybe DFW and I weren't meant to be. I'll always have Kenyon College! (Of course, the one thing he did that was specifically writen for college kids)... But I couldn't even finish a book of his magazine articles... there's no way Beyonce is going to keep me on full-time. All I really got was to say I've been there, and to tell others, "you better get your game-face on, dude".
1 comment:
"The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head."
Thank you for reminding me of that piece, which I haven't read since long before I knew what to do with it.
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