The Oncoming Hope

In the minds of many acolytes, 2011 means the last major release of work by David Foster Wallace, incomplete though The Pale King remains. For long-time fans, I suspect this release closed the book on a tender love affair. For this newbie, the media hoopla actually alerted me to Wallace, and enabled a love affair of my own.

Reading Infinite Jest perfectly split my year. After the trauma of wedding planning and the joy of actually getting married, I chose to recharge my emotional and intellectual stores with one of the most difficult books ever written (difficult being relative, I assume).

I had warmed up with a number of his non-fiction essays, proselytizing E Pluribus Unam and many others to all who would listen. I cooled down with some of his short fiction, even though none could live up to IJ.

But on the day I reached Jamaica, I began Infinite Jest. And my memories of romance, sand and boats intertwine perfectly with the misadventures of one Hal Incadenza and all the characters that thread out from him. I was left with an existential sadness when I finished that novel, which probably won't be wiped away until I give in and read it again.

Now, I barely remember pre-DFW 2011, filled with Freedom and Room and other single-named novels that linger in the memory, but not the soul (I make a neat exception for Just Kids, by Patti Smith).

Many speak of his remarkable facility with language, of the colors of mental illness that thread through all of his work, of his deep impenetrability, like he's some bad boyfriend we're all trying to change.

What makes him so appealing to me is none of those things. It's his sensitivity, his hyper-awareness of all that makes us human and all the forces that would deprive us of that quality.

Do I have plans to read The Pale King? In short, yes. I will not make a promise as to when, however. I suspect five more readings of IJ will come first.

Previous: The Moment that Infinite Jest Broke Me: Ruminations on Tennis

American Psycho's getting the remake treatment, just eleven years after the original film.

According to Variety, it's a "low-budget" project that "reimagines" the novel as a modern-day bloodbath. It hasn't been greenlit as yet, but it's such a bad idea that I have no doubt that it will be made, and probably in 3-D. "It's so relevant! It's about an evil investment banker!" will declare a series of movie executives and advertisers until it lands on our screens, an empty and flat turd.

While I'm kind of intrigued by the conceptual updates that would have to be made (will Patrick Bateman hold a dick-measuring contest over his LinkedIn page instead of his business cards? Will he murder to the sweet dulcet sounds of Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga?), I cannot be convinced that this is necessary, mainly because the original film is so damn good.

It took a book that, frankly, wasn't very good, and flipped it into a satire rather than a celebration of soulless nihilism.

But on the plus side, I get to quote David Foster Wallace! He criticized Ellis and Psycho in this interview:

"I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that."

I agree entirely about the book, but the movie is so much more than that.

Thanks to Stale Popcorn for the hat tip.

What do you guys think?

While I generally enjoyed Maud Newton's increasingly controversial piece on David Foster Wallace, there was something that rubbed me the wrong way, and I've been trying to figure out exactly what that is, until I worked out that it is, in fact, almost everything about the piece.

Edward Champion, in an absolutely superb rebuttal, accuses Newton of a lack of intellectual seriousness, of failing to do the research that shows that David Foster Wallace cannot be blamed for the so-called folksiness permeating the web. (I don't think you even have to do research to prove this, but hey, the New York Times can't openly publish an article lambasting all writing styles that aren't their own, and so they have to somehow make it relate to their books commentary).

WHAT'S UP WITH ALL THIS TALKIN' LIKE REAL PEOPLE, Y'ALL?

Newton writes that:

Never before had “folks” been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions.

Um, really? I'm from Texas, and Newton has her own Texas roots, and I can guaran-damn-tee it that I heard "folks" absolutely everywhere. It's what urban/suburban Texans say instead of "y'all." It's how the politicians speak. But let's ignore her selective memory. I'm more troubled by the notion that folksiness is inherently a bad thing.

I think this snobbery comes partly from University insistence that the only good way to write is like Ernest Hemingway, clear, concise, free of embellishment. But would anyone accuse Flannery O'Connor of being unserious? How about William Faulkner? Mark Twain? Or Martin Luther King, Jr.? Or David Foster Wallace, for that matter? He may be many things to many people, but even when he's funny, he's intellectually rigorous.

Newton seems to conflate unserious language with Southern dialectical norms, which is all the more surprising given how many times she's blogged about the liveliness of Southern Texan vernacular.

But I guess that doesn't bother me too much. If I had a penny for every time I heard someone act snobbish about Southern or Midwestern turns of phrase I'd be swimming in copper.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT INTERNET COMMUNICATION

What troubles me more is how she defines the nature of blogging and internet communication, how she ignores its many and varied uses and the exciting transmutations of language within.

I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified. That music blog we liked was really pretty much the only one that, um, you know, got it.

I remember when blogging was new. You know who blogged? People who wanted to share information, but weren't able to do so through available media channels. Teenagers. Mothers. Would-be writers. Political agitators. Sports Fans. Pornographers. Every variety of geek. These groups are unified ONLY in that they are now able to express themselves to large audiences without conforming to any demands of "style." These are not people that communicate in the real-life sphere, so the idea that there was some "confusion about voice" is patently ridiculous. Was there someone attempting to develop a "style guide" for the internet? Absolutely not. The magic of the internet is its freedom from such shackles.

Early bloggers knew this, and the immense variety of writing styles reflected this. Does Salon resemble Slate resemble Gawker resemble Drudge Report? Of course not.

THE MUSIC BLOG EXAMPLE

Let's just look at the music blog example she uses (out of nowhere, and without any relevance to the story at hand). First of all, she seems not to comment on the writing within the blog, but how we react to it, which has nothing to do with her central point. Secondly, has she ever read a music blog? Let's look at Pitchfork, one of the greatest internet success stories.

First paragraph of original review of Funeral, by The Arcade Fire:

Ours is a generation overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways-- we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded "threat" levels; we receive our information from comedians and laugh at politicians. Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our purported idols and spit it back in mocking defiance. We forget that "emo" was once derived from emotion, and that in our buying and selling of personal pain, or the cynical approximation of it, we feel nothing.

Wordy and pretentious it certainly is, but there's not a single "um," "sort of," or "kind of," in the mix.

This, on Radiohead's Kid A:

"The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax."

Still no sort ofs or ums, and yet it's a completely different style! Variety in style! Imagine that!

And just for fun, go read comedian David Cross's spoof of the Pitchfork style. Still not a single 'sort of' or 'um'.

IN CONCLUSION, SORT OF

Newton concludes that:

Qualifications are necessary sometimes. Anticipating and defusing opposing arguments has been a vital rhetorical strategy since at least the days of Aristotle. Satire and ridicule, when done well, are high art. But the idea is to provoke and persuade, not to soothe. And the best way to make an argument is to make it, straightforwardly, honestly, passionately, without regard to whether people will like you afterward.

When she refers to soothing, does she describe DFW or the blogosphere? Neither would be described as "soothing" by any reader. I would argue that nowhere has her closing sentence been more ably accomplished than in the wild west of the World Wide Web. The problem with her article is that she offers little or no evidence to support her conclusions, apart from the aforementioned oblique reference to "music blogs". In many ways, I resent most that the target is David Foster Wallace, who isn't even alive to defend himself against these poorly delineated charges.

I have been harsh on Maud Newton, who writes a blog that I genuinely enjoy. It's possible that the failures of this article may be more generally attributable to the New York Times's general need to stand up for the status quo (for the internet revolution will eventually render them bankrupt). There are a large number of players in what I would describe as the "monetized paper" industry that are invested in protecting their superiority, in preserving their position as standard-bearers. It's sad when the only way to do that is to denigrate evolution in language and in style. And in this case, the article explicitly condemns certain trends without providing any examples to support that those trends even exist.

SANDMAN MEETS INFINITE JEST:

Part of the reason I've been a little lax about these Sandman Re-Blogs is that I've been sucked into the bottomless abyss that is Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. These are not two works that you would imagine a lot of crossover with, but more and more I can't help thinking what a great comic book series Infinite Jest would make. In fact, Wallace's trademark footnotes would work perfectly well as the sort of asides that are common in Sandman: quick cuts to the Dreaming, stray thoughts invading, passages and passages of loving description converted into art, etc.

In this issue, especially, the parallels leap out, particularly in regard to our friendly gothic sisters, Chantal and Zelda. Here, as with Joelle van Dyne, we have two beautiful girls with no outward deformity hiding behind veils. Chantal dreams of perfect sentences, as does Avril Incandenza. They are both willfully committed to this Doll's House.

In many ways, the Doll's House is the equivalent of Ennet House in IJ: these people aren't trapped there, they aren't locked in, they can leave at will, but for various reasons they don't (at least not yet). They are drawn body and soul to this place, whether that's because of Rose or whether that's because of something else within themselves. (Does this make Don Gately a vortex?)

We meet Gilbert the same way we meet Lenz: in a dark alley, dressed as a vigilante superhero. Like Lenz, Gilbert has other places to be, but he's content to be here (more than content, actually). Gilbert is not a serial killer in training though, of course.

But apart from the superficial similarity, there's a larger confluence in theme: these are people regarded as grotesques by mainstream society and are searching to find their true humanity, which seems only accessible in non-reality i.e. dreams in Sandman or addiction in Infinite Jest.

Likewise, dreams reveal lack of humanity. Look at Ken, going through the motions. In his dreams he is everything he wants to be, and what he wants to be isn't human at all, it's a caricature, it's a Bret Easton Ellis stereotype.

ON CITIES AND DOMAINS:

I said I'd come back to the whole issue of space and city and domain, and here we are. 
We are introduced to the necropolis in Zelda's dream: the city of the dead.

I believe I'd discussed before how the Dreaming appears to operate as a quasi-feudal system, with Dream sitting in the throne room, not micro-managing, but broadly guiding the kingdom. So it's interesting when Rose says "Each mind creates and inhabits its own world, and each world is but a tiny part of that totality that is the dreaming..." and then proceeds to break down the boundaries to create a single dreaming. So that suggests me that rather than executive ruler, Dream is more of a judiciary leader, a Supreme Court of sorts dedicated to maintaining the separation of different dreams. He creates and administers the rules, (and punishes offenders like the Corinthian) but does not govern the whole of the Dreaming. He just governs his judicial branch, as it were, with Lucien, Matthew, et al.

OTHER:

I'm probably not the first to comment on this, but I do wonder about Zelda being drawn explicitly in the style of John Tenniel's original Alice in Wonderland illustrations: See Alice Here. Going by the stories being told, it would be more fitting for Barbie to be drawn in that style, as she enters a sort of late Victorian fairytale herself, complete with anthropomorphic animals and magical talismans.

Next Issue: We Conclude The Doll's House