In which the blogger waxes verbose in re: a much-admired writer w/r/t writer's untimely demise

Internets, we heard last night that David Foster Wallace is dead, apparently by his own hand; he'd hanged himself.

I'm sick of people clocking out -- DFW was only 46 -- and leaving to their families the bad job of finding their lifeless bodies in their own home (I'm looking at you, Hunter S. Thompson).

But more than that, I'm so sorry we've lost the creative genius and the strange pure heart that was David Foster Wallace. I'm one of three people I know who have actually read the entirety of Infinite Jest; it's the strangest and best book I never want to read again. Ten years since the unemployed summer I devoured that thing, and phrases, passages, images, whole chapters are lodged permanently in my brain -- some so vile I wish I could forget them, some so funny they make me laugh randomly in the supermarket or on the street, and many so transcendently brilliant they just humble me, as a person, a reader, a would-be writer.(1)

But let's pretend there's no Infinite Jest -- DFW's essays and non-fiction and other short fiction would be enough to ensure his place in a really rarefied sector of contemporary literature. You often hear him compared to unreadable masturbators like Pynchon, De Lillo, and that douche that wrote The Corrections, but to me, there's no comparison. Sure, DFW made you work -- the footnotes, the endnotes, the digressions and philosophical asides, the brain-stretching vocabulary and sentence structure -- but it was totally worth it. You feel smarter after you read his writing, you feel you've been somewhere you didn't even know existed, like you've peeked through all these oddly-shaped windows in weird buildings and seen all the fascinating things happening right on the other side of the glass. DFW never yanked your chain or threw stuff in just to make himself look clever -- he really was the genuine article.

For my money, the best of the best is his collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I've given that book as a gift to all of the readers in my life -- some more than once, probably -- and it's one of those books that just stays with me, always somewhere in my thoughts (in the best possible way). So funny, so twisty and intriguing, sometimes serious, but always just head-shakingly awesome.

During the Olympics, I was going to write a post on the inanity of athlete interviews ("How great was it to win gold, Michael?" arrrgh!), and use excerpts from DFW's essay on tennis player Michael Joyce to back my argument that maybe we don't need to interview these people at all, considering that they've spent their lives developing one gift and we don't really need to see their lack in other areas (like insightful on-camera interviews), but I got distracted by reading the titular essay, concerning DFW being sent on a "luxury 7NC Carribbean cruise," and then flipped to the David Lynch piece, then the one on the state fair ... and etc. etc. etc. I never did write the post.

I met him once, after an appearance he did in San Francisco a couple or three years ago, did I ever tell you guys that? I had him sign a couple of my books, and when he spoke to me, I answered something light and flip, from the conviction that this famous, admired author had spoken to thousands of fans and certainly didn't need to engage in real conversation with this one so I should keep it quick and get out of his grill, but he met my eyes, paused in thought, and continued our conversation as if I were the only one in the room (there were hundreds in line behind me), and I felt simultaneously like a jackass for having assumed his disinterest and like I was looking into a mind operating on a plane so far beyond my own that it was a real struggle for him to slow it down to my level -- but he did it because he wanted to, without condescension, with nothing but interest and kindness in his soft, tired eyes.

In a way, hindsight being what it is, this early, self-directed merge with the infinite is not entirely unexpected. DFW was never far from thoughts of death, never at ease with living or with the sad grinding struggle that life can be even for happy, passionate people -- the knowledge that decline and certain death come for us all informed his character and his writing in a deep and inescapable way. And though we of course don't know what made him decide to kill himself and then carry that out, it seems clear that the dark parts of his triple-size brain got the upper hand at last.

Here's hoping that whatever's on the other side is more beautiful than what's on this one, David.

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(1) Upon my first reading of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, the selfish thought surfaced in my brain that "This fucking guy -- he's got the niche I wanted to be in! And he's way way waaaaay better than I could ever be! Fuuuuck!" It handicapped my writing efforts for years, people. Years.

The Clooney called. He wants the whole Ocean’s Eleven thing back.

OK so we were watching Leverage – new show on TNT, starring a strangely younger-than-I-thought, thinner-than-I-thought Timothy Hutton, black guy I think I’ve seen before but not on The Wire, some chick that looks like an older Jamie-Lynn Siegler (who, btw, is just EVERYWHERE these days), some guy who I think was shooting for a cross between Sawyer on Lost and Brad Pitt but landed somewhere around David Foster Wallace, and this spazzy little wiry blonde. We TiVoed it because it has a connection to Mr. Gleemonex’s day job (international thievery) and incidentally it is a Dean Devlin joint, about whom we personally could not give one shit but who is married to this really strange chick with giant blue anime eyes that we knew in college (she was on a soap, and in The Patriot, and ... whatever, she’s married to Dean Devlin – just, never mind. Shut up.).

Anyway.

So, Caper Scene ensues. The spazzy blonde ziplines herself down the side of a tall building, cuts a circle out of the glass window, and, contrary to walkie-talkie admonitions from Hutton, prepares to let herself in, clearly certain she can defeat the various security systems without waiting for backup.

And I go, “Oh man, gymnastic robbing. There’s gonna be gymnastic robbing in this thing.”

Do I have to tell you I was right? Cause I was. Sometimes I hate being right.

Irritant

So I was reading the NYT's Book Review section yesterday, which despite the fact that I am a compulsive nonstop reader of books is a thing I rarely do because all it produces in me is a giant untamed raging feeling of WANT IT, WANT ALL THESE, NOW NOW NOW and that's really just unhelpful, life-management-wise, and I come across this, like, graduate skool essay by Katie Roiphe on the "meek" generation of American Male Writers (she names as evidence the truly genius David Foster Wallace and then sorta wanders on to all those Brooklyn kids named Josh and Jonathan and Joshua and whatever, that glib and annoying in-love-with-itself stuff I ain't got NO TIME for, because ugh). I admit I skimmed it -- wouldn't you? -- but I did catch that she was kind of defending my Most Hated of All Lit'rary Hatees, Updike and Styron and the rest of those disgusting lecherous old assholes, on the grounds that a lot of their writing about sex and women was -- allegedly, according to Katie -- intended to be comic. To which I have to say: buuulllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllSHIT.

That's all! OK, so, happy Monday, and welcome 2010!

You KNOW bin Laden had to've enjoyed gettin orange slices after soccer practice!

Abe Kanan and Rodney Mullen Are Awesome For Entirely Different Reasons

1. Abe Kanan: I have the Stern channels on Sirius in my new pimpmobile, so I am finally getting to hear not only Stern but also my new discovery, the Abe Kanan show. It is f'ing HYSTERICAL. They just talk about stuff (sharks, Rottweilers, Abe Lincoln), and when you try to tell your fellow Stern/Kanan fanboy of a husband what they were talking about, it kind of dies in the translation, but OMFG I thought I might have a stroke in the Whole Foods parking lot the other day when they were talking about dictators' and other maniacs' adolescences -- "Was Hitler, like, always a dick? Or did he get book-checked a lot in the hallways at school and that's what MADE him a dick?" "Bin Laden musta been a little bit cool, he was 6'7" and played soccer -- when he was a kid you KNOW he had to've enjoyed gettin orange slices after soccer practice!" See? You're not dying of laughter -- but if you heard these guys say it, you would be.

2. Rodney Mullen: Holy skinny, wiry Shatner would I have been an annoying skate nerd back in the day if I had any notion that this world existed. I've come to know about Bones Brigade from Mr. Gleemonex, who WAS into this stuff back in the day; this weekend, we watched the 2012 Bones Brigade autobiography Stacy Peralta made -- it was absolutely fascinating. This feels like how I got into the Pixies around age 30, since I missed them almost entirely the first time around (would have been a full 100% cultural miss if not for the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack -- but now I play bass because of Kim Deal and kind of almost might someday get a tattoo of their logo). And while I have written here before about Tony Hawk, whom I continue to love, I gotta tellya, I'm developing quite a Thing for Rodney Mullen (at least the current incarnation of him, all bedraggled and wistful and strange and reflective, beautiful like a musician over a mind like David Foster Wallace or some shit). He is so goddamned interesting, and I can't figure him out, and that's sofa king cool, man.

Well, they often call me Speedo but my real name is Mr. Earl

Inspired by a little vid of David Foster Wallace talking about the despair-inducing use of words like "utilize" when you mean "use" and "prior to" when you mean "before," sent to me by Mr. Gleemonex today, I am about to throw down on a kind of writing that makes me figgedy-fucking crazy.

I don't know what else to call it but verbal clip-art. It's when the writer just falls back on the obvious, expected expression or offers useless little brain-prompts that invite you to "see:" or "read:" or "think:", e.g. homewrecking hussies (think: Angelina Jolie) as filler that really add nothing to the meaning. My former boss was the King of Verbal Clip-Art -- in the spoken as well as the written word -- but I don't feel like talking about that douchekayak. Better to give as an example Real Simple, a magazine I kind of love and also totally hate.*

Here's what I mean. You're writing a blurb about productivity, under the number headline 9%, and you say: [9% is] How much more productive workers who take short Internet breaks are. But in between the words "breaks" and "are," you have to insert "(say, to check Facebook or read the news)." Why? You don't trust us to supply our own idea of what a short Internet break is?

The New York Times does it -- that One-Page Magazine thing they do now is a terrible offender. I'm still annoyed by one I actually ripped out and carried around for awhile -- something about permanence, tattoos or something, which ended with "Kim Kardashian is not a fan." See what they did there? Toss in a dumb topical reference to make their dumb point instead of letting you figure it out?

It's just so fucking lazy. People giving their opinions always have to "weigh in." Your feature is about workout clothes, so you have to say "no sweat." Exfoliation? Better say "here's the rub"! Snacks? "Chew on this!"

Ucch. I don't know, I think I'm explaining this badly -- I just want people to permanently retire the cut-and-paste bullshit and come up with something original. You and me, we understand each other, right?

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*It's fun to get it in the mail each month, and there's often lots of good content, but A) the problem described in this post and B) reading it makes me feel like the sweet soft mooshy hydrogenated center of a demographic target market that I try really hard with my Pixies tees and BUST subscription to pretend like I'm not in at all. 

Antitoi's tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn't.

I would like to share with you all the first tones of one of the greatest Track One, Side Ones in all of writing:

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad's alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I'm starting to see why this was so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner's sickness for home. I'd grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids -- and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light. Calculus was, quite literally, child's play. 

--"Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," from the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

And on a side note, peepholes: I am sad for the Kids Today, who'll never know the thrill of actually setting the needle down on a Track One, Side One. They've got a million billion music options and no boundaries at all, but they've been robbed of that moment of yes! this! right now! anticipation. Selah, kids.