i remember three solar eclipses

there was a full solar eclipse towards the end of kindergarden. we were given cardboard punchout foldup toys that we could look through to see it. we stood out on the small K-only playground at my school, Fairview Elementary. Everyone was obsessed with these things, squared, waxed, more of a 50s than a 70s kind of packaging and finish. Left over from some previous eclipse. I can’t recall seeing the eclipse at all.

the summer after 5th grade i was picked to be in some smart kids camp that was themed ‘mythology and computers.’ there were a million kids there…. it was hosted at a college about 45 minutes away from my town. we made our own viewers for this eclipse which would be a partial… the moon obscured 70% of the sun. Mine worked very well: a pinhole in a manilla envelope and a second manilla envelope to project onto. I was, what?, 12 years old and again the eclipse passed with very little thought on my part. there was a girl there that i liked but would never speak to me. i was bored waiting for the moon to pass. at the last minute they carted out a largish mirror telescope and a special projector kit that was made for viewing eclipses. i liked watching the progress on that. I remember when it was done thinking what a miracle the unblocked round projected sun was, how it was something that you never thought about.

the last one was a partial one and I want to say that it happened here in Brooklyn, but I can’t remember it well enough for it to have been that recent. I can’t place it in time at all — it might have been in washington. i had heard on the radio that there was to be an eclipse that day but had forgotten all about it. i was walking down a brick sidewalk street (so it really had to be in DC, then) and there were thick trees over me. I was walking the way that I usually do, looking at my feet. And then I noticed something about the light and shadow on the walk. i felt sickened at first…. a bodily reaction to things not working correctly. I perceived that my eyes had adjusted to a change in the light, that it was dimmer. And then I noticed that all the places where the light fell between the close leaves, which had been apertures all this time without my knowing, apertures showing through the full perfect circle of the sun– I noticed that all the light falling from between the leaves had gone to sickles, tens of thousands of them dancing with the leaves in the wind across the way, all crescents oriented the same but of different sizes. and then i realized what it was.

infinite jest: all done.

I got a lot more out of this reading than the previous ones, but I think that is likely because I am a much more careful reader now than I used to be. Also, for reasons unknown (and despite the assessments of some people around me) my memory seems to have sharpened up in the last five years. I’m sure that it will fade, but right now I feel like I have nearly total recall on the whole book.

So, coincidentally enough, Slate ran an episode of their book club podcast about IJ just this past week. Curious about this and having never listened to one of their shows before I downloaded it and listened in. What I heard was horrifying. Three folks between, what?, 23 and my age were discussing the book. And, well…

One commentator said several things that made it clear that she had very quickly skimmed the book or only read the first 200-odd pages and picked up some summary of the rest. The only female on the panel, she rolled out the ol’ white-man-write-big-book trope (oh god help me) and insisted on saying that she expected a “real ending” about 15 times. One commentator was a fan. And he was ok… not because he was a fan, but because he actually said some things about the book that were really insightful and that I hadn’t brought in to my way of thinking about it. The last commentator said the words “but does it succeed?” at least 25 times in the hour long show. That’s the high level — more to the point it was a very bad analysis of the book that, with the exception of commentator #2, really missed the point of the exercise in reading a book like IJ.

The only thing that I think that I can say in their defense is that two of the three probably wouldn’t have wanted to finish it if it wasn’t their job to read it (a common problem with critics all over, I guess) and the third ended up self-conscious that he was going to come over like a fanboy. Awful, awful stuff. The show literally pushed me over the edge in deciding to buy a netbook instead of taking a writing class in the spring because it reminded me of the worst of the worst part of the workshopping experience: people who will not/cannot invest themselves in something talking endlessly and sounding-smart-but-stupid-stupidly about it.

So does IJ succeed? It is an exercise that is hostile to the reader? Does it succeed? Are the characters weak? Is DFW just showing off with fireworks? Does it succeed?

The answers:

The book succeeds beyond all bounds that I know of. The characters and the situations are really-really real within their fireworks and clichés and the nonlinear plot and total over the top unlikeliness. When it is inside a situation or someone’s head it has a spooky realism and grit that is almost hard to take. It is a thing like no other. An artifact of something that is perfectly unique.

The book most definitely has a “real” ending. It is one of the best endings to a book that I have ever read. The last sentance is, in my mind, a minor miracle of writing. Fuck spoilers, I’m just going to paste it in here:

And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

The characters are not weak in the conventional sense of “weakly written” or “poorly developed,” etc. They are almost without exception very weak people that he has written, though. The book is about addiction and entertainment and you are taken through a rogue’s gallery of damaged people pre/in/during/post recovery and there is a lot to see there.

As for showing off. Well. How do you answer that? Was Hemmingway a show off because his prose is so spare? The over-wrought and hyper-detailed nature of Wallace’s writing is the way he writes. I don’t think he is hiding behind a gimmick… and I’d assert any day of the week that his style is virtually gimmick-free in this novel. He is as earnest as can be possible here and given the biographical details of his life that we all now know, he is showing everything about himself through this book. The passages about depression and suicide in particular are quite a rough affair to read now and hit so close to home as to bring tears.

So, that’s my rose on the altar of Infinite Jest. I promise that this is the last rant on this book, my holy cow, my major literary weakness.

I wonder if I will read it again, now, and I think not. This read began in reaction to the author’s death, and five times is certainly enough unless I write a thesis re: IJ, which I find a deeply undesirable thing to ever do.

Infinite Jest

Still re-reading this. Kindle says that I am 91% done. This is where the book takes a seriously dark (but incredible) turn. I remember slowing my pace during previous readings. For sure an 1,100 page book has a pacing like a marathon, and like a marathon it is getting tough at the end. Also: knowing how the whole thing wraps doesn’t drive me towards the last page like the first time through.

Here is the thing about IJ: I has, without a doubt two of the most compelling characters I’ve ever read and a couple more characters that are among the most interesting. It is a loose retelling of Hamlet, which makes it all the more interesting. There were apparently 700 pages cut from the final manuscript that are fully and totally lost to time. It has a mythos. It is complete in itself. It has a language on the order of Riddley Walker but that can be read without internal translation: Xing is sex, howling fantods are a nails on the chalkboard reaction++, a map is a face, to demap is to die, Bob Hope (or Bob) is pot, Bing Crosby (or Bing) is cocaine, and the list goes on. It is a well versed and deep exploration of Boston AA culture (within which DFW certainly had experience.) It is a book about tennis, and what it means to be a young athlete, it contains the darkest humor that I’ve ever read and it really is funny. It has some parts that are boring and literally painfully long to read, but it has parts that make up for these other parts about 600x over. It invents a league for the hideously and improbably deformed whose members wear veils 100% of the time. It is a dirty, exceptional, overachieving, pinnacle of it’s style.

There is a great, great interview with DFW on the Bookworm podcast from something like 1998 where he talks about what is going on in the world and what is wrong with television and media and everything that we consume. His talking point is about coldness and warmness. He feels that we have long entered the time of the cold character, the cold story, the unwarm and that it is fucking us all up in a big huge way. (looks for link to interview…)

I think that it must be this one. But here are all the interviews and features on him that have been on the show. Warning: Michael Silverblatt, the host of Bookworm is simultaneously one of the smartest and literate people on radio and one of the most annoying people on radio. If you can get through the voice and the snootiness, he can be loved… but that is a tall order. DFW takes over these interviews though and keeps the annoying bits off to the side.

Along with Dellilo’s The Names, Infinite Jest is the only book that I’ve gone back to again and again. There is a love for these words that I don’t have the words to convey, except to say that when I talk to random people about the book, people that are not bullshitting and have read it all I sometimes get very angry with them. I’ve met exactly one person in my life that felt in any way compatibly in love with it (thanks Rob Roy) and the time spent talking to him about it was rare and wonderful. He’s moved on in the 13 (!!) years hence, though, and barely remembers it. So I am an island.

So, read it. If you get to the part that goes on and on in the desert outside Phoenix, AZ and feel like stopping, don’t stop… just skip it for now. Get to the introduction of the Don Gately and you will (hopefully) see the wonder that I see. And that is all I have to say about that.

Saturday morning

Odd time. 50’s era map on the wall: 115 miles to the inch, which is a match for the maps from my mother’s old classroom. Catherine Hanna sings on the stereo here and I’m reading again like I haven’t in so long. It all suits me fine.

Samedi: The Deafness

Half way through and I am so intrigued. The narrator is very interesting, and the plot is utterly fascinating. Like Lost but better, like Kafka but with much more description. And in the descriptions there is a stark poetics to the prose that I like quite a bit and the fact that the main character is a professional mnemonsit (a person who can memorize everything and everything) who must sit pretty high on the autism spectrum. It reads like a combination of the old Infocom adventures or Myst and a hard-boiled noir spy novel. Lovely, really, and unless the author utterly fails to end it properly will be a favorite book from the last year.

Samedi: The Deadness

Claude Lévi-Strauss is amazing.

From The Savage Mind, (first chapter or so can be read here)

It is fun to think that I wasn’t such a stupid 20 year old after all. 15 years ago I knew to underline the cool part. The people we call primitive do not seek the objective truth (smart idea, because there just plain isn’t one of those at all) and every civilization that is sufficiently advanced totally overestimates the power of their arguments for their truth. And besides that making the “primitive” more pragmatic and correct than the civilized, it also makes them better integrated into their environment, which the civilized are most certainly not.

The Savage Mind (sadly no Kindle edition) is really blowing my top this week. The first 60 pages are just so packed with amazing and clear insights that I find myself having to read the same ¶ over and over again. Which is a really good thing if you are me.

music

some music that I’ve made in the last year:

a 1 hour improvised session.

cloud city: shorter

Surround: a rough cut of a long session from this weekend