The Stones Are Gathering

I’ve just about got the collection of pieces I call Stones Gathered Together ready for publishing as an ebook. Look for it in January. I stopped bothering about there being sixty items, as that was an idea from way back that doesn’t seem relevant any more, so I could drop a few pieces that really weren’t good enough to include—judgment about this is totally subjective of course.

Where would I be without my early readers? They include my writing group, my partner Prue and sundry others and make my writing better. Here’s the cover. Making one’s own cover is easier for an ebook than for a print book because you need only the front.

The new novel, which so far exists only in my head and a folder of articles and stuff I call research, is truly on the agenda now. For the time being at least it’s called Alice Green, which is the name of the protagonist.

I’ve just finished reading another David Foster Wallace. This is a further posthumously published book,  called Both Flesh and Not and is a collection of essay-type pieces, most of them previously unpublished. In between each is a double page of words and meanings—DFW was a word collector, and was part of a panel working on an American dictionary. I’ll confine myself to just one quote:

What if we choose to accept the act that every few years, despite everyone’s best efforts, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of terrible suicidal attack that a democratic republic cannot 100 percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

My summer reading will include some classics from the library—W G Sebald and Kafka—the new James Meek, The Heart Broke In, and some others, yet to be chosen, from the “waiting” pile. I’ll keep you posted.

From Gertrude Stein to David Foster Wallace

My fascination with the writing and life of Gertrude Stein goes back a way now. I’ve been thinking about what attracts me to her writing recently, because I have a similar reaction the writings of David Foster Wallace, even though the writing of the two, one from each end of the twentieth century, has little in common. GS said herself that she was doing writing that was the first real writing of the twentieth century; earlier writing she maintained was of the nineteenth century.

In her Lectures In America she says,

Our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production. And each of us in our own way are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing.

GS was writing a new way, a way demanded of daily life in the world of the moment. Of course, this is a simplistic statement about her work, but it is this element of wanting to write in a new way to embody something of a new (twentieth century) world that for me connects her to DFW.

As is made clear in D T Max’s biography of DFW, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, Wallace constantly searched for a way to write that embodied what he was writing about. In a world where entertainment rules and pleasure is the end game, how do you write a novel that is not just an “entertainment”? How do you write about boredom without being boring? How do you move your fiction writing from clever, smart-alecky, irony to conveying authentic experience without sentimentality? These were life and death matters to Wallace.”

In an earlier blog I wrote about DFW’s novel, Infinite Jest that it was “an evisceration of American-style, commercial, pleasure-based culture where there is so much choice that choice is meaningless, in a USA where people are over-entertained and sad and bored and lonely.” Max’s biography details Wallace’s struggles with drugs, alcohol and depression and the ways he overcame these from time to time. Finding a way to write that was true to experience, that was what GS and DFW had in common, I think. That and nothing much else, except perhaps having read extremely widely.

GS died suddenly, on the operating table, in 1946. DFW killed himself in 2008, leaving the partially completed manuscript of what would be published posthumously as The Pale King and a two-page note to his wife. This note has not been made public. (And neither should it be; if it ever is I am sure I will read it.)

Consider David Foster Wallace

I might be done for now with David Foster Wallace, having finished his posthumously published, novel-in-progress The Pale King. Which, as I write is embroiled in an internet brouhaha over the fact that it, along with two other books, was a finalist for the Pullitzer prize for fiction and no prize was awarded this year. “Outrageous!” shouts one lot. “I should think not,” opines another, “you can’t give the Pullitzer to an unfinished novel cobbled together by the author’s editor. And, anyway, it's tedious.” There’s even, “Whatever, let’s stop talking about this dead guy.” 

I haven’t read the other two finalists so I don’t know whether they would have been worthy winners, but I would have no problem with The Pale King winning that or any other prize. David Foster Wallace is described by some as a genius, an attribution that bothered him; in a manner most unlike that of Uriah Heep , he seems to have strived to be humble.

I struggle to identify what it is that I find so compelling about his writing. There’s something about his attention to the details of people being people, the internal monologues, the self-consciousness, the uncertainties, that appeals, but it is more than this. Perhaps, in The Pale King,  his capacity to examine the special boredom, the tedium, of workers auditing tax returns in the US Inland Revenue Service, in the context of a change in culture in that Service from the service aspect, of doing necessary work, to a business model. The business model means that the tax returns that will be followed up on are those where the additional income to the IRS, in the form of previously unpaid taxes, is greater than the cost of doing the follow-up. “Bottom line” over “justice”. But it’s complicated. Always, with DFW it’s complicated, and that may be another way in which his writing appeals to me.

The Pale King, unfinished as it is, is a collection of pieces concerning how people in the IRS deal with the organisation, their jobs at various levels, each other and themselves. There’s no coherent plot, which, surprisingly, didn’t bother me. He captures something of the way many of us profess disdain for the very things we indulge in, like television or buying new things. Also, he sidles into people’s mental states and their relationship to reality—is how I think about myself how others think about me?.

I’ve written two earlier blogs about DFW’s writing (21 December 2011 & 28 Jan 2012).

It’s impossible to give a real flavour of DFW’s writing in short quotes, but here are a few anyway:

“Something has happened where we’ve decided on a personal level that it’s all right to abdicate our individual responsibilities to the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites .”

“Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is .”

“… all accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys.… Riding hard on the unending torrent of financial data.”

And I’ve not managed to say or quote anything to show how laugh-out-loud funny Wallace can be.

Reading Infinite Jest

One way I had thought of describing Infinite Jest is as a long scream with funny bits. It’s an evisceration of Amarican-style, commercial, pleasure-based culture where there is so much choice that choice is meaningless, in a USA where people are over-entertained and sad and bored and lonely. Especially lonely.

I set out to read IJ as a challenge to myself. I read some reviews and comments on it and every one said it was difficult. It's certainly long, at over 1000 pages if you include the 388 footnotes (yes, it is a novel) that are invariably referred to by reviewers.

There's a LOT of detail, whether it's the description of a room, or a person, or the person's state of being, or the drugs they use, or the tennis academy that is one of the locations of the story, or the workings of AA or whatever. The plot is not-quite-hidden in the details, and I'm not sure I could say exactly what the main plot is.

Infinite Jest was first published in 1996 and its setting is the 2000s, so there's an element of futurist technology. One device key to the story is something like what we know as a DVD, and there is a particular one of these around that has such a high entertainment quotient (not DFW's word) that once a person starts watching it they cannot stop. One plot line is to do with various agencies seeking to find and destroy the master copy of this Entertainment, which of course can't be watched by anyone wanting to destroy it. Such pleasure is fatal! Which creates funny and gruesome and fascinating scenarios.

Protagonist Hal Incandenza is a teenage tennis star at an invented academy. The training regime is horrendous. And, as with most of the contents of this book, it provides a context for exploring a whole range of ideas about society and power and success and so on. Including loneliness. The man who created The Entertainment was a film-maker (he's committed suicide before the book begins) and Hal's father. The mother of Hal and his two brothers is a really creepy character who is so nice and considerate and outright good, she gave me what DFW calls in a couple of places the "howling fantods."

Across the road from the tennis academy is the house for people getting off drugs. That's where another protagonist, Don Gately, is. A main source of treatment is going to AA meetings, and IJ includes an exhaustive level of detail about these meetings. "Yes, of course 'one day at a time' and such are clichés, but, hey, they work."

There are a myriad more characters, themes and story threads, such as the Concavity—a huge area encompassing Vermont and part of Quebec where no-one lives and the trash from the northeastern cities is catapulted to. The various plots and characters are carried along on an accretion of details.

The writing is extraordinary. I still haven't figured out why some sentences start with 'And but so...', or variations of that. It's not possible to ask, because DFW himself committed suicide in 2006. There are plenty of clips of him speaking on YouTube and masses of articles about him online, but I haven't found one that asks why he started sentences like that.

So much more could be said about Infinite Jest, and has been—try googling it. My conclusion is that in the end it is maybe a plea for doing our best to live in an actual, present world, and never mind an imagined (remembering is imagined) past or future. Or something. Anyway, I found it utterly worthwhile to make the effort and persist through what were almost boring bits, and excruciating descriptions of coming off drugs.

On Reading David Foster Wallace (&Terry Pratchett)

I don’t remember where I read references to DFW that made me want to read him. Two volumes—A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster—of his essay-type pieces later, I was glad I found him. He portrays his disgust (lobsters) and despair at what people do (that supposedly fun thing, going on a cruise) through accumulating detail and a particular way of writing from inside his consciousness. I like both, and imagine a lot of people don’t.

He uses some odd sentence constructions, like starting a sentence with “And but so…” which, until I got used to it, had me re-reading several times. He also uses some very long sentences.

In the short story collection, Oblivion, the consciousness he writes from inside of is his characters’, not overtly his own. This has a strangely bleak effect (affect?). In “Another Pioneer” the narrator is reporting a conversation he partially overheard on a United Airlines flight in patches of great detail. DFW does this a lot, gives great detail and then not much information—it’s hard to explain.

He seems to have a yen to convey boredom, presumably without being boring. He certainly doesn’t bore me. I’m sure my own interest in conveying everyday boredom arises from my experience of it as a child and young person. (I have seldom been bored in the last few decades.) The story “Mister Squishy” is wonderfully evocative of at least two sorts of boredom, one of being in a group being talked at, the other of presenting too-familiar material.

In “Good Old Neon” (which begins, “My whole life I’ve been a fraud.”) the narrator describes thinking about himself thinking about thinking. (I’m avoiding the phrase “stream of consciousness” because it seems to me what DFW is doing is different from that, but I can’t say how.) And this—thinking about himself thinking about thinking—reminds me, oddly, of Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men, which I have just finished. In The Wee Free Men the protagonist, Tiffany, refers to her own ability to have first, second and third thoughts. The context and circumstances are where she is trying to hold on to her own, real, self in the face of a Queen who wants to put her in various dream spaces (yes, The Wee Free Men is one of 30+ books set in Pratchett’s fanstasy land, Discworld). Whereas DRW is concerned with solispsism, Tiffany is looking outwards by looking inwards. Or something. Anyway, one reminded me of the other.

Another thing DFW does with sentences is now and then make an ungrammatical statement, like, “The next time or next thing I wanted.” These sentences are placed, carefully, I suspect, as a kind of summary—or extension—of what precedes them.

The phrase “the loneliness of solipsism” comes into my mind as I write and I am not sure whether is it my phrase or one I came across reading about DFW before I started to read him. This in itself was unusual for me, I generally prefer to read an author before I look at others’ opinions, but I had accidentally come across descriptions of his writing as “difficult,” “challenging,” and so on, so decided some preparation was in order.

When I finish the short stories, it’s on to his novel, Infinite Jest. A novel with 388 footnotes. Did I mention DFW excels at asides?