A Supposedly Fun Book I’ll Probably Never Read Again: Reflecting On Infinite Jest

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"Swimming Beside a Blue Whale", 1000 Page Novel, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, AA, Addiction, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, Anti-psychotics, Blue Whale Metaphor, Book Review, Charlie Rose, D.T. Max, David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky, Drugs, Endnotes, Hal Incandenza, If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome, Infinite Jest, Infinite Jest Blogs, Literature, Neil Gaiman, Novel, Postmodernism, Reading, reflection, Tennis, The Gender of Books, The New Yorker, The Unfinished, What is Infinite Jest About?, Writers, Writing

Two men of little consequence who happened to be friends met at the mall.  They hadn’t seen each other for some time.  One friend looked at the other and said, “Hey Man(1).”  The other friend, overcome with the complexity of his introduction shrugged and they walked off in different directions.  After considering it, the second friend’s thought about his friend’s statement, and the next day went out and bought Infinite Jest at Barnes & Noble.

 

 

(1)

I’m positive that Infinite Jest is about something.

When I asked one of my previous professors, who’s also become a friend in the last few years, if she had read it she said yes.  When I asked her what it was about her response began with “uhhhhh…well, shit.”  It took a moment but the most she could give me was: “It’s about drugs and tennis and that’s about all I can give you.”

Having read and completed the book for sure it’s about drugs, but it must also be about counter-culture, but what counter-culture exists seems to be really anti-culture because the individuals in third camp seem borderline psychotic, and of course it has to be about drugs, but it could also be about entertainment because that seems to wrap everything together, the title of the book is a film made by one of the character’s great uncle who was supposedly a film auteur, and the endnotes in the back of the book seem terribly distracting from the novel that actually seems to be about something.

There are names of magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and accredited authors all over and inside the introductory pages of Infinite Jest for publicity purposes and they wouldn’t put those names there if they didn’t mean something.  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.

So in order to figure out this 1000-page monster I hopped into another David Foster Wallace book which wasn’t a David Foster Wallace book actually but which is often advertised alongside David Foster Wallace books.  Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is an odd and beautiful book that is fact just one long interview that reads more like eavesdropping.  David Lipsky was sent to spend the last few days of Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest to write a piece about Wallace who was becoming more and more recognized for his work.  Lipsky himself was a published author, and reading the book was an experience I had never felt before.  I felt as if I was listening to two people I had known, or wished I had known my entire life.  Throughout the book 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:

I think probably, what I’ve noticed at readings, is that the people who seem most enthusiastic and most moved by it are young men.  Which I guess I can understand—I think it’s a fairly male book, and I think it’s a fairly nerdy book, about loneliness.  And I remember college, a lot of even the experimental stuff I was excited by, I was excited by because I found reproduced in the book certain feelings, or ways of thinking or perceptions that I had had, and the relief of knowing that I wasn’t the only one, you know?  (273).

Looking back upon an experience can be illuminating, I just want to avoid the awful platitude that “hindsight is always 20/20” because it makes me think of a Megadeth song.  Reflecting on the sensation of reading Infinite Jest I agree that the book is largely, almost absolutely male in its design and presentation.  This is not a weakness just a reader’s, and writer’s supported, 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.

This is doesn’t get us any closer to understanding what Infinite Jest as a novel is about however, so I should admit some hesitation to move forward.

I’ll admit I’m terrified to write this this “review,” it’s really more of a reflection, because I’m positive there is somebody on the internet who knows everything about Wallace, or else wears thick glasses and pretends to know everything about Wallace, and who will try and contact me and inform me that he needs to either explain it to me, or else that I’m an idiot and should feel bad.  Still Infinite Jest is interesting to me because I didn’t hear about it through friends, family, The Daily Show, Family Guy, or even by stumbling across it in a book fair or hidden chest in the Negative Zone: Section 3-z.  I discovered the book through Charlie Rose.

Before I went to work I would eat apples and peanut butter and I would watch an interview on Charlie Rose with some famous celebrity and one day it was with David Foster Wallace.  He was promiting A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never do again and at one point the discussion turned to Infinite Jest and just as quickly it turned to David Lynch.  That was it.  The title was there in my brain and in that little pocket it was allowed to fester until my intellectual curiosity finally compelled me.

On June 9^th 2016 I found the book at Barnes & Noble, bought it, and began reading it.  On October 14^th at 11:19 PM I finished it.  And when I finished Infinite Jest I felt a sensation I had not felt in ages: a tremendous sense of presence in the moment, and perhaps here I’m able to make a real argument for taking the time to read a book like Infinite Jest.

The way I, or any reader, finishes any experimental novel or any 1000 page novel, is through sheer insanity.  You have to want it above the pleasure that would come from reading a genre’d novel.

Reading Infinite Jest, much like reading Ulysses or Don Quixote, is like swimming next to a blue whale.

 

 

I don’t mean a porpoise at sea World or a beluga whale, or even a humpback, it has to be a massive Blue whale for that animal dwarfs all beings on this earth until we discover those space whales from Dr. Who.  A Blue whale is a sublime animal because it possesses such frightening power of being that humans will never obtain, yet still we’re mystified.  The reader who approaches the whale will approach a moving animal as well, and so the power is magnified for they are forced to encounter a living breathing being that is oblivious or apathetic to its existence.  They will pass the whale, but in fact they will only float in one space, wondering how close the boat still is that will lift them up from the ocean once this experience is done.  The whale will approach and the human floating, protected only with their scuba gear and oxygen tank will then feel the whale swimming by them, and while it passes they will start at the tip of its nose and from there it will feel the water pressure change, and their sensations are beyond the rest of us for they will feel nothing and see nothing and know nothing in that observation but the whale.  It will take what seems like an eternity for the whale to pass, and while the reader is watching it they will observe only a few details, and that will fuck with them more than anything 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.

That is the idealization of the 1000 page novel, but also the reality.

That’s why I can only offer one or two quotes from the massive book because my sensation of the whale will completely different than anyone else’s.

In the research done for this article I found one quote that was regularly repeated by bloggers, writers, and reviewers of the book.  The protagonist Hal Incandenza is speaking with someone about the game of tennis, and they discuss the groove of the game, the kind of dance that certain atheletes have been known to enter as they perform miracles,

“But you never know when the magic will descend on you.  You never know when the grooves will open up.  And once the magic descends you don’t want to change even the smallest detail.  You don’t know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can’t miss feeling, and you don’t want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don’t want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun.  Your heart’s in your throat every time you change sides of the court.’ (243).

Wallace actually played tennis while he was a live, and one of the essays in the collection A Suppoedly Fun Thing I’ll never Do Again is an actual article about the Tennis 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.

A second quote occurs much later in the novel when Hal is relating about some events in his family history and he stumbles upon an observation of humanity:

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end.  Could dedicate their entire lives to it.  It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic.  We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.  God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or Philately –the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly.  To games to needles, to some other person.  Something pathetic about it.  A flight-from in the form of plunging into.  Flight from exactly what?  These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat?  To what purpose?  This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws.  It was king, in a way.  (900).

I’ve remarked in several essays how absurd human existence is, and while many would protest and claim that life is rich with meaning, Hal’s observation seems terribly true.  It might just be because I’ve begun teaching and found almost immediately that I don’t have the stomach for it, but looking at some of my fellow Millennials, and those that came before me I see the trend of those who are willing to dedicate what little existence they have to an idea, cause, organization, or path.  Their life goals while largely humble, are a dedication.  And before I put myself above others I myself follow this “black miracle.”  My life is about writing and encouraging others to write.  Looking over my life, and the decisions I have made now and for my future there is not component in which writing does not play some crucial element, and so for my own part I recognize that in what short amount of time I have I’ve already selected my “black miracle” which, as I write it out, sounds like a perfect title for a novel.

There’’s one more quote worth mentioning because it’s too important to miss:

Human beings came and went. (972)

It’s simple, and the reader may immediately object “so what?” but looking at the page number they need to remember that the novel is 981 pages long with around 80 pages of endnotes that themselves can be anywhere from a single word to thirty pages long.  By the time the reader encounters this small quote in the heavy meat of the body of the novel it’s deceptively simple.  Infinite Jest follows the life of Hal Incandenza as he progresses through an elite college and its tennis program, however it also follows the actions of a Canadian terrorist group, and lengthy portions are about the Boston area Alcoholics Anonymous or other Drug related rehabilitation programs.  In such moments the reader is offered a glimpse of the people who wind up in such places, or other times they are offered the viewpoint of those people who work regularly in such programs and the truth is human life filters through such halls and while some find peace, often it happens that people don’t make it.

Looking at my teaching right now I have groups of students that I recognize will not make it through college, and some will most certainly succeed, and others will simply pass and enter society.  Looking at the time I spent in graduate school working in the Writing Center of my college I would see students come and go, and also fellow tutors who meant the world to me or else people I wanted to strangle with my bare hands.  Looking at my life I have encountered a wide crowd of people.  And so this simple sentence, while it is directed towards a Rehab clinic becomes far more potent concerning the human experience by the time one has managed to slough through the dense book up to this point.

There is unbearable pain in reading Infinite Jest, for if you try it, as I did, by reading just 10 pages a day, eventually they’ll come to the end of their tenth page and the last word of the last sentence of the last paragraph of their page will have a footnote, and when they flip to the back they’ll discover Wallace has written twenty pages for one footnote, and while the book is flying through the air surrounded by the shattering glass of the reader’s window they used to own until they cast the book through it, they’ll never be able to mistake the faint sound of David Foster Wallace’s unspeakable laughter cackling in each shard and tingle, and the final onomatopoeic “thlumpul” of the dense 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.

But it’s worth it.  Damn if it isn’t worth it.  And not just for bragging rights.

Any idiot can brag, but if the action is undertaken just to brag then it’s an empty gesture.  I was happy when I reached page 500 because it a reminder I haven’t given up on my goal which compelled me in the first place to pick the book up: I wanted to know David Foster Wallace better because he seemed like a person I wanted to know and understand.

In an article published in The New Yorker titled The Unfinished, D.T. Max provides a brief glimpse into Wallace’s dedication to the book:

He was still interested in the warping power of media culture. And he had a new appreciation of addiction and its lethality: it gave him something to warn against. He created a character named Hal Incandenza, who bridged two worlds Wallace knew well—Incandenza is a pothead and a talented high-school tennis player. He goes to an academy run by his family, which his older brother, Orin, 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.

Wallace worked quickly in the house that he shared. He filled page after page of grade-school notebooks and then typed what he’d written with two fingers on an old computer. In a letter to Nadell, he had made a promise: “I will be a fiction writer again or die trying.”

It’s becoming more and more apparent, with every essay I write, every book I finish that while the goal of acquiring and maintain the title of intellectual was once the stated goal, the reason I keep reading is to understand people more.  The “Wallace Explosion” I’ve ridden over the past few months has been more and more revealing to me because I recognize in the man a similar burning.  I want to be a writer, not for bragging rights, but to simply influence someone the way Wallace has influenced me.  There’s a strength of will to finishing a 1000 page novel, or a lunacy, but I do believe that like Infinite Jest there is a desire of curiosity.  I wanted to see the whale and report back what I’ve found to someone else.  So here it is: I have no idea what it was that I saw, but when it passed and was behind me I felt alive and present in the world in a way I haven’t felt in years.

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

While looking for images I found a link to an article on Buzzfeed I believe you will appreciate.  Enjoy:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jameskicksa/1088-reasons-you-should-read-infinite-jest?utm_term=.ss9p85vZb#.ncbRxqDMP

Here also are some essays about the book, either people’s impressions or…you know I’m not really sure there is another word for encountering Infinite Jest, it just is…

http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2011/07/24/retro-read-infinite-jest/

https://interactivelitspring2015.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/when-infinite-jest-is-just-too-interactive-or-martin-heideggers-vorhandenheit/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/feb/15/infinite-jest-at-20-still-a-challenge-still-brilliant-emma-lee-moss

http://mentalfloss.com/article/59486/15-facts-about-infinite-jest

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/07/31/infinite-jest-fake-reading

https://jackblackwell.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/the-end-of-the-tour-review/

https://madmanmoviereviews.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/the-end-of-the-tour-movie-review/

https://versaviceinc.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/first-blog-post/

https://bensherick.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/how-to-read-infinite-jest/

https://yanni365.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/i-think-i-think-fuzzy-thoughts-all-the-time/

https://thecommonthemes.wordpress.com/2016/06/04/book-21-i-am-more-than-you-see-and-hear/

https://nicschuck.wordpress.com/2016/06/05/book-review-infinite-jest/

https://thechronichobbyist.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/infinite-jest-a-confused-look-back/

https://eclecticconsciousness.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/infinite-jest-the-beginning-of-the-journey/

https://avastdesert.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/what-to-read-after-infinite-jest/

https://mia215.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/locked-in-infinite-jest/

https://thetmmorgan.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/infinite-jest-is-no-joke-query-letters-are-though/

https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2016/04/13/thoughts-on-reading-infinite-jest/

http://infinitewinter.org/my-infinite-jest-origin-story/

https://infinitejestattempt.wordpress.com/

https://thejester311.wordpress.com/category/preparing-to-launch/

http://www.npr.org/2015/08/14/432161732/david-foster-wallace-the-fresh-air-interview

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94629055

 

Here is also a link to the D.T. Max article The Unfinished if the reader is at all curious:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/09/the-unfinished

 

**Writer’s Note**

Read the book, there’s nothing like it.  And if the page count daunts you just remember, 10 pages a day everyday and you’ll be done in just a few months.

 

 

Although of Course, You Could Become Somebody Else: A White Tower Review

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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, apples & peanut butter, Author Vs Voice Vs Persona, Book Review, Cetology, Charlie Rose, Consider the Lobster, Conversation, David Foster Wallace, David Lipksy, Derrida, Dostoyevsky, Guys, Imposter Complex, Infinite Jest, Interview, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Moby Dick, Personal Development, Philosophy, Postmodernism, prose, public intellectual, public perception of writers, Reading, reflection, Sentimental Novel, television, Ulysses, Writers, Writing

It started really with Charlie Rose.  In the mornings my wife would usually wake up before me, and in fact she still does, in order to get to school and so given the fact that I had no classes to teach and my job wouldn’t start until around 11 or 12, I would usually have the mornings to myself to putter, drink my tea, eat my apples and peanut butter, and watch videos or read before I left.  I usually couldn’t read and eat at the same time and so I pulled up YouTube on my phone.  However, I really don’t like wasted time, and so these early morning moments seemed like a chance to grow intellectually so I would watch Charlie Rose interviews because Charlie Rose usually hosts substantive interviews.  I watched Robin Williams, Gore Vidal, Bill Maher, Quentin Tarantino, Benjamin Netanyahu, and even Mr. Rogers.  I can’t honestly say if my brain got any bigger, but watching those videos while I ate my apples and peanut butter reminded me how underappreciated the Interview format is in our culture.

In the queue was a man by the name of David Foster Wallace, a writer I’d read before and largely ignored, and so like most of the choices in my life that lead to books, I picked the video largely because I had heard rumors and speculation and read something somewhere, and even after the interview I wasn’t terribly impressed.  In fact, to be frank, the man bothered me mostly because of the way he discussed academics in a kind of pejorative tone.

I can’t explain the Wallace explosion.  Like Orwell before him, and Christopher Hitchens before that, David Foster Wallace just seems to be dominating my consciousness and I honestly believe it has something to do with the fact that I’m beginning to abandon any and all hope that my life will have any real connection to academia.  I also wonder why, whenever I have these intellectual storms in which I become consumed with reading the entire works of single author or subject that I can never get myself to dig into the histories of Rome or Ancient Greece.  There’s a stack of books with names like Livy, 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 20^th and 21^st century.

Perhaps I’m just doomed to be another soulless, shameless Postmodernist.  More’s-the-pity.

Still, the name David Foster Wallace buzzed in the background of my head and so when I had coffee with a friend a few weeks later I snapped up a copy of Infinite Jest, ordered two copies by accident of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, bought Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, bought Consider the Lobster, and finally bought a copy of a book that, while it wasn’t written by Wallace, was still half written by the man and largely about him.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, apart from having an incredibly long title, is a book that shook me.  I was tempted to write some bullshit about the book shaking me “to the core,” and while the sentiment is accurate I distrust sentiment when trying to convey how much a book can affect you.  I was used to David Foster Wallace being a writer who always somehow managed to convey thoughts about society, art, literature, and writing that always left me profoundly altered and adrift in intellectual storms that would cloud my reality until I wrote about my thoughts about his thoughts and how fucking true they were, but David Lipsky’s book gave me something far more shocking and I use that word carefully.

David Lipsky’s transcribing of the various conversations he had with Wallace shows me not only a great writer, but a deep human being who seemed to suffer from most of the same shit I did.  Later in the book when Wallace and Lipsky are talking they discuss college.

[Lipsky:]…You said being a regular guy was a great strength of yours as a writer, I thought it was smart, but what did you mean by that?

[Wallace:] I think—I had serious problems in my early twenties.  I mean, I’d been a really good student.  I was a really good logician and semantician and philosopher.  And I really had this problem of thinking I was smarter than everyone else.  [Reason for faux]  And I think if you’re writing out of place where you think that you’re smarter than everybody else, you’re either condescending to the reader, or talking down to ‘im, or playing games, or you think the point is to show how smart you are. 

And all that happened to me was, I just has a bunch of shit happen in my twenties where I realized I wudn’t near as smart.  Where I realized I wasn’t near as smart as I thought I was.  And I realized that a lot of other people, including people without much education, were a fuck of a lot smarter than I thought they were.  I got—what’s the world? Humbled, in a way, I think.  (214).

Besides these two paragraphs in my paperback copy of the book is an arrow and above it in cursive is written the phrase “My Life.”  It’s a pathetic confession but I admit that I often felt during my undergraduate career this combination of superiority and inferiority, and while part of it is simply growing up and suffering through the necessary reduction of the ego, I recognized early on that the kind of education I had received in grade school as well as home, far surpassed what most of my friends had experienced.  As such I enjoyed being the smartest kid in class, that is until a new student came down the pike who understood Derrida, and another who knew what the Sentimental Novel was, and someone else who had actually read Dostoyevsky, and so on and etc. and so I quickly 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.

Eventually I settled into a comfort with my intellect because I realized that I will never know everything and so it was better to keep growing and be, as Wallace noted, humble.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is written as a long interview between David Lipsky, who is a novelist but also a regular reporter for Rolling Stone, and David Foster Wallace.  The book is specifically an interview for the promotion of Wallace’s book Infinite Jest which had just been published and would, in time, become part of the American cultural consciousness as a kind of American answer to Ulysses.  This combination isn’t made in jest…bad joke, it’s an earnest assessment having read Ulysses.  The book stands at 981 pages long, but throughout the text Wallace has numbered words and sentences that lead back to end notes some of which range from a single sentence, to multiple paragraphs, to, in one unfortunate instance, well over thirty pages.  And so the book stands at actually 1079 pages, 98 being endnotes alone.  It is considered an avant-garde masterpiece, and one of the great “challenge” books in the American literary canon if not the world.  Entire blogs are dedicated to deciphering the book, and scores of essays exist about the book and the myth that surrounds it.

For my own part I am working slowly through it, but while I did I decided that I would read Lipsky’s recorded interviews to see if I could find the man behind the whale.  That’s a personal metaphor for long difficult books by the way.  The lovely aspect about Although of Course You End up becoming Yourself is that the book does reveal these two men as realistic human beings as one early passage demonstrates:

[Lipsky:]You’re the most talked about writer in the country.

[Embarrassed to hear myself talk that way.]

[Wallace:]There’s an important distinction between—I’ve actually gotten a lot saner about this.  Some of this stuff is nice.  But I also realize this is a big, difficult book.  Whether the book is really any good, nobody’s gonna know for a couple of years.  So a lot of this stuff, it’s nice, I would like to get laid out of it a couple of times, which has not in fact happened.

I didn’t get laid on this tour.  The thing about fame is interesting, although I would have liked o get laid on the tour and I did not. (11).

It’s hard, as a man at least, to condemn this impulse because I’ve studied biology, and rock stars, and I recognize how fame influences conscious choices.  Lipsky immediately after this notes that rock stars certainly get this kind of notice and perks of fame, but they observe that writers tend to miss out on this kind of treatment.  There is a tendency on the part of men to enjoy their fame and this translates into having sex with multiple women because that’s a sign that you’re the dominant male or that you possess some kind of power, but looking at this passage what’s important is how human Wallace appears.  Most men, if they became famous, might expect the “groupie effect” and so the note of the missed chance reminds the reader that Wallace was every bit a man.

That isn’t diminishing his legitimate genius, I’m just noting the man would have enjoyed getting some while on tour, and this impulse isn’t necessarily crude, it’s just what seems appropriate from a man who tried to be down to earth as he could be.

Lipsky’s book is not just conversations about missed opportunities, or lack thereof, for sex that makes Wallace become real, it’s also for the fact that he, much like myself, grew up in a house that valued education and books.  Another passage shows this while he’s discussing his home life.

[Lipsky:] Environment in house?  Lots of reading?

[Wallace:] Yeah.  My parents—I have all these weird early memories.  I remember my parents reading Ulysses out loud to each other in bed, in this really cool way, holding hands and both lovin’ something really fiercely.

And I remember me being five and Amy being three, and Dad reading Moby-Dick to us (Laughs)—the unexpurgated Moby-Dick.  Before—I think halfway through Mom pulled him aside and explained to him that, um, little kids were not apt to find, you know, “Cetology” all that interesting.  (49).

I legitimately laughed out loud at this passage, because I have read Moby Dick before, and while the book isn’t always dry, the “Cetology” chapter is literally nothing but a taxonomy of the various species of whales known by whalers and biologists up to that time.  If that sounds fascinating but painfully boring that’s because it is, and don’t forget it’s Melville.  This brief scene by itself wouldn’t necessarily bring out Wallace’s humanity, but a few sentences down he says:

But I remember, I remember because there was some sort of deal about Amy, Amy got exempted from it, and was I gonna be exempted or not?  And I remember kind of trying to win Dad’s favor, by saying “No, Dad, I want to hear it.”  When in fact of course I didn’t at all.”  (49).

I suspect every child has that moment of recognition.  Our parents give us so much of themselves and their time and patience and energy and so as kids we recognize this and try to give something back even if it’s just our own time and attention.  My little sister and I would sometimes note that whenever dad talked about economics we would smile and nod, but much like Cetology in Moby-Dick we were left rather bored.  Likewise growing up my mother read numerous books about spirituality, and not being a terribly spiritual person myself listening was sometimes a bit of a chore.  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.

So what about Wallace?  He was a hyper-intellectual avant-gardist who wrote incomprehensible novels and esoteric essays about television, tennis, and David Lynch movies.  What relevance does his personal life have to do with me?  In other words why should I care?

Well dear reader that’s where I have it.  During this essay I’ve repeatedly referred to David Foster Wallace as human, or noted that Lipsky’s book emphasizes this humanity.  This is because I believe in some fashion, the man has become an ideal rather than a human being.  And if I may take it a step further, writers in general tend to receive this treatment, their works becoming some kind of totem 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.

Wallace is often painted as my imagined contester paints him, as a hyper-intellectual who was above human beings and solely existed in thought, but reading Lipksy’s book a different image of Wallace appears: a man who wants his passion and ideas to be understood or appreciated while he shares them with others while also trying to be a normal guy as more and more hype builds around him.

In one passage the pair of them are standing outside of an airport in Chicago and David begins discussing the problem of art in this time period:

[Wallace:] We sit around and bitch about how TV has ruined the audience for reading—when really all it’s done is given us the really precious gift of 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).

On the very next page he continues this idea:

[Wallace:] The old tricks have been exploded, and I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader.  And my personal belief is that a lot of it has to do with vice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader.  That sort of, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life—that’s our opening, and that’s our gift.  That’s a very personal deal, and here are seventeen ways to do it.  (72).

Without sounding arrogant, I recognized a similar thought when I first read this passage.  Part of that was simply because I spend most of my time reading, writing, thinking about reading, thinking about writing, and wondering what is possible in writing, or, more importantly, what can be accomplished in writing, and sometimes why I spend so much time thinking about writing and not actually writing.

I may sound arrogant, or desperate to sound clever, but I do believe a great many readers read lives of quiet desperation.  Novels are mass produced that follow formulas and give the same material, and before my reader believes that I am now about to rail against mass produced paperbacks I promise that I am not.  My aim is not to mock readers who willfully ingest such material, my aim is point a finger at the writers.  Why is there no desire to play with language and try for something more?

I want to think that perhaps my great collection of essays will actually amount to something accomplished in words.  Writing is my solace and my passion, but reading Wallace I was reminded again that it leaves me wanting for an opportunity to find something new. It’s not enough to tell a story about how I discovered a copy of The Stranger in my wife’s childhood bedroom and began reading it before describing its larger significance.  The writing has to mean to something or do something that impacts the reader just as much as the material.

I want, and there is the card game.  My writings are ever and always words thrown out to some unknown being in the world who stumbles upon this space, and when they read my words they discover that I have written sentences and thoughts not to myself but to others.  It’s a cheap trick, but one in which I’ve developed a voice around.

Lipsky’s book could easily become just a long list of beautiful quotes that a casual or superficial reader will ingest to spit back out in conversations to sound smart, but in many ways the style of the book is unlike anything published that I have read because Lipsky manages to present me with the real human being that was David Foster Wallace.  The interview format can lead certain writers to just kiss an individual’s ass and then get one or two good quotes from it, but the interactions between 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.

Near the end of the book Wallace seems to provide a final summation as they discuss why people are ugly towards one another in this contemporary period:

[Wallace:] It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings.  The ability to do that 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).

I’ll disagree with the man, suggesting only that pious may be incorrect, but at least virtuous, even if that word has fallen upon hard times.  Wallace has secured a legacy as one of the great minds and writers of his generation with only a few essays and a few novels, and while that greatness is certainly one of the reasons I find myself warming to the man it’s this last bit where I really recognized his intellectual ability.  The mark of a great mind is not necessarily making grand, sweeping generalizations, but small observations that lead to real insight.

More than any of that though, Lipsky’s book is at the heart of my recent Wallace explosion, for while it was some unknowable serendipity and influence that lead me to Infinite Jest, it was the social connection between a few of my friends that lead me to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, and reading this book has helped me revaluate that tenuous connection.

Is it possible to feel another human being so truly and completely, feeling as if you might be so bold as to suggest that you know that person’s heart and soul but for a moment?  The end result of Lipsky’s book is the impression of a long conversation that, at the end which seems almost like saying goodbye, you knew another person’s heart.

Few books bother leave such a stamp on a person’s soul, though many try, and we’re all left wanting for such moments.

Is There Any “Other” Way to Fart?, Fart Proudly: A White Tower Review

Tags

A Letter to a Royal Academy, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, biological arguments, Book Review, Carl Japikse, Catch-22, Essay, Family Guy, fart jokes, Fart Proudly, farting, fathers, Founding Father, Founding Fathers Purity Myth, history, Literature, Mouse Trap, On Rhetoric, Playboy, Playboy Interview, Playboy September 2009, Satire, satisfaction, Science, Seth McFarlane, The Oath, Walter Isaacson

A title like Fart Proudly grabs you immediately and you realize that you not only need to read the book, you have to own it.  The fact that it’s written by Benjamin Franklin and actually taught in college classrooms is just the way you defend it when you mother tsk tsk’s you when she catches you reading it.  Your mother anyway, my mother loved the book and wanted to read it herself.

I read Fart Proudly in its entirety during graduate school when I needed an early American Lit course and decided to spend my semester reading famous American speeches, and while that semester was largely spent reading and dissecting Native American oratory, I made sure that Fart Proudly was on the reading list.  My professor laughed, but didn’t object, for she often used the book when teaching the class to undergraduate students and in her own words, “The title just beckons.”  I hadn’t come across the book through her class I’m ashamed to admit (she had a reputation as being one of the most difficult professors and so I pussied out), but actually through a friend who was taking the class.  She had her books spread out over one of the tables in the writing center, a not uncommon sight for everyone did this at some point, and because I am the self-declared book whore I had to see what she was reading.  Dr. Beebe had been right, the “title just beckons,” and so I picked the book up while my friend worked on her paper and I read a few of the passages.

I mean this without hyperbole, I actually laughed out loud.  This is a rare occurrence, for while I have found several books funny, there’s only been two or three times a book has actually made me laugh out loud, the other two being Catch-22 and Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace.  Fart Proudly is a book of rich and deep humanity, because it tries only to poke fun at day to day life, including its more morose moments.  Take for instance the small poem The Oath:

Luke, on his dying Bed, embraced his Wife,

And begged one Favour: Swear, my dearest Life,

Swear, if you love me, never more to wed,

Nor take a second Husband to your Bed.

 

Anne dropt a Tear.  You know, my dear, says she,

Your least Desires have still been Laws to me;

But from the Oath, I beg you’d me excuse;

For I’m already promised to John Hughes.  (30).

It’s passages like this that remind me I want to go back and pursue my degree in American history, for it would provide me plenty of excuse to study Benjamin Franklin.  Growing up in America the Founding Fathers are figures of contention for when you’re young the typical indoctrination is that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were perfect beings, devoid of flaws or human weakness.  This image becomes contrasted as you age and experience the first “real” history teacher, who begins to show chinks in the armor of these ideal beings, and then eventually students will encounter teachers who will teach them that these men were slave owners, drunks, and hypocrites.  Before the reader assumes I’m going to side with any one of them, I have to disappoint because my position is that all of these interpretations hold value.  George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did in fact own slaves, and John Adams was boring at parties (seriously who wants to play Mousetrap at a kegger?  The damn game never works).  These are facts that can’t be denied, but I would remind the reader that there is nothing so suspect as judging people in past with contemporary standards.  I’m not excusing or condoning the owning of slaves, I’m just asking the reader to remember that the idea that slaves were people too was a paradigm that was slowly gaining in traction.

My aim isn’t to discuss the complexities and nuances inherent to studying and arguing about Colonial American historical discourse, because like the title suggests, this article is about the noble art of farting.  I just want the reader to understand what model of man I’m working with here before I get into the book.

Benjamin Franklin is the troublesome founding father for many Americans, for while pundits on Fox news try desperately to pretend like the man doesn’t exist, and while Liberals try to turn him into some kind of enlightened genius plagued by rumors of his sexual voraciousness, Benjamin Franklin, the man tends to get lost.  Just the other day I decided to begin a biography of Franklin, not his autobiography which I started once and had to stop because of school and Fraggle Rock (it was a weird weekend), but instead Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson.  Two chapters in and already the book is proving to be one of the best financial decisions of my life, and when approaching the life of Franklin Isaacson offers up what is in my mind, one of the best examples of what good biography should do:

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us.  George Washington’s colleagues found it hard to imagine touching the austere general on the shoulder, and we would find it even more so today.  Jefferson and Adams are just as intimidating.  But Ben Franklin, that ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history’s stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles.  He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with ortund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary, sometimes unnervingly so.  We see his reflection in our own time.  (2).

It’s this spirit of man who wrote the essays, letters, reviews, and poems found within Fart Proudly, and the reason why I return to the book again and again.  Washington is a man made of marble and legend; Franklin as a man is as much a scholar as he is a vulgarian, and for this he earns my eternal respect.

Looking through the book the best selection to choose from, for it best represents the book as a whole and even provides the inspiration for the title of the slim tome, is A Letter to a Royal Academy.  Franklin studied the natural world throughout his life, and these observations eventually lead to him becoming one of the best scientists of his generation.  He often read and contributed to scientific societies and documents, and in A Letter to a Royal Academy, which was in fact a real letter to a friend, Franklin is able to demonstrate his passion for science, as well poke a little fun at the institution of the Academy.

He says, with tongue firmly in cheek:

It is universally well known, that in digesting out common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind.

That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it. 

That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offense, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.

That so retained contrary to nature, it not only gives frequently great present pain, but occasions future diseases, such as habitual cholics, ruptures, tympanies, &tc, often destructive for the constitution, & sometimes of life itself.

Were it not for the odiously offensive smell accompanying such escapades, polite people would probably be under no more restraint in discharging such wind in company, than they are in spitting, or in blowing their noses.  (15).

It’s hard to put into words painful and pleasant recognition.  I often get into debates with friends and colleagues who argue that fart jokes aren’t terribly funny, and while there are individuals who legitimately suffer from medical problems that result in uncontrollable flatulence who understandably don’t find farts terribly amusing, most of the criticism of fart jokes, and likewise farts themselves, is that enjoying them is an indication of stupidity or immaturity.  I’ve written at length about my love for the television show Family Guy, which relies on farts for a majority of its comedy, and my love for the show is often looked upon as suspect.  Farts smell bad, sometimes, and Franklin tries to argue that the only reason farts bother people as much as they do is because of that smell.  If farts possessed no odor at all, he argues, then farting would be no different than sneezing or coughing, though people would still probably tell you to shush in a movie theatre.

Franklin’s creative aim in the letter however is scientific and so he makes the following proposal:

My Prize question therefore should be, To discover some drug wholesome and not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food, or sauces, that shall render the natural discharges, of wind from our bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreeable as perfumes.  (15).

The idea of pills that make farts smell better at first sounds ridiculous until you remember that there are pills on the market designed to make penises stiffer.  Letter to a Royal Academy is not mocking science so much as it is mocking the standards of “moral” or “proper” behavior.  In many ways Franklin’s letter is akin to On the Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde, for the Letter is in essence a “comedy of manners.”  Franklin is poking fun at humanity who regard farts as monstrous or unwholesome despite the fact that, scientifically speaking, there’s nothing inherently wrong with farting.  In fact, as the previous quote demonstrated, farts are a natural and healthy part of every individual biology.

To return to Family Guy for a moment, I remember a time when I actually received Playboy magazine on a regular basis (before they decided to cut the nudity from their magazine and become, I don’t know what) and my favorite part of the magazine was actually the Interview.  I still hold to this day the September 2009 copy because the interview was with Seth McFaralane, a man who has become not just as a formative influence upon my life, but who is also in his own way reminding me why I enjoy Rat Pack music so much.  At one point in the interview he’s asked about his “emotional age” and this brings up the topic of fart jokes on Family Guy.

Playboy:  What would you say is your emotional age?

McFarlane:  Maybe 97

Playboy: Really?  It seems a lot more adolescent than that.

McFarlane: Yeah, it’s sort of a combination of 97 and 12.  If somebody farts, I can get to laughing so hard I can’t breathe.  But I sure do love the music of Nelson Riddle.  I love Woody Allen movies, and I love watching Jackass.  We’ve been criticized for being too crude and lowbrow on Family Guy.  What in the world is wrong with that?  That kind of laughter releases the healthiest endorphins.  There’s something puritanical about people who object to fart jokes or shit jokes.  It’s that puritanical idea that you shouldn’t have sex because it feels good—and that’s a sin.  How can anything that makes you laugh that hard be bad in any way unless it’s harming somebody?  Farts are good; they clean you out.  (34).

McFarlane and Franklin come together beautifully then for both men advocate the release of farts, but more importantly the release of the elitism that surrounds farts.  Rather than embrace biology, and laugh off what can be the most annoying and obnoxious part of our biology, there is a section of humanity that tries to ignore the cold (though sometimes hot if you’ve eaten spicy foods) reality of their bodies.  The body digests food through a process of cellular respiration and during that process a fair amount of carbon dioxide and methane is produced, and because our species has yet to find a way to release that gas without producing funny smells and sounds, we’re all slaves to our biology which is rather loud, though sometimes sounds like Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.  Rather than mourn this reality, or suggest that those who try to laugh off the pain of embarrassment are uncultured and immature, the only healthy approach is to laugh and remind yourself that life is absurd and ridiculous.

By purging your body of the fart, and the idea that there’s something wrong with farting, a real comfort arrives.

Franklin embraces this model of hedonism, and in fact explains it out as the more sage philosophic reality:

Are there twenty men in Europe at this day, the happier, or even easier, for any knowledge they have picked out of Aristotle?  What comfort can the vortices of Descartes give to a man who has whirlwinds in his bowels.  The knowledge of Newton’s mutual attraction of the particles of matter, can it afford ease t him who is racked by their mutual repulsion, and the cruel distention it occasions?  The please arising to a few philosophers, from seeing, a few times in their life, the threads of light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian Prism into seven colours[sic], can it be compared with the ease and comfort evert man living might feel seven times a day, by discharging freely the wing from his bowels?  (17).

I am an avid reader, but I must concede to Franklin’s argument for the release of a fart has tended to provide more satisfaction to me than ever reading Aristotle.  In fact, to be honest, between the choice of re-reading On Rhetoric again or laying a fart I would probably choose the fart.  This is not because I don’t believe On Rhetoric has no merit as an intellectual product, but if my aim is to be happy and comfortable farting will honestly, realistically provide me with more comfort for afterwards I will probably laugh, move on with my life, and then eventually pick up On Rhetoric and learn about what makes Oedipus the King such an amazing play.

Fart Proudly offers up numerous essays that deal frankly with issues of sex, farting, and parodies of the seemingly endless rules and values of cultured society, and once again I look to Franklin the man rather than the “founding father.”

I’m a product of my time, for the last words always inspire distrust, because those people who talk about what “the founding fathers would have wanted” always come with their own agendas and the “fathers” are merely the justification for whatever action is desired.  It all boils down to elitism and personal bias, and this is odious to me as an American because I am a patriot, and I am a man who understands that “fathers” tend to be human creatures; fathers are anything but ideal in this way.  My father and grandfathers taught me plenty of lessons about life and liberty, but they also taught me the important lessons: like how to spit, where to pee in the woods, if you have to take a shit what do you use (or not use) to wipe your ass, and of course, what to say when you eventually fart.  For the record I always taught to blame “frogs,” their croaks sounded suspiciously like the farts of a grown man who would laugh when mom sighed and told me grab him another beer.

Farting is a human act.  It levels you in your reality and body and prevents you from developing an asinine elitism that is in fact only having your head up your ass.  Fart Proudly, Franklin (really Carl Japikse the editor), argues, because there really isn’t any other way to that will keep you sane.

 

*Writer’s Note*

Because I like fart jokes, having a steady supply of them on hand is of a must and so I’ve provided a link below of one or two websites that provide the reader with all the fart jokes their hearts and gum could ever desire.  Enjoy:

http://www.short-funny.com/fart-jokes.php

http://www.jokes4us.com/barjokes/fartjokes.html

http://www.sillyjokes.co.uk/fart-jokes