a skilful negligence

After the failures of the Pamela sequels, Richardson began to compose a new novel.^[1]:73 It was not until early 1744 that the content of the plot was known, and this happened when he sent Aaron Hill two chapters to read.^[1]:73 In particular, Richardson asked Hill if he could help shorten the chapters because Richardson was worried about the length of the novel.^[1]:73 Hill refused, saying,

You have formed a style, as much your property as our respect for what you write is, where verbosity becomes a virtue; because, in pictures which you draw with such a skilful negligence, redundance but conveys resemblance; and to contract the strokes, would be to spoil the likeness.^[1]:73–4

In July, Richardson sent Hill a complete "design" of the story, and asked Hill to try again, but Hill responded, "It is impossible, after the wonders you have shown in Pamela, to question your infallible success in this new, natural, attempt" and that "you must give me leave to be astonished, when you tell me that you have finished it already".^[1]:74 However, the novel wasn't complete to Richardson's satisfaction until October 1746.^[1]:74 Between 1744 and 1746, Richardson tried to find readers who could help him shorten the work, but his readers wanted to keep the work in its entirety.

From our friends at Wikipedia.  (Depending on your point of view, you may feel that Richardson was born too soon, or David Foster Wallace too late. I know very little of Michael Pietsch, but I feel he would be unlikely to tell an author that 'you have formed a style, as much your property as our respect for what you write is, where verbosity becomes a virtue.')

hm

There's a piece by Wyatt Mason in NYRB on Lipsky's book about David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. At one point he comments on an early story, "The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing" (first published in The Amherst Review, Vol XII). A story I have never read. Here's Mason:

In “Planet Trillaphone,” Wallace puts that “opening” to indicative use. As the narrator divulges the precarious details of his depression and how the drugs he’s on both keep him from suicide and produce a new species of intolerable feeling, the reader is run up against the story’s surprising final sentence—”Except that is just highly silly when you think about what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really”—a sentence that doesn’t conclude. Without outlet, the flow of the story ceases midstream. What has happened? One can’t know such things, the story would argue, just as when, without warning or explanation, we receive news that a friend has committed suicide, we can’t know precisely what has happened: we’re left with the shock of a life cut short and for which there can be no reassuring resolution. Life is regularly all beginning and middle; why should fiction be any different?

I don't know the story. I do know that Wallace was not only a writer but a mathematician and modal logician. I read Mason with furrowed brow, thinking, what can this possibly mean? I write:

All sorts of things might have happened to the narrator: he might have been knocked down by a car, stung by a bee, kidnapped by pygmies, or just realised suddenly that it was time for the Simpsons. Or he might have jumped off a cliff. It's not easy to see how these are in principle unknowable (we can't know these things?), nor why breaking off in mid-sentence should imply that they were. If a friend commits suicide, whether with or without warning, I presumably do know, at any rate, that s/he has committed suicide (that is, I have the sort of fact Wallace withholds); in the absence of this sort of knowledge I would have no reason to speculate about motives. And life is not regularly all beginning and middle: humans are begotten, born, and die. (I am not enough of a mathematician to be sure of this, but is it actually possible for something to have a beginning, a middle and no end? The interior of a sphere could perhaps loosely be described as all middle but has neither beginning nor end. The set of positive numbers has a beginning, no end and no middle. Could there - well, Wallace would know, but in any case, even if such a thing is logically possible it is hardly true of life as we know it.) (When I say I find myself wondering what it means, I mean that the things it seems to mean are both false and inconsistent with each other.)

So, yes, this is me, writing merrily along without ever having read the story. This is precisely the confrontational, argumentative tone which provoked the resignation of my agent, it wins me no friends and alienates people disposed to help; I put it, as one does, in the drafts folder.

Some time later I have a radical idea. Why not, erm, read the story?!!!!

Some quotes from the story (here in PDF):

And you start thinking about this pretty vicious situation, and you say to yourself, "Boy oh boy, how the heck is the Bad Thing able to do this?" You think about it -- really hard, since it's in your best interests to do so -- and all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you... that the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because you're the Bad Thing yourself! The Bad Thing is you.

That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. By the time these people swallow entire medicine cabinets or take naps in the garage or whatever, they've already been killing themselves for ever so long. When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly. They're just giving external form to an event the substance of which already exists and has existed in them over time. Once you realize what's going on, the event of self-destruction for all practical purposes exists. There's not much a person is apt to do in this situation, except "formalize" it, or, if you don't quite want to do that, maybe "E.C.T." or a trip away from the Earth to some other planet, or something. (pp 29/30)

end of story:

The big question is whether the Bad Thing is on the planet Trillaphon. I don't know if it is or not. Maybe it has a harder time, in a thinner and less nutritious atmosphere. I certainly do, in some respects. Sometimes, when I don't think about it, I think I have just totally escaped the Bad Thing, and that I am going to be able to lead a Normal and Productive Life as a lawyer or something here on planet Trillaphon, once I get so I can read again.
Being far away sort of helps with respect to the Bad Thing.
Except that is just highly silly when you think about what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really

All right, class.

What did he say the Bad Thing was earlier?
And what was the logical conclusion?
And what has he just realised?

One can’t know such things, the story would argue, just as when, without warning or explanation, we receive news that a friend has committed suicide, we can’t know precisely what has happened

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH

A point of contention between me and my former agent was that I thought maybe the NYRB would like me to write something for them.

Moving right along, here's something I don't get.

Mason talks about Wallace's decision to use the vernacular, which he thinks creates an intimacy between writer and reader: given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life, that's our opening.

Well . . . the vernacular in this story is straight out of Salinger, and the odd thing about Salinger is, he used it, on the one hand, for the voice of an unintellectual prep school drop-out (Holden Caulfield) and, on the other, for the allegedly exceptionally intelligent, more or less suicidal Glass family. So whatever Wallace is doing, it isn't new. I slightly get the sense that what the vernacular is really doing is giving an anti-intellectual intellectual (the equivalent of a self-hating Jew or homophobic homosexual) the chance to build some kind of bridge to people he perceives, at any rate, as unintellectual. It's hardly surprising that this dodge doesn't succeed in reducing the writer's sense of isolation and alienation. All it really manages to do is persuade a certain sort of reader that he doesn't have to pay attention (which, again, is hardly likely to reduce feelings of isolation and alienation).

I've been clinically depressed. Wouldn't have described it the way Wallace does. Maybe not talk about that today.

Q&A of David Lipsky discussing his five-day interview of David Foster Wallace, Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes.

Another great Q&A on the Howling Fantods.

And an amused...a kind of amused attempt to separate what's good, what of the fuss has to do with the book, and what of the fuss has to do with the sort of enormous engine, um, started by Little, Brown. But which now clearly seems to be humming in and of itself. Y'know, when somebody asked somebody in New York, had they read Martin Amis's The Information, the person said, "Well, not personally."

David Foster Wallace in David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, to be released 13 April.

iterated polarisation games

[published this earlier, then wanted to think some more and put it in the drafts folder, got some e-mails from readers so I am posting again so people can comment if they want, though I should still probably think some more. Kevin Connolly, who sent in a wonderful Excel chart a few months ago, said he thought I was misrepresenting DFW: 'As I read it, the most important sentence in Wallace's speech is "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day." I think he's asking for something more than 'keeping your head down' or swallowing the profoundly unjust and stupid system in which we live.' ]

The Guardian has published an abbreviated version of David Foster Wallace's speech at the graduation ceremony at Kenyon College.

Wallace seems to have had an abiding fear of solipsism all his life; fiction helps the skull-caged mind to believe in other selves. The speech, oddly enough, shows how easy it is to slip back into solipsism even one is trying to believe that other people and their concerns actually matter.

Wallace invites the audience to imagine a long hard day at work, at the end of which you're starving but there's no food at home so you have to go to the store and there are too many people and the lines are too long and then you drive home and there are too many people on the roads... but you can, he says, choose how you look at it:

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?

DFW thought this way of looking at was our default setting. He proposed an alternative:

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -

Well, hm. Let's just remember that this speech was in part about the importance of being serious about other minds. So let's look at the situation the way another mind would look at it.

The first thing that leaps out is that everyone in a crowded store is inconvenienced by everyone else in the store; everyone in a traffic jam is inconvenienced by the traffic jam.

The second thing that leaps out at this naysayer is the unhelpfulness of the serenity prayer. (Lord, give me the patience to the bear the things I can't change, the courage to change those I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.) Most of the time, surely, we actually don't know what we can change till we try - it's not a question of wisdom but of, well, a combination of the willingness to have a bash and decent methodology. (Oh Lord, don't give me a Mercedes Benz, just tell me whether I should use a folded-t, or a half-cauchy, or a uniform over the traditional inverse gamma. Please? Pleeeeeeeez?*)

The point being. Look. If crowds and traffic jams are unavoidable, we are definitely best off learning to live with them. But let's just remember, dreaming up improbable scenarios about my fellow shoppers/drivers really only helps one person: me. OK, it may help other people if I would otherwise be swearing or shooting, or if my new -improved unfocused beaming smile makes people feel good; is that really the best I can do? What if there is a solution, something that would make lines in stores move faster, reduce crowds? If there is a solution, a really good solution, surely it will be a successful meme - it will spread through overcrowded grocery stores across the city! the state! the country! the world!

So maybe I have to be driven berserk, maybe I actually have to be a prima donna maddened to distraction by the horror of my local Kroger's or Giant, to be goaded into looking for solutions. Maybe being driven berserk, maybe thinking this is literally a fate worse than death, is a prerequisite for trying to do something.

Suppose I'm stuck shopping at the busiest possible time. It's too late to have laid in supplies at some earlier time. But it's not too late to lay in supplies now. Would it be a good idea to pass up the superficial attraction of the '10 Items or Less' checkout? Say I buy 20 jars of peanut butter, 10 boxes of Ritz crackers, 50 packs of spaghetti, and 50 jars of Barilla's Pesto al Genovese. The spaghetti alone eliminates 49 emergency trips to the store at peak times!

Well, do I actually have enough storage space? I mull this over, dodging the madding crowd, and I realise that bulk-buying will actually enable me to make better use of the couple of cupboards I have at my disposal. Normally, when my cupboards are not bare, there's a lot of unused space above the head height of the jars: I don't want to stack them on top of each other, because it's a hassle to get them out, and then I can't see what's behind the front row. But I can stack 20 jars of peanut butter front to back, from the bottom of the shelf to the top, and I really only need to see the front row/stack. Same with the pesto. Same with the spaghetti. Same with the crackers. Good news.

At this point I become aggrieved. If I subtract a minimum of 49 trips to the store - 49 peak-time trips - I am making the world a better place for my fellow shoppers, who will benefit from my absence from the store on at least 49 occasions. Why is the store encouraging short-term shopping with its '10 Items or Less' line? Why isn't it encouraging people like me? Why don't they have a line for people who are bulk-buying a small number of types of item? 20 jars of Skippy can be rung up in almost the same time as 1. If we were given a shorter queue for buying in quantities of 20 or more, hundreds of people would be slashing dozens of trips to the store off their year. Wouldn't it be to the advantage of the store if more people bought in bulk? Or are they relying on impulse buys? Is it just that they make so much more out of getting people into the store and getting things they didn't mean to buy that they don't want people to make fewer trips?

I don't actually know the answer to the last question. I can see that everyone can't afford to buy in quantity. But it seems to me that I definitely have the power to make my own life less stressful, by the simple expedient of buying 50 jars of my favourite pasta sauce and something simple to put it on. Plus pb & crackers. If everyone who could afford it made their life less stressful in this way, they'd be better off, wouldn't they? So maybe I'm being selfish keeping this 'Hint from Heloise' manqué locked up in my skull? (Should I start a web comic?) Also... if I am really saving myself a minimum of 49 stressful trips to the store, maybe I could dedicate one to making a trip for someone else, someone who doesn't have a car or can't get heavy groceries upstairs (I'm still 48 trips to the store ahead...)? Also...

What if this were standard practice? What if we knew that most people kept supplies of some kind in bulk? We don't know what other people have, we just know that whatever they have, they have a lot of it. What if I knew that about other people in my building? What if I couldn't face a 35th last-minute meal of spaghetti with pesto al genovese, might I not feel more comfortable about knocking on somebody's door and asking if they'd swap anything, anything at all for s w/ p al g? And might I not feel pretty comfortable about occasionally having someone knock on my door and offering a swap? And might most of us feel somewhat comfortable even just asking or being asked for the makings of a simple meal (pasta with sauce or something) when the person asking had nothing to swap and maybe hadn't made it to the ATM? What if we knew most people had a stash of 10+ jars of peanut butter... Might a parent, caught short late at night, not feel more comfortable just knocking on a door and asking for a jar of peanut butter? Or if we live in a bad part of town, if we're nervous of strangers knocking at the door/knocking on strange doors, could we have a communal cupboard with a key to which we all contributed 1/50th of an occasional bulk buy? (This is a question that is likelier to present itself if one starts from the position of having 20 jars of peanut butter, 10 boxes of crackers, 50 packets of spaghetti and 50 jars of pesto al genovese in one's own personal kitchen.)

Well, I'm just going around and around in my head, but the point is, there are things I can do that will tell me more about the world than I already think I know. I can find something out by unilateral action; I can find out more by sharing ideas with my fellow man. And I can start with something that has an extremely high probability of being true: most people hate peak-time grocery shopping, most people hate traffic jams. To me that looks more attractive than making life bearable by inventing highly improbable backstories about the people I run up against in a crowd.

There are some problems that can't be fixed. If I get a million dollars today, I can't go back to the summer of 1996, when I was desperate for £1,000 to finish a book. I can't go back to the summer of 1979, when I was desperate for money to pay for Oxford. But there are problems that can be fixed. Young people who have just finished 4 years of college (US) or 3 years of university (Britain) may not be nicer than they were when they started, but they should be better informed, they should be smarter - they should see many more things that might be fixable than they did when they turned up on Day 1. So, well, hm, it's a bit demoralising that a speech cited for its inspirational qualities should be one that offers acquiescence as the first port of call (nothing to be done, might as well make the best of it).

A general comment. Americans live in a profoundly unjust and deeply stupid social system. Britons live in a profoundly unjust and deeply stupid social system that has the saving grace of a national health service. The French face institutionalised injustice and stupidity; so do the Germans; so do the Italians; we could go on, but let's not. And whenever injustice and stupidity are institutionalised, legitimised, there is enormous pressure on those caught up in the system to make it look good - and, of course, to avoid looking bad by failing to thrive. And humans are able to survive, at least, under astonishingly damaging circumstances.

What this means, unfortunately, is that the collective action of finding ways to survive, of making the system look bearable, makes the system weigh very heavily on those least able to bear it. I think that may mean that we shouldn't necessarily be looking for ways to get to the age of 30, or 50, without wanting to put a bullet through the head. Maybe it's a good thing to find circumstances absolutely unbearable; maybe we shouldn't look away. Maybe paying attention to what I myself find intolerable is a better guide to what is oppressive to others than, say, paying attention to what the system says are reasonable expectations for any individual.

We should note that David Foster Wallace, for all his public acclaim, was caught up in a machine that treats writers with contempt. In an interview with Dave Eggers he spoke once about the immense investment of time and energy involved in publishing a single book; he said this meant that he had to be very selective about the projects he was willing to see into print. So - if other writers had fought harder, if fewer writers had kept their heads down, if someone somewhere had insisted on submitting documents in LaTeX, for example, DFW might have published more books without feeling that his personal requirements were the mark of egocentrism. As might many other writers we haven't happened to hear of. It's hard to see how that wouldn't have been a very good thing.

*To the best of my knowledge, it's rare for this sort of question to be directed to God. Someone did recently fire it off to Andrew Gelman.

oblivion

DFW lies in the arms of sleep's cousin. I think suddenly of the work of David Lewis on modal realism. My friend Peter King summarises:

When I profess realism about possible worlds, I mean to be taken literally. Possible worlds are what they are, and not some other thing. If asked what sort of thing they are, I cannot give the kind of reply my questioner probably expects: that is, a proposal to reduce possible worlds to something else.
I can only ask him to admit that he knows what sort of thing our actual world is, and then explain that possible worlds are more things of that sort, differing not in kind but only in what goes on at them.

(Lewis [1973], p.85)

This passage contains, or implies, the heart of David Lewis's modal realism. It explicitly states three of his six central doctrines about possible worlds, and implies at least one of the remaining three. The three doctrines explicitly formulated are:

• 1. Possible worlds exist -- they are just as real as our world;
• 2. Possible worlds are the same sort of things as our world -- they differ in content, not in kind;
• 3. Possible worlds cannot be reduced to something more basic -- they are irreducible entities in their own right.

From these three claims (and from the second in particular) we can see that, when we talk of our own world as being the only actual world, we cannot be asserting that our world has a special property not found in (or instantiated by) any other world - the property of actuality - but that we must be using the term `actual' much as we use the term `here' or `now' -- to indicate our position. This gives us Lewis's fourth doctrine:

• 4. `Actual' is indexical. When we distinguish our world from others by claiming that it alone is actual, we mean only that it is ours -- we live here.

(more here)

Here, where we live, DFW wrote unselfconsciously about the elitism of professional tennis, the sport he knew best. Writing about Michael Joyce, then #64 in the world, at the Canadian Open, he said that he realised that he did not even play the same game as J; that he did not mention that he had played tennis, that Joyce, being a nice guy, would probably have been happy to hit a few balls back and forth, but to do so, to go on the same court with him, would have been obscene. (Here's DFW on Roger Federer as Religious Experience; an assessment of DFW as sportswriter can be found here.)

Here, where we live, DFW did not bring the same standards to writing. He disliked texts that show contempt for the reader, whether by being unabashedly avant-garde or unabashedly commercial. He wanted to write texts that would challenge readers but be enjoyable enough to encourage them to take up the challenge - no easy proposition.

I contemplate this; I then contemplate, with some bafflement, critical response to DFW's collection of stories, Oblivion, generally perceived as difficult. Wyatt Mason, in the LRB, described them as "uncompromisingly difficult", went on to gesture at the immense effort required of the reader to puzzle out what was going on:

Imagine a reader being schooled by Wallace. See the reader sit there, Oblivion in hand, already crafting an official complaint in his head, unconvinced before an apparently pompous narrator. Let’s acknowledge and appreciate this reader’s inability to see such a narrator otherwise. For why should the reader be swayed? Why should he grant Wallace any of his demands for surfeit goodwill, when the reader feels, not unreasonably, that Wallace is making unreasonable demands?

and concluded:

Wallace has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him. I flatter myself to think that I am one of them, but I haven’t any idea how to convince you that you should be, too; nor, clearly, does Wallace. And it might not be the worst thing in the world, next time out, when big novel number three thumps into the world, were he to dig deeper, search longer, and find a more generous way to make his feelings known.

This (just to be clear) was a sympathetic review defending DFW from misunderstanding and hostility from James Wood.

Well, this is the world we live in, brothers and sisters. It's a rum old place. Oblivion doesn't strike me as a difficult, never mind uncompromisingly difficult, book. Plato can be difficult; the speeches in Thucydides drive strong men to drink; Kant is difficult, Wittgenstein is difficult, David Lewis is not for the faint of heart. But Oblivion? DFW had a ravishingly lovely gift for voice; he took the sort of pleasure in variety that we see in (say) Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition or Debussy's Preludes. Why would a reader labour grumpily through the stories in search of hidden meanings? Let alone blame the profligate author for lack of generosity? I've no idea, but one thing is certain: in this world, here, now, there is no place for a Roger Federer among writers.

If David Lewis was right, there are an infinite number of possible worlds as real as this one; there are an infinite number of possible worlds with a person genetically identical to DFW. If you believe in modal realism, suicide in the particular world you happen to inhabit probably doesn't look like that big a deal: in this particular world, through circumstances beyond my control, I find myself cabined, cribbed, confined, but an infinite number of alter egos have different histories. If there is any set of circumstances at all in which a person genetically identical to me can be a great writer, that person actually exists in at least one other possible world. Perhaps there is no set of circumstances in which this person, here, now, can match that alter ego or even come close. But if those infinite others all exist, perhaps it doesn't matter if one dies here, now. (I'm not convinced that this is rational - it's a bit like saying that I don't mind dying as long as my twin has a wonderful life on Mars - why exactly does bringing my twin into the picture make a difference? Rational or not, the thought that this particular botched self might not be all that there is is strangely comforting. [I am not, of course, referring at this point to DFW.])

To the best of my knowledge, David Lewis was unique in being a true believer in modal realism. Most people who work in this field use possible worlds as some kind of figure of speech; they don't think they're as real as Canada or Mars. So there's no reason whatever to think that DFW was a modal realist. On the contrary, he probably thought that this world, here, now, was all there is. This world, here, now, was self-evidently not good for him; there were things he needed that it didn't give him. But he seems to have thought that in this world, here, now, many people had been cheated by the educational system into thinking they didn't like literature; that many people could be brought to surpass what they thought they could do, if someone was willing to take the trouble. We were lucky to have had him.

the new new grub street

Gabriele Bärtels, award-winning journalist, founder and editor of the now defunct online magazine Frida, had a remarkable piece in last week's Zeit on the financial difficulties facing journalists in Germany today. I say remarkable because there is no reason to think Die Zeit is any better than any of the other papers in its treatment of freelancers - the editors who don’t reply to submissions, accept a piece after months of silence, decide not to publish but don’t bother to tell the author are no doubt as much a fact of life at Die Zeit as anywhere else, as, I assume, are the cheques which mysteriously take further months to materialise thanks to helpful accounts departments. Bärtels’ hand-to-mouth existence, avoiding her landlord when she can’t pay the rent, staying in bed when she runs out of money, coaxing and cajoling her bank manager not to close down her account because look, a national newspaper has accepted a substantial piece of work, the money is in the pipeline if not the post, is not the predicament of someone just starting out, with no credentials and no contacts, but someone with an impressive history of publications and awards. It’s as bad as it is because of the capricious behaviour of those who buy her work. So hats off to Ms Bärtels for having the chutzpah to write about it and send the result to Die Zeit, and hats off to Die Zeit for putting it on the front page of Chancen (‘job opportunities’ would be the English equivalent, I think, but German trounces English in capturing the lottery that is the modern job market).

I can’t imagine any English-language paper of comparable stature publishing a piece that exposes the machinery behind its own publishing practice. Back in the mid-90s David Foster Wallace wrote an essay for Esquire on the Canadian Open; he spent a lot of time on the obstacles the system places in the path of talented players not yet in the top 10. It’s an extraordinary piece of work - but if DFW has written anything comparable about the system confronting writers like himself it’s never been published by Esquire or anyone else.

＊＊＊

Bah. Many hours have passed. My start-up OS 9 disk has arrived, ordered off Ebay so I can install Language Kits for a version of Photoshop ME that only works in Classic. I wanted to say something about Adorno, I wanted to translate passages from GB's excellent article, but the phone rang and it was a friend who had been out of town, visited by another friend from out of town, we should have coffee, he said, so I joined them for coffee and was told no names could be named, Whatever you do don't mention this in your blog, my wife will think we're having an affair. Adorno. Dead giveaway. Hm. German readers can check out the piece here, those unfamiliar with the language can curse jealous wives and nameless friends.

DFW again

I'd just been reading Eagleton's piece on Bakhtin in the LRB (which I came to courtesy of Language Hat who came to it courtesy of wood's lot, so we are back in the echo chamber) and so was especially interested by these comments from an Israeli reader on the DFW interview:

In the interview with DFW there is this part where, the interviewer asks the dfw about the footnotes, and then when dfw says that is a way to fragment reality, the interviewer, full heartily suggests that the readers could just read the book and then read the footnotes afterwards, (or the other way around, that the readers could just read every footnote when it appears, I didn't quite get which one it was and it doesn't matter) well, what matters is the SUPER CONFIDENT way in which dfw cuts the interviewer off and says (it's really in the tone) "Well I DON'T think readers would read it THAT way...and the interviewer is quick to assert him "yes yes of course"

I read that book (started during the pull out plan of gaza, finished in a
bunker of the separation fence of hebron) and I read half of it one way and
the other half in another way. I didn't even know I was doing it, I was just
trying to BEST survive the English, and best survive the way that the only
light I had was from my watch in hebron, and the letters in the footnotes
are too small for that light and my eyes.

My point is, what is the point of communications? You can talk and talk and
talk write sing dance paint shoot and the other person can hear and
understand what they want, there are hardly any ways for one to communicate.
I was once trying to communicate to a woman I used to respect how much
thought is invested everyday in my zionism, and all she was trying to do was
think of ways one can turn into an american citizen. Josh doesn't understand
me, I don't understand what you write on your website, even if I spend a
life time explaining to my unit members I am leaving behind what their
existence meant to me, they will never understand. I used to think if we are
Lucky, we get little fragments but now I am not sure of that anymore. The
last thing I was trying to do with wanting to stay in the army is be
dramatic, but if I would have told anyone in america except for you, (who is
a a half real person) that would have been the result. instead one has to go
through everything alone, making decisions out of necessity, rather than
choice and knowledge. people may know all kinds of things i don't, but i
don't know how the heck they could communicate them to me.

you think if one is an english speaker and a published author like dfw, and
went to college they would know all kinds of things you don't . But the fact
he REALLY thought he had control on how one would read his work (it was in
the tone) really depressed me. This is one thing you can learn as a sniper
commander. Teach a boy to shoot. And watch his interpretation on the
sidelines.

hmm...that's what I wanted to say

***

I wrote back saying

Well, I think one of the things DFW was trying to convey in the interview was that it was very hard for him to say what he wanted to say, on TV, in an interview. In other words, he did SAY things, because if you are on TV you HAVE to say things -- and it's all very linear. But maybe for everything he said he would have wanted to have a long footnote qualifying what he said, but in an interview it all has to be linear, and once you have said something you can't take it back.

I also think, though, that what I was trying to do in Your Name Here was SHOW how every reader takes a book in a completely different way, and you can't control that, but that affects what the book actually is -- except that then people didn't like it because they wanted the book to be totally controlled.

and begging to be allowed to post the e-mail on the blog and then got a reply which struck me as the ne plus ultra of dfwism


I am aware that I just wrote on how one doesn't actually react to what
someone else said, that one cannot understand what somebody else said, that
so...(well,) there is no point in anything we view as communications as one
cannot communicate, and yet I said all of that as a response (? or was it
all my head's doing..) to what someone else has SAID. on television. Now
if the dfw were to read my response to the interview's little sentence dfw
might say OH NO that is not what I was saying, you did not understand at
all, I do not see how this is related. (This is why I think television IS
sometimes great, you get to see the person, and pretend that even if they
tell you you completely don't understand, it's in the TONE, or something,
and they are denying it for this or that (money probably, or pride, or
craziness) and you don't feel so alone.)

I would like to say I do not understand at all how your first sentence in
the email was related to what I said. I do not understand at all, I do not
see how this is related. (I of course understood what dfw was trying to say
about literature, and also talking being linear and how he would have loved
for it to be a footnote, how you can't just say something once and be done
with it in his head... what I was commenting on was on how in his tone a
second later he sounded SO confident that the book would be read a certain
way the way he intended, and I was commenting on that confidence...what I
thought of it etc etc...If I did not understand what he was saying about
what he wanted why would I comment on his confidence that some of what he
wanted was achieved? why would you write the first sentence? you must have
not understood at all, this was totally unrelated, I must have failed at
communications.

Except for the second sentence, which with your name here adds to exactly
what I was saying and then some. I DO think why people may not be able to
THINK they understand the book like they THINK they understand other books
(and by people i mean me, i don't really know any people who read books) is
because it is not controlled, a PART of it is that one could get different
messages, people can't find the RIGHT way (which they don't know is THEIR
way) to get the book, people then say i don't get the book, you keep on
messing with the plans they have for themselves as they are reading it, I
think that can be rather unpleasant and tiring for some, people may not like
to be messed THAT way.

I am sort of inconclusive as you can or (cannot see) about whether or not
one can get fragments of communications across at times.

One way to see if that is true, to really not give up and try, would be to
keep on saying, at least once in every interaction when appropriate, I do
not understand at all, I do not see how this is related, and then explain.
This is what I was demonstrating right now. but of course, then people think
you talk too much about little things, that you do not know how to glide
things, that you are (I looked it up) high maintenance. They don't want to
talk to you anymore, at least not about that. If you keep on saying, I do
not understand at all, I do not see how this is related, what you become is
the OPPOSITE OF A STRIPPER.

The Show Must Go ON

Just after quoting Goffman came across DFW on the Charlie Rose Show back in 1997, new to me if not to you, which says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here

DFW: Well I'm just gonna look pretentious, talking about this
CR: Quit worrying about what you're gonna look like and just be
DFW: I've got news for you, coming on a television show stimulates you're what am I gonna look like gland like no other experience, you may now be such a veteran that you're like you don't notice it anymore
you confront your own vanity when you think about going on TV so, no apologies, but just that's an explanation
um
uhh
the footnotes in the
there's a way um
there's a way that it seems to me that reality's fractured right now at least the reality that I live in
the difficulty about writing one of those
writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it's very unified
and you you um I anyway am constantly on the look-out for ways to fracture the text that aren't totally disorienting I mean you can you know you can um take the lines and jumble them up and that's nicely fractured but nobody's gonna read it

the rest here