Aside from the sheer pleasure of it, part of why I’m listening to Jesse Thorn’s interview of Mavis Staples is to smother my urges to:
1) write an entire post on the specific and general wrongness of “Twitter Can’t Save You,” a review in Sunday’s NYTBR. That’s for the best because, upon reflection, there really are people who should read the review. It should be read by any and all apocryphal beings who think of Twitter not as a tool but as the magic ingredient in the equation Apathy + Disorganization + Twitter = Successful Revolution. It should also be read by anyone who doesn’t choke on the extremism-begets-sanity premise of this sentence: “But the pendulum has swung so far and so long to the cyberutopians’ side that a little extremism is needed to correct the imbalance.”
2) spend a bunch of time and a bunch of words doubling down on last night’s post about the “if gulags don’t sound like your idea of fun” guy who’s griping in Esquire that there’s not enough sex in modern novels. Today it hit me that he conveniently ignored the sexual bluntness of Freedom, arguably the biggest novel of 2010. Then I thought that maybe, in spite of being someone who gets paid to write about books, he doesn’t know about Freedom. But he does. Six months ago, he praised Freedom for dealing with issues such as “the way sex can both create love and destroy it.” So to leave Freedom and its author out of a piece bemoaning the lack of sex in novels seems sloppy or dishonest. Thank you, Mavis Staples. Thank you, Jesse Thorn. You’ve spared me from spending more than a paragraph on a guy who — in that same Freedom review — nodded toward the fact of David Foster Wallace’s suicide with the phrase “David Foster Wallace may have cashed in his chips.” Grrrrr.
Here, from an Associated Press story about Wallace’s memorial, is Freedom author Jonathan Franzen:
Franzen spoke of Wallace’s final months, when his depression had “metastasized” and phone conversations became lifelines. “Tell me a story,” Wallace would ask and Franzen recalled conjuring a “stubborn control freak and know-it-all” (“So are you!” Wallace interrupted at the time) and how he suffered terrible pain, but would come through and write better than ever.
“I like that story,” Wallace replied, but soon he wasn’t listening, or even answering the phone. He had fallen into a well of “infinite sadness, beyond the reach of story,” Franzen said. What remained was a “beautiful, yearning innocence.
“And he was trying.”
Cashed in his chips. Right.
