I’m taking a break this week from the IJOSASa/oBC to talk about something that’s been on everyone’s minds and very much a part of the national conversation lately. I’m talking about the New Yorker, of course, and its cover art, which incorporates the “dark imaginings” of America’s current cultural landscape into a tableau that is both satirical and controversial.

That’s right, I’m talking about the artwork on the front of the June 9 & 16 Summer Fiction Issue, with artwork by Adrian Tomine—by far the magazine’s edgiest, cleverest cover in recent history. It depicts a UPS courier delivering a package from Amazon, presumably full of books, to a woman who is looking sheepishly over at the proprietor of the independent bookshop located next door. Excellent satire, and incisive cultural commentary. It doesn’t get much sharper than this! Well done, Tomine. Another one out of the ballpark.

Anyway, the issue contains—in addition to fiction, of course—a wonderful personal essay by Haruki Murakami about his origins as a writer, which happened to coincide with his decision to take up running as his primary means of physical exercise. Since writing and running are the two things I spend the majority of my waking life doing nowadays, I was naturally drawn to his piece.

Turns out, Murakami came to writing relatively late. “I was about to turn thirty. I was reaching the age at which I wouldn’t be considered young anymore. And, pretty much out of the blue, it occurred to me to write a novel.”

A lot of Murakami’s narration is like this, and makes his path to being a commercially and critically successful author sound pretty effortless, like a series of happy accidents. “When I got a call from an editor … informing me that my novel had made the prize’s short list, I’d completely forgotten having entered the contest.” I always get a little suspicious when writers’ (or really anyone’s) tales of their ascension to success contain curious elisions like this: no mention of the struggle and the doubt, or the extreme patience, required by the craft.

But aside from that one qualm, I found a lot to like and relate to in Murakami’s piece. Over the past couple of years I’ve slowly been carving out a lifestyle for myself where both writing and running, once two incredibly unappealing and arduous activities, are now simply matters of fact—not necessarily any less arduous, but less intimidating, easier to fathom and commence on a daily basis. Every single day, every single time I sit down to write or am faced with a free hour or two when I could go for a run, the temptation to do something esaier, lazier—take a nap, watch a DVD—is overwhelming, and nearly impossible to resist. But I am resisting it more often than not, and when I do, I’m always glad I did.

Of course, this conundrum—hating the very thing you’re good at, resenting the hard work that makes life worth living—is universal. Great writers like Murakami share it, and great runners apparently do too:

Once, I interviewed the Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko, just after he had retired from running. I asked him, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today?” He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course. All the time!”

I knew how dumb [my question] was, but I wanted to hear the answer directly from someone of Seko’s calibre. … Seko’s reply came as a great relief. In the final analysis, we’re all the same, I thought.

Every morning I wonder if this will be the day I can’t think of a single thing to write, if I sit paralyzed at the keyboard and never press a key. Every afternoon I come home, feet dragging, having gotten insufficient sleep the night before, wanting more than anything to take a nap. But I’ve increasingly been flinging myself back out the door before I have a chance to lie down, running out into the muggy heat, to go three or four miles. Because I know that a nap will make me more sluggish and sad, while a run will energize me.

Last week I turned thirty-two, and like most people—maybe more than most people—I am occasionally self-conscious about my age. In an era when the best and brightest writers, musicians and artists seem to emerge and peak at younger and younger ages, it’s hard not to internalize the (unfair, incredibly insidious, self-defeating, and ultimately inaccurate) notion that if you haven’t made it big by the time you’re oh, let’s say twenty-six, then it ain’t gonna happen. I alternately entertain and scoff at this notion every single goddamn day, and I’m not sure I’m any closer to dispelling it. But I am getting better at ignoring it.

Murakami and countless other really talented people are living proof that such notions are bullshit. His explanation of how he went from an out-of-shape nightclub owner to a successful novelist and marathon runner may at times be smooth, zenlike and direct, but he is careful to emphasize that it was hard-won:

Having the kind of body that easily puts on weight is perhaps a blessing in disguise. …. People who naturally keep the weight off don’t need to exercise or watch their diet. … Those of us who have a tendency to gain weight should consider ourselves lucky that the red olight is so clearly visible. …

I think this viewpoint applies as well to the job of the novelist. Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. … I have to chip away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. … If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their source, they’re in trouble.

In other words, let’s face it: life is basically unfair. But, even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness. …

At any rate, this is how I started running. Thirty-three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F. Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. It’s an age that may be a kind of crossroads in life. It was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

The things most worth doing are going to be the things that entail the hardest work. This seems like a foregone conclusion, but it’s easier to pay it lip service than to actually believe and follow it. I think I came especially late to this philosophy, and it’s only recently that I’ve begun to see it borne out in my own life.

I don’t mean to brag, because at heart I am a profoundly lazy person, but I’m in the best shape of my life right now, both physically and mentally. I ride my bike everywhere and run four miles every day; I’m producing more meaningful writing than ever before because some very smart people trained me how to do it every day. So it’s taking me a little longer than the hotshots publishing books at twenty-five. It’s not a fucking contest.

Posted: July 18th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 3

I want to begin the second meeting of the Infinite Jest Online Summertime Appreciation Society and/or Book Club with some shout-outs to other IJOSASa/oBC members who have already posted some great stuff to their blogs. Maria led the way with a couple entries, including an especially nice one highlighting the poetic qualities of DFW’s prose. Meanwhile Laura has accomplished the impressive hat trick of not only being from Tucson (allowing her to address the novel’s Arizonan settings), but also having attended the same MFA program as DFW, and being half-Canadian. (Which means that if we hear any squeaky wheelchair wheels, we’ll know it’s her. Har har, and so forth.)

Both Dan and Maria have written about encountering the book for the first time and how external circumstances affected their reading experience. I’m interested in this too, since tackling such a big book is inevitably going to impact one’s daily routine, and our memories make certain associations with our favorite books. (For example, I read it for the first time in the UK, and reading this Great American Novel overseas might have had some effect on the way I initially experienced it.)

Finally, I’m pleased to announce that Neil has started up a blog and added his voice to the fray. For some reason it bears a Blogger Content Warning, so I can’t wait to see what kind of licentious material Neil plans on putting up there.

Before I get into my notes on the next chunk of the book, I want to talk about Difficult Books and why we read them. Infinite Jest is undoubtedly a Difficult Book, but I would argue that it’s not unreasonably so. It’s just the right degree of Difficult.

Jonathan Franzen makes a distinction—in an old New Yorker essay called “Mr. Difficult” (abstract only; reprinted in his NF collection How to Be Alone) to which Burn refers on pp. 9-10—between “status” and “contract” novels. Status novels are books by the likes of Joyce, Gaddis, and Musil—books that Franzen feels are difficult for the sake of being difficult, as if their creation was fueled by some kind of authorial contempt for the reader. Contract novels, however, are difficult books that seek a connection with the reader, that reward the reader for sticking with them, that challenge but still respect the reader’s intelligence. Franzen categorizes Infinite Jest as a contract novel, and despite the possibility of bias arising from his being an old buddy of DFW’s, I agree with him (obviously).

Which isn’t to say a person could be blamed for beginning Infinite Jest, only to put it down after fifty or a hundred pages. It’s not an easy book to get into, and its first twenty (or hundred, or two hundred) pages are not immediately accessible.

I’m always interested in the various reasons people are or aren’t successful getting through this book, since for a while back when it was published, and maybe still today, whether or not you bothered with this book (or Underworld or Gravity’s Rainbow or the Recognitions or any of the other Difficult Books) was supposedly a barometer of your position in/on the Fraught State of Contemporary American Literature, not to mention a superficial indicator of your intellectual rigor and willingness to “engage” with a “text” and/or look like an “overserious” “douchebag” on the train in the morning.

I don’t worry too much about those things—I’m pretty confident in my ability to both engage with a text and look like an overserious douchebag in pretty much any context. I read (and re-read) Infinite Jest because it’s fun; it’s almost infinitely (GET IT?) entertaining. I wouldn’t waste my time with a difficult novel if it wasn’t going to be. Entertaining, that is. Despite my English degrees and love of reading, my patience for literature is finite, and I’ve put down a lot of Big Important Books I was supposed to read because people I either respected or feared told me I should. Read them, that is. So despite my best intentions and pretensions toward intellectual rigor, if a book doesn’t grab me right away, it doesn’t stand much of a chance. This is why I still haven’t read any Tolstoy, or made it all the way through Gravity’s Rainbow. When it comes right down to it, I’m a pretty lazy reader. So why have I succeeded in reading Infinite Jest four times when I’ve failed to conquer so many other books?

Like Franzen, I do believe there is a difference between Infinite Jest’s enduring reputation as a contract novel and certain other Big Important Books’ (possibly unfair) reputation as status novels. I heartily subscribe to the minority opinion that Infinite Jest is ultimately more accessible than many books a tenth its size. DFW takes a big, calculated risk by front-loading his novel with extremely scattered, dense material. He’s counting on you to tough it out for the first couple hundred pages, the implicit promise (or contract) being that if you can just do that, you’ll be rewarded. Around the 200th page, the book kind of levels out: nearly all its characters have been introduced, and we’re now revisiting narratives and characters with which we’re already at least glancingly familiar. The chapters get longer, the camera lingers a little longer on each scene, and the rewards begin to manifest themselves. If the book is a loop (and it is) then this is the point where the loop starts feeding back on itself. Or, in the Sierpinski scheme of things, we’re cutting small triangles out of bigger triangles we’ve already seen.

Maybe it begs the Russian-novel approach: i.e., “Please bear with us through these first few hundred pages of extremely dense prose and and unfamiliar locales and surnames with all but the first letter blanked out and two dozen characters with seven-syllable patronymics, and by page 300 or so you’ll be cruising. We promise.” (I don’t know why the voice became first-person plural there. Maybe I’m channeling the collective voice of all great Russian novelists ever, plus DFW.)

A few years ago I was on a long car trip with my brother. I was on my third pass through the book, and he was on his first, and he asked me what kept me coming back to the book, what it was I liked so much about it. You’d think I’d have had an answer to that question rehearsed and ready, but I hemmed and hawed and eventually just said, “It’s got everything.” I think I even raised the book in the air a little, sitting there in the passenger seat, as if its sheer heft were going to somehow prove my point.

But it does have damn near everything: it’s got humor, pathos, violence, romance, sex, ambition, avarice, intrigue, complex human emotions, self- and other-destructive behavior, drugs, alcohol, insightful pop-cultural and political commentary, wordplay, science fiction, science, giant feral hamsters, and tennis. And it address all of these things more artfully than any other book I’ve ever picked up. It does everything I want fiction to do and wish I could do if I ever wrote fiction, and also accomplishes a lot of the things I hope to one day do with nonfiction. It’s limitlessly appealing and, yes, addictive. I keep reading it instead of Proust or Dickens or Eat, Pray, Love because it keeps inviting me back.

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Posted: July 10th, 2008 under IJOSASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: 11

Mmmyellow. Happy In(ter)dependence Day. E Unibus Pluram, and so forth. Greetings and welcome to the first online meeting of the Infinite Jest Online Summertime Appreciation Society and/or Book Club.

The IJOSASa/oBC will be a loosely-constructed fellowship of people posting semi-regular updates to their blogs containing their notes about the novel, including observations, theories, questions, problems, and questions about the book, with links to online reading resources and to each others’ blogs, Tumblrs, Twitters, Flickrs, Bebos, BoingBlurgs, TopChefs, BarackObamas, and Zeitgeistrs.

THE NATURE OF THE PROJECT

For my own part, my posts will take the form of notes I’ve taken during this and previous readings of the novel. This time around I hope to focus on the themes and emotional resonance the book has for me, moreso than its cleverness or plot contortions, although there’ll inevitably be ample discussion of that, too.

Contrary to the buzz the novel received (and continues to receive) and David Foster Wallace’s earned reputation as a really smart smartass, Infinite Jest is at its heart a profoundly sad book. Wallace once said that when he began writing Infinite Jest his goal, having written some absurdly comic stories and his first novel, was to plot a different emotive course with nobler ambitions:

I wanted to do something sad. I think it’s a very sad time in America and it has something to do with entertainment. It’s not TV’s fault, it’s not [Hollywood’s] fault, and it’s not the Net’s fault. It’s our fault. We’re choosing this. We are choosing to spend more time sneering at hype machines, [while still] being enmeshed in them, than we are living.

My secret pretension … I mean, every writer wants his book to change the world, but I guess I would like to know if the book moved people. I assume that the future the book talks about, while it might be amusing, wouldn’t be a fun future to live in. I think it would be nice if the book could maybe make people think about some of the choices we are making, about what we pay attention to and give power to, so maybe the future won’t be quite that … glittery but cold.

I think he’s succeeded in “do[ing] something sad,” though that tends to get lost in the noise. And don’t get me wrong; there are still some really fucking hilarious things in this book.

SECONDARY SOURCES

In my posts I’ll be making some references to secondary and tertiary sources. These include the extensive discussions, essays, dissertations, and compendia archived at the Infinite Jest section of The Howling Fantods—an excellent resource for me the first time I read the book and in the decade since.

In the print realm, there’s Stephen Burn’s excellent reader’s guide, part of the Continuum Contemporaries series. It’s a slim volume that packs in a surprising amount of analysis. I had this one at my side the last two times I read the novel. It’s probably best for second (or more)-time readers who are already familiar with the basic plot, and Burn is a genius when it comes to unpacking themes and pointing out Lost-ish coincidences (the French significance of Jim and Avril’s initials [AMI and JOI], the importance of November 8, nifty mythological parallels like Gately=Heracles/Marathe=Peracles) and the masterful ways he traces the dissemination of the Samizdat and successfully maps out the book’s chronology.

To the extend that time and stamina allow, I’ll try and dig up and refer to some of the articles and critical essays that Burn cites toward the end of his book, and most of which I’ve never read before. (I’m particularly interested in Tom LeClair’s “Prodigious Fiction of Powers, Vollman, and Wallace”, Frank Louis Cioffi’s “‘An Anguish Become Thing’”, and Timothy Jacobs’ “American Touchstone.”)

This time around, I also have Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity, published last year. This one is a scene-by-scene analysis, and as such, is over 500 pages long. Much of it is merely summative, and therefore ideal for the first-time reader, but also contains some ideas I hadn’t yet considered. Its main contributions are probably 1) the nifty map of the ETA grounds, rendered by Kyle Ware and based one what must have been exhaustive and exhausting study of the text’s references to the geography and layout of the academy; 2) Carlisle’s formulations of the novel’s plot and themes into Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal that Wallace himself has said inspired the novel’s structure; and 3) Carlisle’s ordering of the novel into roughly equal units, chapters, and section—no mean feat for a book with no table of contents and seemingly (but not actually) capricious use of chapter titles and section breaks, and incredibly useful for breaking the book down into more digestible chunks and citing scenes during discussion:

I. Chs. 1-15: main text pp. 3-181 and endnotes 1-59
II. Chs. 1-21: pp. 181-321 and notes 60-119
III. Chs. 22-24: pp. 321-489 and notes 120-207
IV. Chs. 25-26: pp. 489-619 and notes 208-256
V. Ch. 27: pp. 620-808 and notes 257-336
VI. Ch. 28: pp. 809-981 and notes 337-388

Even just glancing at this, I can see how elegant Carlisle’s breakdown is, and it reinforces a few things I’ve always believed about the novel’s structure: the almost-impossible-to-overstate importance of p. 489, for example, or that the novel really does wind down in two extremely long (about 200 pages each) chapters. My own citations will probably still be primarily page numbers, but I’ll make references to Carlisle’s breakdown where appropriate.

I’d be happy to lend either Carlisle or Burn to any book club members who are curious, except that I’m pretty sure there are approximately zero members residing in the same city as I am for the duration of the club.

Speaking of which:

THE PARTICIPANTS

Joining me in the endeavor will be a handful of friends and colleagues who have committed, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to discussing the book via email and on their blogs. This distinguished array includes but is not limited to Joe, Aden (Aden: you need to give me your blog address. Also, you need to start a blog), Andrew, Dan, Toby, Sonya, Laura, Maria, and of course Neil:

From: Neil
Subject: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 1:26:48 PM CDT
To: Jake

attached is my homework assignment. I don’t know if you’re giving extra credit for handing in things in early. if you want, you can correct my essay in red pen and email a scan back to me. or not. whatever.

someday you might be an English teacher and I assume you would make some effort to teach on this book. just thought it would be fun to see what you thought was important and what you feel I should be getting out of this reading.

(click to enlarge)

From: Jake
Re: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 11:48:12 AM PDT
To: Neil

I started reading the first chapter this morning, and it was like re-watching a really great Simpsons episode. A great, dystopian, 1100-page Simpsons episode.

Your essay is brilliant, and exactly the kind of work I like to see from my students. A++++ (”Most institutions do not even have grades of A with multiple pluses after it.”) plus extra credit for turning it in early.

I’ll pass it along to Jill Allen.

(click to enlarge)

From: Neil
Subject: Re: theyearofglad
Date: June 23, 2008 1:56:48 PM CDT
To: Jake

cool. my parents say they’ll give me $5 for every “A” I get this semester. I’m saving up for a boombox that can record music from CDs.

SPOILERS

I am going to try my darnedest to avoid revealing spoilers, making as few references as possible to things in the novel that haven’t happened yet. This will be more difficult than it sounds since, given the book’s nonlinear nature, it’s hard to tell what’s a spoiler and what isn’t, or what future information would truly spoil a first-time reader’s enjoyment of the novel. But I’ll try to keep it to a minimum all the same, or at least give adequate warning (something along the lines of [SPOILER? ALERT] or [S?A]) when I’m about to reveal something that might be construed as a spoiler.

SO, LET’S GET STARTED, SHALL WE?

My first round of notes covers the first 49 pages, or the first six chapters in Carlisle’s formulation. I hope to tackle bigger chunks in future posts, simply because if I don’t, this will take fucking forever. (Do the maths.)

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Posted: July 4th, 2008 under IJOSASa-oBC, Literature.
Comments: 12

I realize I’ve been an unapologetic cheerleader for Minneapolis lately, but it shows no signs of abating. Maybe it’s because winter sucks so much here that it makes me appreciate everything more when summer finally arrives.

And it’s especially easy to appreciate Minneapolis in the summer from top floor of the Walker, where I’d never been until I went there for this the other night, and spent most of the time just staring out the window. It isn’t even the best view of the city, but it’s still pretty great.

Posted: June 26th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: none

Permit me to rhapsodize for a moment.

I was doing my usual weekly ride around the lakes today and headed back home on the Midtown Greenway, getting off at Park Ave and heading downtown, when I got a pinch flat in my back tire. Fortunately, I was only a couple blocks from the Greenway, so I just turned around and walked my bike to the Freewheel that’s part of the brand-new, ridiculously awesome bike center there. Inside is a sleek, spacious bike shop/cafe/depot with lockers and showers for commuters, and bike parking and service and of course plenty of expensive gear to gawk at.

They fixed my flat and put a new, better-sized tire on my wheel in like ten minutes while I had a coffee and watched all manner of riders come and go—and not just the rich white lycra-clad gear fetishists, but mothers and their small children, and old men, and kids from the surrounding neighborhoods, pouring into the place to get their bikes serviced or just look around.

So many things are wrong and unfair right now, it’s reassuring when something works the way it’s supposed to, if not better. Sitting in that place, buffeted by friendly service, high ceilings, clean lines, right angles, and air-conditioned convenience, I felt like I was seeing into the future—in a good way, for once.

I nudged my bike back out onto the Greenway (itself a marvel) and rode home swelling with sustainable-transportation-infrastructure goodwill. Between that and Dosh, I’m really proud of my adopted hometown right now.

Posted: June 18th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: 3

I’m not going to try and justify or apologize for the fact that I recently viewed the new Genesis documentary/concert film, When In Rome. I did it, and I am not sorry. (Nor am I sorry for riding my bike to the nearest Wal-Mart, which is in the suburbs, to purchase the DVD because Wal-Mart is the only U.S. retailer selling the DVD, and I kind of wanted to be able to say that I rode my bike to a Wal-Mart in the suburbs to buy the new Genesis DVD.)

I have a Masters of Fine Arts degree.

Whether you’re a fan of Genesis and/or Phil Collins or not, I think this short film is a nice little portrait of what happens when a handful of wildly successful musicians in their mid-fifties decide to undertake that dubious endeavor that is the reunion tour, and the developments, both positive and otherwise, that result from a fifteen-year hiatus and subsequent reconvening in lavish rehearsal halls tucked away in Lausanne and Helsinki with seven months to rehearse and a quadrillion-dollar production budget.

Through it all, the person who acquits himself surprisingly admirably is actually Phil Collins. There’s none of the supposed egotism or overweening ambition that has led to various PR issues over the span of his thirty years as a solo artist (and I stress the word “artist”); no mention of Tarzan, or any of the other occasionally middling pap he’s churned out during his solo career, or his insistence on collaborating with Eric Clapton, or Tarzan, or his three divorces, or Tarzan. Rather, he emerges as a talented but flawed musician in his autumn years—which was never how I’ve perceived him until a very specific moment in the documentary.

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Posted: June 13th, 2008 under Video, Music.
Comments: 3

First of all, we didn’t get in. Andrew and I were not two of the 18,000 who made it through the doors. We weren’t sure how insanely early we would’ve had to arrive to get in. The important thing is that we tried.

We showed up at seven, far too late, and wandered several blocks looking for the end of the line that wended through the streets of downtown St Paul—otherwise a ghost town after 5 p.m.—a docile but cheerful crowd that, much as I wanted to make some weary pronouncement to Andrew about our cohort, confounded all attempts at demographic or cultural classification beyond our shared reason for being there.

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Posted: June 3rd, 2008 under General.
Comments: 3

There’s a new mini-meme out there: a growing collection of drawings, done by various bloggers, of themselves as teenagers. It’s a great idea, and I decided that, as someone who is 1) a blogger; 2) a former teenager; and 3) an occasional doodler, I would give it a shot.

The result is, I think, a representative portrait of who I was around age eighteen, and can be found after the jump.

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Posted: May 29th, 2008 under Images.
Comments: 7

Guess what I’m planning to do again this summer.

That’s right; I’m going to teach my cat to read.

We’re going to start an online book club. If you want in at the ground floor, let me know.

And by “ground floor” I mean, of course, November Y.O.G.

Posted: May 22nd, 2008 under General.
Comments: 4

In high school this time of year would be marked by graduation parties and drama club awards ceremonies. In college, finals and hasty last-minute dormroom moveouts. This year it’s thesis defenses, a new but not entirely dissimilar ritual. A lot of departures, whatever the reason or destination. The weather complies and becomes unpredictable or ominous. Thunderstorms every few days. Still chilly at night. Sunny and dry in the afternoon. Earthquake weather without the earthquakes.

Us third-years cluster in the halls and just outside the doors to buildings. We come out of our thesis-writing hovels, bleary-eyed and ready to be friends again like we were in the beginning. Everyone wishes everyone well; nearly every debt has been squared or forgiven. I see a little more of the people who’ve spent the past three years propping me up. During defenses, sitting in the room listening to them read from their manuscripts, glancing around at the people in the seats next to me, I find my pride in my cohort growing outsized, a little amazed at the sheer magnitude of creative firepower all concentrated in one room.

When I’m not watching my peers make their presentations, I’ve been spending my days preparing mine, trying to winnow down and optimize the material I have so that when I go before my friends and mentors on Friday it will appear I’ve been working and thinking hard. It hasn’t been easy. And when I do get outside, I get sunburned and pleasantly exhausted, pedaling till it seems absurd. Yesterday I rode my bike around Lake Calhoun while listening to Led Zeppelin and playing along on the handlebars. I came home and cleaned my apartment while listening to Yes. I took a too-long nap, the kind that makes you think it’s eight a.m. when you wake up instead of eight at night. I woke up and wondered what I’m going to do with all these books.

A tapering rather than a resolution.

Well-wishes for the well-wishers.

Posted: May 15th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 4

“Instead, I’m ready to consider the argumentative essay, the lyrical essay, the prose poem, literary journalism, and criticism. I’m ready to write in the second- and third-person voice, in the present and future tenses.”

Posted: May 8th, 2008 under General.
Comments: 2

Ever since I finished my thesis, whenever I talk to people about it, I’ve been joking half-jokingly that I’ll never write again. “Surely you’ll keep writing,” people will say. Or they’ll ask questions like, “Do you really think you’ll never write again?” or, “Why do you think you’ll never write again?” or, “Jake, why are you flinging your laptop into the turbid waters of the mighty Mississippi River? Is it because you intend to stop writing forever?”

I’m not serious, of course; I know I’ll keep writing. I can’t help myself, and I’m not really much good anything else (besides crossword puzzles, of course). But I will say that I’m ready to be done with the first-person voice for a while, and with the memoir. I’ve written a thick slice of unabashedly personal history in order to obtain a graduate degree, which is already kind of strange when I stop to think about it—which I’ve been doing a lot lately.

So I’m ready to be done casting back into the past, to finish scrutinizing and documenting an era that was hard enough the first time around. It’s been difficult, draining, depressing work to spend three years (re-)inhabiting what was arguably the worst year of my life. So I’m ready to be done with that. I’m ready to be done with reflection, and retrospect, now that they’ve served their purpose; I’m ready to be done with nostalgia, something that, I’ve recently discovered, isn’t actually that up to which it’s cracked.

Instead, I’m ready to consider the argumentative essay, the lyrical essay, the prose poem, literary journalism, and criticism. I’m ready to write in the second- and third-person voice, in the present and future tenses. Now that I’ve spent three years and a couple hundred pages dispatching a weird chunk of my own history, I’m ready to look outward, to draw my gaze up from my navel. The past may not be done with me, but I’m done with the past. (For now.)

Posted: May 5th, 2008 under Literature.
Comments: 4

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Posted: May 1st, 2008 under Minneapolis, Images.
Comments: none

(Last Monday I had the rare opportunity to see Stars of the Lid perform live. Because I apparently can’t let a beautiful musical moment stand on its own without documenting it exhaustively, I came home and wrote this review.)

During the first true spring rain of the season, an eclectic array of people—hipsters, the art crowd, older classical-music aficionados, season-ticket holders, and everyone in between—crammed themselves into the tiny seats at the Southern Theater, not quite sure what to expect from the Wordless Music Series‘ Minneapolis stopover. While the artists currently showcased in the series do happen to traffic in instrumental music, the “wordless” component of the name probably refers more to the eschewal of genre tags as outlined in the series’ mission statement: “The various boundaries and genre distinctions segregating music today … are in an artificial construction in need of dismantling.”

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Posted: April 28th, 2008 under Minneapolis, Concerts, Music.
Comments: 1

In college, whenever I was feeling antsy and uninspired, I would rearrange the furniture in my dorm room. This usually bought me a couple days’ worth of an artificially renewed feeling of purpose and invigoration before the tedium set back in and I finally got around to writing that paper about the Dry Salvages.

Today, probably because of the shitty weather, I was feeling antsy and uninspired, so I dragged my comfy couch out of the comfort nook where it’s been for the past year and installed it by the window in my bedroom. So far, so good. Just look at all that natural light my couch is enjoying.

All that cold, rainy, natural light.

Still, though. This is going to change everything. I can already feel it. Now I can lounge in the natural light on my couch while I enjoy the dour exploits of unhappily married couples on Tell Me You Love Me read classic literature and catch up on my New Yorkers and otherwise edify myself.

Truly, a new era.

Posted: April 25th, 2008 under Images, General.
Comments: none