Tags
Anatomy, Big Daddy, Bile, Blood Meridian, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, Boobs, Borderlands, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Corey Taylor, Cormac McCarthy, Creative Non-Fiction, Creative Writing, David Foster Wallace, Dead Babies, Dead Baby Tree, E Unibus Pluram, Eraserhead, Eraserhead Baby, Essay, Family Guy, Family Guy Ipecac, Film, Human Body, Human Memory, humors, Ipecac, Medieval Physiology, Mr. Torgue, Nicki Minaj, Pain, Parabola, Physiology, Prime Numbers, Slipknot, television, TOOL, Two Girls One Cup, Vomit, Watching, Writing
*WARNING*
THOSE READERS WHO BELIEVE THEMSELVES OF FIRM CONSTITUTION SHOULD PROGRESS, BUT THOSE READERS THAT ARE EASILY DISTURBED MIGHT JUST GOOGLE KITTENS OR PLATYPUSSES INSTEAD. ANY AND ALL READERS ATTEMPTING TO FIND A POINT OR PURPOSE IN THESE WRITINGS SHALL BE SUBJECT TO A $273 FINE AND A STERN TALKING TO.
–Management, White Tower Musings
I
My dog Sonya, not Huckleberry because he’s actually well behaved, is a silent vomiter. On at least three separate occasions she has yakked in my car, actually my sister’s car she’s letting me borrow Mr. Torgue, that’s what she calls her vehicle and I try my best not to yell “THE BADASS CRATER OF BADASSITUDE” while I’m driving in it, and on each of those three occasions I have never actually heard her 
make a sound while she ralphs up what could constitute enough food to feed three dogs. It’s also an oddity to discover at this point in my life that picking up dog vomit does nothing to actually phase me. I am not terribly bothered when the heavy clumps of partially masticated food pellets soaked in the chalky stomach acid squeeze between my fingertips, and apart from the smell which is often sterile and basic leaving no impression of faintness on my part, I am often able to simply lift the “puddle” in my hands and drop it apathetically into the grass by the driveway.
II
The frail body on the unknown baby creature in a gif (pronounced “jif” pronounced 
“gif”) from the movie Eraserhead by David Lynch leaves me uncomfortable and terrified to go to sleep. There’s something about the way the face of the creature is so alien and yet so human. It’s a baby, and by and large, rotting babies tend to unnerve people. It’s grotesque. Grotesqueness shouldn’t exist. At least not for babies.
III
Corey Taylor, the lead singer of Slipknot, use to vomit in the sack mask he’d wear on stage. That’s the first Slipknot album so at that time his mask was a burlap sack with holes where his dread knots would come out. He eventually lost that mask because his dreads would melt in the heat of the electric lights into the sack. As for the vomit,
Taylor’s vocal cords weren’t prepared for the level of intensity that was being placed on his throat. The producer of the album kept telling him “deeper, harder.” He spent most of the time recording the first Slipknot Album throwing up between takes. Then, once the album was mixed, he had to repeat it on the road. He would usually throw up, but it wasn’t just that. He would throw up but huge chunks would get stuck inside his mask. So along with being hot, having a sore throat, and having to perform in an uncomfortable burlap sack, he also had puddles of vomit collected in his mask close to his mouth and eyes.
IV
I have yet to review Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West. The book, apart from being one of the darkest novels published in the last forty years in American fiction, is philosophically heavy and so one has to be at a high point before approaching that monster. There is one passage, in particular, that is impossible to forget:
The way narrowed through the rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies. They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their under-jaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being. The castaways hobbled past, they looked back. Nothing moved. (57).
I have tried writing fiction since reading this passage, and while I have written passages that have attempted to convey malevolence in certain characters, I have yet to really produce anything that surpasses the potency of this images. The little jaw bones haunt me.
V
I had no idea what Ipecac was before I watched Family Guy. It’s apparently a syrup developed to induce coughing and actual vomiting. Peter challenges Stewie, Chris, and Brian to chug it and whoever can go the longest with puking gets the last piece of pie. Chaos eventually ensues as one by one they all begin to vomit over and over again. Watching the scene for the first time 
I nearly came close to vomiting myself, and I wonder at that physiological reaction. It’s not uncommon for people to throw up themselves when other regurgitate, but where does that come from? Is it the sound of a person upchucking? Is it the sight of vomit erupting from the lips? Is it an almost traceless smell that is produced? But it must surely be the sound and the image of vomit because watching Family Guy I didn’t smell anything. I could only picture my early experiences vomiting. I have since watched that scene at least thirty to forty times and every time I can’t watch it and not laugh. The physicality is just too perfect.
VI
It’s fascinating to see “reactions” become a content and discourse all their own. To wit.
The Two Girls/One Cup video became famous not so much for the actual content, but because people discovered it, suffered the initial reaction of watching it, and then began to show it to their friends and family almost always recording the reaction to the video. It became a game unto itself and the pleasure of watching other people react to something you yourself had already seen became a new kind of experience in entertainment. Where before watching something was a way of sharing the experience, the language had become so deconstructed and weak that the only means of eliciting recognition between fellow human beings was to watch their reactions to watching the video. This watching of watching is something that I wish was an original observation
but David Foster Wallace beat me to it. He notes in his essay E. Unibus Pluram that this watching of watching is not only a common phenomenon, it’s actually generational. His generation, which I believe is generation X, grew up on television, and while defending the regular watching of television he observes how people tend to feed off the watching of one another for lack of the ability to converse:
The plain fact is that certain things having to do with fiction production are different for young U.S. writers now. And television is at the vortex of most of the flux. Because younger writers are not only Artists probing for the nobler interstices in what Stanley Cavell calls the reader’s “willingness to be pleased”; we are also, now, self-defined parts of the great U.S. Audience, and have our own aesthetic pleasure-centers; 
and television has formed and trained us. It won’t do, then, for the literary establishment simply to complain that, for instance, young-written characters don’t have very interesting dialogues with each other, that young writer’s ears seem “tinny.” Tinny they may be, but the truth is that, in young Americans’ experience, people in the same room don’t do all that much direct conversing with each other. What most people I know do is they all sit and face the same direction and stare at the same thing and then structure commercial-length conversations around the sorts of questions that myopic car-crash witnesses might ask each other— “Did you just see what I just saw?” (44).
I think the grotesqueness of the Two Girls/One Cup fed into this same concept, for while the initial reaction of the ingestion of feces and vomit for the sake of eroticism repulsed us, we found in this bile a connection to other people because watching someone else gave us first a sadistic pleasure of horrifying someone else, but then also validated us as we acknowledged the fact that what we were watching was absolutely repulsive.
VII
Watching TOOL videos is an exercise because each video challenges the viewer. Often the challenge is explained in the sentiment, what the actual fuck did I just watch? This
initial reaction subsides and one is able to eventually pick at certain elements until meaning becomes clear. That and Wikipedia provides “meaning” behind the lyrics of certain songs and so looking at the videos again one is able to find meaning.
Parabola is a little difficult. Most of TOOL’s Aesthetic relies either upon Eastern religious imagery and philosophy or else upon Mathmatical concepts. In the case of a Parabola it is a curved line formed on a Cartesian graph. Because I know nothing about math I had to look up a satisfactory definition and found the following on a site called Purple Math:
The parabola is the curve formed from all the points (x, y) that are equidistant from the directrix and the focus. The line perpendicular to the directrix and passing through the focus (that is, the line that splits the parabola up the middle) is called the “axis of symmetry”.
Looking at TOOL’s lyrics, I’m able to decipher, or at least how this mathematical construction could help create meaning:
We barely remember who or what came before this precious moment We are choosing to be here right now Hold on, stay inside… This holy reality, this holy experience Choosing to be here in… This body, this body holding me Be my reminder here that I am not alone in… This body, this body holding me, feeling eternal All this pain is an illusion Alive! In this holy reality, in this holy experience Choosing to be here in… This body, this body holding me Be my reminder here that I am not alone in… This body, this body holding me, feeling eternal All this pain is an illusion Twirling round with this familiar parable Spinning, weaving round each new experience Recognize this as a holy gift and celebrate this chance to be alive and breathing 
A chance to be alive and breathing This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality Embrace this moment, remember, we are eternal All this pain is an illusion
The song celebrates the body while also hinting at the sublime power of the spirit to transcend the body. There’s some cognitive dissonance here as almost every TOOL video makes the viewer observes the frailty of the body when set against such supernatural forces . At one point three blurry men wearing suits cut open an apple before vomiting black slime onto the table. Their bodies lift up off the ground and, still vomiting, they revolve around the table making a circle.
And here’s the thesis soaked with ingested slime.
VIII
The idea of humors is an outdated medical concept. We possess entire libraries explaining the gastric process and how regurgitation is done. There is no mystery, yet for this knowledge many are still disgusted by vomiting. 
Simply watching or hearing someone vomit is enough to induce vomiting. Even thinking about the sound or sensation of vomiting can sometimes induce this process and so the question that needs answering is: What is it about regurgitation that so bothers us biologically and psychologically?
It is because vomiting is physically and psychologically traumatizing. It is painful to vomit because the act of regurgitation brings partially digested food, but also stomach acid up the throat and so it feels as if our throat and mouth are burning afterwards. It also occurs that often we vomit often as children and the experience, at least it was for me, is horrifying the first time and every time afterwards it is awful reliving this previously horrific experience. Food is supposed to go down and stay down and leave out one end. Vomiting is a reminder of the drawbacks of our biology.
Yet looking at TOOL, I cannot deny the fact that vomiting is a physical act that reminds me that I am alive. There is no sensation so powerful as pain, and vomiting is simply that, pain. My reader may ask then, what good is it observing this pain? To this I can only provide a quote from the play A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Big Daddy is suffering from the cancer that will kill him and when his son offers him medicine he rejects it. His excuse is one I’m fond of:
Brick Pollitt: [Offering Big Daddy morphine] It’ll kill the pain, that’s all.
Harvey ‘Big Daddy’ Pollitt: [Wincing with pain] It’ll kill the senses too! You… you got pain – at least you know you’re alive.
I’ll never forget vomiting for the first time, or watching those blurry men vomit the black slime, or watching Sonya carefully as I drive her anywhere, or that scene in Family Guy with the Ipecac, because those moments were possessed by a fierce carnality that is impossible to forget. In this postmodern, pseudo-Modern period, Whatever-the Fuck Period we live in, it’s easy sometimes to forget the body because so much of life is wrapped up and experienced in screens and technology. The moments that are making up our lives are in screens.
I’m not railing against technology, nor suggesting all these “gadgets” are divorcing us from our bodies, I’m simply remembering a few moments when I was reminded of my body, often at another’s expense. Connections are where our memories are embedded and established, and while it isn’t as pleasant as remembering your first kiss, or your wedding night, or your first ice cream cone, the first time you vomit is a sensation that lasts in memory, and there’s most certainly a story behind it.
CODA
Here you’ve been through a lot. Here’s a picture of Nicki Minaj bouncing her boobs out for…you know I’m still not entirely sure why this was a thing in the Pound the Alarm Video. Hope you enjoy nonetheless:
bullshit in my head, partly because last year’s birthday was quite possibly the worst day of my entire life. This year I wanted it to be different. Part of what helped was having to work on my birthday, it kept me occupied, but the other half was about a week later my family took me to one of my favorite restaurants, Shogun’s a Japanese Steakhouse. I’m sure places like this exist around the country, but if the reader doesn’t know what this is it’s a place where patrons sit around a stove and a chef comes out and cooks their food in front of them usually performing by lighting fires, throwing bits of food into their mouth, and performing incredible stunts with knives, spatulas, and other cutlery.
Wallace’s writing, and my amazon account was always recommending it to me. When I asked a professor friend of mine, who I originally consulted for Infinite Jest, about it her answer was an unequivocal, “Yes, I fuckin loved that book.”
which, if the reader honestly believes I won’t provide a quote for you clearly have never read any of my work:
someone who has just recently eaten lobster will start to gag as they realize that cockroaches, beetles, and centipedes are related to lobsters and that they, in principle, recently ate a sea-roach. But after I get over my juvenile habit of grossing people out with facts about bugs (it’s the main reason why I never get invited to parties), there is a purpose to including this quote because it’s also part of the reason Wallace includes this background material in his essay. Shortly after this he provides a brief historical account about how lobster was seen a lower-class food, how it was often fed to criminals, and after this he explains that the principle means of cooking lobster is to boil it alive. All of this ultimately moves towards his central thesis, or, really, the central question of Consider the Lobster:
concept, actually, let’s be real here, it’s damn near abstract for them. Probably one of the best examples is the hog-killing scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where Jason Segel has to kill the hog which is screaming and grunting and then spends most of the time on the way to the party crying.
is not just coming up with catchy hookers that grab people’s attention and then being cute and smart and funny until you reach your word limit. Which, you’ll note, is pretty good summation for everything I do on this shitty blog. The writer’s principle job, to sound archetypal for a moment, is simply to observe humanity’s character and behavior and then to show it right back. As Wallace observes his own question he notes immediately what the reaction will be, and having asked this question in real life I understand why he prepares for a reaction. I asked my wife one night the same questions and she responded with a quick and precise “no.” Now in her defense she’s a biologist; she’s been trained to study animals and that often includes capturing them, killing them, and then cutting them up to see how they work. I tried to make my argument but she threw back plenty of facts about arthropods in general the most obvious one being that, unlike humans, they lack a real nervous system, or at least one as centralized as human beings.
opportunity for meta-cognition. If the reader doesn’t remember that word it literally means “thinking-about-thinking,” or to put it another way “thinking about the way that you think about things.” I suspect many readers of Gourmet were rather pissed at Wallace for making them revaluate choices that he himself admitted he didn’t think about, but if I can dust off a platitude, the unexamined life is not worth living.
an issue for me, it was literally just business. But when I lifted my foot and looked at the carcass I felt instantly that I had done something wrong. The cricket hadn’t bothered me. It hadn’t bitten me. Crickets aren’t known for spreading disease. Nor do they usually bite. A cricket is about the closest thing you can get to a puppy in terms of insects. It’s ridiculous to fret about wantonly stepping on a bug, but is it?
I suppose, but then again what doesn’t?). But fostering a lack of empathy can lead to real problems because it negates that suffering can exist in multiple forms. Once one stops caring about whether lobsters may be experiencing pain it might be easy to forget that people are dying in Syria, that the state of Israel acts like a bully and gets away with it, that women across the globe face regular sexual harassment, that workers in the meat industry tend to be illegal immigrants who are used and exploited and then quickly tossed aside once they become injured on the job, that in the united states there is a 14% illiteracy rate, and the list can go on until one becomes with numb to tragedy.
And this is where ultimately the show Twin Peaks made its mark.
My reader may wonder what this has to do with Twin Peaks. I promise there’s a message here, just be patient. The essay was an assignment for a magazine in which Wallace received the opportunity to be on set during the filming of Lost Highway. While at first the essay is mostly Wallace talking about the actual filming, as it continues he manages to break-down the creative structure of Lynch’s movies and tries to define the term Lynchian. There are long passages full of insightful commentary but my focus is Twin Peaks and so one passage, in particular, seems terribly important.
toward Mattie. It’s not a dramatic shot in terms of camera angling. It’s simple and it holds for exactly the right reason. The aliens, inter-dimensional beings, the forces of evil are not what they seem. They can be cackling lunatics, dwarves in red suits dancing to jazz, they can be owls, or they might even be someone close to you, someone who you’re supposed to trust and love.
Names in or on books are supposed to give a book street cred to the common reader, and if someone from The New York Times slaps their name on a novel that must mean it’s good. If Playboy’s on or in the book then maybe not so much, and if I see the name of authors who are terrible, or else people who I’m told are terrible, or people I’ve never heard of, then maybe not so much. Infinite Jest is covered with names of people and papers, and so it must be important, but after 200 pages I found myself terribly frustrated because I was still struggling to figure out what the damn book was actually about.
Lipksy asks Wallace about his feelings of Infinite Jest, and looking back over the scores of passages I’ve underlined or marked with circles or stars there was one admission by Wallace that seemed important:
observation. Neil Gaiman has a marvelous essay entitled [THE GENDER OF BOOKS] in which he explores this, but the simplest explanation is that certain creative works will have appeal to particular genders over others because of the way the artists constructs the text. But that identification is the most revealing because as I’ve grown older I’ve become more and more accepting, or perhaps more condemning, or my former self and what that young man was all about. He was rather isolated, believed himself to be creative, he didn’t care for too many people, the only real people in his life outside his family were in books he either read or was writing.
because they will regret later that they did not observe anything but they couldn’t possibly compartmentalize every last detail of the gargantuan beast. They’ll remember a few details and sensations of the whale as it passed them, and of course they’ll never forget the tremendous sense of accomplishment and closure once it’s tail has passed pushing them further away into the water while it’s seemingly infinite body somehow passes into the haze of empty infinity into the deeper ocean and the blue swallows up every last bit of the creature and the reader finds themselves alone in a great empty space. That they have seen and, in a way, touched this creature that only a handful of people in the world will actually ever even see outside of a Google Image search is humbling. They’ll have a few details that stand out to them, and a few sensations, but trying to describe every last detail of the whale is impossible because it was an experience unlike anything but unto itself.
offer one or two quotes from the massive book because my sensation of the whale will completely different than anyone else’s.
player Michael Joyce. Tennis is part of the aesthetic of Infinite Jest and long passages are dedicated to games or practice or following the players. What I personally remember of tennis is always being the last or second to last player to play because I sucked at it. That’s partly the reason why when I read this quote I didn’t think about Tennis at all, but in fact I thought about a good swing of creativity. There are times while writing when the exact right words come onto the page and you’re able to concoct your fiction or essay in just the right way so that the inspiration which compelled you to the word processor in the first place is actually transcribed, translated, and transplanted onto the page in a kind of glory. Every writer has had one of these moments, and when they are writing on a day like this it really does feell like magic, and in those moments there is an intense desire to shut out the world completely because the world will distract with commercials, or social obligations, or house hold chores. And later when youre reflecting on the groove that you rode while writing you won’t want to understand where that feeling came from because that would ruin it. It would take the magic out of the moment, or at least the illusion of magic.
observation of humanity:
in a way. (900).
tome landing against the concrete or grass will be a temptation to just let the book alone and leave it where it is. These three moments might be a guard against such an impulse because in the heavy lectures about the history of pain prescription medication, or long passages dedicated to the jargon ladened descriptions of failed sexual escapades there are moments where the reader can see the whale. That doesn’t mean they won’t doubt themselves and wonder why they’re bothering with this long book.
also attended. Their father, James, a filmmaker, committed suicide after making a short movie called “Infinite Jest,” recorded in a format called a “cartridge,” which is so engrossing that anyone who watches it loses all desire. Wallace writes of one viewer, “He has rewound to the beginning several times and then configured for a recursive loop. He sits there, attached to a congealed supper, watching at 0020h, having now wet both his pants and the special recliner.” The action is set in the near future: a Qué-bécois separatist group tries to get hold of “Infinite Jest,” copies of which are extremely rare, to use as a terrorist weapon.
Tactitus, Heroditus, Plutarch, Cicero, and Ovid that sit literally right behind my laptop while I write, yet consistently the books that wind up consuming my time and energy are those written by men, and not enough women, living in the 20th and 21st century.
developed what is known as “imposter” complex, the belief that you don’t belong somewhere because the people around you seem to be significantly smarter than you.
Still I listened to my parents because they gave me so much emotional, financial, and spiritual support it seemed fair on my part to listen to stuff that they found fascinating and important in their life. Regardless there was a moment of recognition with Wallace and this is where I’m able to address my contester.
from which people form a kind of abstract intellectual worship. The novels of Ernest Hemingway are not just stories of moody men drinking, fishing, hunting, drinking, etc., they are in fact looked to by some as wellsprings of masculine spirit. Likewise, the poet Emily Dickinson is revered with a passion that is at times inspiring and at others horrifying, but along with her work comes the image of the recluse. Dickinson is not afforded the opportunity to be a human being, she is the cartoon character of the shut-in, a woman who was so plagued by social anxiety that she had to lock herself away in her study writing poems that no one would ever read. The conflict with this image, as well as that of Hemingway, is that it is devoid of real being. Writers are people, flawed people, but people who possess passion and desire, and Lipksy’s book shows Wallace in this way.
making the job harder. You know what I mean? And it seems to me like the harder it is to make a reader feel like it’s worthwhile to read your stuff, the better a chance you’ve got of making real art. Because it’s only real art that does that. (71).
Lipsky and Wallace are not just the back and forth exploration of a career. These two men discuss music, publishing, relationships, fast food, movies, smoking, realties of the magazine market, and within every conversation there are moments Lipksy notes that change the dynamic of the text. Whether it’s being interrupted by an announcer three times at an airport, smacking Wallace’s dog when it gets too feisty, sharing a dirty joke, or just noting and reproducing Wallace’s Midwestern accent. These moments coalesce so that the interview becomes two people trying to find and understand one another not only because one needs the other to promote his book and the other needs a publication credit to help his career, it’s about finding each other’s humanity.
with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think its probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. [Spits a mouthful into cup] I know that sounds a little pious. (292-3).
f surreal art is not about observing oddity, it just means experiencing something that, while you recognize it couldn’t happen in mundane reality, it feels as if it is actually real.
A bowl is something we know is real because we see or use one almost every day. Seeing a bowl filled with ten small elephants is a surreal image because, what we know of elephants, that they are massive in size, distorts reality and makes us feel as if something odd is occurring or else that we’re dreaming. Or, that Skinny Dave laced the stuff with LSD and we need to have a talk with him once the gloves hovering over the coffee table stop arguing in sign language.
an alliterative name that would make even Stan Lee blush, is a mad monarch, now I’m doing it, who has hidden himself away in his castle while a disease known as the Red Death ravages the countryside. The reader is given no other details about the nationality, or even the continent, though it’s generally felt by the reader that the story is about Europe during the Plague. Prospero decides to lock himself, and a thousand “friends” and fellow monarchs up in his castle while outside the common people are dying of this decimating contagion. Prospero arranges his castle into a series of colored rooms and, one one night in question, holds an elaborate masquerade ball. If you don’t know what that is think of Mardi Gras when people wear masks and beads and feather and usually nothing else. The party is fine but for an obnoxious ebony clock which distracts people, until one of the guests appears dressed in a long red robe and a mask that is reminiscent of a victim of the “Red Death.” Prospero is outraged and chases the figure down the halls until he rips off the mask and it’s discovered that the figure is the embodiment of death sent to punish these arrogant nobles for trying to outrun death at the expense of their responsibility.
at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue—and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange—the fifth with white—the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet—a deep blood color. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire, that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all. (485-6).
ortantly an efficient writer, because far too often I’ve read writers who believe having a character see a Great Horned Owl wearing a mortarboard qualifies as surreal. Poe’s efficiency though is established because he masters color.
become surreal spaces because as one would move from the purple room to the yellow room the physiological response would be almost blinding and dream-like. Reading them alone the reader is able to feel that dramatic shift in hues and so these dense color patterns create a sensation that can only accurately be felt rather than described.
constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused revery or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before. (486-7).
I suck at it. You have to have the right chops to scare people and my weakness is I’m too intellectual. I know that sounds vain as fucking fuck but it’s not meant to be. My only claim here is that I’m in too much of a rush to explore ideas rather than feelings, and when looking at horror all you’re talking about is feelings.
For obvious reasons I kept reading. King’s ability with structuring his writing, the use of ellipses and parenthesis especially, create this slowly growing sense of terror because they become impressions of thought that the reader, after a while, cannot tell whether it is their own thoughts or the character’s. The only problem with this passage is that, while you have the clock and the lunch tray, this scene completely abandons the surreal for the supernatural. It’s frightening and climactic, but long after reading it the reader will recognize you need the earlier passages to make it unnerving and terrifying.
that I had experienced moments such as this. I grew up in an Episcopal church, and since Episcopalism is descended from the church of England, Anglicanism, which itself almost an exact copy of Catholicism, the church we attended was designed to be a big beautiful building. There were stained glass windows, old clocks, couches that seemed to belong more in the homes old people, grand pianos, and even a library with a massive council table. It was a beautiful building and remains so to this day, but the great conflict with it was at night the place allowed a child far too much imagination. The echoes of your footsteps seemed to follow you, the old clocks’ ticking became the growling stomach of some patient monster, and the shadows seemed to twist and contort into nightmares which were rather left unexplored. Worst of all was, because there were so many halls and twists and turns, and while you knew rationally there was no one following you through the building, you couldn’t escape the super-real feeling of those halls and the sensation that someone might be there. There moments were surreal, much like the firehose in The Shining, because while there was nothing that was outside the realm of experienced, the sensation of the objects were heightened into a kind of uncomfortable truth.
and by the time Naomi Watts and Laura Herring wound up in bed together the scene wasn’t really all that out of place, though my teenage hormones made it a bit of a distraction. The reason I bring up my father is that for a moment there was an event in which a grown man and his teenage son were sitting in the dark, watching two women fuck on the screen, sitting on separate couches unaware of what the other’s expression was.
Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a book I bought partly because I had begun Infinite Jest but also because a friend of mine had bought the book before me and raved about it (he was a creative writer but one of the smart ones who tried to push himself creatively in what he read and wrote about) and after he and I lost touch I encountered the book again at a friend’s house while I was watching her dog. The cover strikes you immediately, largely because it’s comically grotesque, with a little boy with an obscenely large head licking his chest while steam pours out from his ears. I wonder at times if I compromise whatever artistic credibility I have when I write things like this, but the book is most certainly worth your time and money if only because you’ll be able to freak out your mother and girlfriend (or boyfriend, we’re open minded here at White Tower Musings) for a month with the cover. Once you get bored with that you can read about watching television or else how David Lynch is a genius, but the movie is Dune is absolute swill.
during three specific quotes. Wallace says in section 10 of the essay:
way The Shining or Psycho were(though I did jump when the grotesque homeless man first appeared). These films are genre based films, specifically horror, and the fundamental aspect of horror is that once the first experience is done it is possible to overcome the experience and, possibly, even laugh at it later. A great example of this is the Paranormal Activity films and just about any Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street movie. The films of David Lynch are not horror films however for even after you have processed the experienced there is a discomfort and emotional awareness that doesn’t leave the viewer. David Lynch as a director has probed into the viewer psyche and, if I may use a grotesque metaphor here, effectively licked the inside of their skull leaving a lasting membrane the viewer can still feel decades after the fact.
quality of the dialogue, the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterly way screens are staged and lit and the overlfush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted—these all give Lynch’s movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cineastes view as more like cold and clinical. (167).
Played by Naomi Watts the narrative, such as it is, follows Betty as she encounters a woman known as Rita who has suffered a terrible car crash and can’t remember who she is. Betty recently moved to Los Angeles and many critics and fan of the film have noted that she comes to embody the standard naïve outsider hoping to make it big in L.A. Most of this is certainly true, for Betty freely helps Rita after her accident and by the end of the film she has seemingly been destroyed as she eventually buys into the grotesque realities of the Hollywood system. She’s an aspiring actress, and when the plot flips, and Rita is revealed to be a successful actress, betty is left a shriveled waste of malevolent intent. It’s not enough that she has failed, she has exploded because of her kind nature.
Diane attempting to construct a narrative in which she’s actually the sympathetic character who’s just a victim of abuse and manipulation. What is important to note however is that this structure does not make it difficult to watch Lynch’s film, in fact it only informs it more. Betty is either the victim of evil, or else a perpetrator of it, and at a certain point there isn’t much of a distinction. At least, as Wallace suggests, in a Lynch movie.
film-watching are both “passive” exercises you “receive” the medium rather that “actively” generating some part of it yourself, there has arisen an “elitism” coupled with bullshit morality in our society and so film makers who explore violence will always suffer the wrath of people who are bothered or disturbed by violent or perverse content. Lynch’s movies freely employ violence, this is a fact, but not to the level that it becomes pornographic or gratuitous. As Wallace wrote, whatever violence exists within his universe the acts performed and recorded do not provided a kind of malignant catharsis, nor are they designed to be employed as black humor. Death, pain, destruction, and murder just are.
Trying to explain that something just is, doesn’t fit into the narrative structures that human beings live their lives by. In the Judeo-Christian faith that was I surrounded with as a young man, acts of evil or monstrosity were performed because there was an evil supernatural tempter swaying the will of human beings in the form of The Devil. As I got older, and received more education, I learned that human beings’ motivations could also be swayed by economics, there are financial reasons for evil deeds because people are greedy or hungry. Adding a bit more complexity to this sexuality becomes a factor in the compelling of people to violence, for sex inspires passions that blind people to reason and so a lover may be drawn into a fit of violence after he catches his boyfriend in bed with two other men, or a wife may kill her husband’s mistress because she won’t share him. These are examples of causes and effects that fit narratives most people would recognize and be comfortable with, but Wallace brings up an important point when he notes that violence in David Lynch films aren’t about narratives because in Lynch films narratives are contorted, twisted, and may not even be real.
either by their own force of will or by outside influence. Looking at Mulholland Drive this last impression of evil seems more and more relevant for ultimately every character falls prey to the evil forces that seem to occupy the city of L.A. Betty and Adam both are human beings trying to fulfill a narrative of their own life until outside forces, evil forces, eventually corrupt their will and force them into paths they don’t desire or can live with in the case of Betty.
what is a Lynchian moment? A teenage boy watching an erotic moment in a movie with his father most likely doesn’t satisfy that idea, but on some level I believe it does. Wallace defines it as best he can for the reader:
in this collection, trying to read as many as I could.
of the importance of my father’s work to the defense of the state, for we had privileges and lived comfortably. The television program I most preferred then was to watch Betwitched, featuring American performer Elizabeth Montgomery. (349).
losers who could never get a date, didn’t understand that not washing my hair repelled women, and often found solace listening to Slipknot’s “Wait and Bleed” on repeat, or else memorizing virtually every episode of Family Guy. To this day I can quote lengthy passages from the earlier shows at will, sometimes to the annoyance, dismay, or pity of my wife and friends, but it’s impossible to deconstruct this muscle memory and allow room for more important facts and information. Family Guy was a television program I adored, my friends adored, and some girls actually at least pretended to like because they were bored and our interactions would usually revolve around starting each other up to do moments from the episodes. 
These repeated actions assume great weight as I look back on my development and realize that it wasn’t the nurturing sublime language of Shakespeare or the Transcendental beauty of Emily Dickinson, it was sitting with my friends, or often alone, watching Peter Griffin try to come up with a fake name before looking at a pea, a tear, and a griffin before saying “Peter Griffin. Aw, crap.”
He provides his own example, a Pepsi ad in which an entire beach full of people scramble to a food truck to purchase the soft drink after the van projects the sound of a carbonated drink opening up:
watch over and over again, aware of the irony that is taking place as well as the invitation to participate in this farce. Advertising is not malevolent by nature, it simply serves the purpose of allowing companies to make their product known the consumer. Wallace achieves a brilliance in recognizing and thus writing out the fact that the viewer of such adds is not helpless in this matter, that in fact they fully recognize on some level that the ad is being purposefully hyperbolic to appear absurd. What’s complicated is the nature of choice that follows that recognition for absurdity is not necessarily a protection from it.
as usual, but also wrong, also usual. Looking over the passages cited already is enough evidence to demonstrate the relevance of the article to fans of television because it’s clear that Wallace is not condemning television as a form of media, he’s simply trying to understand it and offer up fresh arguments about what role it plays in society. Perhaps the best example of this comes from a quote following a passage from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise where two characters have stopped to see “THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA.” The characters get out and watched the crowd and Wallace writes a beautiful and, as usual, insightful analysis:
something quirky happens. Every season of Rick and Morty has at least one episode dedicated to the family sitting and flipping through infinite numbers of channels from infinite numbers of realities that have television. Robot Chicken’s central narrative is of a chicken strapped to a chair being forced to watch television. These are just some examples but they demonstrate the relevance of Wallace’s essay and why the reader should care.
there’s a simple joy in being passive and receiving data. Television as a medium has become so much a part of the cultural and psychological landscape that simply writing it off as corrupting is becoming immaterial. More to the point when a person condemns television and then themselves enjoy watching it they’re simply engaging in hypocrisy.
whole farce?” I laughed, feeling validated that one of my professors could be so blunt, and trust me enough to be blunt around me, but the title of the work immediately stood out. I asked her who wrote it, and when the name David Foster Wallace appeared I knew I had to read the speech.
himself above his listener, he merely put himself as a fellow human being trying to figure everything out himself who’s learned maybe just a little bit more than others. Along with this attitude came a familiar notion, namely that the important aspects of reality are typically the most difficult to talk about and discuss either because they are so prevalent that it’s easy to miss them, or else because they demand a level of attention we may not be willing to give.
beautiful to me is that Wallace is able to do more in this brief passage than simply describe the human feeling that your mind is, at times, all that really seems to be.
to be the only real existence in reality. By implication that would mean that every person, animal, plant, protist, etc. are not in fact independent beings but just a projection in the mind of the person who looks at them. When I see my cat all that I am seeing is just a projection. He isn’t real. His meows are just further illusions. If this is a disturbing concept it should be and many philosophers have rejected this concept, but of course for those of us living in this Pseudo-Modern time, solipsism has actually become ingrained into us whether we realize it or not.
t’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
however because I needed olive owl and dish-soap. Walking through the grocery store I was reminded why I hate the act. People are all in such a rush, the cashier’s automatic responses grind on you, and when you’re there at 5 P.M. everybody just got off work and so they’re tired, not paying attention, or else annoyed and hate being there. Despite all this I tried to remain pleasant and consider them and the reasons they were there. I could have just crept inside of my head, but instead I opened myself up and talked to the cashiers and tried to make them laugh.
but I wanted to focus on this last passage because it was unlike anything I had ever heard or read in a public address. Growing up in a private Christian school there was always lectures and moral lessons about the grand acts of heroism, or the bold/brave acts that were supposed to be revealing about how the small actions matter, but ultimately they always fell flat. The selfless actions were never really selfless, they were about proving that Jesus was real and that you were part of his club, and that always seemed counter to everything that I was actually taught about god and religion and Christianity. As I grew up and parted from god, reality became something far more important, for in the absence of god it was all I really had, as such being a good person for the sake of being a good person was everything. Wallace was able in this speech to remind me of the thought I have always had and held close to me but never been able to really put into words.
Comfort is in this moment all that is and will ever be and so listening to my commencement speaker talk about the opportunities for growth and the great chances, everything just fell flat and I thought of my professor.
