... although my heart started to race, now it has slowed, I'll let it go.

As for David Foster Wallace, I do not hold it against him for writing his collections of essays, short stories and whatnot even where his ambition lies with grander fiction novels. Even in the face of legitimate allegations of "vanity collection" spurred by the undeserved fact that "everything Wallace chooses to write about will be worth preserving",(1) legitimate to me at least, as culture typically finds name and appearance infinitely more fascinating than substance, I do not hold DFW at fault for (if there was any) compromising.

Writers write, for one. Not only out of natural propensity, where writing may be addictive habit to keep, but also out of necessity, to practice and explore, and hopefully improve, the craft. So DFW writes, he has to. As well, DFW no doubt likes to get paid; and I would not sweat anyone for making a buck while he or she can.

Which does not mean I have read this latest anointed genius, among the other hype crowned upon him for his massive late 90's mega-novel, titled Infinite Jest. Another embellishment is DFW is Pynchonian, which has not made his writing as automatically attractive to me as my well-professed affection for Pynchon might suggest. These days, any half ass ambitious or overblown writer - cough Jonathan Franzen, cough Neal Stephenson – is adorned as Pynchonian by slothful critics, reviewers, and other adulators.

By the way, any comparisons to Pynchon, even directly on target, do not ignite much my interest for anyone. None of the writers I newly or long liked, really, are too similar to Pynchon, even if most in my favored group fit in that modernist and post modernist and possibly avant-garde tradition that Pynchon, and DFW is supposed to, for that matter, belong. Or, I have more or less actively avoided Pynchon-like writers such as Dom Delillo, who by most account is a close and most contemporaneous comparison, and DFW, the recentest greatest incarnate. Reading and books may just be entirely different for me. In popular songs, references to My Bloody Valentine provide me with at least cause to investigate; similarly with movies and Michelangelo Antonioni, which led me to the robust achievements of the Taiwanese New Wave. Yet I never read a book for style or content because it resembles something or someone else that I have read, even if it was someone or something I love having read. My quick and close to technically true reason why: writing is more or less strictly a solitary effort, while popular songs and movies are collaborative by nature.

Yet I will be reading DFW anyway, and one of those vanity collections to boot. Among the fresh crop of modernists/post modernists, DFW is the cream, or so I cannot rail against critical consensus. Part of me is just interested in how prose is developing these days, and DFW seems like a good ground to dig. But not IJ however. That book is just way too hefty to be portable. Instead I have A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which gathers some essays of his. Like I agreed, for ambitious fiction writers, short collections of stories or essay seem purely masturbatory jobs. Watching DFW with Charlie Rose it becomes more obviously so, as he underscores parts of his essays to answer Charlie's lazy questions. Seriously, DFW, I would love you if you just said, "Charlie, it's in the fucking book, read it." Which is why, in part, I like Pynchon; if he masturbates, it's mainly at home in his room; and to be clear, I am not anywhere near that room.

A point that I would like to make explicit is that when it comes to the public eye, it is never a question of getting into the public eye, but of staying in it.(2) Entry to public scrutiny and perhaps applause normally is won by doing things that do not take into account the public's whims. Taking DFW, his efforts to write IJ and to write it well were self-contained within the efforts; the attention he received from the public was incidental. Or, and probably no less opaque, he did that something (write IJ) to do that something. But once the attention of the nation/world happens to turn to him, the fight is to keep that promiscuous gaze affixed. Which is why he puts up with the questions posed by CR (and others). Questions that are near uniformly and utterly stupid but if DFW decides not to comply, attention will turn in an eye blink instead to those who do not mind docility. And I say this even with DFW's appearance on the CR Show being a contributing factor for me to try him out.

And ASFTINDA because it is handy, so to speak, enough to carry around with relative ease, and I hope, easy enough to carry to the end swiftly. IJ I'll save when I do not have a shitload of other books in my knapsack. Let's see what surprises are in store with the essays.

This will seem more of a segue later than it does not seems like one now. At the Wrens show, my friend was picking to start a brawl with the fellas in front of us. Maybe it was the effect of two Heineken beers seducing some of his darker impulses. Or maybe I goaded him too much with my complaints about the typically vulgar standing room crowds at concerts of which the preposterously tall segment invariably finds their way in front of me. Like, what the fuck. I've got enough height to make it a smaller deal than it would be. So does my friend for that matter. Or no inconvenience to the sightlines, but these human beanstalks planted before me just so happen to be purposefully rude, idiotic, stinky, or combines of the three.

My friend added, "He might have three inch or so on me, but I'm forty pounds on him." Uh, okay. And later, "Well, I have a bottle and can use that." Uh, okay. More: "We can switch, you take the bottle and give me the plastic cup, I can scrunch it to stab them."(3) Uh, wicked. Or that is not reassuring, not at all. I sincerely suspected my friend of repressed anger issues, but then again, who, when pressed and/or liquored up, isn't monomaniacal in pursuit of pain infliction, even if it is to oneself, or perhaps especially so. Or, I drink and have my testimonial scars/memories aplenty. I will say this, my normal manners clearly evince a bad attitude and any karmic retribution is more than warranted; my friend typically goes out of his way to be a nice guy.(4) Still, I reserve final judgment on him.

The tension peaked with mainly verbal back and forth, demands for contrition, evil-eyeing, and requests for bygones to be bygone. From my perspective, I love my friend, but all concerts that are standing room are like this. Assholes always cajole their way stage-ward, and in the process roadblock views and personal space for someone, and for the innocents behind me, I am one of those assholes. That I am less smug about it does not change facts. And even as I would have stood by my pal's side if things did devolve to fisticuffs (or suds receptacles), I really hoped things would just blow over. No final resolution would ever come. Yet, as the houselights got crushed by the Wrens guitar strum billows, the crisis thankfully passed. Perhaps waiting (and the nothing to do but standing and waiting) was the chief fuel for that hostility.

The Wrens flat out rocked.(5) The Meadowlands is really good, but the live versions of the songs are something else entirely but something else entirely really good too. Which segues. The Wrens are good buddies with the guys of Okkervil River, I found out.(6) Then, I (legally) downloaded OR's Black Sheep Boy. Holy. Transforming and excellent. I can see how the bands benefit from their association with each other.


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1 Allen Barra, http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/03.06.97/books-9710.html.

2 This paragraph I think should technically be a footnote.

3 One of the best thing about Knitting Factory is that it serves Boddingtons, in cans which they pour into the afore-described plastic cups. Creamy, smooth, delicious, and it's a beer. I think I have only been to Knitting Factory once before, but it will always be, more than the performance I saw itself, the place where I first ordered Boddingtons and the place where I re-saw lovely Jinah. The latter also applies to my feelings for PS 1. And as I have not mentioned this yet, the Wrens show was at the Knitting Factory.

4 Going out of ones way to be a nice guy does not, of course, actually equate to being sincerely or actually a nice guy. Not to say my friend is not sincerely and actually that. But I think it deserves to be pointed out.

5 An opinion wholeheartedly joined by my friend. He is named Will, by the way, if that detail is at any way necessary.

6 The Wrens live act at certain points will unabashedly and randomly lift snippets from OR tunes.

tired of running, let's walk for a bit

for those who knew me a little, and even a little is probably a lot for most folks who know me at all, and for the faithful here who do not have too short of an attention span, and for which i have no qualms in repeating: i absolutely love, love, and love thomas r. pynchon. not the most prolific of writers – he's published a seeming meager 7 books, some fairly mammoth in size, but which includes also one collection of early, formative short stories and one shortish novella, as well as releasing the occasional essays, criticism, and such, in 40 or so plus years – pynchon output has been more than bountiful that i still have a while to go before catching up with his phenomenal backlog.

anyway, this is not a(nother) love note to tommy p, actually quite the opposite. for a supposedly notorious recluse, pynchon in his new novel, called against the day, which is now part of his unread backlog, starts with an epigraph from thelonious monk, which reads: "it's always night, or we wouldn't need light." perfectly fine by itself in setting up pynchon's new opus. my principal objection is one of insincerity, in that with pynchon's staunch and well documented refusal to allow the public to glimpse his private life, he selects not something from monk's work, in which case, as monk is a jazz pianist, would doubtlessly be a challenge to epigraph, but instead something from monk's private life, in this case, a saying that he reportedly was frequently fond of sprinkling in his conversations. it stinks (slight, but surely) of an equivocation, a double standard. pynchon apparently found something essential in his hero's private life, probably something that granted him greater access to his hero's work, but himself refuses the prospect of something in his private world to be essential (or beneficial) to those who view him, his life and work, as heroic.

howeverz, right now i am about 1/3 into white teeth, zadie smith's much acclaimed first novel, a novel that kind of sucks so far. reason one:

before planting their asses back out to the curb, i sometimes listened enough to the occasional interloping duo of jehovah witnesses (they interlope typically in pairs) to know that most of zadie's representations of the jehovah witnesses are bunk. even if zadie's ears are not as indulgent or patient with the fanatics pounding on her door, whatever wikipedia forerunner that existed last century (library?) must have revealed to her in five measly minutes that the jehovah witnesses do not tiny silver cross, saint, pew, nor jesus freak - heck, they do not even hell. call it carelessness or intentional, but zadie plainly shortchanges intellectual integrity for a few good cracks and/or narrative convenience. and what had been done once for one thing, can be done again for any number of other things. that sort of compromise can make everything else suspect.

and that's not counting the overriding cynicism, superficiality, and self consciousness of her writing. but i have a ways to go with white teeth, so maybe good surprises are in store.

wait, more (time passes). now close to 1/2 way through, here is an example, partly, of how i read. i reach this excerpt: "to know at least one particular place, one particular period, from firsthand experience, eyewitness reports; to be the authority, to have time on your side, for once, for once." (emphasis in original). actually, let me first backtrack a bit and frame exactly what the fuck is going on. the heroes of sort in white teeth are the suppose odd couple archie and samad, friends whose friendship was forged by operating the same tank during the waning days of ww2, currently (in the 70 - late 80's setting of the novel's "present") neighbors, and while at o'connell's poolroom, drinking buddies. o'connell's being the place of the particular place and post ww2 through the novel's present setting being the particular period. and that excerpt presents the how, namely the "firsthand experience, eyewitness reports", for the intimacy the two dudes feel for their watering hole.

okay, now back to my shtick. the novel proceeds by presenting a chronology for o'connell's; a chronology that kicks off with the year 1952. 1952, as a testament to my inability to trust, stopped me instantly and made me reverse course to find where and when exactly archie and samad reunited in london after their friendly relations stalled with the close of ww2 (i was struck by the use of "eyewitness" and its applicability, but that's another separate gripe), and well after 1952 was my best remembrance. took some time, but close to the beginning of white teeth, i found: "their wartime friendship had been severed by thirty years of separation across continents, but in the spring of 1973..." question marks abound.

how does 1973 minus 1945 (that's when ww2 ended) equal 30 years? seriously, "wartime friendship had been severed by thirty years of separation across continents, but in the spring of 1973." (emphases added). that's 1973, and they met sometime in 1945; more precisely, post april 1945. 1973 minus 1945 equals... 28 years? best case scenario give or take a year, but definitely not 30 years. oh, you say i nitpicking too much? well, zadie's writing clearly plays with a minutia capturing, inventorying, journal documenting style: evident by the aforementioned use of the chronology, evident by the second freaking sentence of the novel having "at 0627 hours on january 1, 1975", evident by "eight-thirty a.m., the first wednesday of september, 1984", evident by a lot of those sort of touches through the book. if zadie is going to play off at being precise about things, she did not have a calculator handy?

yet i take that back, and say i'm not really calling zadie out for this (as i did for her miscue regarding jehovah witness). no one is perfect, except perhaps: (1) certain religion's illusions, and even then i value god for his/her friendship more than anything else; and (2) certain women, and that's because, at a given time, they seem beautiful and i want to fuck. moreover, the miscalculation is more clerical in nature (the jehovah witness thing is more artistic/literary choice) that zadie might reasonably be careless about. assigning culpability here, the editor should have done his* job better. he did not have a fucking calculator handy?

putting it all together: reading is fun, ain't it?


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(* per google, a mister simon prosser)