... 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.