DFW Memorial, Part III

Salon has a story about David Foster Wallace's final days, with comments from his father, mother and sister. It confirms with more detail the return of Wallace's debilitating depression. It's sad reading, but it's also comforting to know that he had the support of his family and loved ones at the end. It helps explain.
I prefer this kind of straight-up reporting to some of the other things I've read about Wallace during the past days. Wallace's work over the years has consistently addressed issues like depression and suicide, and some critics now are looking back at his work for themes that might shed light on his death.
I think we have to be very cautious about this kind of reading for biography. We do authors and literature a disservice when we get carried away looking at the work this way. It trivializes the writing, which should be able to stand on its own. Yes, it is helpful to understand an author's historical and cultural milieu. And the author can and will use details of his or her everyday life, which biographers can document. But the author's artistry should transcend those details in ways that make the biographical details much, much less important to the active reader. At least that is what happens if the author is good, and Wallace was beyond good. He was great.

Adventures in second-hand book-buying, Part I (Peter Pauper Press)

My household is in austerity mode thanks to the recent economic downturn. So I've curtailed my book-buying. A few weeks ago, though, I was visiting a friend in Sarasota and we stopped by the very lovely Selby Library, which has a Friends of the Library used book store.
For 50 cents each, I picked up one reference book published in 1969 on modern world history (in retrospect, a dubious selection) and one very interesting copy of the Psalms.
I have several Bibles already, so I didn't need a copy. But what caught my eye was its charming design. Titled "The Psalms of David" and published by Peter Pauper Press, the small hardcover came in its own cardboard slipcase. The slipcase was frayed, but but it did its job of protecting -- the book inside is in excellent condition. (Book on left; slipcase on right.)




It has charming woodcut art by Valenti Angelo, and the paper is rich and textured. There's no information to identify the year of publication, but I poked around on WorldCat and figured out it could be 1936 or 1943.



I'm also fascinated by the fact that the Psalms are laid out in paragraph form, i.e. big blocks of text.



In the Bibles I have, the Psalms are laid out with many breaks between sentences, so that it resembles poetry. This mimics the traditional thought on the origins of the Psalms, which are said to be music lyrics authored by King David (of David and Goliath fame). David would sing the Psalms while accompanying himself on his lyre, which is a harp-like musical instrument. I love the image of the handsome young warrior king, moodily strumming his lyre under a shade tree, but taking a break every now and then to open up a can of whup-ass on someone.

I also looked up the Peter Pauper Press, and as I expected it was a budget imprint of yesteryear, specializing in inexpensive editions of the classics. I almost fell off my chair, though, to read that its first edition was ... Petrarch sonnets translated by J.M. Synge. Synge is a major, major figure in Irish literature, the author of the once scandalous play "The Playboy of the Western World." Why do so many things come back to Ireland? More evidence of Ireland's important place in my own narrative history.
I'll have even more thoughts on this copy of the Psalms in my next post.

DFW Memorial, Part II

The act of reading is so intimate and dear to me, that I have a constant fantasy that certain authors are my friends. Good friends, too. Intellectually, I know this is a fantasy, but on an emotional level, there is a certain kind of reality there. I think anyone who loves reading knows what I'm talking about.
I was so sad this week thinking about the death of David Foster Wallace. He was my favorite living author.
But he was not the kind of author I would whole-heartedly recommend to friends, because he was just so darn difficult. He wrote about off-putting, pathetic characters in his short stories. His two novels, by any standards, are long and verbose. His nonfiction essays appeared in popular magazines, though, and the collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster are brainy and accessible.
To talk about his fiction: it has to be Infinite Jest. That was his masterwork. It's on the same scale as Ulysses -- huge and complicated and daunting. But on another level, if you were willing to surrender to it and just go with it, it was remarkably funny and freewheeling, but serious and sad and touching, too. It was an inside look at the following: addicts who go to AA meetings, tennis-prodigy teens at a sports boarding school, what it's like to be a punter in the NFL, and wheel-chair bound assassins plotting next moves.
I can still remember vividly where I was when I was reading certain parts of it -- the New Mexico State Fair on a perfectly crisp and sunny late afternoon.
Wallace is often referred to as postmodernist, and I can see because Infinite Jest doesn't really wrap up its plot in any discernible way -- it just kind of stops -- and it has tons of creepy pop culture references. Also, Wallace would make these funny discursive asides about what he was trying to do as an author and whether or not he was succeeding or failing.
But he was also terribly traditional, and obsessed with moral behavior. Not ina binary good vs. evil kind of way, but a How-should-we-treat-each-other-in-the-world kind of way. His Kenyon College speech is a classic here. (If you haven't read it and have a few minutes, please do so.)
Many, many tributes this week. Here are my favorites:

• McSweeney's
  The literary Web site run by author Dave Eggers has posted a number of lovely, heartfelt reminiscences of people who met Dave Wallace, as he liked to be called. It really hit home with me what a good man this was -- a kind, caring person.
• A.O. Scott
  I liked this remembrance by A.O. Scott, especially its title: "The Best Mind of His Generation." How I agree with that compliment. Scott compares Wallace to Ezra Pound (my friend Ezra) but I think there are many more parallels between Wallace and James Joyce. Not just that they wrote big, doorstop novels with anti-plots, but also that they were concerned with the theme of exile of the mind, and fashioning your own belief system in a society in which the belief systems has become dessicated and hollow (Catholic Ireland under English rule and the corporate, consumerist United States, respectively).
  That latter point is really brought to the fore by ...
• Steve Almond in the Boston Globe
  Headline is "A Moralist of Hope." This gets at what a moral writer Wallace was, something I never felt like he got his just due for. Almond writes
  

  This is the crucial question of our historical moment: whether our citizens can
  rise above their doubts and anxieties and express a genuine idealism. And it's
  the very reason we should mourn Wallace's death. He was one of the few popular
  writers who threw himself into the maw of American life and challenged the
  reflexive cynicism he found there. He was a moralist of astonishing clarity and
  hope.

  
  Then he writes about Wallace's appreciation of Dostoevsky. I really need to read Dostoevksy soon. Too many signs and portents are telling me to read him.

David Foster Wallace archive at Harper's

Harper's magazine has posted all the stories David Foster Wallace wrote for them. Go there now and read one of my favorite stories of his, "Everything is Green." It's short, not even a whole page.
It begins:

She says I do not care if you believe me or not, it is the truth, go on and believe what you want to. So it is for sure that she is lying, when it is the truth she will go crazy trying to make you believe her. So I feel like I know.

Read the whole thing here.

NYT Obituary on David Foster Wallace

The New York Times has published a moving obituary:

A versatile writer of seemingly bottomless energy, Mr. Wallace was a maximalist, exhibiting in his work a huge, even manic curiosity — about the physical world, about the much larger universe of human feelings and about the complexity of living in America at the end of the 20th century. He wrote long books, complete with reflective and often hilariously self-conscious footnotes, and he wrote long sentences, with the playfulness of a master punctuater and the inventiveness of a genius grammarian. Critics often noted that he was not only an experimenter and a showoff, but also a God-fearing moralist with a fierce honesty in confronting the existence of contradiction.

Well worth reading here.
His parents confirmed that he was suffering from terrible depression, that he had been hospitalized over the summer and had tried numerous therapies, to no avail.

I hope and pray he's gone to a better place.

DFW Memorial, Part I

One of my favorite bits from David Foster Wallace was this little joke, which is featured prominently in his novel "Infinite Jest":

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

Wallace used this joke to begin a commencement speech he delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. He further explained:

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

This really very quickly gets at what I love about Wallace.
And a bit later:

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

Read the whole speech here.

David Foster Wallace, RIP

I learned today that David Foster Wallace has died.

This is sad, shocking news. 

Regular readers will recall he is a particular favorite of mine. His novel Infinite Jest affected me deeply, and I would venture to say even changed my life in the way that only great works of literature can.

The news reports are frustratingly brief -- that he committed suicide by hanging at his home, that his wife found him, that he was 46. There is no mention of depression or illness or other explanation. I doubt we'll learn more -- the human response from his readers is a mournful, incredulous Why? -- but Wallace was an extremely private person.

I'll be gathering my thoughts on his passing and posting more soon. 

This is a very sad day for American fiction, and my sincere condolences to his family and friends. 

Biblical epigraphs

Epigraphs -- the short quotations that begin a longer work of fiction or nonfiction -- are rare in newspaper reporting. But this week's column by Floyd Norris in The New York Times about the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac uses one perfectly.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.

— Matthew 6:24

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were intended to serve at least two masters — the investors who put up capital and a government that wanted to help the housing industry and extend home ownership. In the end, they failed to serve either one very well.

Read the rest of the column here. 
It got me to thinking about epigraphs -- those short sentences that begin a novel. Usually they get their own page, setting the tone for the 200+ pages yet to come.

Now doesn't that seem like a great Jeopardy! category?

"I'll take Biblical epigraphs for $200, Alex."

Answer: " ... The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose ... "

Question: "What is The Sun Also Rises"

Alex: "That's correct, the novel by Ernest Hemingway."

"Biblical epigraphs for $400."

Answer: "For we are strangers before them, and sojournors, as were all our fathers."
Question: "What is Dreams from my Father."

Alex: "Yes, the memoir by Barack Obama."

But then I ran out of ideas for my Jeopardy! category ... . 

Begin tangeant: In the interests of nonpartisanship, I will note that John McCain begins his memoir "Faith of My Fathers" with a moving quote from the eponymous hymn by Frederick William Faber:

Faith of our fathers, living still,

In spite of dungeon, fire and sword;

O how our hearts beat high with joy

Whenever we hear that glorious word!

Faith of our fathers, holy faith!

We will be true to thee til death.

It's works well as an epigraph, but it is not strictly Biblical. I will soon do a separate post on hymns, because I have a lot more to say on that subject. End tangeant.

But then I couldn't think of any more answers for my Jeopardy! category ... 

But I was thinking maybe some of the more knowledgeable Spoonreader readers -- Mmm, I'm glancing your way, Drs. K and L -- might be able to help me come up with four more appropriate Biblical epigraphs! Hope so, anyway.

I have two more pieces of advice for authors about epigraphs.

1. Pick one epigraph, not two. One epigraph has punch and power. Two epigraphs make you look indecisive.
2. I would advise against using an epigraph in a foreign language. Most Americans only know one language. And if you use an epigraph in Latin or French, you'll seem pretentious and no one will no what you're talking about -- I'm sorry to say it, but that's just the way it is.

Confederacy of Dunces and my juvenile sense of humor

Walt Disney World, which is not far from where I live, puts on an annual Christian rock festival it calls Night of Joy.
In the great New Orleans novel Confederacy of Dunces, the Night of Joy is a French Quarter strip club where dim-witted Darlene works on her "exotic" dance routine involving a cockatoo; a tipsy Irene Reilly sells her hat to vintage clothing dealer Dorian Greene; Lana Lee masterminds her illegal porno ring; and janitor Burma Jones plots the sabotage that will bring this wacky house of cards tumbling down.
(Snicker snicker snicker.)

Gustav has passed; thoughts on Kate Chopin and The Storm

Hurricane Gustav has passed, and my friends and family in Louisiana are doing well. I breathe a sigh of relief and gratitude.
Hurricanes remind me of a short story by Louisiana author Kate Chopin, who wrote the 1899 novel The Awakening. "The Awakening," like a number of 19th century novels, has the general plot of "married woman wakes from her stuporous life, finds herself, has an affair, meets tragic end." (The great novels Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and Madame Bovary by Flaubert come to mind easily. House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is a variation on the theme.)
Anyway, the Chopin short story is called "The Storm." (Read the story online. It's fairly short.) In "The Storm," Calixta is waiting at home alone for a hurricane to pass; her husband and son have gone to town. An old flame of hers -- the wonderfully named Alcee Laballiere -- is passing by and stops by her house to wait out the storm. One thing leads to another. We come to lines like ... "when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life's mystery." (I think that's a well-written line and take it seriously, but it makes me smile, too.)
The storm ends, Alcee goes on his way, Calixta's husband and son return. Amazingly, tragedy does NOT ensue. Instead, Calixta is very sweet to her husband and makes him a nice dinner. Alcee writes his wife a thoughtful letter and tells her to extend her vacation in Biloxi; the wife is relieved and glad to get more time away to relax.
Chopin concludes, "So the storm passed, and every one was happy."
Definitely a different take on the usual "tragic end" plotline! My book tells me this story was written in 1898 but not published until 1969. Not hard to see why.

New template and thoughts on my mission

I got bored, so I changed the template for the blog. That's why the colors and layout look different.
I've also been thinking about who are the core audiences for this blog and how I can better serve them.
Here's my list:

1. Me. Yup, it's true. I am the most dedicated reader of this blog. The number one reason I keep blogging is because it's fun. It helps me organize my thoughts about books I'm reading or themes I'm pondering. I don't post as much as I would like -- there are many things I' obsessed with that never make it to this space. But I do well enough to please myself and keep this thing going. It's hard to believe this blog is going on almost four years now.
2. My friends from high school. Yes, Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts Class of 1990 and friends, I believe you are the next most dedicated readers of this blog. I try to read all of your blogs too, and one day I may do a blog roll. It's fun that we get to share our thoughts with each other. It's like a lovely echo of that intense intellectual community we shared back in the day. Priceless. You mean the world to me.
   
3. Various and sundry Web surfers. I get a little report on how people get to this blog, and a lot of it is random Googling. If you Google "Bill Wilson LSD", my blog post on the topic is the sixth hit. That one is probably among the most popular posts on this blog. I also get a good number of hits from students who want to write papers on Spoon River Anthology. I think my post on why this blog has its name is my most-commented post.
4. Work colleagues. Every now and then, someone I work with will say something like, "Hey, I saw your blog post about blah-dee-blah." That's nice.

So I'm thinking about these audiences as I contemplate a new project for this blog, kinda like my friend Doug's ABCs of Music. More to come on that.