Tag: davidfosterwallace
Oblivion (review: 4/5)
James Tanner’s Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace is a nice parody of the writer’s style. A little absurd but kind of spot-on. Amusing for a little while, just like it always is when you’re watching someone else work. But if you get a chance to read a bit of Wallace (granted, I’m no expert—I’ve only got maybe 3-400 pages under my belt, but more is on the way), you get a sense of how crazy inventive this guy was, whether you like the stories or not.
In the stories in Oblivion, all these layers of ambiguity or inexactness juxtapose with excessive detail. I like the way the narrators/protagonists/Wallace zip around making associations and adjustments and corrections, sentences accumulating detail as you read. At its best it’s kind of like a mural with words. Everything, large, all at once.
Let me get fetishy with a couple sentences. My favorite bit in recent memory, from The Soul Is Not a Smithy:
I was often the first to register the sound of my father’s key in the front door. It took only four steps and a brief sockslide into the foyer to be able to see him first as he entered on a wave of outside air.
Four steps and a sockslide and a wave of outside air. Lord, that’s perfect. I’m willing to grant that I especially like that one because it makes me think of Dad, but I haven’t read something so compact but evocative in a long time. Here’s a funny bit from the opening story, Mister Squishy, mostly set in a market research office:
Attached to the breast pocket on the same side of his shirt as his nametag was also a large pin or button emblazoned with the familiar Mister Squishy brand icon, which was a plump and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its eyes squeezed parly shut in an expression that somehow connoted delight, satiation, and rapacious desire all at the same time.
You can certainly read the verbosity as annoying and peacockish, but I can’t help but love seeing the product of a mind at work, like he’s been doing some serious thinking and noticing. Likewise, a couple dozen pages further into the story, some clever meeting room cynicism:
All that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted…
I’d say Good Old Neon was the highlight for me, but the title story Oblivion gives it good competition. The first is imagined reflections before a suicide. The second a husband’s retelling of an ongoing dispute with his wife about his alleged snoring. Neither of those summaries do them justice. Read those two at least.
An interesting bit from a David Foster Wallace reading circa Infinite Jest:
I would go to halfway houses and just sit there. I lurked a lot. Nice thing about halfway houses is they are real run-down and real sloppy and you can just sit around. And the more you sit around looking uncomfortable and out of place, the more it looks like you belong there. Some of the people knew this [breaking and entering] stuff very well and they loved to talk about it. And nobody is as talkative as a drug addict who just had his drugs taken away.
It’s paired with a decent interview where he predicts the rise of curators and filters in internetland, and also mentions how important an editor is…
I, of course, get all wrapped up. ”I know. I’ll have an allusion to a Russian thing that’s half true and only people who speak Russian will know.” Great, you are now talking to exactly one person on the planet earth.
The last bit from a 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace [pdf] in Whiskey Island Magazine, some advice for young writers:
This is a long haul. Writing is a long haul. I’m hoping that none of the stuff that I’ve done so far is anywhere close to the best stuff I can do. Let’s hope we’re not fifty-five and doing the same thing. I’d say avoid burning out. You can burn out by struggling in privation and neglect for many years, but you can also bum out if you’re given a’ little bit of attention. People come to your hotel room and think you have interesting things to say. You can allow that to make you start to think that you can’t say anything unless it’s interesting. For me, 50% of the stuff I do is bad, and that’s just going to be the way it is, and if I can’t accept that then I’m not cut out for this. The trick is to know what’s bad and not let other people see it.
The New Kings of Nonfiction (review: 3/5)
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:
I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one thing it would’ve made titling this collection a lot easier. Sometimes people use the phrase “literary nonfictioni” for work like this, but I’m a snob when it comes to that phrase. I think it’s for losers. It’s pretentious, for one thing, and it’s a bore. Which is to say, it’s exactly the opposite of the writing it’s trying to describe. Calling a piece of writing “literary nonfiction” is like daring you to read it.
Not only is it a pretty good collection, but almost all of them are available online, in their entirety. Someone is listening to my prayers. My comments on each, roughly listed from Must Read to Don’t Bother…
“Losing the War” is easily my favorite work in the book (made obvious by the dog-ears). And I tend to have severe World War II nausea, so I was surprised to like it so much. Lee Sandlin explores the “collective anxiety attack” of the war, the impressions of the war that Americans got through the weak, cheerful reporting from the frontlines, and how we remember and how we forget. Highly recommended.
In one of the better tales in the book, Michael Lewis wrote about “Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities.” Lebed, at 15 years old, was called out by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock market manipulation and doesn’t seem very much phased by it. Fun story.
Jack Hitt‘s “Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit” is another good one that covers ballooning litigation over the Stringfellow Acid Pit, a local dumping ground made to spur business. Naturally, with a name like that, you’re going to end up with a lawsuit. This one has 4,000 plaintiffs and doesn’t look to end anytime soon. Recommended.
Susan Orlean profiles a ten-year-old in “The American Man, Age Ten.” Interesting voice in this one.
Michael Pollan bought a cow and writes about its journey from birth to beef in “Power Steer.” And he touches on how our food chain all interconnects and the twin scourges of oil and cheap corn.
Though I’m not much for card games, I did like James McManus‘ story in “Fortune’s Smile.” McManus learns the ins and outs of no-limit hold’em and enters the World Series of Poker, and walks out with $250,000. A lot of the lingo flew over my head, but the spirit is right and the story is good.
“Tales of the Tyrant” is Mark Bowden‘s profile of Saddam Hussein. The scale of the vanity and self-delusion are incredible. It makes the guy a lot more human and a lot more disgusting. Pretty good read.
“Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy” is Chuck Klosterman‘s profile of Val Kilmer. I’d recommend it, keeping in mind what Ira Glass says about Klosterman in the introduction: When Klosterman does reporting, the superstructure of ideas and the aggressiveness with which he states those ideas are a big part of what makes the stories stand out.”
“Shapinsky’s Karma” [excerpt] by Lawrence Weschler follows an improbably cheerful, persistent Indian man who has found his calling in promoting the artwork of Harold Shapinksy, an undiscovered peer of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others, who is in his 80s at the time.
Bill Buford reports on hanging out with a bunch of rowdy Manchester United loyalists in “Among the Thugs.” It takes a while to warm up, but the later bits about group psychology and inevitable soccer mob violence are good (and downright scary).
“Host,” by David Foster Wallace, is the longest in the book (surprise!). It’s a profile of a conservative radio personality in California. I couldn’t get much into it, but I do like this bit from one of the many sidebars:
It’s hard to understand Fox News tags like “Fair and Balanced,” “No-Spin Zone,” and “We Report, You Decide” as anything but dark jokes, ones that delight the channel’s conservative audience precisely because their claims to objectivity so totally enrage liberals, whose own literal interpretation of the tag lines makes the left seems dim, humorless, and stodgy.
Dan Savage‘s “My Republican Journey” is about being homosexual and infiltrating a local Republican group. Eh.
“Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg” is Malcolm Gladwell’s exploration of one woman’s social network. Not recommended.
“The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hot Spot” by Coco Henson Scales is okay, but feels out of place here and doesn’t measure up to the other writing in the book.
Mark Larson 