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This is a notebook I’ve started carrying. The image taped to the cover is from the paperback of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. That’s because I’m using this notebook to write down supposedly fun things. It’s also for to-do lists, dates I want to feed into my laptop’s calendar later, things like that. But the notebook’s real reason for being is to serve as a drab waiting room for supposedly fun things. By supposedly fun things, I mean all the little bursts of curiosity that interrupt my conversations, my jogs, my life and send me to my iPhone to track down some fact, some title, some long-ago actor’s name, some YouTube clip. My plan is to let these curiosity bursts accumulate in the notebook, where I can review them at the end of the day and decide whether I still care enough to seek that fact or see that video. I decided to do this after finishing a book by William Powers. It’s called Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. The book spoke to the part of me that decided to take five weeks off from blogging. It includes passages like this: Rather than bringing the crowd ever closer, our machines should help us find some distance, whenever we need it. And this: Given my maximalist tendencies, I should have been delighted to see digital connectivity spreading far and wide. Wasn’t this what I’d wished for? No more of those irritating moments of isolation. But here’s the weird thing: I started missing them. It wasn’t the annoyance and frustration I wanted back—I’m no masochist. It was the state of mind that I’d found myself in after I couldn’t get a connection and gave up. And this: A decade ago, the digital space was heralded for the endless opportunities it offered for individual expression. The question now is how truly individual—as in bold, original, unique—you can be if you never step back from the crowd. When we think and write from within our busyness, surrounded by countless other voices, too often the result is reactive, derivative, short-shelf-life stuff. The greatest gifts one can give to the outward world lie within. To reach them, you have to go there. I’m not a technologist, so I can’t say exactly how the outward bias of today’s technologies might be changed. But the first step would be to adopt a different philosophical approach, one that acknowledges that in a busy, crowded world, less is more. That for many of life’s most important and rewarding tasks, inwardness isn’t just nice but essential. Perhaps on booting up, a digital device of the future might ask me how connected I want to be right now and offer various options … I was completely primed for the book, so I don’t know how much to trust my own urge to recommend it to just about anybody with a smartphone or a Facebook account or a Twitter habit. Getting back to my notebook and the image I’ve taped to the cover, here’s one of those save-it-for-the-end-of-the-day-and-see-if-you’re-still-curious things I did decide to go ahead and track down: Where did that image come from? It turns out to be by Joseph Mills, a collage artist and longtime street photographer. I hadn’t heard of him, but Washington City Paper profiled him in 2003. The piece includes this quote from Mills: “So finally I quit photography and got into pumpkins. At first I was growing them casually, and then somebody threw this book on how to grow giant pumpkins at me—and soon I was thinking about competitive pumpkin-growing 24 hours a day.” He isn’t joking. Neither is the article. A sensitive, worthwhile read. One more bit from it, and then I swear I’ll stop. I won’t even say goodbye. Here: Giant pumpkins aside, perhaps the oddest thing about Mills’ career is that Mills himself judged much of it, for the longest time, a failure. When he stopped working the streets, with just a few hundred of his thousands of shots printed, he believed “the work was good, but there was something I had not accomplished. I definitely felt that something I desired had not come about.” With the passage of time, however, his attitude toward the work shifted. “Ten years go by, you have kids, and you get healthier,” he says. “And at some point I revisited the negatives and, lo and behold, the photographs I had only dreamed of taking all lay in front of me. The photographs ended up being the pictures I thought I’d failed to take, the work I thought had never existed …” Click for high-res photo

This is a notebook I’ve started carrying. The image taped to the cover is from the paperback of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. That’s because I’m using this notebook to write down supposedly fun things. It’s also for to-do lists, dates I want to feed into my laptop’s calendar later, things like that. But the notebook’s real reason for being is to serve as a drab waiting room for supposedly fun things. By supposedly fun things, I mean all the little bursts of curiosity that interrupt my conversations, my jogs, my life and send me to my iPhone to track down some fact, some title, some long-ago actor’s name, some YouTube clip. My plan is to let these curiosity bursts accumulate in the notebook, where I can review them at the end of the day and decide whether I still care enough to seek that fact or see that video.

I decided to do this after finishing a book by William Powers. It’s called Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. The book spoke to the part of me that decided to take five weeks off from blogging. It includes passages like this:

Rather than bringing the crowd ever closer, our machines should help us find some distance, whenever we need it.

And this:

Given my maximalist tendencies, I should have been delighted to see digital connectivity spreading far and wide. Wasn’t this what I’d wished for? No more of those irritating moments of isolation.

But here’s the weird thing: I started missing them. It wasn’t the annoyance and frustration I wanted back—I’m no masochist. It was the state of mind that I’d found myself in after I couldn’t get a connection and gave up.

And this:

A decade ago, the digital space was heralded for the endless opportunities it offered for individual expression. The question now is how truly individual—as in bold, original, unique—you can be if you never step back from the crowd. When we think and write from within our busyness, surrounded by countless other voices, too often the result is reactive, derivative, short-shelf-life stuff.

The greatest gifts one can give to the outward world lie within. To reach them, you have to go there.

I’m not a technologist, so I can’t say exactly how the outward bias of today’s technologies might be changed. But the first step would be to adopt a different philosophical approach, one that acknowledges that in a busy, crowded world, less is more. That for many of life’s most important and rewarding tasks, inwardness isn’t just nice but essential. Perhaps on booting up, a digital device of the future might ask me how connected I want to be right now and offer various options …

I was completely primed for the book, so I don’t know how much to trust my own urge to recommend it to just about anybody with a smartphone or a Facebook account or a Twitter habit.

Getting back to my notebook and the image I’ve taped to the cover, here’s one of those save-it-for-the-end-of-the-day-and-see-if-you’re-still-curious things I did decide to go ahead and track down: Where did that image come from? It turns out to be by Joseph Mills, a collage artist and longtime street photographer.

I hadn’t heard of him, but Washington City Paper profiled him in 2003. The piece includes this quote from Mills:

“So finally I quit photography and got into pumpkins. At first I was growing them casually, and then somebody threw this book on how to grow giant pumpkins at me—and soon I was thinking about competitive pumpkin-growing 24 hours a day.”

He isn’t joking. Neither is the article. A sensitive, worthwhile read. One more bit from it, and then I swear I’ll stop. I won’t even say goodbye. Here:

Giant pumpkins aside, perhaps the oddest thing about Mills’ career is that Mills himself judged much of it, for the longest time, a failure. When he stopped working the streets, with just a few hundred of his thousands of shots printed, he believed “the work was good, but there was something I had not accomplished. I definitely felt that something I desired had not come about.”

With the passage of time, however, his attitude toward the work shifted. “Ten years go by, you have kids, and you get healthier,” he says. “And at some point I revisited the negatives and, lo and behold, the photographs I had only dreamed of taking all lay in front of me. The photographs ended up being the pictures I thought I’d failed to take, the work I thought had never existed …”

“
A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Good stuff. That’s what I write.

- Nicholas Sparks

(via the great FYH)

Touch your wrist. Take your pulse. Now touch just about any string of words from the start of A Farewell To Arms. There’s a pulse as human as yours or mine in “the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels” and “the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.” Read the opening to yourself. Out loud. Maybe you’ll hear what I mean. Maybe you’ll think I’m hallucinating. Here’s how A Farewell To Arms starts:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were too dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Nicholas Sparks is entitled to believe there’s a pulse as human as yours or mine in the opening sentences of A Walk To Remember, a book he wrote. You’re entitled to believe it, too. Free country, etc. A Walk To Remember starts like this:

When I was seventeen, my life changed forever.

I know that there are people who wonder about me when I say this. They look at me strangely as if trying to fathom what could have happened back then, though I seldom bother to explain. Because I’ve lived here for most of my life, I don’t feel that I have to unless it’s on my terms, and that would take more time than most people are willing to give me. My story can’t be summed up in two or three sentences; it can’t be packaged into something neat and simple that people would immediately understand.

Even if we call it a tie and decide A Walk To Remember equals A Farewell To Arms, there’s no getting around timing. Sparks published his book seven decades after Hemingway published his. This makes me think of something David Foster Wallace said in an old interview I read back in February:

… after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. … I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion.

Or, as Hemingway told The Paris Review, “Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics.”

I’d feel mean for posting this if the same second-coming-of-Hemingway interview didn’t include an attack on Cormac McCarthy, whose work Sparks called “horrible” and “probably the most pulpy, overwrought, melodramatic cowboy vs. Indians story ever written.”

On not buying a vowel for D_n_ld Tr_mp

I ran seven angry miles today, propelled by the same disgust that fueled my previous post. It’s not quite right to say that all seven of the miles were angry. After some uncounted number of strides and some smaller uncounted number of times forcing myself to really hear the “Get that dirt off your shoulder” of the Jay-Z song I’d set on repeat, I realized something that started to calm me.

What I realized is that D_n_ld Tr_mp is never going to matter. Not if he formally declares his candidacy. Not if he polls well. Not if he wins a primary. Not if he wins the White House.

D_n_ld Tr_mp can’t matter because he is nothing but an Internet troll. Yes, he’s got pricey suits and a helicopter with his name in giant letters and that dipshit hairdo. But, down at the empty heart of him, he’s just the jerk who elbows into a comments section to jab at strangers’ scabs.

What I realized after today’s 100th or 261st “Get that dirt off your shoulder” is that the Internet already has an adage for how to deal with the D_n_ld Tr_mps: Don’t feed the trolls.

Our outrage is D_n_ld Tr_mp’s oxygen. As a nakedly opportunistic convert to the GOP platform, his only conceivable gambit is to show the angry base that his troll tactics infuriate the right people. Even if you recognize this as a ripe tactical opportunity to ratchet up our outrage and blog  D_n_ld Tr_mp’s name with all the vowels intact and oxygenate his candidacy and trick extremists into nominating a buffoon to run against Obama, I hope you will think bigger.

For bloggers or citizen journalists or time-wasting professionals like Jake Tapper, a good first step toward thinking bigger would be to read this short bit from David Foster Wallace’s unfinished final novel, The Pale King:

The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes, and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this feature. Consider, from the (Internal Revenue) Service’s perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting. People are drawn to secrets; they can’t help it.

Instead of chomping the fishhook of whatever outrageous D_n_ld Tr_mp headlines come tomorrow or next week or three months from now, I’m going to make myself seek out “the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex” that Wallace wrote about. I just put “Multiple U.S. Agencies Provided Billions of Dollars to Train and Equip Foreign Police Forces” on my Instapaper. The  Government Accountability  Office even did a podcast about the report. It’s billed as an “interview by GAO staff with Joseph Christoff, Director, International Affairs and Trade.”

Don’t even try to pretend you’re not tempted.

“
What appeals to me? The heart, the sincerity. Behind the cleverness and the meta-bullshit, here was a person trying to do what we’re all trying to do, which is figure out how to be alive in the world today.

- from Nina MacLaughlin’s Boston Phoenix piece on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King

I avoided reading her piece until I finished the book itself. Now that I’m done, I quoted her words because I agree with them. Wallace’s unfinished final novel doesn’t have a mean bone in its body. That’s how I read it anyway.

Wallace sometimes gave us such freaks that they seem, at first, to exist only for us to laugh at. But there’s something about the way he let his characters be themselves — in all their pathological sweatiness or officious helpfulness or whatever else — that primes me to reserve judgment, to hang out for as long as it takes for three-dimensional humanity to reveal itself in what at first seems to be a cardboard cutout of a person.

There’s a magic to the way Wallace blended pitiless description with pitiable detail. Look at this sentence: “The rodential man, whose aura was timid but kind, a sad kind man who lived in a cube of fear, had his hat in his lap.”

When I say stuff like “doesn’t have a mean bone in its body,” when I agree with Nina about the “heart, the sincerity,” it’s only honest to make clear that I’m talking about the writing; I didn’t know the writer one bit.

Jonathan Franzen knew him. I’m about to quote Franzen. It’s not anything you need to read unless you, like me, sometimes fall into cheapening Wallace’s work by baselessly idealizing Wallace himself.

Here’s Franzen:

He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn’t belong to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.

The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms.

Franzen’s full piece was in the 4/18/11 New Yorker. Only subscribers get to read it for free online. For everybody else, there’s always the library or a dentist’s waiting room.

mcnallyjackson: skibinskipedia: themadeshop: I can’t decide if I’m going to let myself read this. But if I do, I’m gonna find a way to get the UK cover. Gorgeous. And honest. Good for them for putting “Unfinished” on the cover.  Click for high-res photo

mcnallyjackson:

skibinskipedia:

themadeshop:

I can’t decide if I’m going to let myself read this. But if I do, I’m gonna find a way to get the UK cover.

Gorgeous.

And honest. Good for them for putting “Unfinished” on the cover. 

(this post was reblogged from mcnallyjackson)
“
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.

- David Foster Wallace

This comes from an interview Wallace did with the Review of Contemporary Fiction. If there’s a date on it, I haven’t spotted it. Infinite Jest seems to exist only as “the thing I’m working on now.”

This passage was one of many that also struck me:

TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.

The same site has a whole archive of interviews. I only found it because the URL is printed on my library copy of Wittgenstein’s Mistress.

Can Cormac McCarthy really think short stories are a waste of time?

I’m puzzling over something I read via carpentrix today. It’s a quote from a Wall Street Journal interview with Cormac McCarthy: “I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

This seems like a straightforward slam on all short fiction. I don’t want to believe that McCarthy could really think that “hardly seems worth doing” describes the work of anyone from Anton Chekhov to Alice Munro. So I’m looking for ways that McCarthy may have meant something other than what he said.

To begin this exercise in denial, let’s look at context. This was an interview. McCarthy wasn’t just talking; he was answering questions. Here’s the aging-and-death-themed question that triggered his “not interested in writing short stories” answer: “How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?”

So maybe McCarthy just got sloppy with his words. He said “I” in one sentence and “your” and “you” in the next. A consistent “I” and “my” and “me” would have seemed like a vehement personal preference instead of a slur against a whole form. Here. Try it out: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of my life and drive me to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

But that’s not what he said.

If denial reaches for context, then flailing denial reaches for even broader context. Let’s look dig up his previous answer. It was also about mortality. McCarthy said:

Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Now, you could wring a “Cormac McCarthy Opposes Travel” headline out of that. But, as I hope McCarthy intended with short stories, it seems more likely that the statement is about him choosing to stay home and not about him demanding that you cancel your big trip to Altoona.

Finally, it’s worth noting that McCarthy seems to believe that long fiction is mostly doomed, too:

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

My mind, naturally, turns to the un-short Infinite Jest and to the post-reading Q&A in which David Foster Wallace named McCarthy, Cynthia Ozick, and Don DeLillo as his “holy trinity of American writers.” Of course, being admired by Wallace doesn’t preclude McCarthy from believing nobody will read Infinite Jest. So my denial is still getting me nowhere definitive.

I e-mailed the journalist who interviewed McCarthy for the WSJ. I will post something new if he replies with anything that helps confirm or debunk the idea that McCarthy has a baffling prejudice against some of our greatest literature.

====================

UPDATE: Three cheers for the Internet. No, make it four. At least four.

Just minutes after I posted this, I got a reply from the WSJ’s John Jurgensen. He’s quite clear that he can’t speak for McCarthy, but his e-mail gives us a bit more to think about. Here it is:

David,

I have gotten a lot of questions about that interview, mostly from people hoping that McCarthy offered some illuminating specifics about the calamity that scorched the world of “The Road.” (He did not.) As for the part you’re interested in, I don’t mind you quoting me, but I doubt I can be of much help—we had no follow up conversations of length and I’m reluctant to speculate on any deeper meanings of his words.  That said, as the listener, I took that answer at face value to mean that short fiction held no interest for him personally as a writer. I have no idea if he reads short stories or what he thinks of the form. But in general he struck me as a pretty laissez-faire fellow. With nice taste in boots.

All the best,

John

UPDATE #2 (2/13/11): Five cheers for the Internet. After hearing back from the WSJ’s John Jurgensen, I e-mailed Cormac McCarthy’s literary agent, Amanda Urban. I asked her about Jurgensen’s sense that McCarthy “struck me as a pretty laissez-faire fellow” and that he probably only meant “that short fiction held no interest for him personally as a writer.”

She replied Sunday morning:

Mr Jurgensen is correct in his impression.

AU

If seven words signed with initials seems overly concise, let me just offer my opinion that a seven-word reply is seven or eight more words than a random blogger should expect when he e-mails an agent who, according to this, “has repped a long list of fiction writers that include Richard Ford, E.L. Doctorow, Anna Quindlen, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, Toni Morrison, David and Nic Sheff, E.B. White and Haruki Murakami.”

Her seven words tell us plenty. Short of Cormac McCarthy friending me on Facebook, her words are as close as we’re going to get to the truth of how McCarthy feels about short stories.

Bottom line: If you’re a short-story writer who admires McCarthy and you’re about to set fire to your manuscripts on McCarthy’s account, I think it’s now safe to say that McCarthy would want you to blow out the match.

Endnotes: David Foster Wallace (BBC Radio)

via sometimesagreatnotion

As I post this, the BBC site warns that there are five more days to listen to this 45-minute documentary on David Foster Wallace. I would have missed it. Big thanks to Chad for posting the link.

The BBC presenter talks with Rick Moody, Don DeLillo, and editor Michael Pietsch. He visits southern Illinois with Amy Wallace, DFW’s sister. That segment will do nothing for global tourism to Illinois. It gives the sense that tornadoes lurk behind every shrub.

Still, a very good way to spend 45 minutes.

(this post was reblogged from sometimesagreatnotion)

The David Foster Wallace Audio Project

carpentrix:

It’s likely that most of you who want to know about this, already do. But just in case!

My pal Ryan Walsh, he of the band Hallelujah the Hills, has gone about assembling all the David Foster Wallace recordings he could find on the internet. They’re organized, being added to, and posted in one place: the David Foster Wallace Audio Project. It’s a good site, and a worthy service.

As Ryan notes: “I’ve found that listening to large chunks of the project in a concentrated period of time has the ability to transform the most mundane road trip or massive cleaning project into a compelling, thoughtful adventure.”

(this post was reblogged from carpentrix)

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.

“

‘I am wonderful to talk to. I’m a consummate professional. People leave my parlor in states. You are here. It’s conversation-time. Shall we discuss Byzantine erotica?’

‘How did you know I was interested in Byzantine erotica?’

‘You seem persistently to confuse me with someone who merely hangs out a shingle with the word Conversationalist on it, and this operation with a fly-by-night one strung together with chewing gum and twine. You think I have no support staff? Researchers at my beck? You think we don’t delve full-bore into the psyches of those with whom we’ve made appointments to converse? You don’t think this fully accredited limited partnership would have an interest in obtaining data on what informs and stimulates our conversees?’

- David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

I’m re-reading Infinite Jest, concurrent with more books than really makes sense, after listening to the 1996 KCRW interview with Wallace that I mentioned here a few days ago. Many things from the interview are worth thinking about and blogging about, but the one that makes the most sense for this post goes like this:

INTERVIEWER: … the book is long enough, involved enough, rich enough, deep enough, and moving enough to begin to feel like a dialogue — that you could go back and talk to the book in the form of reading it again. Because I did. I’m halfway through it a second time.  And of course, the second time round you know things that you couldn’t have known the first time through, and so the book is like getting to know someone well.

DFW: … I mean, this is probably a little pretentious to write a book this long and have it be designed to be read more than once. That, for me, wasn’t the thing that was really hard and really scary. The really hard and really scary thing was trying to make it fun enough so somebody would want to.

Which brings us back to the passage quoted at the top of this post.

Since writing a post didn’t help me stop thinking about that pianist’s theory that Ian McEwan used Bach’s Goldberg Variations as the model for Saturday, I went looking for this video. In it, David Foster Wallace talks about how he structured Infinite Jest based on some mathematical principle whose name I’ve already forgotten. Was it important to Wallace that readers understand — or even detect — the underlying math? No. It sounds like the math functioned as a kind of GPS, helping him maintain his sense of direction and connection while he wrote.

This video isn’t really a video; it’s audio. So feel free to press play and do your dishes or your desk-bound isometrics or your elbow exfoliation.

The fine print on YouTube indicates that the video-less video is an edited version of this 1996 interview on KCRW, which I will listen to later and post if it’s as good as I expect it to be.