Remembering DFW

While I'm sitting here, writing some very strange new sort of metafiction art that isn't talking about itself as a story, but rather talking about itself (art) as art, I can't help but think about the fact that three hundred and fifty-six days ago, David Foster Wallace -- man of Infinite fame from footnotes, bandanas, and tennis -- had the one bad idea in his entire life, which unfortunately for him, me, you, and all the rest of this world, was the last bad idea in his life. I can't write a eulogy for him, not in any sense that would do him justice (a remarkably adequate one has already been written by D.T. Max and can and should be found at the following address: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max), so I'm really not going to try, but as the anniversary of his death approaches us, I still can't help but think of him in such deeply loving terms, and I've never even met him. A large part of that comes from the fact that I hadn't read anything of his while he was living, despite the fact that my parents had more than one copy of his books on our shelves at home, and that friends of mine were virtually shoving Infinite Jest down my throat with sugar cubes. In fact, I remember talking to a friend of mine in a restuarant in Chicago last year, and remarking upon what a sad several months that literature had gone through. "Yes," I had said, "it's a shame about Updike, but he was old, you know, and that sort of thing happens."

My friend said something resembling "Fuck Updike," but much kinder and along the lines of something you could potentially hear on the six o'clock news (she is, after all, a mother, and in good practice of censoring herself). "Don't you think David Foster Wallace's suicide was worse?"

I had remembered hearing about this, sometime in the fall, and seeing a different friend of mine tearfully paging through a dog-eared copy of Broom of the System, and I said: "Maybe, but Updike just had longer to say what he had to say."

I cringe, today, when I think about saying that, and more, the fact that I'm now publishing it for the whole world to read, if they choose, because I realize now how utterly uneducated I must have sounded. While I haven't taken the time to read all of Updike, as I am currently doing with Wallace, I can assure you that while Updike had his amazing and journalistic propensity for finding the facts of the matter at hand, David Foster Wallace was concerned with nothing less than finding out "what it meant to be a fucking human being."

There is nothing I can write in memory of him that will take away the literary equivalent of white-guilt that I feel every time I remember that I had every opportunity to read him while he was alive, but still for whatever reason chose not to (likely due to the fact that upon first look, his fiction is rather akin to reading the instructions on a ventilator). It is a very strange feeling to know that, were he alive, and were I to email him a question, I have very little doubt that he would answer me. I kick myself every time that I think about his life, and how every word he wrote was in pursuit of human beings dropping the charade of proper this-and-that, and just trying for one minute to get over themselves and to be unalone, instantaneously even.

All I've got to leave you with is a small collection of remembrances that I read when I'm trying to think of things to write about. One is above, the Max New Yorker piece, and the other is below, an interview on Salon.com by Laura Miller. Lastly, please read him, and if it's something hard to figure out or what-have-you, reread it. Everything he has written is worth it, I promise.

http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace1.html

This is just to say...

As Bri had some choice remarks in response last time, I will offer a redress. I would like to point out that nothing said either here or previously was meant to be antagonistic w/r/t blogging or bloggers, but rather my own thoughts on what is either a solitary hobby or something of a cult. Second, I'm grateful that anyone reads this at all (actually, mixed feelings re: that. I don't know if I have enough readers to actually warrant writing for an audience, and the fact that I have any readers precludes me from writing blogs a la "Why come no one loves me?"), so take my rantings with two grains of salt and a shot of tequila.

So. I am actually surprised that anyone reads this, as I do write in something of a "found journal" sense. In addition, the few blogs that I read are conducted in a similar fashion. Common titles may be "What have I been up to lately?" or "Why, despite my latex allergy, I can engage in anal sodomy!" Blogs like this are of only one variety, and it's a sort that mine falls into. Obviously there are more specialized ones, but I don't think that I know enough about anything to write that specialized of a posting. Of course, I could just post lists of things that I like or dislike, in the hopes that some frantic reader will be able to parse together a profile of me, and therefore come to some Great Understanding about both me and the Real World At Large. /glare.

As I said, chronicle of my thoughts and whimsy this shall stay. Not to disappoint, here are some of them. I am now in Denver, fighting crime and bad spelling/punctuation. I went up a mountain on Sunday. On the top, there was snow and a yeti. Upon closer inspection, it wasn't really a yeti, but rather a heavyset man whose Ford Mustang had overheated halfway up the mountain. We considered stopping for him, but reconsidered when we realized that our initial assumptions may have been right, and he was, in fact, a yeti. We rationalized our decision by telling ourselves that, if he were not a snow-creature, he could certainly use the exercise one way or the other, and we continued along our way. That was with my friends Dave and Michelle (no relation).

There has been fairly little of note happening since then, which is probably due to the fact that I am prepping for a career of sitting in front of a desk by sitting in an auditorium for nine hours and some change a day. Don't ever let anyone tell you that sitting isn't hard work, or even anything resembling rest. One works up a sweat trying to screw around and not be noticed.*

What else? Denver very cool. I discovered that my spirit animal is a fox, as one guided me home while lost on a run on Saturday night. I celebrated by finding really good new beer (by New Belgium, called Mothership Wit. It's organic, and fantastic.), drinking a whiskey sour and eating a shrimp sushi roll, and then going with my cousin to a club that had a cage dancer and waitresses wearing identical dresses and platinum blonde wigs (PBW, in the future, should I require additional reference).

Finally, a haiku:

Acorns and acorns,
Pandering to my readers,
Don't choke on candy.


Love,
Derek


*This last is either greatly helped or hindered by my new skill: iPodding. While it looks like I am doing extensive equations on my mini-computer/music player, in reality I am updating my facebook status or checking my email. I have, in the past twenty or so hours, complained about the title of an essay I wrote, responded to facebook messages (several times), found tickets to a Deathcab for Cutie show (which I later found out I won't be able to use, and therefore didn't buy), and gotten directions to a place where we may play Ultimate Frisbee, all without leaving my chair.

On Blogging: A Memoir on the Craft

Well, been a while since we've last left our hero, eh World? Much has happened, one would think, in the meanwhile, but perhaps not so much. Graduation come and gone. Finished the whole Ivory Tower thing (www.ivorytower.umn.edu). I have since been accepted into grad school and a graduate certification program (one at MSU, one at DU) and am doing both. Hell, I'm leaving for the latter of them tomorrow, which is actually the impetus of my writing in this thing again.

One of the things that worry -- I only use the word 'worry' here because I can't think of a more accurate one -- me about blogging is that there is potentially no one out there reading what I've written. It's kind of like secretly writing in your journal, and then leaving it out on the kitchen table for the world to see, and deep-down hoping that someone is going to stumble across it on some rambling trip through the Internet/Kitchen, pick it up, and exclaim to him or herself: "Aha! This is the sort of wisdom that I can get behind. I need to read this and rejoice!" The fantasy ends, some time in the future, with the blog writer being given a large sum of money for his or her clever witticisms.

I mention this because -- and this is largely my own fault, one must pay advertisers in this day and age even for one's own personal blog -- I'm not sure that I have a reader base larger than one, perhaps two. To be honest, I'm counting myself in that reader base, as I will periodically check up on this thing, click "Refresh, Refresh" (anyone?) and see if anyone has left that long-awaited message: "Derek. You've changed my life with what you have written here and left in public domain. Congratulations on being the Single Undisputed Master of the Written Word [caps mine]." In reality, it would probably be written in Internet-Speak, so it would read something more like : "dreek kewl blog. check out this lin kfor great sex leg panty!" Or something like that.

The reason that I have so few readers, and that I suspect most blogs have so few readers, is that no one is nearly as interested in my own life as I am. Though I don't read many blogs myself (perhaps an indicator of where I fail; one should always imitate if one can't initiate), I'm always drawn to the ones that just recycle old news. For example, blogs that keep me reading are the ones that reference things from the New York Times website for example, and then make marginal comments on them. It's kind of like getting your news from the newspaper and finding that someone has already filled in the crossword, but instead of being angry, you're pleasantly amused to find all sorts of esoteric minutia about the day's news. The key to this sort of blog is that you have to update it pretty much daily, as if you don't, your O-So-Faithful-Reader will find another equally witty place to get the same news (obvious exceptions to this are people like David Sedaris or Ariana Huffington, whose either wit or complete lack thereof are the reasons to read the blog in the first place).

This last is my own sort of failing, or at least similar to it. I don't remember that I have a blog often enough for me to update it with any sort of consistency. I'd like to think that's because I have so many Important Real World Things that demand my attention, but it's really because I'm too flighty. Blogging is a kind of escapism for me, and the thing about escapism, with the exception of the Big Three (Sex, Drug, Drinking), making a habit of any of them decreases the allure of said escapism. If I go running every time that I'm upset, pretty soon I'm just going to have some really great calves, but the endorphins won't kick in as quickly or as strongly. It's just the same way with blogging. To make matters worse, I blog only when I can't think of anything decent to write that I would want to work up to a level of publication. Think about that for a minute. My solution to writer's block is to write things and then leave them on the kitchen table of the planet. The big difference, I suppose, is that I don't even perform a rudimentary spell-check on this, which is kind of liberating for me, having just performed a literary jousting match with an editor for some essay I wrote.

The writer in me wants to cook up some really important summation, a la J.D. in Scrubs. "What have we learned today?" sort of thing. The blogger in me, however, really wanted to just stop writing half-way through that last paragraph and then leave you, the Faithful Reader, to decide whether I got sick of writing, did it intentionally, or if my internet just kind of crapped out. Perhaps I suffered a fatal heart attack like the animator in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail, and with my last failing breath hit "Publish Post." How would you know (especially if this last were the case, and I was, in fact, dead as a damn door-nail) until I came back the next week. I think that's what I forget. My readers here may not even know me in real life. I'd like to think that they do, but really, I'm not describing my own life. All I'm doing here is giving you a sort of snapshot of what I see the interesting thoughts of my life are. The funny thing is, you now know something about me because my choosing of the portions of my life that I think you'd like to read about.

Actually, that wasn't a half-bad ending. Let's just leave it there.

Plagiarism

Here is an Allen Ginsberg poem that my brother read to me today. I found it as apt today as when it was written. That's right ladies and gentlemen, O faithful reader, we'll make a Literature student out of him yet. Pay the blue hyperlinks in the text no mind, they copy when I copy/pasted the poem (don't expect me to type this thing out).

America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Working title...

When I title this, I find a particular smile creeping to my face. Mostly, if you were wondering, from the irony of it: This is an escape from any real work.

I've had a bit of writer's block recently. Things that are 500 words or fewer have been fine, but any sort of prolonged narrative has evaded me of late. So, my solution, is to finish a literary essay tonight. For those of you who both read this, and are not in constant communication with me (I have between one and three readers at any given time, and that description applies to two of you), I have been trying to write nonfiction. I wonder at my ability to write fiction in the spring. Most things that I've written in spring time over the past few years have been a touch to elegiac for my tastes, and I wonder if nonfiction memoir or essay is a better fit.

My habits are so closely linked to the seasons. I'm prolific in the summer time, a waste in the winter, carefully trimmed in my prose during the autumn months-- though I usually only churn out one thing that I'm particularly fond of-- and a wispy, emotional sack in the spring. Perhaps I should turn to poetry? Perhaps not.

Lists seem to be something popular on blogs. In no particular order, here are some of my favorite books I've read in the past year:

David Sedaris- Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
Jo Ann Beard- The Boys of My Youth.
Vladimir Nabokov- Lolita*
John Updike- Pigeon Feathers*
The Touchstone Anthology of Nonfiction.
Michael Chabon- Wonderboys.


*Denotes a book that I haven't yet finished, but still endorse so far.

Oh god... I wake up prematurely and I start to blog? I feel like that there is something wrong with that. Maybe there is, and that explains a lot. For whatever reason, I woke up at around seven this morning and just couldn't get back to sleep. Some general miasmic discontent surrounds me this past week for whatever reason. I find myself wishing often that I could simply stop my life from progressing and remain in one instantaneous moment forever, reliving one single day of happiness. I suppose that we're gifted with a memory to serve us with those moments when the proverbial "winter of our discontent" hits, but it's never as sweet.

Jesus, that sounds depressing. In lighter news, I've been considering the idea of narrative recently, and the relationship developed by the producer of a piece of art (writer, painter, musician, etc.) and the consumer (listener, viewer, reader). These two parties form a narrative between the two of them. The artist supplies stimulus, and the consumer adds in portions of his or her life in order to create a narrative unique to two of them.

I recently went to an exhibit at the Weissman art museum, and saw an exhibit called The Pedicord Apartments. It is a walk-in exhibit, in which you're literally walking through a six apartment corridor, complete with carpet and a spiderwebbing of tape over a hole in the window. As you walk past each door, labeled A-F, you can lean in and a recording will go off, either of a dog barking, a woman laughing, a Cowboys game, a party... things like that. While the stated purpose of the piece is an exercise in voyuerism, I found myself adding in my own story to answer some of the questions that came up for me. "Why is the dog barking? Is there no one at home to get the door?" "Why is woman laughing so manically and nonstop?" The consumer will create an answer to these questions, built of past experience in his or her life inevitably. Looking at any painting, the viewer will guess at what might be happening. "Why is the Mona Lisa smiling?"

Each article of art, therefore, is only half of what art is: a narrative. All art is storytelling, whether it tells an epic or just communicates a feeling. An artist is successful if he or she can anticipate the sensations that the viewer or reader or listener will add into the piece. This is why artists learn to anticipate prejudices.

That's about all I've got today. I still don't feel any better. What's the Stone Temple Pilots song? Big Empty? See you all soon.

Why I don't like titles...

Okay, that is totally not what this blog is about. Although I don't. Like titles that is. I have never felt comfortable with any title I have ever chosen for any story, essay, or paper I have written. Just thought I'd share.

So... I wish that I had more to tell you, O faithless reader. I'm getting over a bout of something or another, and am currently Ibuprofened up a bit. Also eating Whoppers (the candy, not the Burger King creation), and I'm pretty sure that if I get any comments on this blog, it will be something to the tune of: "lolz i luv wopperz!!1" Please don't be that person.

I spent this morning and yesterday morning writing my Senior paper, which might be a bit early of a jump start, but fuck you, I have nothing else to do that do anticipatory homework. In other news, I found my stapler. I also bought a copy of "Fiction on a Stick," which seems like a good reading prospect for a laugh and a half.

I'm done typing right now. Hope you loved it.

Fuck you*,
Derek




*Not really