Literaisons

The Waves, Virginia Woolf

2005-10-02T16:05:00.000-04:00

        "How strange," said Susan, "...Something irrevocable has happened. A circle has been cast on the waters; a chain is imposed. We shall never flow freely again."
        "For one moment only," said Louis. "Before the chain breaks, before disorder returns, see us fixed, see us displayed, see us held in a vice.
        "But now the circle breaks. Now the current flows. Now we rush faster than before. Now passions that lay in wait down there in the dark weeds which grow at the bottom rise and pound us with their waves." The Waves, p.142

In all the books I've read by Virginia Woolf, there's some variant on this occurence: a social event brings the characters of the book together, but the event ends up being nothing more than a chaos of individuality. Then, abruptly, the characters are bonded for a few moments before it all falls apart again. (See, for example, this passage in To the Lighthouse:

Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there.)

But I'm fond of the above passage in The Waves because it emphasizes how the bonds that develop between people at such gatherings can also be chains, forcing you to behave in accordance with everyone else, to obey the dictates of the perceptions they have of you. Or more often, there's no bond at all, but you're chained to the charade of pretending a bond exists.

Observe last-period Biology, Thursday afternoon. Half the class was sitting on stools around a lab table, for we had been given a free period. I forget what they conversed about - college, or how we're all bad drivers, or how unfair our parents are. But from my vantage point on the other side of the room (where I was ostensibly reading The New York Trilogy), patterns surfaced. The conversation went in waves. As in, somebody would say something, someone else would say something, then someone would interject with a witty comment, and everyone would break out into laughter. Repeat. It was an ineluctable rhythm.

Although these bonds/chains may structure interaction, they completely inhibit self-definition. All individual opinions and thoughts are impatiently shoved aside rather than probed. People become traits, for it is too tiring to explore what one really wants to think and do. Instead, one trims off all the excesses and becomes the cynical one, or the silent one, or the stupid-funny one. This way, one doesn't have to worry about oneself, whose complexities interfere with the bonding. And then if everyone else does the same thing you don't have to worry about getting to know their complexities, either. That's really how it's always been, and lately it's just gotten exhausting.

The solution, I concluded, was to be more solitary. When you're alone, you don't have to simplify yourself. You can ooze in whichever direction you'd like. And that's how you explore, that's how you fashion a self.

When I was done reflecting, the first thing I did was search out a friend, so that we could disdain social interaction together.

We are more complex than our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple. The Waves, p.89

School Fosters Anti-Intellectualism

2005-09-27T07:54:00.000-04:00

But the reason you haven't heard about it is because instead of protesting, we watch Nip/Tuck with glazed eyes.

To my older self

2005-09-09T19:05:00.000-04:00

When Thoreau first went on about how he had never learned a single thing from old people, I pooh-poohed him. But lately, it's come to my attention how alarmingly silly many old people are. So when Proust says in The Guermantes Way:

How many women's lives, lives of which little enough is known (for we all live in different worlds according to our age, and the discretion of their elders prevents the young from forming any clear idea of the past and taking in the whole spectrum), have been divided thus into contrasting periods, the last being entirely devoted to the reconquest of what in the second had been so light-heartedly flung to the winds! (249)

I have to admit that he makes sense - absence does make the heart grow fonder. It is possible, then, that instead of being wise and perceptive I will become one of the vain old women on Nip/Tuck who require monthly Botox injections. Or a money grubber, a pretentious dogmatist, or one of those insipid suburban moms who do nothing but drive their kids to soccer practice and read chick-lit. Nobody really wants to be these people; yet they exist.

It's a dreary thought. Far from improving upon my flaws and bad habits, growing older might cause me to develop new ones.

So just in case it turns out that I am wiser now than I will be later (God forbid!), or because I might have a better vantage point from which to comment on certain things since it's all so far-removed, I think I'm going to start writing down notes to myself. Plastic surgery is ridiculous not only because it's self-indulgent and a waste of money, but because it propigates beauty stereotypes and makes other people feel unattractive, thus causing an endless feedback loop. Plus, just looking younger doesn't make you younger - you'll have to deal with the fact of old age sooner or later, so you might as well learn to live with it sooner. And anyways, nobody takes nubile women seriously. Stuff like this seems so intuitive right now, but I'll write it down just in case I think differently later. That way, I'll at least have a reason to reconsider.

Now if only my older self could write notes to me.

To the Lighthouse and Beauty

2005-08-27T01:48:00.000-04:00

Indeed [Mr. Ramsay] seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's (107).

There's this excellent interplay between beauty (Mrs. Ramsay) and intellect (Mr. Ramsay) in To the Lighthouse that I'm ashamed to say I completely missed the first time around. Sometimes Woolf seems to say: beauty is ordinary and intellect is extraordinary, as she does in the passage above. For now, let's focus on the former.

In a way, human beauty is extremely mundane. Beautiful people lack the imperfections, the abnormalities that most people have - at least on the outside, they're so normal that they're abnormal. I think this is one of the reasons why beauty is so sought-after: it solves the typical high school conundrum of how to stand out yet still fit in. Simply standing out is too lonesome; simply fitting in is too anonymous. The solution is to be acceptably exceptional.

Mrs. R is such a convincing character because of the way she deals with her beauty. Mr. Bankes's perception is accurate:

…or if one thought of her simply as a woman, one must endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy - she did not like admiration - or suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like other people, insignificant. He did not know. (48)

Yet she feels offended when Augustus Carmichael snubs her:

And after all - after all (here insensibly she drew herself together, physically, the sense of her own beauty becoming, as it did so seldom, present to her) - after all, she had not generally any difficulty in making people like her… She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty was apparent. (64-65)

These two quotes seem contradictory, but they both go back to the same impulse mentioned earlier. In the former, she's trying to fit in; in the latter, she's trying to stand out. Much of her day seems to be a balancing act between these two things - for whether she admits it or not, she wishes to be liked and admired as much as her husband, in spite of her 'extraordinary' beauty and his 'extraordinary' intellect.

My grandma would pwn Thoreau at Freecell, though.

2005-08-22T09:31:00.000-04:00

Right now I sleep in the same bedroom as my grandma, and last night I asked her why so many people stop making friends and getting together with their own friends after they graduate college and start their own families.

She discussed many reasons – about how white-collar workers use their brains so much during the day that they just need to relax and not use their brains anymore when they’re off from work, about how there’s simply no time, or when there is time the other person doesn’t have time, about how there’s this sort of embarrassment among adults past a certain age to talk about anything more profound and relevant than “How are the kids?” and politics and so on.

I tried to ask if adults found it lonely, but due to language barriers it came out as “Do they find it boring?”

And she said no, because adults are a lot more capable of independent thought, which as she elaborated struck me as a pretty satisfactory answer to the intended question, as well.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. (p. 108, Walden)

Thoreau would probably disdain my grandma since she’d old, and my grandma would probably disdain Thoreau for being that oxymoron, the intellectual American. But they’re pretty much of one mind on this point: they both think that their own thoughts are more companionable than actual people.

On the one hand, this seems like a rather selfish and/or arrogant philosophy. Both Thoreau and my grandma seem to like holding forth on their own opinions, despite the fact that they easily tire of the company and opinions of others. Like: why should we listen to them when they don’t want to listen to us?

But then, how nice it would be to have such fruitful thoughts that one needs no conversational stimulus to set the mind afire! And how nice it would be to be so self-sufficient, companionship-wise. I sort of hope I’ll attain the companionship of my own interesting thoughts at some point, but maybe without the weariness of society that seems to accompany it.

Harry looked around; there was Ginny running towards him; she had a hard, blazing look in her face...

2005-08-10T04:15:00.000-04:00

This post from The Valve talks about the appeal of Harry Potter. Before Rowling, there were books about school, books about magic, and books about school and magic, but never books about magic schools.

[Little kids] want the comforting, rather repetitive opportunity to feel the way they want to feel about fairly ordinary things - school friends and hard classes and homework and mean teachers. But they also want the fantastic.

As Holbo says, the fantastic is a reason in itself for Harry Potter's appeal. But it's not enough - a book simply about Hogwarts the magic school with episodic bad-guy attacks (a la Sailor Moon) would not have made J.K. Rowling this rich. What makes the Harry Potter books such page-turners is that the ordinary occupies an elevated position; schooltime has become essential.

In other young-adult books about school and magic (e.g. K.A. Applegate's Animorphs or the Spiderman series), the scenes which took place in school were mostly background, to get you to sympathize and identify with these heroes that are just like us. Both the character(s) and the reader usually just spent classtime worrying about what was happening outside - Have the Yeerks taken over my parents yet? Is Doc Oc at this very moment torturing helpless citizens? If we cared about what went on in these scenes at all, it was only because we cared about the character. These series also had both the fantastic and the ordinary, but they weren't inextricably linked. Peter Parker could have dropped out of school, and it wouldn't have adversely affected his ability to stop crime.

But with Hogwarts, it's all of a sudden necessary that Harry stay in school and hone his Quidditch skills because he'll need all this in his final battle. The school scenes are just as exciting and fun as the fight scenes because learning has become part of the fight. Throughout the entire book, something is at stake - Rowling even tries to make a case for the necessity of the love-affair subplots:

'You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!' said Dumbledore loudly. 'The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort's! In spite of all the temptation you have endured, all the suffering, you remain pure of heart, just as pure as you were at the age of eleven, when you stared into a mirror that reflected your heart's desire, and it showed you only the way to thwart Lord Voldemort, and not immortality and riches.' (478)

It's treacly, but now we know that even Harry and Ginny's heart-warming puppy love is crucial to Harry's success.

In short, Harry Potter gives you, vicariously, a little bit of what you've always wanted - the assurance that the everyday activities and problems you go through have a deeper importance. They probably don't, but that's what escapist fiction is for.

Thank You For Tuning In (Henry James's The Europeans)

2005-08-08T06:05:00.000-04:00

Attempts to answer my original question ("What is the consequence of being self-contained and unaffectable by outside circumstances?") re: Henry James's The Europeans have proven pretty tricky. I think it can be answered, but I'll need to explore it in more detail than we are accustomed to.

This post will focus exclusively on married couple #1: Felix & Gertrude, and you can decide whether you care this much. A good portion of the novella is spent on this relationship - they are the Mr. Bingley and Jane of the novel, if we are to use the Pride and Prejudice analogy. It is actually a good analogy here because, although they encounter their fair share of obstacles, the love that the sunny Felix and eccentric Gertrude feel for each other never falters and only grows stronger. All obstacles to their love are external; viz., a jealous ex-suitor, a disapproving father.

It may seem counterintuitive, what with the madcap passion that Felix feels for Gertrude and his willingness to stay forever in America for her, but I maintain that Felix has not changed by the end of the book. The key, I think, is this:

[Felix's] sentient nature was intrinsically joyous, and novelty and change were in themselves a delight to him. (53)

See? It's in the nature of Felix to be affectable by outside circumstances - by changing, he's still being true to himself.

With Gertrude: Although she is not as pliant as Felix, she too readily changes in the direction that she wants herself to change in. She has always wanted to be more extroverted, more uninhibited, and Felix helps her to be these things. By the end of the novel, the quiet Gertrude has become wry and opinionated. But you still sense that she is on a certain predetermined path - when Mr. Brand (the aforementioned jealous ex-suitor) tries to tell her that she is cruel, she feels only rage.

She said to herself that it was quite right that she should not allow him to make her believe she was wrong. (102)

She's willing to re-evaluate herself, but only under a certain light.

Mr. Wentworth, Gertrude's father, warns his family from the very beginning to be wary of these newcomers, Felix and Eugenia.

'You must keep watch. Indeed, we must all be careful. This is a great change; we are to be exposed to peculiar influences. I don't say they are bad; I don't judge them in advance. But they may perhaps make it necessary that we should exercise a great deal of wisdom and self-control.' (48)

But even though both Gertrude and Felix have changed, it's only been in the direction that their nature has dictated - they have not been radically altered from what they probably would have become anyway.

My original question has to be answered in light of this - the way that Gertrude and Felix have changed, but not really. Are they any better or worse than the person (i.e., Eugenia) that doesn't change because it's in her nature to stay the same? Or is Eugenia simply being perverse and greedy, since it's in everybody's nature to change? All these exciting questions and more will be answered (to some extent) in a future installment.

Easily the Most Disjointed Post on this Blog

2005-08-01T01:38:00.000-04:00

People seem to think that these new Dove billboards, featuring "REAL women with REAL curves," are either some sort of aesthetic revolution, or they wish that Dove would stop giving them an eyesore.

I think that these billboards really won't change the way that we perceive beauty fundamentally, and that doesn't seem so bad.

By fundamentally, I mean that whether it's by changing your body to meet some universal standard of beauty, or changing that standard to meet your body, everybody still wants to be beautiful. It doesn't matter how hard you try to revise or expand that definition - most people will still feel like they don't meet it as fully as they'd like to.

But aren't unattainable ideals the stuff that life's made of? Truth, love, justice, etc. - so many of them seem to have been given the boot by so many people, yet everyone still appreciates beauty. Like Thoreau says:

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high. (Walden, p. 24)

...

But here's the problem with what I've written so far: I argue that people should struggle for ideals, but is the person who struggles to be beautiful actually struggling for an ideal? Or is she merely struggling so that someone may think that she is "easily the most beautiful person in the room"? In other words, does she want to be beautiful, or does she only want other people to see that she is beautiful? (Let's not get into whether or not those two can be separated.)

Milan Kundera said in Immortality that fashion has ceased to be art because it makes no progress; I think the metaphor he used was that it's become a pendulum that goes back and forth. Human beauty can't really be art then, either, unless you count plastic surgery as progress.

So if beauty isn't an ideal, or an artform, there must be another reason why everyone is so preoccupied with it. This is a pretty spoony answer, but it's the best I can come up with: maybe it's because it's a uniting struggle. If everybody's self-conscious and worried about beauty, then it's something that people have got in common and can bond over (see: girls and shopping, boys and girl-watching).

I see problems with this answer too, but I think I'll just shut up and go back to reading Henry James.

Something Borrowed, Something Blue

2005-07-29T22:12:00.000-04:00

I am going to change the way I do things, since the way I do things has been unfruitful of late. Instead of just blithely reading books and waiting for passages/ideas from the text to forcefully strike me, I am going to revisit sections of a text until I can articulate something about it. Bear with me (if, indeed, you are still here at all) if this experiment doesn’t pan out.

Right now the text under scrutiny is Henry James’s The Europeans, which is a lot less stuffy and a lot more delightful than I’d expected it to be. A less-empty Oscar Wilde is what comes to mind, although I also see where comparisons to Jane Austen come from. Anyway, upon revisiting the first chapter, I came upon (appropriately) this passage:

You are irritating,’ said the lady, looking at her slipper.
He began to retouch his sketch. ‘I think you mean simply that you are irritated.’ (8)

There are a couple times in this first chapter when a character (consciously or unconsciously) attributes an emotion to a certain cause, when in reality the feeling is linked more to the character’s own mercurial disposition and passions, the core of which doesn’t change. For example, the woman, Eugenia, after exhausting the subject of first the weather, then her brother, immediately switches to complaining about how often their cousins will probably be. She’s not a pessimist, exactly (James describes her as having “a certain tranquil gaiety (16)"), but she never comes out and admits that she enjoys anything.

What is the consequence of being self-contained and unaffectable by outside circumstances? I don’t know, but at least now I have a question to ask the rest of the book. Will report further with my findings at a later date - keep your fingers crossed.

Literature/Real-Life Correlations

2005-07-21T02:45:00.000-04:00

Note: I wrote this post about 2 months ago but never published it because it felt unfinished. It still feels unfinished, but I don't know how to end it so I'll just put it up anyway.

Waggish posted a few days ago on the lack of literature regarding work.

But when I think about work as I know it, there are few literary correlates. Proust, I'm sure, would have had brilliant things to say, but he was lucky enough not to have to work. Social realist novels like Gladkov's Cement or those of Dos Passos say less about the act of working than they do about the sociological politics underlying it. Leopold Bloom doesn't spend much of his day, page-wise, in the office, and certainly seems preoccupied with other matters even while he's there.

(This is really only tangentially related to his post, but) I can't comprehend. After reading his post, I spent a long while trying to think of an experience I've had that hasn't had multiple literary correlates, and I failed. This is troubling.

When I was a prepubescent little girl, I devoured books. My parents never kept tabs on my reading, so I was free to read coming-of-age novels, young-adult science fiction, and Danielle Steel. Before I even purchased my first pair of bell-bottoms (8th grade), I'd read all about pimples and bras and teenage pregnancy and how nice guys often had seedy underbellies and drugs and class elections and different sexual orientations and what to do if you were a girl who wanted to be a knight with magical powers. I was ready and excited to enter high school.

Of course, reading about it is different from living it, and expecting the problems didn't make dealing with them much easier. But the point is, ever since then, I've always had a guideline for my life - this is what to expect, these are your choices, these are your possible outcomes. This is how to look at things and how to look past them. I can't ever remember an experience (in my admittedly sheltered life) that hasn't had a close correlate in something I've read. I'm pretty sure most others, even the ones that don't read, have gotten a pre-taste of their life through other media outlets. Yet still, I do sometimes get exasperated because they don't sense the magnitude of the cliche of all their personal problems.

The people I know that have read a lot and widely since a very young age rarely talk at length about themselves. Is this common?

P.S. A question I am less well-equipped to answer: Is it the author's responsibility to come up with something that correlates with what the reader has experienced?

You, or Your Memory

2005-07-15T04:27:00.000-04:00

I threw away picture-frame wire, metal book ends, cork coasters, plastic key tags, dusty bottles of Mercurochrome and Vaseline, crusted paintbrushes, caked shoe brushes, clotted correction fluid... I bore a personal grudge against these things. Somehow they'd put me in this fix. They'd dragged me down, made escape impossible.
- White Noise, p.281

About two years ago, I read this essay, which I forget now who it's by or what it's called. But the author talked about how she used to take her camera everywhere and take pictures of all her doings, fearful that one day she'd look back on her past and remember nothing.

Then one day she tried to look back on her past and all she could remember was a string of snapshots, the memory of these having replaced the memory of the events themselves. So she stopped taking pictures, preferring to experience and absorb her life.

There's an obvious correlation between taking taking pictures of everything and hoarding all your junk. They both attempt to preserve the now in case it should become useful in the future, the obvious problem being that they preserve it imperfectly, and sometimes end up destroying and replacing the memory they were meant to preserve.

The difference between that and this blog is that I'm not trying to preserve events or memories, but rather ideas and thoughts. Although I'm not sure, actually, how I'll feel about this blog in the future. Even now, I look back on many of my former entries and blush. I've felt tempted to edit them, or hide them, or pretend they never happened.

There's this great quote by Fitzgerald in one of his letters to his editor, but the book's a million miles away so I'll just paraphrase it. After rereading his Great Gatsby a few decades after it was first published, he says (much more elegantly):

Looking at it now, there are many places that ought to be fixed and touched up, characters that need to be redrawn. But it's a finished work, and I'm a different man now, so I can't do anything about it.

In which I am better than everyone.

2005-07-07T01:53:00.000-04:00

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living... I have lived some thirty years ont his planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. Walden, p.6

When I first read this, I thought, shut up Thoreau. Later that night, at a business dinner with my mom, I listened to an elderly man ramble on about the importance of knowing the etymologies of Chinese characters, and I thought, I don't care, old man.

Moral: it's no use fighting condescension with condescension.

I've been reading a lot lately, but I've had nothing to say because I've thoroughly enjoyed and agreed with a lot of the literature I've read.* It seems like I always have less to say when that happens. Why is that? Often, a person that dislikes a piece of art has some articulatable reason for disliking the piece, while the former can only shrug and say, "I thought it was good."

Although thinking about it, that's not always true. I have many things to say about Proust and DFW, both of whom I like a lot. And I had nothing at all to say about Lipsyte's awful Homeland. So maybe the reason's more simple - I haven't been reading the right way, or the books haven't appealed to me in that way.

--
*Also, it's been difficult to get enough online time to write good blog posts in China.

Ismail Kadare

2005-06-27T22:52:00.000-04:00

If you haven't been following the International Man Booker Prize, you should be. Kadare is such a thrilling character - an exiled dissident ("Every time I wrote a book, I had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship." - NYSun article), writing in a language so obscure that the English translation has to be translated from the French translation, about a country that most people forget about with a style that "owes far less to magic realism than to Kafka, and to Albanian epic and myth (Ibid)." - that I'm excited for him even though I haven't read any of his books (a fact which I will remedy at some point, believe you me!).

For all your international fiction coverage needs, it's all about the Literary Saloon - head over for everything you could want to know. I especially recommend the charming article written by Kadare's English translator, David Bellos - "The Englishing of Ismaïl Kadaré".

All this if my site isn't broken, that is. I've been having trouble accessing the main page for the past couple days, so if you can still read this, can you drop me an email? Thanks.

Crime and Punishment

2005-06-22T12:43:00.000-04:00

"What can be done? Smash what has to be smashed, once and for all, that's all; and take the suffering upon yourself! What? You don't understand? You will, later.... Freedom and power, but the main thing is power! Power over all cringing curs and over the whole ant heap!" (341)

The characters:
- Rodya: the speaker of the above quote. Ex-student and murderer of two women, including Sonya's friend, Lizaveta.
- Sonya: the addressee. Eldest daughter of an impoverished family. She's become a prostitute in order to make them money, but emphasis throughout the novel is placed on how meek and pure she remains, despite her vocation, because of the faith she has in God. The money she made, more often than not, went to fund her father's drunkenness. She doesn't know that Rodya is the murderer of the two women.

In this bit, Rodya is encouraging Sonya to run away with him, to leave, to change, to foresake everything before it destroys them both. He wants her to run away and stop being a prostitute, while he wants to run away to get away from his murder and the detective that is hot on his trail.

But it's his diction that's interesting. By helping her family through prostitution, isn't Sonya already "taking the suffering upon herself?" She's bearing/easing her family's suffering by suffering tenfold for them. Rodya's response to this:

"... but most of all you're a sinner because you've destroyed and betrayed yourself in vain. Now, there's a horror for you! Now there's a horror for you, to be living in this mire that you loathe so much, and knowing all along... that you're not helping anybody by it and not saving anybody from anything!"

Rodya sees Sonya as living selfishly. She knows that the money she makes is ultimately useless, yet she continues to do it so that she may feel self-sacrificial and religious. Running away would be the best thing for her, yet she doesn't do it because it would cause her unbelievable amounts of guilt. If she ran away, she would be taking the suffering upon herself, as opposed to transferring it to God.

It's happened throughout the novel (although I haven't finished it yet, so we'll see) that everytime someone tries to be charitable, the act misfires, backfires, and/or turns out to be not actually of charitable intent. Rodya gives money to Sonya's mother for her father's funeral and she prepares a lavish one, but the only people that come are ill-bred drunks. Mr. Luzhin marries Dunya (Rodya's sister) to save them from poverty, but it turns out he only does it to make himself feel like a powerful benefactor (parallel to Sonya?). Rodya murdered the money-collecting woman for supposedly noble reasons, but at the part of the novel I'm at right now he's on the brink of realizing that that's not so.

So the question: Is the only way to save yourself & not go mad (as many characters in the novel become by the end) to become self-acknowledgedly selfish and to stop trying/pretending to do things for a greater good, whether it be God, morals, or love? It's the cynic's old argument - that even those that are supposedly kind are, underneath it all, just doing it to make themselves feel kind.

But if that's so, what then? The only time when the characters feel happy, however transiently, is when they feel like they're benefitting/helping someone. So if it's useless to do that, then not only do people suffer, but they suffer twice-over because they don't even feel like they have a noble cause to suffer for. Perhaps "taking the suffering upon yourself" would be to have "freedom and power" - freedom from your benefactee, power over your own life. But even then, maybe you're just trading your current shackles for the shackles of suffering and misery.

In other words, it's a lose-lose situtation and we should all just crawl into a hole and die.

John Darnielle

2005-06-16T17:04:00.000-04:00

Oh, how I love. Via Largehearted Boy: an interview with the lead singer of The Mountain Goats discussing every track on The Sunset Tree, conducted completely in haiku.

Q. Preparing yourself
for an ominous ending
What is the magpie?

A. Only a traitor
undresses his metaphors
As if they were whores

Giddy to see him on June 24.

Franny and Zooey -> DFW

2005-06-08T16:34:00.000-04:00

The part of the book that I found most affecting was in the middle of Zooey:

I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping--and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge--when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway--is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly."

This passage just made me pause and wrinkle my forehead a bit. Because yes, we all know that money isn't everything, that fame and power shouldn't be one's ultimate goals. But knowledge? Knowledge is honorable, which is why people spend the first twenty or so years of their lives accruing it. But now here comes Franny/Salinger, all anguish and pain, because knowledge isn't a worthwhile or satisfying goal, because it might be just as meaningless and selfish as the aforementioned culprits.

I guess that idea was shattering, when I first read it. Well where was I now, if something that I'd always secretly felt a little superior for striving for turned out to be not such a superior goal after all?

But at second glance, Salinger's answer is decidedly unsatisfying:

"I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while--just once in a while--there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"

How is wisdom for wisdom's sake superior to knowledge for knowledge's sake? This is crap. If knowledge is a phony (to use a Salinger-ism) goal because all it is is a tangible way to make someone feel proud for owning "treasure," then wisdom is the same thing. Wisdom without direction or some higher goal is also useless.

Maybe he's saying that wisdom will point out the higher goal to you. Which I guess makes sense. But then, that still avoids a more important question: how do you obtain wisdom? If it doesn't just arise automatically out of knowledge, how does it arise? Proust would perhaps say a well-lived adolescence, but there are problems with that as well.

I am exasperated by the answer that's glaring me in the face: just grope around for wisdom and pray that somehow you'll find it. It sounds so religion-y - "finding God" - and I guess I just have an instinctive distrust of crazy faith-based mumbo-jumbo (a product of the time period?). But according to Wallace's (remarkably cool, even for DFW) Kenyon commencement speech (order of words switched for emphasis):

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings... Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Meme (i.e. "Me! Me!")

2005-06-07T18:30:00.000-04:00

Via Waggish.

Total number of books I've owned: 200 tops, since I usually borrow my books from the library.

Last book I bought: Barron's How to Prepare for the SAT II Math Level II C, 7th ed. by Howard Dodge and Richard Ku.

Last book I read: A book of essays by Montaigne, specifically Of the Education of Children.

Last book I finished: In Search of My Beloved by Thorbergur Thordarson.

Five books that mean a lot to me: In no particular order,
- Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
- Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Franny & Zooey, J.D. Salinger
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
Wince. Homogeneity. Moral: I need to read more widely.

Five people I want to see do this:
Laura from Popscratch,
Mel from In Favor of Thinking*,
Wendi from The Happy Booker,
Tito from Black Market Kidneys, and
Patricia from Book Lust.

*I have no idea whether she's ever read this blog.

Oprah <3s Willie F.

2005-06-04T16:47:00.000-04:00

Oprah names Faulkner as the first in her summer reading series, repackages three of his books (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August) in a pretty box set and all of a sudden it's ranked number two on the Amazon bestsellers list, under Harry Potter.

We're going to have a ball with this one.

Watching you watching you watching you watching me

2005-06-03T20:44:00.000-04:00

A little while ago, on Fitzgerald's eightieth anniversary, The Valve had a little to-do over The Great Gatsby. Is it great literature, is it painfully adolescent, is it mellifluous, is it bad writing, &c. Although the entire discussion is great stuff, this comment in particular kept on coming back to me as I was re-reading the novel:

One of the things that affected me so much when I was first read the book was the way that Daisy herself completely didn’t matter - Gatsby didn’t actually have any valid idea of her as a personality, and it wasn’t important. It really hit me - this idea that we never really know other people, and always interact only with our own conceptions of them.

I don’t think I was sophisticated enough at sixteen to take this one step further, and see to what extent the book was really just Nick’s inscribing of the figure of Gatsby. But now that I am infinitely older and wiser, I think that the fact that Nick is doing to Gatsby something reasonably similar to what Gatsby does to Daisy (or, at least, what Nick obviously thinks Gatsby does to Daisy) is pretty neat, and part of what makes it a worthwhile read for me.

The fact that Gatsby idealizes Daisy - well, that's staple. But upon re-read, I think the chain does go deeper than that. Nick idealizes Gatsby; in many ways, Gatsby is Nick's Daisy. Compare Nick's descriptions of Gatsby - "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life... (2)" - to Gatsby's reverent "'Her voice is full of money.' (120)" To Gatsby, Daisy represents a romantic, perfect specimen; if she makes mistakes (like, oh, accidentally running over a person), it is because of external factors. To Nick, "Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby(2)" that is at fault.

But can we extend this further? To what extent does the reader idealize Nick Carraway?

The first time around, I left the novel liking Nick. He's a good guy - honest, objective, and smart enough to not allow himself to be sucked in by everyone else's crap. At least that's how he represents himself. But I think Fitzgerald has dropped some hints that he's really not all that he seems - after coming home from the war, for example, he chooses the uninspired path of going into the bond business, yet never mentions cracking open the "dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew.(4)" or in any way getting involved in his work. He prides himself on reserving judgments, yet within an hour or so of meeting Tom Buchanan he is already describing him as "pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him anymore.(14)"

Or how about his father's advice to "'remember that all the people in this world haven't had all the advantages that you've had,'(1)" which is nice but also rather condescending, especially after we find out (as was pointed out on The Valve) that Nick's family only received its fortune two generations ago when his grandfather's brother sent a substitute into the Civil War.

The implications of this are rather face-scrunching. If Gatsby is Nick's Daisy, then Nick is a Gatsby. So when Nick watches Gatsby, he is watching Gatsby-as-a-Daisy, but he is also watching a de-familiarized version of himself. Perhaps the two are related - perhaps Nick idealizes Gatsby in order to idealize himself. And then what are the implications for us, the readers, who idealize someone who idealizes someone who idealizes someone? We are watching ourselves (Nick) watch ourselves (Gatsby) watch ourselves (Daisy). While T.J. Eckleburg watches us back.

A Question That a Literary Meme Should Ask

2005-06-01T00:54:00.000-04:00

"If you could pick any author to ghostwrite your autobiography, who would you pick?"

Thorbergur Thordarson = best name ever

2005-05-27T18:46:00.000-04:00

I am ashamed, but that is largely why I chose to read In Search of My Beloved, a slim little Icelandic work clocking in at 116 pages.

     "A love struck young man worships the soul of his beloved. He considers her soul to be more gifted, more noble, more loving than all other souls. But why does he worship her soul?"
     "Because the soul is the most noble part of a man."
     "I don't think it is because of this... the main reasion is that the young man doesn't know her soul well enough. Therefore he worships it. Just as men worship God in Heaven. We never worship anything other than that which we do not know and understand. (48)"

Emily Dickinson agrees -

A charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld.
The lady dare not lift her veil
For fear it be dispelled.

But peers beyond her mesh,
And wishes, and denies,
Lest interview annul a want
That image satisfies.

Are worship and understanding truly mutually exclusive? Thordarson, who narrates the story, seems to think so. In order to combat heartache, he retreats into the mind - "I'll... bury myself in studies next winter and drown all these miserable pangs of love in the well of sexless knowledge. (43)" And there are definitely examples of this occuring in life and art – the harlot that has had sex so many times that it ceases to mean anything for her (Scott explores this in Vollmann's The Royal Family), or the professional that gets bored of a job that he'd fantasized about having since he was young. Or how about the literature professor (from a book, I don't know which) who understands everything about literature except how to enjoy it?

But there are people who beg to differ. The entire body of lit studies, for one thing. An English teacher, R., spent time telling me one day that all life is “is looking for patterns.” When I protested at the sterility of living one's life this way, he argued back (I paraphrase, of course):

You make it sound like it's a clinical experiment. But it's not - you're not dissecting something, making it lifeless. It's more like you're peeling back the folds, seeings things in new ways so that they come alive. That's where wonder is.

Perhaps these two viewpoints aren't so different after all. Both agree that worship/wonder is important. Mr. Thordarson is afraid to peel back the layers because he's afraid that there's nothing under there to wonder at (understandable, in the case of his particular Beloved). R. prefers to peel back the layers until he can't anymore; he wonders about that part instead. Maybe the reason Thordarson finds knowledge “sexless” is because he isn't digging deep enough. Maybe the moral of the story is that when you have the right text, be it a person or a book, you shouldn't ever have to worry about completely understanding it and losing your sense of worship – if it's art, it will always have more layers for you to peel back.

Why I Have Nothing Interesting to Say

2005-05-22T15:23:00.000-04:00

Lowry's Under the Volcano is so, so good, yet so, so difficult, and that is why it has become the bane of my existence. The only thing that keeps me going is my vow to myself that I will someday read it again and understand it. Otherwise, I surely would have throttled myself somewhere amidst the dense writing and multilayered metaphors and intertwining subplots. Not to mention the Spanish, and the Spanglish, and the random drunken outbursts. But then, you get to something like this:

There is, sometimes in thunder, another person who thinks for you, takes in one's mental porch furniture, shuts and bolts the mind's window against what seems less appalling as a threat than as some distortion of celestial privacy, a shattering insanity in heaven, a form of disgrace forbidden mortals to observe too closely: but there is always a door left open in the mind-as men have been known in great thunderstorms to leave their real doors open for Jesus to walk in-for the entrance and the reeption of the unprecedented, the fearful acceptance of the thunderbolt that falls on oneself... (334)

and you don't have the heart to set it down.

But, some fun vocabulary: votive, hoyden, cucumiform (as opposed to cuneiform), crenellation, cloacal, nutation, euchred, recusancy, floriferous, and pukka.

So I haven't been slacking off; I've just been toddling through this monster and my American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed.

When you have books, you don't need friends.

2005-05-14T21:20:00.000-04:00

Gwenda's post at the LBC about reading habits got me wondering about the correlation between the type of reader you are and the type of socializer you are.

For example, Gwenda, who doesn't read books she doesn't want to and always finishes one book before starting another one, might be a fiercely loyal friend who doesn't brook any nonsense from people she doesn't like. Another commenter, who "lets the brilliant nonfiction he asked for for Christmas pile up on the coffee table while he dawdles over old favorites," might enjoy meeting new people but not forging new friendships. Somebody who always donates her books to the library after buying and reading them is probably the kind of pragmatic, unselfish person that I always wish I were.

What kind of reader am I? I rarely pick up books on impulse anymore; they always have to be touted and recommended by a reputable source before I decide to read them. However, once I decide to read something, I always finish it, unless it completely fails at what it tries to do (e.g. humor books that aren't funny). I always read at least three or four or five books at once - I'm pretty good at keeping plotlines in my head, and it's fun to be able to make connections not only within the novel but with other novels. Also, I'd get bored with only one book.

I'd rather read a book twice than read it once slowly. I'm really antsy near the beginnings and ends of books; I always miss lots of things in those spots. The books that grab my attention from the start (a.k.a. "frontloaders") rarely live up to their promise. Perhaps that's why I don't pay much attention to openings - I'm more eager to see how it'll all pan out.

I love the feeling you get when you finish a good book. It's like a sense of victory at having finished it + a sense of defeat at not having even begun to understand all of it + a renewed sense of wonderment, just in general. Often, it's really difficult for me to know what I think of a book until it's over and it either gives me the feeling or it doesn't.

As Simple Plan says,

2005-05-11T21:02:00.000-04:00

Is love really nothing more than an addiction, a rarefied habit?

Here's Veblen (read it a few times, or just skip it and read what I have to say about it):

And the prevalent type of transmitted aptitudes, or in other words the type of temperament belonging to the dominant ethnic element in any community, will go far to decide what will be the scope and form of expression of the community's habitual life process. How greatly the transmitted idiosyncrasies of aptitude may count in the way of a rapid and definitive formation of habit in individuals is illustrated by the extreme facility with which an all-dominating habit of alcoholism is sometimes formed;... Much the same meaning attaches to that peculiar facility of habituation to a specific human environment that is called romantic love.
- p.96, The Theory of the Leisure Class

It's odd that this passage from a book (purportedly) about economics should be echoed, a century later, by David Foster Wallace.

'What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?'
Marathe's snfif held disdain. 'Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self's sentiments; a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.'
- p.106, Infinite Jest

In this passage, Veblen is discussing the ways that habit informs the things we consume. He defines habit as a "heightened facility of expression in a given direction;" i.e. habits come when a person finds that it is agreeable to do something over again in the same manner. As a result of habit, even when they come upon economic hard times and ought to logically scrimp and save, people find it difficult to lower the standard of living that they've grown accustomed to. He goes on to compare this to alcoholism, and alcoholism to "romantic love."

Here, it seems like habit is synonymous with addiction. When he first begins using the term, a habit seems to be merely a mild predilection for something (the way an addiction seems harmless at first), but by the time he starts describing people that refuse to cut down on superfluous expenditures even as they descend deeper and deeper into penury, and cites alcoholism as an example, it's clear that what we have here is something much more pernicious.

Yet the sudden reference to love is rather off-putting. It's casually tossed-in at the end of the paragraph and never expanded upon; Veblen seems to see love as a natural extension of all other habits and addictions. For me, the connection isn't so obvious.

The Wallace passage continues where Veblen left off and plays with this idea, of love being nothing more than a helpless addiction and, as such, simply an exercise in solips-/egotism. Being swept away by a tempestuous love isn't romantic; it's contemptible - to fall in love with someone at first sight is to fall in love with your own made-up construct of what that person is like. It's to become enamored with an extension of yourself, and not in a fuzzy Plato's Hermaphrodite Theory sort of way.

Hmm. I'm sure I could never find it, but there definitely is a passage in Proust's Temps Perdu that takes on this issue from the other side. Basically, he says that what makes love for a human different than "love" for an object is that, while objects are immutable, you can never fully know another human being because by the time you get close to him he's already evolved a bit more. So true love can never be an addiction or a habit because you have to constantly modify your perceptions and emotions to fit the object of your desire.

As usual, I'm uncertain of my own take on this. It's possible that both types exist, but that's not a very comforting thought because how can one ever be sure that his love is the latter and not the former? All that is romantic within me (and there is an embarassing amount of it) wants to deny love-addictions, but there's also something rather thrillingly defeatist about the thought. Perhaps the secret to a successful relationship is simply a healthy dose of self-delusion, or, as my mom says, "After you get married, keep your eyes tightly shut.*"

---
*Lest my mom sound like some sort of mythomaniacal Avril I., the full quote actually begins: "Before you get married, keep your eyes wide open."

That's Not Funny.

2005-05-04T21:47:00.000-04:00

The usual technique, among the literati, is to pretend like absurd events aren't absurd at all, by making one's characters accept them as if they're everyday happenings. The idea is that when juxtaposed with the otherwise normal behavior and a detached narrative, bizarre events become even more unsettling.

What Louis Malle does in Le Souffle au Coeur, which I found interesting, is make the characters fully aware of the ridiculousness of their situations. Yet the characters, instead of evincing the usual corny mouth-agape/wide-eyed/whatever expression of shock, just laugh. Oh, my older brothers are molesting me. Hahaha. Oh, now we're comparing penis size. Hahahaha. The final scene shows the entire family sitting in the hotel room, dissolved into laughing fits. It's probably important to point out that the laughter is just normal, easy laughter - it's not hysterical or affected or uncomfortable.

So what does this mean? I am reminded of this excellent quote by Dave Barry, even though he really doesn't do it for me as a comedic writer:

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.

Like it's okay to get all worked up about love or sex or religion, and read Proust and Camus and Goethe, but sometimes events are just too big and too vast, and at that point it's helpful to be able to just laugh at how ridiculous it is, how ridiculous you are, how utterly unimportant everything actually is in the scheme of things.

-----

I don't mind sounding like a pretentious ass in order to admit that I've fallen head over ears in love with French film. Within the past month, I've watched Amelie, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, and Le Souffle au Coeur. Despite being vastly different, they all seem to share a peculiar tenderness/reverence for their subject matter that tickles me in just the right way.

Edit
A trolling of my tracker has revealed the following:
- Tito Perez relates this to a really interesting Umberto Eco quote. One day I will sit down and read an Eco book, I swear.
- Patricia of BookLust writes a really swishy post about the true nature of humor. Far from being a defense mechanism, a shying away from reality, perhaps it's only through humor that we can accept the bleakness of reality. Her talent to amuse might just be a talent for telling the truth.

Poetry

2005-04-29T19:45:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd mention that I finally get poetry. Not that I fully understand all the subtle nuances (or even the unsubtle ones), but I finally understand the appeal.

For a while, I read T.S. Eliot exclusively, and by that I mean I simply read The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock over and over again. Which is a fabulous poem, of course, but there are definitely more poets out there. POETRY magazine demonstrated this to me.

So now I have a little ritual, where everyday I take a poem to school, something to pull out during dull moments. Some of them are better than others, but they're all strangely calming and equilibrating, most of all the ones that send your emotions for a thrill. For a while I brought Frank O'Hara's For Grace, After a Party, then e. e. cummings's since feeling is first, and right now I'm in the middle of Dylan Thomas's oddly lilting Under Milk Wood. Love poetry I like better than most, but I'm gradually growing to appreciate nature/people poems too - although I'm not sure I'll ever learn to enjoy Stephen-Crane-type war poems.

I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crépon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

Nevertheless, it's nice to exit a stuffy classroom, lean out of a bathroom window, and exclaim to the parking lot.

Push/Pull Factors

2005-04-29T17:39:00.000-04:00

To further refine my thesis question: "According to IJ, How do we get past the loneliness of our addictions and connect to other people?"

So, reading the text with this specific question in mind (and I'm only on page 140 so we'll see what happens), it seems like thus far DFW's presented two (not necessarily mutually exclusive) alternatives:

1. On page 111, right after everyone's just spent like an hour sitting in the locker room and complaining about how difficult/tiring the tennis life is. Hal's talking with his Big Buddy group, and Kent Blott asks him what the point of it all is, if everyone at the ETA is so miserable. And Hal says "The point is it's ritualistic. The bitching and moaning. Even assuming they feel the way they say when they get together, the point is notice we were all sitting there all feeling the same way together."

So the fact that everybody is lonely and alienated conversely gives us something to share and a level to connect on. Maybe Wallace is saying we should just continue being lonely and trying/pretending to connect (just like the people in AA just go through the motions and say the cliches even if they don't believe in them), and through this we one day actually will.

2. On pages 127-128 we first get introduced to Lyle, who, along with Mario and Don Gately, seems like one of the only people in IJ that isn't debilitatingly addicted in some form or another. Near the end there's his saying of "And the Lord said: Let not the weight thou wouldst pull to thyself exceed thine own weight." And a kid that ignores him and piles on the weight "finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself." I think it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to connect this to the idea of an addiction - when you're addicted, you keep trying to get more and more of what you're addicted to until you've gotten too much and it pulls you in/controls you.
But here's the key: When this happens, Lyle doesn't smirk or laugh or shake his head sagely. He just sits and waits, supremely indifferent, "able to sit quietly and pull life toward [him]."

So the two are definitely connected. They're both passive ways of dealing - just sit and be patient and do what you can. And my mentor for my paper is this crazy man who knows everything, and he drew some really interesting parallels between what DFW seems to be saying and Buddhism. There's the idea that Gately, Mario, and Lyle are able to be so passive because they've been "enlightened," but at what price? Gately I'm not sure about, but both Mario and Lyle are even more alienated from others than say Hal or Orin, perhaps because they lack that inner loneliness that allows people to connect. So is reaching inner peace more important than reaching out to others?

Maybe Gately is the key because he's been through hell and back, while Mario and Lyle haven't.

(this and subsequent posts are all made with the help of significant input from Scott.)

Babies can't talk.

2005-04-24T19:27:00.000-04:00

Here is my considerably-less-well-conceived reply to his email:

From: Debbie
To: Scott Esposito
Date: 24-Apr-2005 19:19
Subject: Re: infinite jest

Scott-

Thanks for your comments - sorry it took me a while to reply, but I had to chew on what you said for a while.

re: adult infantilization. It's funny that infants, because they can't speak English, are literally unable to communicate -> thus, while we generally perceive babies as being open and unself-conscious, they're actually (through no fault of their own) really private. I'm reminded of the last story in Brief Interviews, where the dad talks about his infant son being just this incredibly narcissistic, repellent, and manipulative thing, but everyone fails to see it but himself. Although it's made pretty clear by the end that the dad was basically transferring all the characteristics he hated about himself onto his infant son, the possibility is still raised: perhaps infants aren't as cute and cuddly as we think. Or, because they can't communicate, most of our perceptions of babies come from within ourselves.

And on a larger scale, even our perceptions of other people that can talk are largely skewed by our own biases because talking is such a limited/impossible activity. (e.g. pg. 956 where Himself is trying to convince Orin not to watch the porno because Orin should "wait until he'd experienced for himself what a profound and really quite moving thing sex could be." Orin finds this talk moving because Himself assumed that Orin was still a virgin. Hal disparages Orin because that wasn't the point at all.)

It also ties into this transcending/defeating cycle that is addiction, where adults try to reach their inner children because they think it will "Fulfill Those Needs" when all it does is add to their loneliness.

Also, none of the characters were really allowed to have childhoods; many of them ended up parenting their parents (Joelle had to fend off her dad's advances - like a reverse Oedipus complex, Gately had to monitor his alcoholic mom).

There also seems to be a lot of this idea of opposites being the same thing (adults = infants); the whole two sides of the same coin idea. E.g., A lot of the characters try not to be like their parents (Orin and Avril), but they end up at the same place (satyriasis). Hal's overabundant vocabulary is the same as Hal not being able to talk at all. The ambiguity w/r/t Joelle - is she hideous or pretty, or both?

So those are the things I thought about. But I'm still not quite able to answer the main question raised by your email: If Gately's figured out a way to overcome his addiction in a satisfying way, then what's his secret, and what prevents everyone else from doing the same thing?

I'm tempted to say that maybe the answer is that people should simply stop trying to "transcend and vanquish the limited self...," but that sounds an awful lot like giving up/killing yourself. And anyway, Gately's battle with his addiction is also a battle to transcend/vanquish his self, except this is a healthy battle, unlike addictions, which are unhealthy. So what's the difference?

- Debbie

Adult Infantilization

2005-04-24T19:20:00.000-04:00

Scott sent me a really interesting email a couple days ago; I'm reposting it here.

From: Scott Esposito
To: unstickytape@gmail.com
Date: 21-Apr-2005 17:51
Subject: infinite jest

Your comments field wasn't working so I'm e-mailing you direct.

It all has to do with need fulfillment. There's a pretty strong "adult infantalization" theme running through the book (e.g. the book is mostly set in the "Year of the Depends Adult Undergarmet" -- if that isn't a sign of adult infantalization, I don't know what is). You can see this most clearly in the latter 1/3 -- for instance, that weird AA session Hal ends up at by mistake where the grown men are holding the teddy bears and changing "Fulfill Those Needs". Also, Gately in the hospital bed is pretty blantantly infantile (shit, he's having fantasies back to when he was in his crib, the nurse is pulling shits out of his ass for him, he can't talk).

I think the thing Wallace is going toward is that our capitalist society makes us all like this. We're all on that viscious infinite circle where we "seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place." Whatever it is -- tennis, drugs, TV -- we keep trying to get to that place where we're finally 100% satisfied, but of course that's impossible to reach (and if we ever did reach it we'd be bored as hell), so instead we get these addictions.

Gately is the key character here, because he's virtually the only one who's figured out how to overcome his addiction, but in a way that's not going to collapse from dissatisfaction. It's also no coincidence that he's about the best communicator in the entire book. Note that a lot of the "successful" characters -- Hal's father, the tennis coaches, Hal's mother -- are pretty shitty communicators and are all pretty strange in ways that relate directly to their addictions.

Of course, you can tie this all in to the Entertainment, that functions as a nice little combination metaphor. On the one hand, it's addiction taken to the highest plane possible. On the other, it's a really great satire of the ways our culture pulls us in, pretty much from birth, into this whole incredibly addictive, immersive entertainment system.

Scott

Means to an Ends

2005-04-18T20:20:00.000-04:00

So I might have alluded to the fact that I'm writing a pretty big (i.e. 12 pages, which, okay isn't that big) paper on Infinite Jest, so expect this blog to be living and breathing that book for the next few months. Tentative thesis question: What are the implications of the inability of the characters to interact and communicate -> i.e. if everything that the characters (thus implying people in general) do is masturbatory, where do we go from there?

Things I wish to discuss:

1. The word "interface."
Instead of "communicate" or "interact," David Foster Wallace uses this cold technological term. Which, not to go all dictionary on you (because we all know quoting dictionaries is lame), but the word means sharing a boundary. It's a rather unsettling idea, but that's really all communication seems to be in IJ, what with the long Orin/Hal or Hal/Mario conversations that always end up being divergent monologues, or Hal's inability to communicate to his father/his father's inabiltiy to listen, or even the Entertainment itself, which is perhaps his father's attempt to communicate with his son, even though entertainment is essentially a one-sided affair.

2. The means becoming the ends, i.e. addiction
Almost every activity in IJ - tennis, drug-use, tv-watching, &c. - ends up becoming addictive. And by addictive DFW seems to mean that the original ends towards which the activity was performed (e.g. tennis was played to win to feel success, drugs were used to get high to feel pleasure) sort of drops out of the equation altogether and the activity becomes an ends unto itself. Like Hal doesn't smoke pot in secret to get high to feel pleasure anymore - he's stopped caring about the pleasure, about the getting high, about the pot; all he cares about is the secrecy. But it's not always a negative thing; like how Schtitt says that in tennis

You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. (84)

Which is still sort of forgetting or bracketing off the commonly-perceived goal (beating your opponent) and returning to a more fundamental goal (transcending yourself).

3. The ultimate loneliness/one-sidedness of everything.
All the things that are normally seen as interactive, social events become really lonely in IJ. Communication, as we've already discussed. Sex - Orin has sex to feel connections that he instantly breaks the next morning, and because his "Subjects" are usually single mothers, he probably also breaks other connections such as the ones between a mother and her son. Television/movies are such a solitary and passive enterprise; each person has his own private experience when watching it.

So the idea is that the articulation of these ideas will (hopefully) foment further thought, and everything will eventually cohere.

Mrs. Dalloway

2005-04-13T15:49:00.000-04:00

So I lied. I'm not actually reading Malcolm Lowry. I meant to, but then I finished Mrs. Dalloway and found myself starting it all over again. It's odd how a book that you don't understand can compel you, or perhaps that's what makes it compelling.

Take, for example, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus. They're obviously meant to be juxtaposed or compared or paralleled in some way. But how? He hates outside stimulae and dwells in his own created reality, while Clarissa thrives on superficial pleasures - a party, a walk in the park.

She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment (78).

So who here is really the coward? Septimus, for fleeing from reality, or Clarissa, for fleeing from the truth?

But it's not even that. Because all through the book Clarissa is criticized, by Peter and by the original Sally, for her vanities and petty pleasures. What's odd is the wistful undertone that their criticism often carries. This quote is from Peter's POV -

Beneath, she was very shrewd - a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance... [She had] that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be. (75-76)

So while they (Peter and Sally) clearly condescend on people like Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread, who are shallow and silly, their attitude towards Clarissa is more ambiguous. Perhaps it's because Clarissa herself is more ambiguous - clearly, she is capable of ascending to a more meaningful level; she simply chooses not to. Again from Peter's POV:

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough-going sceptics he had ever met... possibly she said to herself, as we are doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favorite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.

Is this to be admired or frowned upon? If it's a bad thing, is it worse than Richard/Hugh's unknowing shallowness?

But then to add a further layer, there is the hypocrisy of Peter and Sally, Clarissa's best friends/harshest detractors. We find the sophisticated Peter returned from India in a sorry state, getting ready to marry an already-married woman that he's not in love with, prepared to ask Richard for a government job. Sally has married a rich man, a Lord Rosseter. She lives in a mansion, and at the party, she brags about her main accomplishment: "I have five enormous boys. (171)" Oh how the mighty have fallen; how the people of depth have have ended up floating to the surface, too shamefaced to acknowledge their shamefacedness. For all their lofty ideals, they've both ended up becoming (or in Peter's case, on the brink of becoming) the very people they grew up criticizing. Maybe this is what makes Clarissa the heroine of the story - Hugh and Richard never knew anything else, and Peter and Sally were dragged there, but Clarissa is the only one who chose her lifestyle, empty and bland though it may be.

w/r/t Septimus (spoiler?): Perhaps he is the other extreme; he's rejected life entirely. In a way, this is what Sally and Peter originally strived for. Where they ended up, as well as Septimus's demise, seem to suggest what Ms. Woolf thinks of their idealism - pretty, but otiose.

Unrelated: There's something revealing about this book's statistically improbable phrase: "solitary traveller."

The Valve

2005-04-11T22:33:00.000-04:00

I find the recently-established The Valve to be endlessly interesting.

Recall Kierkegaard’s metaphor (paraphrased from memory): today we are in the position of a man who is starving to death because his mouth is so full he cannot swallow. Feeding this man would paradoxically consist in removing food from his mouth.

Wonder

2005-04-09T15:40:00.000-04:00

From The Young Hegelian:

...the attitude proper for the philosopher is a state of wonder.

Plato it was who in the Thaetetus has Socrates say that the experience of "wonder" (Thaumazein) is "very much that of a philosopher". The idea is take up in Aristotle who rehearses it in the Metaphysics: philosophy, Aristotle tells us, "begins in wonder". A wonder at the world, at the order and the meaning which seems to inhere in that which exists, ta onta.

This very clearly corresponds with Proust's view of adolescence, a view that I mostly agree with but that I still can't help finding a bit hypocritical and unrealistic. The hypocritical part being that the very philosophers that advocated "wonder" were also the ones that had their own philosophical doctrines about how things were and how they should be seen. In other words, I hear a hint of "you should be open-minded... to my ideas." Not to mention the problem that liberals and other purportedly forward-looking idealists run into all the time - viz., you should wonder about everything except whether or not you should wonder about everything.

All of which, whatever. The more difficult part to swallow is the idea that progress comes from wonder. Because it doesn't. Ultimately, wonder is passive.

Sample Thoughts from People Who Wonder
Woah.
Hm.
Why?
How?

It's these latter two that Proust et al seize upon, saying hey, look, this is where progress comes from. Questioning norms, but in an objective way - bracketing off value judgments, which modernity sees as the devil.

But that's all it does. As soon as you start to answer these questions, you leave the realm of wonder and enter dogmatism. You adopt your own viewpoint and set up a system of beliefs. And it's not like it's a bad thing because this is where progress comes from. Progress comes from people with firm ideologies, people that don't wonder or pause to long to consider dissenting viewpoints.

Initially, philosophers ought to question things. Dip their toe in everybody's bathwater. But once they've found a pool of ideas they like, they should completely immerse themselves, develop their theories and ideas as far as they can. Produce something for the next generation to wonder at, then stop wondering at. The new generation can be the judge of whether or not a philosophy is valid or to what extent, and they can use it to branch off into their own ideologies. It just seems like, if people keep on trying (futilely, because at some point you're just too entangled in history and culture) to be open-minded, nothing will ever get done. Stop trying to guess whether there's a cliff at the end of the path and ride that horse. If you fall, at least I'll benefit.

EDIT: Mr. Waggish does his own take, relating this to the idea of linguistic maturity.

Poetry magazine

2005-04-08T22:36:00.000-04:00

Many, many months ago, I signed up for a promotion that Poetry magazine was doing - all book clubs could get free March issues to be used for discussion. Since we have a modest little pseudo-club at our school, I went to the dinky little website (this was before the classy remodel), signed up for it and that was that.

They came two weeks ago and well but oooh, aren't they gems. We discussed them at our club last week, selecting poems almost at random to read aloud. Unsettling how high-caliber and absorbing all the poems were, even to our untrained ears. Billy Collins is amazing, as are J. Allyn Rosser, A.E. Stallings, Dean Young, and Averill Curdy.

There was also a rather interesting series of essays about the relationship between the poet and his audience. Which I have nothing of note to add to, but you should read about anyway.

Blah. The reason I haven't blogged because I've been reading rather passively for the past week. We'll see if things pick up.

Two Anticlimactic Books

2005-04-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

1. Homeland, by Sam Lipsyte.
Dick-lit. At least now I know why his interviews are so funny*.

2. Ishmael, by David Quinn.
It was The Matrix, replete with a shaky premise, one-dimensional characters, and stilted dialogue. Recommended earnestly by a certain snide English teacher, but recommended wrong.

I think I've overdosed a bit on contemporary fiction. Luckily, Virginia Woolf is here to save the day.

---
*...inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. - Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray

Sordid Lifestyles of the Artistic and Famous

2005-03-29T18:46:00.000-05:00

Just in case you wanted to know, Michael Chabon is mad good in bed. Oh, and let's have one more look at how William Faulkner was a crazy alcoholic. But it'd be mendacious to say that I didn't devour both of these articles. Like a vacuum cleaner. The J.M. Coetzee one was really nicely done, too.

But I feel like I read these things (and this is why I've resolved to avoid literary biographies) for entirely the wrong reasons; namely, 1) to deplume the writer of all her mystery and 2) to gain insight into "what she meant" in her literary work. I've talked about the first reason before, although not very luculently. In fact, I think I'm setting myself up to contradict that post.

The point is, I don't think we're supposed to like authors, the way we like our friends, or dislike authors the way we dislike people that don't tip waitresses well. Because putting them on the same level as normal people, with all their pettinesses and faults and insecurities, causes one to unconsciously degrade the art that they make as well. Maybe. It takes away from the nobleness and beauty of their art, which good art is, even if the art's subject matter is ignoble and grotesque. So just because I desire to familiarize myself with artists doesn't mean it's good for me.

Re: the second reason. I'm all for attempting to discover what a writer means by something he writes. I'm not (yet) Mr. Stanley Fish, who is all "the true writer is the reader" and "interpret the text however the hell you want." But I don't think that this is the proper way to go about it, by snooping through his private life and trying to reconstruct his state of mind at the time. On the one hand, it makes everything super-mundane; I'm reminded of Wallace's review of a Borges biography in the NYTBR a few months ago - he felt (like Coetzee, re: the Faulkner biography) that the biography sucked the magic out of Borges's stories by reducing them to reflections of Borges's broken heart/other piddling emotional trauma.

So don't read those articles. And if they do publish that unpublished Hemingway novel, don't read that either. But who am I to tell you what to do.

A book is the writer's secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can't reconcile them. - William Faulkner, Mosquitos

A Brevity on the Fallibility of Language that Eventually Gets Tangled Up Inside Itself and Dies

2005-03-28T21:16:00.000-05:00

So if you haven't read Mr. Scott David Herman's Dense-But-Maybe-Trues (part 1 and part 2), you are ignorant and blind and should remedy this appalling faux pas immediately.

So self-consciousness — which it seems was meant to prevent misunderstandings caused by one person saying too little and then the other person reading too much between the lines (i.e. we can all just come right out and say every little thing we really mean and let's put aside these petty games and social pretenses) — what it does is give everyone infinitely more lines to read between, or to imagine can be read between, and so infinitely more energy gets expended at trying, ad inf. ad naus.

Which, well, we're reading Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction (self-urticating, but maybe true) for Theory of Knowledge, and this is exactly his point w/r/t meaning and text in Chapter 2, i.e. the author attempts to explain his meaning(s) using language, and to clarify it (them) he uses more language, but the more language there is, the more open to interpretation the entire text becomes, or as SDH says, there are "infinitely more lines to read between."

So the more we say, the less that gets understood? It's like the universe (or God, or Buddha, or whoever) is purposely out to prevent us from ever comprehending ourselves, each other, and/or the nitty-gritties of life. If the only way we can communicate is through language, and language itself is such shaky ground, how are we ever supposed to get anywhere?

SDH seems to imply, at the end of part 2, that if everyone could return to naked earnestness then the problem of infinitely regressive articulatory self-consciousness could be solved. Universal nude sincerity would put everybody on the same page, at least w/r/t IRASC, thus eliminating the need to talk about the way we perceive or don't perceive ourselves. It's the assimilation/nativist argument. Immigrants are bad because they have different values- they're at a different location in the cultural spectrum. People can't communicate if they're on disparate pages. Therefore, we should either assimilate them (force them into our value system) or force them out and forget about them altogether. The ultimate goal is one universal value system.

But this itself raises so many problems, e.g. Which value system should be the value system? And can language accomplish this? that I feel quite out of my league and uncertain of from what angle to attack this or whether it even has attackable angles that I think I'll be quiet now.

Pleas of Adoration for a Common Reader

2005-03-24T20:01:00.000-05:00

But there isn't enough time! And there are too many books!

Shush, says Anne Fadiman. I am here to totally renew and refresh your love of reading.

Oh man, says I. Prove it.

And she does. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader is, sans doubt, the best thing I've read this year. Ms. Fadiman leads the type of life that I want to lead, a life of books and books and books. They are an inexorable part of her life: her first glimpse of the carnal world at age 14 was through a book. Her son Henry sharpened his teeth on the pages of Goodnight Moon. Every night, she and her husband read The Odyssey aloud to each other. And for her birthday, she once went into a used-book store and came out with nineteen pounds of used books.

Nick Hornby wishes he could write about books with the tenderness and familiarity that Ms. Fadiman possesses, her easy rapport with words (other people's as well as her own). And don't I wish it too.

As a rule, I dislike book covers made less than 30 years ago. Perhaps I am like Proust's grandmother, who only likes things that a) are functional, or b) have historical value. What semioses literature to me will always be the paisley hardcover with the title in white capital letters on the spine.

That being said, I love, love this cover. For a while, I considered expropriating the center image for my site layout, but then I decided that I really couldn't do it justice. Plus it would probably be illegal. But nevertheless I'd like to shake the hand of whoever came up with this particular ex libris. The dangling shoe is my favorite touch.

Happiness vs. Pleasure

2005-03-22T20:08:00.000-05:00

I'd like to rewind back to January, before I had this blog. There I was, a younger, spryer (sprier?) self, reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Falling in love with it. Coming upon this following passage with something akin to the eerie familiarity you feel when you're walking around in the basement and come upon your second-grade journal.

Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition. (298)

vis-à-vis Dorian Gray's

Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.

The things that bring pleasure, in many ways, are actually the opposite of the things which bring happiness. To long for pleasure is to long for novelty, which is why pleasures are fleeting and don't last. Happiness can't be sought-after. Happiness occurs accidentally, but once it happens, you want it to happen again and again. Things that bring happiness bring happiness everytime.

Somehow it all seems more mundane when written out.

Freedom of Thought

2005-03-20T22:55:00.000-05:00

It is a fearful question with no certain answer, the question of

I was going to do a post on the just-finished The Metaphysical Club, but I didn't really know where I was going with it, so I'm going to talk instead about this David Foster Wallace article I just finished reading instead, entitled "Laughing with Kafka."

Actually I'm not going to talk about it because it's late in the day and I have to pack for a trip tomorrow. (I'm bringing Gulliver's Travels and a book of plays by Euripedes.) I'm planning to go off and ponder the role of ex-formation in referential jokes. It now makes sense why referential jokes should be funny, but it doesn't really explain why they usually aren't.

Why you should mostly stop making referential jokes:

1. They're kind of lazy.
Think of your own jokes, or don't say anything at all. You're not allowed to earn funniness without the sweat of your brow.
2. They're not as funny when you say them.
3. They don't provoke genuine laughter.
Any hilarity is usually a combination of "I get the reference" and "The original joke was funny."
4. They mark a cultural regression.
There will come a day when we stop having original jokes to reference and begin referencing referential jokes. Oh dearie me.

Etiolated

2005-03-19T11:20:00.000-05:00

There's a pretty terrific moment in time when one first meets a word, just as when one first meets a person, when one can appreciate the word on one's own terms. Hello, Mr. Eee-shee-oh-lay-ted. Aren't you dashing? I'll bet you have a particularly long definition, something abstract and multi-layered. Just look at the society you travel around with: sitting complacently on the page, modifying the word ocean and preceding the phrase motionless lightfoot guardians.

But there comes a time when imagination just doesn't suffice. One must venture bravely into the outside world (i.e. The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed.) and prepare to meet the man behind Mr. Etiolated's ticking blue eyes. Further discovery has the potential to renew the semance, which, let's face it, hasn't really been very romantic thus far. Who knows? He might even be The One, able to stimulate one's language to unheard-of heights.

e·ti·o·late (ē'tē-ə-lāt') v., -lat·ed, -lat·ing, -lates. v.tr. 1. Botany. To cause (a plant) to develop without chlorophyll by preventing exposure to sunlight. 2. a. To cause to appear pale and sickly: a face that was etiolated from years in prison. b. To make weak by stunting the growth or development of. v.intr. Botany. To become blanched or whitened, as when grown without sunlight.

Vonnegut Battles the Pink Robots

2005-03-17T22:40:00.000-05:00

Robots are something, aren't they? They're alternatively glamorous and crude, admirable and pitiable, chillingly automated and chillingly human-like. This is why they're so story-tellable, why we willingly shell out ten bucks to see Will Smith kick robo-butt yet don't bat an eyelash when we discover that [spoiler alert!] ~~he is a robot as well~~ the movie has nothing at all to do with the book. [Ed. What the hell, Jeff Vintar? I know his buttocks are nice, but lots of Will Smith rear-cleavage does not an Asimov movie make.]

In the old days, when a man had trouble turning his beautiful sentiments for a woman into a beautiful sonnet to the woman, he stole something from a book or enlisted the help of an eloquent friend. But things will be different in the future. When the narrator in Kurt. Jr's 8-page story "EPICAC" (from Welcome to the Monkey House) falls desperately in love with one Pat Kilgallen, who, in typical human fashion, refuses to believe the veracity of his love, he's able to one-up all his predeceding schmucks. To win Pat's love, he enlists the help of the smartest robot in the world.

Written before Asimov had hit his stride, this story is nevertheless an Asimovian tale told in Vonnegut's voice. By 'Asimovian,' I mean that the robot EPICAC is beyond anthropomorphized. He's like a Human Vers. 2.0 - he has all the basic human sentiments (e.g. dissatisfaction and loneliness), but they're always expressed in an unselfish manner. Conversely, it is the humans that are predictable and sympathy-repellent.

------

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

According to one of Asimov's stories, the "3 Laws of Robotics" are also the 3 Laws of Human Beings, or should be. If we disobey them, as we so often do, it is because we have faulty hardwiring.

This little inconsistency in human nature leads to all sorts of possibilities, which Isaac Asimov explored in length. In his stories, humans fall in love with robots, robots fall in love with humans, and robots do tasks of derring-do in order to save the human race self-destruction. But it is the secret little irony of all the Asimov tales (as well as this one Vonnegut tale) that by the end of them we're always rooting for the robots, a little bit frightened and a little bit sickened and a little bit saddened over how cold and calculating humans can be.

Statistically Improbable Phrases

2005-03-16T21:48:00.000-05:00

There's some brouhaha over Amazon's new feature: Statistically Improbable Phrases. I can't see them, but according to one of the elite, they're located right at the top of the individual book pages.

The Search-Inside feature is really neat. It'll be a really useful tool when one tackles big novels - for example, the part of that Stanford guy's thesis on Infinite Jest when he discusses Wallace's use of the word "pirouettes" (and how it shows the parabolic structure of the book) would have been so much easier to write if he could only have searched inside the book for that phrase.

Proust - Aptness = Aptness

2005-03-16T19:48:00.000-05:00

Because infinity - infinity = infinity.

I'm sorry, I'm almost done with Within a Budding Grove, and then I think I'll take a break from Proust for a while because there are definitely plenty of bloggers that have much better things to say about him than I do.

But tell me if this isn't the most apt thing you've ever heard.

Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people. (620-621)

Housekeeping

2005-03-14T18:23:00.000-05:00

So I finally got around to finishing McSweeneys #14 last night. I had received it for Christmas, read about a third of it, and put it down until now. There were: good stories, bad stories, and one or two horrifically boring stories. I think I caught the whole McSweeneys wave too late.

Meanwhile, reductive literary equations.
David Foster Wallace - Thomas Pynchon = Nicholson Baker.

I think that's being a bit too generous. It's more like David Foster Wallace - Thomas Pynchon - J.D. Salinger - any residual genius = Nicholson Baker.

I really, really despised Fermata. The creepy protagonist was just creepy enough to repel one's sympathies, but not creepy enough to be interesting. The plot was bland. And to make the whole thing worse, Baker tried to distract us from the novel's failings with oodles of clumsy smut. Tsk tsk, Mr. Baker.

Proust, re: Adolescence

2005-03-13T10:41:00.000-05:00

There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase [adolescence] which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything. (423)

'...there are young people...whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement from their schooldays. ...but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.' (607-608)

What Proust isn't trying to say: Go forth. Light up a Doobie. Couchez avec des jeunes filles, sans protection. Do it all for the sake of wisdom and experience.

What Proust is trying to say: I (Debbie) am unsure. I realize that his intended audience is the 20-/30-year-old French male, well out of adolescence but still regretting all his teenage faux pas. To them he is saying "Be at peace with your mistakes because they have shaped your intellect and character."

But is there any sort of lesson in there at all for the struggling pubescent besides "Revel in your screw-ups because one day you'll grow up and be sad that you have lost the spontaneity of adolescence?" Which is like 40% comforting in a delayed-gratification sort of way, but 60% irritating because that is exactly the type of thing that old people say - treasure your youth, &c. - and really the only reason they can say that is because they've conveniently nostalgia'd out all the terrible parts of youth.

It is also 100% disappointing because other than this one incident, Mr. Proust has shown himself to be very adept at putting himself in shoes that he no longer fills, recapturing the splendor of first loves and sidelong glances and explaining it all away quite beautifully and sensibly.

So, now that I think about it, it is more likely that I am misinterpreting him. Which illustrates my least favorite part about this phase: the inability to ever be certain of your own validity. (Proust would probably say that this is a good thing because it indicates an eagerness to learn. I would probably say oh shut up.)

Pretty Little Flowers

2005-03-09T18:53:00.000-05:00

From Within a Budding Grove, p. 472 in my Modern Library paperback edition, spoken by the eccentric M. de Charlus, previously supposed to be condescending and testicularly insensitive:

... the greatest folly of all is to mock or to condemn in others what one does not happen to feel oneself. I love the night, and you tell me that you dread it. I love the scent of roses, and I have a friend whom it throws into a fever. Do you suppose that for that reason I consider him inferior to me? I try to understand everything and I take care to condemn nothing.

Compare this to something I picked up from the DFW mailing list (wallace-l):

I would be saying that all aesthetic choices are equally valid, in which case there's no point in talking about them at all. I like what I like, you like what you like, and there's no way to reconcile that, or any need to. I doubt anyone here believes that absolutely. - PR

The "my aesthetic choices are better than yours" vs. "everybody's choices are valid" is a pretty tired old argument, I know. But I think it's at least a tiny bit interesting that the passage from Proust, which was probably meant to apply for "real" emotions, can also be taken as an argument for aesthetic toleration.

For the emotions we feel for art are often every bit as dear and sensitive as the emotions we feel for people.

Also, I'm not sure what Proust/the narrator is all about, re: girls. Well, actually I'm pretty sure I do know what he's about, I just think it's funny that it more or less corresponds with what the average college boy is about. Except he's French and uses prettier words about it. "Dude, those girls are hot." becomes "[They are] an amorphous, delicious mass... a sort of vague, white constellation in which one would have distinguished a pair of eyes that sparkled more than the rest, a mischievous face, flaxen hair, only to lose them again and to confound them almost at once in the indistinct and milky nebula. (550)" "Milky nebula" indeed, Mr. Marcel!

Literary Blogs (the other kind)

2005-03-07T21:38:00.000-05:00

You kind of want to give lit blogs a hug when they get repeatedly insulted and patronized by print publications. You kind of want to rub* their arms and reassure them that it's okay, that publicity is publicity is good publicity. People are taking note of lit blogs, and that's a good thing.

It's the other type of literary blog that I'm worried about - wonderfully well-written weblogs that get passed over in favor of light and funny. I love getupgrrl. But I also love Laura Joldersma's lovely condensed prose and Michael Barrish's half-true whimsy. The noises I produce while reading Mind are either chortles or chuckles. Mayhaps some British combination of the two.

Ahem. Where's their New York Times feature?

But maybe we need to realize that newspapers are no longer the only key to fame and fortune and vindication. Or maybe we should stop worrying about the above and just be happy with our three Bloglines subscribers. Two if my self-subscription doesn't count.

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*That's probably not the verb I'm looking for.

Droop

2005-03-06T22:40:00.000-05:00

Eyelids are all: "Make this post quick, before we descend."

So I am back and kicking (albeit droopily) from Boston. To those curious, I ended up bringing Proust (good for before-bed) and a book of plays by Sophocles (bus-reading). Giddy with baby-sitting wealth, I also ended up buying, oh, eight or nine used books at the Harvard Book Store, including Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (DFW), Immortality (Kundera), This is Not a Novel (Markson), and Ishmael (Quinn). I also grudgingly parted with a ten and a five for Cloud Atlas, as a result of hip from hypsters.

This is also the last time I begin reading this many books at the same time. Somebody that I admire recently remarked, his hand very much off-, that he read as many as six books at once. Evidently, this kept his reading interesting and fended off "Why isn't this book getting good yet?"-syndrome.

So the reason why the upper-right hand corner is so distressingly oversaturated is because I was practicing the highest form of flattery. But there comes a time, e.g.* now, when I need to admit to myself that I'm more or less terrible at multi-tasking.

*If you don't know the difference between e.g. and i.e., which I didn't until about two minutes ago, I recommend this clever little explanation.

Books to Take on a Trip?

2005-03-01T21:20:00.000-05:00

Okay, so now that I am (somewhat) done climaxing over Wallace, I have to turn myself over to the more pressing matter of What to Bring, Book-Wise, on my Four-Day Trip to Boston.

The book one brings on a trip is everything. It has the potential, literally (literally), to be the perfect travelling companion, the one that offers new perspectives and clever insights.

It could also suck and leave you all alone in a foreign land.

The things that one ought to take into consideration when choosing a book:

1. Length
This probably isn't the time to take on The Anatomy of Melancholy. One's suitcase is only so big, and one is hopefully going to do at least a bit of non-reading activity on the trip. Yet something too small and lightweight is inadvisable as well, in case there's a terrible storm and one is stuck in the hotel room for the whole trip. You (this "one" thing is pretty irritating; I don't know how Virginia Woolf did it) need a book that's just right. Which for me is probably 200-400 pages.

2. Depth
This is tricky. On the one hand, you probably want to take a break from high-brow and open up something light and airy, something debonair to go along with a breezy respite. On the other hand, you might be of the type who can't go a day without exerting her mind at least a little bit; if your vacation is too carefree, you might want to contrast it with something that requires careful reading. In any case, something that tickles both your mind and your fancy is advisable.

3. Image
Okay, so this is the thing that I worry about a great deal and then pretend that I don't. The truth: some books are cooler than others. Your book is an accessory; it's a statement. Eggers says - "I am hip yet sensitive." Nietzsche and Kafka say - "I am fiercely intelligent person and wish to be perceived as such." Danielle Steele says - "My ovaries are middle-aged." The right book attracts the right company allows the right conversation. Success!

I will ruminate some more, but right now I'm leaning towards Proust. I still have about 200 pages left of Within a Budding Grove, and his book is kind of quietly intelligent. Or perhaps Middlemarch. Or maybe I should just forget everything and read Kevin Guilfoile's Cast of Shadows, which I won from a contest and feel like I'm kind of obliged to read. Plus it looks pleasantly scintillating.

More DFW-fawning

2005-03-01T11:36:00.000-05:00

Hallelujah halleleujah hallellujah... David Foster Wallace has written something new, about the radio industry.

EDIT: Link is no more.

Authors, Personality-Wise

2005-02-28T19:03:00.000-05:00

So I've never (to my knowledge) actually met a real-live author. "Met" as in flesh-and-blood conversed, joked, dined with. And there are lots of people (including many authors) that say that that's the way it should be - we should know artists through their art, and not through their personalities. Oscar Wilde said in Dorian Gray that really good artists poured all of their interesting qualities into their art, which is why they're very dull to be with.

And by all accounts, a lot of writers are pretty disappointingly imperfect in real life. Take, for example, this article (link via Maud Newton) about Hans Christian Andersen, author of The Little Mermaid.

A hypochondriac and super-sensitive, he was so terrified of being buried alive that on his travels through Europe, he slept with a note -- "I only seem dead" -- by his side. He was snobbish, insecure and self-obsessed, never able to judge his impression on others.

Oh dear.

On one hand, this would offer a kind of viscious comfort if it were true for the general case (i.e. "Marcel Proust may have been able to tear out and polish piths about truth, love, and beauty, but at least he probably smelled bad!")... but I don't believe it. I haven't read The Little Mermaid, but I'm pretty sure that the book wasn't about Hans Christian Andersen. But a key component (and you either love it or hate it) of modern/postmodern/whatever literature is that it is oftentimes about the writer. In other words, I can't help it if, along with falling in love with the book, I end up falling in love with the author as well.

I mean, how do you want me to react when Vonnegut writes (in Welcome to the Monkeyhouse):

I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing.

In the water I am beautiful.

Do you honestly expect me to not want to ravish him, the Vonnegut that wrote this passage, to not want to moan yes, yes, you are beautiful? Or at least have coffee with him?

That is an obvious example, but little things do it, too. The use of uncommon descriptors - a blushing idea. Wry asides that make me giggle. Creative punctuation, I don't know. Suddenly it's in there, and, tobacco juice notwithstanding, I'm nothing but a puddle of oozy appreciation. Perhaps that's what I mean by a "literaison."

MBI Georgetown Press Conference

2005-02-27T11:57:00.000-05:00

Oh, if you haven't already, you really should go watch the webcast of the Man Booker International Prize announcement. Feel free to skip straight to the questions, though - Mr Carey's opening speech thingie is rather dull.

Now I've never followed any type of book award before, but I still really like the way that this one is set up. The three judges (especially Azar Nafisi and Alberto Manguel) all obviously really love books and reading, and it's really a joy to see how open-minded they are about the whole thing - for example, they all admitted upfront that this was a very arbitrary process, basically based on their whims, and that it's hard to justify and explain to other people sometimes why one falls in love with a certain book (Carey - "All artistic judgments are autobiographical."). Mr Manguel was very charming with the wry jokes that only old men can make - ("How do you expect us readers to read all the authors before the prize is announced in June?" "Well you have the benefit of having the rest of your life to do that."), and Ms. Nafisi made all sorts of splendidly ambiguous and passionate analogies to reading and loving (and I'm pretty sure at one point she talked about sex with writers, but she might have just meant it in a metaphorical sense.).

They all made very insightful comments about reading, books, literature, and the state of affairs thereof. When asked if he thought books were a dying art, Carey responded adamantly that it was not, the evidence being that books are made into movies more often than movies are made into books - the creativity still starts with ink and paper, like it always has.

There were a few things that were said that I didn't like - for example, Carey stated in the beginning that the "primary aim" of the MBI is to "build bridges between cultures," and all three judges are primarily Anglophones, despite this being an international prize. But I think the former was something that Carey more or less had to say; the issue never came up in the Q&A - in fact, Ms. Nafisi (whom I'm now very much in love with; I plan to read Reading Lolita in Tehran ASAP) stressed that the best part of this prize was the shortlist, which would promote the reading and discussion of literature all around the world. And I'm totally with her there.

Link provided via the Literary Saloon.

Books imitating Film (Dubliners)

2005-02-24T20:43:00.000-05:00

Of course James Joyce published Dubliners in 1914, which means he was writing it before movies had actually become a genuine artistic medium, but his storytelling method still reminds me keenly of film.

Look at this, for example, taken from the story Counterparts:

The man muttered Blast him! under his breath and pushed back his chair to stand up. When he stood up he was tall and of great bulk. He had a hanging face, dark wine-coloured, with fair eyebrows and moustache: his eyes bulged forward slightly and the whites of them were dirty. He lifted up the counter and, passing by the clients, went out of the office with a heavy step.

In a movie, we would not be able to see what Farrington (the protagonist) looked like until he stood up. Books don't have this constraint, but Mr. Joyce does it anyway.

Other things that he does to create this feel:
- usually narrates from a detached omniscient third-person POV
- often doesn't reveal the names of the characters to us until somebody in the story says that person's name out loud
- And I guess lots of that whole "show not tell" shebang.

(Sidenote: Although he does it well, I don't really subscribe to that philosophy in general. I think a lot of the ways that writers "show" - i.e. "She smiled" in lieu of "She was happy" - are more blatant and annoying than if they figured out a more creative way to "tell" us.)

I think most readers get occasional visual flashes when a writer describes something particularly well, but this is different. I wonder whether Mr. Joyce would have become a screenwriter had he lived about 50 years after his time. Although I suppose that before I make suppositions like that I ought to read some of his later works.

Burden of Personality

2005-02-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

The above phrase actually being one of my favorite phrases ever; I repeat it to myself at random moments and it just fits. I'm not sure if I read it or made it up, but I also don't care because it's mine now.

I mention this only because I just stumbled upon quite the trove of literariness. Literariness, as we discussed in Theory of Knowledge (crazy everything-class, don't ask) or as Terry Eagleton would say (actually I don't know about this one, I basically just wanted to name-drop), is equal-parts a burden on the reader and a burden on the writer. So in other words, no matter what the writer-output is, there's still room for something to become literature if the reader-input is right. And vice versa. And somehow, when the output and input clicks, then well boom you have art. Perhaps I oversimplify. But that is why I regard this zany geocities page, put up in despair and written with the most overwrought of overwrought self-consciousness, as art - because it gives something to and takes something from me.

Lemony Snicket

2005-02-22T19:53:00.000-05:00

At some point in the future I will expound on the fabulous phone conversation I had with Daniel Handler (the man behind A Series of Unfortunate Events), but for now I will content myself with talking about his delightful children's book series. I'm not sure where the influx of homosexual* adjectives came from.

But seriously, every once in a while I take a little break from reading high-brow/trendy literature and pick up one of these and set aside an oh-so-enjoyable hour to breeze through it. Children's books are really the only books I can breeze through without guilt nowadays; all these literary writers are always so clever and subtle that I have to carefully pore over every word to make sure I don't miss anything. Mr. Handler is funny in a way that's not self-congratulating or reader-abusing; he slips in cute references once in a while, but they never inhibit the reader's enjoyment.

If you're getting tired of watching American Idol 9 (or whatever number we're on now), try picking up one of these for a relaxing read that doesn't leave a bad aftertaste. And for goodness' sake: read the books before you watch the movie.

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*How un-PC.

Bureaucracy in Literary Awards

2005-02-21T14:42:00.000-05:00

I find the Complete Review's breakdown of how the Man Booker International Prize will turn out to be crazy interesting. I just hope that Milan Kundera wins and not, say, Tomás Eloy Martínez, mostly because Kundera and Marquez are the only authors on the shortlist that I've actually read, and Marquez has already been given eighty million prizes (heck, he's a regular on our high school curriculum! Once an author has reached that point, I think he should be exempt from nominations).

Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is my favorite book that I've read so far this year. Light and clever with the perfect blend of readability and thought-provocation, but ultimately probably not sufficiently dense for something as prestigious-sounding as the MBIP 2005 (or, as the CR says, "too intellectually playful."). (Although I hope "Booker" is somebody's name and not the etymologic product of an overly-/underly-clever mind.) If he wins, I'll have an excuse to read the rest of his oeuvre.

Eww, Jonathan - that's gross.

2005-02-19T20:39:00.000-05:00

Book #13 is The Corrections, by the ever-adorable Jonathan Franzen, whose picture on the inside book cover looks like it was taken mid-wink. Which, he really does look like one of those men who will say really serious things and get you all thinking-up, then, when you least expect it, drop the most subtle wink in the world. I love it.

Anyways, the book was: not bad. Although I'm pretty sure it's hardly worth a reader's guide. But let's put aside thematic discussion and discuss one particular passage.

    On the first day of August, moments after Don Armour's two-week vacation started, he and Denise doubled back into the office and locked themselves in the tank room. She kissed him and puts his hands on her tits and tried to work his fingers for him, but his hands wanted to be on her shoulders; they wanted to press her to her knees.
    His stuff got up into her nasal passages.
    "Are you coming down with a cold?" her father asked her a few minutes later, while they were driving past the city limits.(375)

So I've read my share of sex, whatever, but that passage kind of made me want to die. It was definitely infinitely worse than anything in the first 200 pages of Gravity's Rainbow (which I began reading and then lost somewhere in New York; $19.50 library fine).

But I don't want this post to be an endless reiteration of ews. Let's talk about grossness in literature/grossness as a literary device.

Because my English definitely contends that it is a literary device. Like I said, we just finished reading Fifth Business, and there were definitely some writhe-inducing passages, namely the war scenes. But if we ever mentioned this in class, or talked about it, the first thing she'd say was "If that makes you feel squeamish, then it's a credit to Davies."

I'd always sort of secretly disagreed with that. I think there are many emotions that, if a book provokes them in a reader, are a "credit to the author" - sadness, anger, peacefulness, &c. But I never thought squeamishness was one of them.

After reading that passage, I'm not so sure. Because it wasn't only the event that made me shudder- it was the way Mr. Franzen described the event. If he had written "Some of Don Armour's semen got up into her nasal passages and ran down," I would have made a face and moved on. But her father asked her if she had a cold! All of a sudden he had rendered me aghast.

So maybe it was sort of a credit to the author. I don't know. I took a shower after reading it, though.

More Metaphysical Ideas (not ideology)

2005-02-16T18:47:00.000-05:00

[Ralph Waldo] Emerson's own method... was to skim works of literature and philosophy, of all types and from all cultures, with an eye to the ideas and phrases he could appropriate for his own use. This was his notion of research. It was based on the conviction that organized study deadens the mind, and that genuine insight arises spontaneously from the individual soul. "To believe your own thought," as he put it in a well-known passage in "Self-Reliance," to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius."

It is with shame that I admit that I haven't read any Emerson, although Menand references him so often and so tantalizingly that I think that I just might have to, if I want to live any type of intellectual life at all.

But so anyways my point is that this is the antithesis of what we do in English class right now. With every book we read, we read and read and read. Entire 45-minute classes spent picking away at a single paragraph, discussing the significance of the word "abyss" when William Golding could have used "hole." Masticating until the text is reduced to a sodden, lumpy, indigestible mess*. I am reminded of (nerd alert) a sentence completion I once did on a practice SAT - which was like "X debunked the idea that memorizing poetry at a young age prevented children from formulating original thoughts later in life." I wasted precious seconds pondering whether said debunkage was valid.

And as fatiguing as I find English-class-style analysis to be, I am troubled just as much by Gordsellar:

what feels like a spontaneous, naive (ie. unstudied) insight into a text is usually a rather standard and formulaic reading of the text. You may think you under stand a book straightforwardly but your straightforward "understanding" is really built upon a huge network of preexistent reading and understanding strategies which you have been taught. Given the kind of things that have gone into building our education system—the way curriculum has been formulated with the approval of "specialists", the way literary figures and establishments have rallied behind insane, awful, ridiculous things like, oh, war and slavery and the like, why should we trust "received" understandings of how we come to understand books?

Some punchy phrases seem to be in order. It seems as if Emerson says that, thought-wise, "breadth breeds depth," while Gordsellar says that "depth breeds depth." Both, of course, agree that depth of thought is the ultimate goal.

I'm trying to come up with a stance on the issue, but the truth is that I don't know. As a reader, I fall somewhere between these two camps. I read every word, but I also mostly go along for the ride, taking my flashes of insight as they come and not actively seeking them out within the text. Perhaps this approach is the worst of all, for it requires the least work on my part: Emerson had to skim with a critical eye, picking out the most important parts - he skimmed, but it was active skimming. Gordsellar reads with a critical eye, also actively. Meanwhile, I am passive. Horridly so.

Although, (note considerable peak of mood at this thought), this blog will hopefully encourage me to do the former - to read with an eye towards thought-provoking ideas, then to write about them, hopefully resulting in some sort of spontaneous insight, while lit blogs in general will encourage me to do the latter - to discover other reactions to a text, and compare those to mine.

P.S. As far as librarian pick up lines go, this one takes the cake: Baby, I may be the one with the overdue books, but you’re the one with the fine.

---

* Although I think I am bothered more by the things we discuss than the style of analyzing in general. It seems that our "critical observations" about a book never really amount to more than people, including me, raising their hands and voicing ill-formed ideas. If you can't tell, I'm not particularly fond of English class and never really have been, although I still hold out the hope that it's simply because I haven't found a suitable teacher. As a matter of fact, while I'm digressing, I might as well come out and say that there is an English teacher at our school who, by all accounts, is all I'm looking for and good-looking to boot, but I unfortunately will probably never have him due to forces outside my control. And I confess that this actually relieves a small part of me, for I'm terrified of the idea that someday I will meet a worthwhile English teacher who will look right through me and calmly tell me that I have no English abilities whatsoever. Which, to digress further, is probably why I've made no effort to publicize this blog.

The Metaphysical Club, Testicularity, Clarity

2005-02-15T17:38:00.000-05:00

After having read only the first two pages of The Metaphysical Club, I can tell Menand has it. Menand has it, and so does Proust, and (to a lesser extent), so do Oscar Wilde and Milan Kundera. My history teacher has it. What I am speaking of, here, is something fuzzy and undefinable (probably because I do not possess this thing), but words such as "insight" and "clarity of mind" do it some justice.

If you know what to look for, the people with these traits are not hard to identify. They always seem like they're assessing whatever's happening. They say things with a measured tone. And most importantly, they make, without the slightest bit of self-awe, statements that have the unmistakeable stench of Truth. Basically, these men turn their steady eye upon events, upon people, upon their surroundings, and it all makes sense to them.

I am so, so jealous*.

Despite uneasy self-assurances to the contrary, I feel as if I'll never possess this, this steadyness of perception, this depth of intellect. For it's more than mere intelligence (although "smartness" is a prerequisite) - David Foster Wallace, who seems much smarter than my history teacher, doesn't seem to have it. In fact, many of the postmodernists don't. For this clarity requires a firm system of beliefs for the person to stand on - from which he can study things and pass judgment. The problem being that most people either don't have this system, or if they do, become close-minded as a result of it. To be able to stand from this dias and not succumb to masturbation, that is what these men have done. They are still able to look critically at things that may perhaps go against their belief system and modify it (their belief-system) if necessary.

I am everything they are not - young, with the queer combination of hope and cynicism that comes with adolescence, ethnic, female. Which, after long brain-wracking, I still can't think of any females that have this. Is the feminine mind, through genetics or some other strange twist of nature, necessarily a roiling, muddled thing, fluid and insubstantial, able to be swayed by every new thought that passes its way? I want my brain to be the firm polygonal clay of those men, malleable only by practiced hands, able to easily ignore ideas and arguments that don't matter.

Because how am I supposed to express myself clearly if I don't think clearly first?

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* All of a sudden, this has turned into a rather personal journal entry. Sorry, sorry - I'll try not to let it happen ~~again~~ too often.

Fifth Business

2005-02-14T20:13:00.000-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day. So today I made a giggly fool of myself and emailed a valentine to Conversational Reading. But Scott was very nice about it in a hair-tousling sort of way:

Scott Esposito <scott_esposito@yahoo.com>
To: Debbie <unstickytape@gmail.com>
Monday, February 14, 2005 12:09:44 PM GMT-05:00

Wow Debbie. Rarely does the hard world of lit-blogging
produce such sweet rewards.

Thanks!

Scott

Also finished reading Fifth Business by Robertson Davies (book 12 of the challenge). Excellent writing and very evenly-paced, but not, I think, thought-provoking enough to justify the style. At some parts the nplot seemed overly-contrived, but charming enough that the reader can kind of ignore it.

It was characteristic of Boy throughout his life that he was always the quintessence of something that somebody else had recognized ad defined. (111)

I had seen a good deal of egotism in my life, and I knew that it starved love for anyone else and sometimes burned it out completely. Had it not been so with Boy and Leola? (207)

It's funny how egotists are often the most shallow of people. Because you would think that egotists, whose characteristic is that they examine themselves constantly, would be the ones most likely to dig beneath the surface and discover hidden truths about themselves. The problem is that egotists examine themselves from entirely the wrong point of view - they try to view themselves from another person's perspective. And it is unfortunately true that the person whose opinion the egotist cares about is probably a very shallow person herself, which is why the egotist only polishes the areas of his personality he thinks she'll notice.

So it is that "self-involved" is a misnomer because self-involved people are actually more concerned about others than normal. Those that aren't egotists are able to spend the day examining themselves and others with equal interest/disinterest; egotists spend the day only worrying about what others think.

David Foster Wallace

2005-02-13T14:02:00.000-05:00

I'm sure that everybody else in the literary world is tired of hearing about him by now. For a while, everyone was all "David Foster Wallace this" and "David Foster Wallace that" and "holy crap Pomona gave him $1.8 million to teach there."

But I can't help it - he's just so dreamy.

I'm about halfway through my second reading of Infinite Jest, and it's still ridiculously fun and smart and giggle inducing.

Administrative diddle-checks have been required at all North American tennis academies since the infamous case of R. Bill ('Touchy') Phiely at California's Rolling Hills Academy...

The Story Thus Far

2005-02-13T14:01:00.000-05:00

This is a lit blog.

My blogging skills, never that graceful to begin with, are rusty. Forgive me.

If everything turns out the way it should, and it never does, this should serve as a cache for more or less regular posts on the books I'm reading as well as things of interest to the literary community.

I'm trying to write very professionally and reservedly but I think I come off simply as trying too hard, so let's get past this part and into the books, shall we?

Go.

As part of the 50 books challenge, I've been keeping a list of the books I've finished reading this year. So far:

1. Please Don't Kill the Freshman, by Zoe Trope
2. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
3. Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust
4. Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
5. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
6. a book of plays by Anton Chekhov
7. Fermata, by Nicholson Baker*
8. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer
9. technically cheating, but half of Half in Love (Maile Meloy) + the good parts of Oscar Wilde (biography by Richard Ellman) = a book
10. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
11. How we are Hungry, Dave Eggers

All of which looks rather impressive typed out, but the fact remains that most of these books were a) started before this year, b) 150 pages or less, and/or c) read for school. At some point, I'll begin digging into the meatier stuff.

Current Reads:

- Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
- Within a Budding Grove, Marcel Proust
- The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
- Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (re-read)
- Dubliners, James Joyce

More on these will be posted later**.

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* Don't read this book
* I don't have a very good basis of comparison, but I feel somehow that this opening post is sub par. Much too much stifling pubescent self-consciousness that will hopefully dissipate with the upcoming posts. And this footnote is the worst of all. But perhaps if I keep on articulating it, that will make it all okay.