I want my reading regimen for 2010 to be at least more robust than last year’s, which isn’t saying much—I’d have to read more than five books to beat last year’s total (hey—these YouTube videos aren’t going to watch themselves).

The first one is Mary Karr’s Lit, which I was looking forward to for a while, and which I received for Christmas. Her first two memoirs are among my favorite models of the form, and I was eager to see Karr’s singular voice brought to bear on her adult struggles with alcoholism and spirituality.

So maybe my high expectations were part of the reason I was a little disappointed that Karr’s account of her salvation seems almost too tidy, when in fact motherhood, divorce, addiction, and the writer’s life are extremely messy things. It’s a truism in literature that happy lives don’t make for narratives nearly as compelling as tragic ones, so maybe after watching Karr navigate such a spectacularly fucked-up life across three books, we don’t quite buy it when she actually finds peace.
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Posted: February 3rd, 2010 under Reading & Writing.
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Notes on David Foster Wallace’s “All That” (The New Yorker, December 14, 2009):

From what little I know about The Pale King, I am already wondering if and how this story fits into it.

The early mention of the narrator’s “biological parents” recalls similar qualifications made by the narrator of the 2004 story “Good Old Neon” from Oblivion.

On the surface this story is about faith v. skepticism. I wonder whether it is meant to function as DFW’s rejoinder to the New Atheists, knowing as we do from his writing that he attended church and made substantial room in his work for faith, magic, the supernatural, and the afterlife. He was always good at putting the lie to the idea that smart people cannot be believers, or that believers must be simple-minded and irrational.

“The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life’s meaning.”

Has it taken me this long to get around to reading this story because I was reading other things, because I had much catching up to do in my NYer reading, or because I was avoiding this story with a kind of vague dread I’m worried will accompany all my consumption of whatever future writing by DFW ever emerges?

“I’m not putting any of this well. I am not and never have been an intellectual. I am not articulate, and the subjects that I am trying to describe and discuss are beyond my abilities.”

Posted: January 4th, 2010 under Reading & Writing.
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I would not be a very good Infinite Jest/David Foster Wallace enthusiast if I didn’t observe the fact that SPOILER ALERT the primary action of his most famous novel takes place in what is established to be November of the year 2009.

Upon noting that a bulk of the novel’s action has transpired by November 23 of the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, I began wondering how our version of 2009 stacked up against DFW’s. Not as entertaining, or as dystopian, but equally unsettling, I bet. After all—to paraphrase Hal on page 12—Johnny Gentle is just Sarah Palin in a dark mirror.

With much thanks to Peter Levinson and Stephen Burn.

Posted: November 24th, 2009 under General, IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 1

I woke up to Kerri Miller interviewing Mary Karr about her new memoir, which I didn’t even know existed. It’s called Lit and it’s sort of the third installment in a trilogy of memoirs (The Liar’s Club and Cherry being the first two). I am going to run, not walk, to my nearest local bookseller to get this book if there’s even a slim chance that Karr’s ex-boyfriend, David Foster Wallace, shows up in it. Plus, some of it takes place in the Twin Cities and it’s about Karr’s struggle with addiction and spirituality. Sold!

Posted: November 11th, 2009 under Reading & Writing.
Comments: 2

I must admit, when I first heard about Infinite Summer, the online Infinite Jest book club guiding readers through the book at the rate of 75 pages per week, I was gripped by the same maddening combination of jealousy, pride, resentment, and exhilaration one feels upon hearing a song by one’s super-favorite semi-obscure indie band used in a television commercial or on a popular TV show: “Those bastards! They realized there are other people out there who like the same things I do, and now they’re going to capitalize on it! It will no longer be my special thing, enjoyed only by me and an elite few other obsessive, haughty individuals connected by Internet fan sites and tiny barroom gatherings in college towns.”

As so often happens with cult icons and subjects of small-scale but intense devotion, David Foster Wallace didn’t become really well-known until after his death, when he hanged himself last September. Before then, plenty of people had read Infinite Jest, even more had purchased it with the intent of doing so, and even more had at least heard of the book and its author. After DFW died, the mainstream encomia by Newsweek and the New York Times ensured that, in a culture predisposed to neither 1,089-page bestsellers nor frank discussions of suicide, he would now be widely known.

But with the same selfish, wounded pride that might accompany a hipster’s complaint that “I liked TV On The Radio way before they blew up and played Saturday Night Live,” around about September 13 of last year I found myself often thinking, bitterly, that I’d been on board the DFW bandwagon long before his suicide and the attendant surge of interest.

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Posted: July 15th, 2009 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 8

Check this out:

In Subsidized Time the Statue of Liberty is outfitted with a large-scale version of the subsidizing corporation’s signature product. To wit: in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, she’s wearing a giant diaper.

“NNYC’s harbor’s Liberty Island’s gigantic Lady has the sun for a crown and holds what looks like a huge photo album under one iron arm, and the other arm holds aloft a product. The product is changed each 1 Jan. by brave men with pitons and cranes” (367).

The following year, largely elided by the novel’s main action but referenced ominously throughout, is the ironically named the Year of Glad, when the gigantic lady will be adorned with a giant black plastic garbage bag—or, a “large dark billowing shape,” q.v. Geoffrey Day and Kate Gompert’s conversation on 649.

Another indication that the Year of Glad is going to be very unpleasant indeed for a great number of people.

On a pretty much entirely unrelated note, here’s my debut on Minnesota Reads.

Posted: November 25th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
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I’m not much for Halloween costumes, though I’ve had a couple smartass showings over the past few years, ranging from the esoteric to the extremely esoteric.

Far be it from me to discontinue a trend. And yet, my costume this year is esoteric while at the same time obnoxiously inevitable.

And it exists only in photographic form. Click here to see this year’s costume and groan accordingly.

Posted: October 29th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Images, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 8

Jodi at Minnesota Reads warned us that this Salon piece would break our hearts and probably make us cry.

Mornings were spent walking Wallace’s two dogs, Werner and Bella. Wallace and his parents strolled the streets of Claremont, talking of small things. In the afternoons, they spoke some more, and helped their son deal with the paperwork and insurance issues that had been piling up. “He was very glad we were there,” says his mother. “And he was very emotional. He was just terrified of so much. We would just try to hold him.” The memories bring tears. “He did tell me that he was glad I was his mom.”

—“The last days of David Foster Wallace,” Salon.com

Boy howdy, was she right.

Posted: September 26th, 2008 under General, IJOASa-oBC.
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All right, then. Fuck you, Dave. The sixth meeting of the fucking Infinite Jest Online Appreciation Society and/or Book Club is hereby called to fucking order.

pp 407 – 442 I’m going to try not to say anything elephant-in-the-room obvious about the Eric Clipperton chapter. In fact, I’m going to try and accomplish the seemingly impossible feat of getting through the rest of this novel, and my discussion of it, without mentioning the events of September 12 any more than necessary. Which might not be possible. And who’s to say how much is necessary? For now, I’m doing this for myself, for the selfishest reasons, because once I’ve started something, leaving it unfinished is horribly depressing, a sign of my failure to follow through; also, I’m clinging to some poorly reasoned notion that by staring into the center of the greatest work by a man who I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to think about as little as possible over the past week, by finally after a week’s embargo reading eloquent summaries that I wish were the last word but know are not, by going through it rather than around it, I’ll “get over” it all somehow.

But that’s all much easier said than done, so bear with me. Read more »

Posted: September 22nd, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 3

UPDATE: My piece for the Utne Reader about DFW.

For the past two months this site has functioned primarily as a repository for my thoughts as I slowly read, for the fourth time, my all-time favorite book, Infinite Jest.

Now that project, along with my read-through and a whole lot of other things, seems hopelessly inconsequential and trite. Read more »

Posted: September 13th, 2008 under IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
Comments: 9