Happy Halloween Indeed

Detente!

Leaking anew

The best thing about being on the Wallace-l is the generosity of the listers. That's also the worst thing. I could have avoided the whole Rolling Stone article, maybe just read the excerpt online (thanks, Claud) but of course, one of the generous members copied the whole thing, made a PDF of it - around 25 mb, and put it on her website.

So now, thanks to a writer who had access to DFW's family and friends, including the famous, we have his entire personal history, the blueprint for suicide, according to a lister - the early depression years, the mid-depression years, and a chronical of his insecurities, from high school through last summer. Of course, many artists/writers will recognize and relate to the insecurities, the worry that the ability or the impulse to create will dry up, that the one thing that keeps you relatively level will disappear and not leave a forwarding address.

It's a weird sort of comfort to know that this great talent was burdened with the same basement sale humanity that the rest of us root around in, separate from any clinical depression.

It's not at all a comfort to re-realize that for all its glory and expense, modern medicine can fall so incredibly short.

RIP, DFW.
"He was like a comet flying by at ground level."
Editor

Debate this, my friends...

I planned to watch the last debate, mostly so that when I watch the commentary on Rachel Maddow's show, or the Saturday Night Live parodies, that I get every nuance... yeah, that's my level of commitment. Debate that, "my friends."

And I thought I made it through an hour, seemed like an hour, but it was only 25 minutes. I was trying to stay in the moment and actually listen to what they said, but I was too distracted by McCain with his red, anime eyes, his bumbling and angry statements, and that gigantic Sharpie he was using to take notes. How big was that thing? Now, I am a huge fan of the Sharpie, my friends, and have every size - but the McCain size is what I use if I'm making a Help sign on a deserted island.

And then I'm trying to think of a one word that would describe McCain. Evil is already reserved for Bush, and it isn't really descriptive enough, and is also kind of a cop out, actually. For McCain, the word for the short-term is smarmy, my friends. The dude is smarmy. Smarmy, bumbling, and angry. Presidential? Nope.

And not just smarmy because of this campaign, which of course, would be reason enough. But he's already feeling guilty about statements he made, what, 3 days ago? In one of his ads, all of which are completely negative and not about issues... That's reassuring, my friends. But commentators suggest that voters don't want to hear about the past, about Obama's relationship with Ayers, about McCain's being one of the Keating 5. (Because THAT comparison, my friends, is apples to apples no?)

McCain was involved in a debacle in a local savings and loan that is like a thumbnail sketch of what is happening nationwide now. I'm going to copy and paste a bit from Wikipedia cuz I'm lazy: "The Lincoln Savings and Loan collapsed in 1989, at a cost of over $3 billion to the federal government. Some 23,000 Lincoln bondholders were defrauded and many elderly investors lost their life savings."

Now, all-told, it was a nationwide-wide savings and loan debacle, but here in Arizona, McCain and his compadres went to bat for Keating, the Chairman of that ill-fated S and L, against regulators after they received mondo bucks from Keating. Keating bilked the oldsters out of their dough by buying junk bonds with money made off real estate development projects. Eventually their holdings were worth nothing. Obviously it was more complicated than that, but that's the gist.

The most arresting visual image I have from that particular debacle was watching, on Tv, a senior citizen throw a pie in Keating's face while he was being led to jail. Wouldn't we all like to have a giant, Sharpie-sized pie right now for the folks responsible for the current economic apocalypse?

I did a stint as a temp for the Resolution Trust Corporation in the early 90s, the agency created to liquidate the assets, mostly real estate (read - FAILED LOANS) of that savings and loan debacle, and saw close-up the process, and how much waste was generated by having a government agency run that kind of show. The kind of waste that makes you question every cent of your tax-paying life.

Americans' memories being what they are, McCain went on to re-election and years later, here we are. Not that many years later, either! But voters don't want to hear about all that stuff, that's history, my friends, and has nothing to do with character, or ability. And acting like it never happened, and promising the world regarding balancing the budget and fixing somehow this current debacle, which should feel super familiar to him and give him a Presidential-level case of the willies, well only a smarmy dude could get away with that, and still think he deserved the voters' trust.

Ode to Istockphoto.com

I remember when we had to go
To Corbis, to Getty, to I don’t know
What was it, photos.com?

And suddenly, like manna from heaven
If you believe in heaven, and you like manna that is,
Istock appeared on the internets

And lo, it was good, and low, as in cheap
Its contents juicy, the artists, many,
And the lightboxes, divine

Searching is wiggy but soon you learn
That white background means color
and ethnicity too

For a dollar - photo credit,
Which you can use outright
Or edit!

It’s bad for the artists, but good for us
They’re screwed, yet no one makes a fuss
“I’ll make it up in volume!” their tortured cry.
Istock, great photos we can afford to buy.

Living with David Foster Wallace

The Blammos have recorded a tasty little tribute to DFW...

give it a listen

And but so...

'...'

Palin cartoon

Or should it be, "Palin, cartoon."

Favorite flicks in September

The Fall
Burn After Reading
Son of Rambow


Bad!
Cassandra's Dream

I'm ill too!

"I'll try to find ya some and I'll bring 'em to YA!"

A slightly more comic version...

Posey

I got a new kitty today. Kevin's feral cat had kittens who mostly lived in the bathroom, going in and out of the cupboard. Posey's last moment of happiness was running out to greet Kevin and prancing around the room before he put her in the cat carrier and spirited her out to the car.

She has her own bedroom here until we see how King Deighv reacts. Bella has been standing guard outside the door and can't figure out why she can't go in and see the kitty.

Posey is hiding in the closet next to some luggage. She alternates between crying and hissing at me. I hope it doesn't take long for her to adjust, it's making me feel like a terrible person, wrenching her away from her brothers and 24/7 fun.

I'll take some pics as soon as she is relaxed.

This isn't her.

The Dude Abides: Zenlightenment

The 10th Anniversary of The Big Lebowski is here and I have nothing to wear!

Not to worry, it's just a DVD. Back in all their glory - John Turturro as Jesus, Sam Elliott as The Stranger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the assistant, Steve Buscemi as Donny... poor Donny. Not to mention Aimee Mann, Tara Reid, Julianne Moore, Ben Gazzara, David Thewlis - everyone was in this movie, even Carlos Leon, Madonna's baby daddy. Flea, taking a real stretch in his role as a nihilist: "We believe in nothink!"

But Jeff Bridges stood out from the crowd like Elvis Costello stood out from disco. The Dude, the Dudester, or Duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing. What's it like to live in the moment? Ask the Dude. No one gets him - he is written off as a slacker, a stoner, a thief, etc. But he is steadfast, he is himself, he is always the essence of Dude. He is the moral compass in a whacked out morality tale, the better Jeffrey Lebowski. Not for him your easy cash, your 9-5, or even your beer with bowling. He just liked that rug - it really tied the room together.

In keeping with the Coen Bros pattern - slouching towards a line-up of awards and critical drooling, and then pulling back and flipping the bird with an absurd, surreal adventure, they're following No Country for Old Men with Burn After Reading. See Blood Simple into Raising Arizona, and Fargo into Big Lebowski. And it's probably no coincidence that the Lebowski anniversary DVD release coincides with the release of Burn After Reading.

But hey - is there ever too much Coen Brothers? Not in this house, Dude.

The Big Lebowski - Gutterballs
Uploaded by thenelaware

This is water, this is water.

OK, time to move on.

Thanks to everyone who sent emails and phoned and especially thanks to Kevin, who gets me. The Wallace Listserv rocks beyond all belief.

Here's to all the other brilliant, depressed people out there who manage not to kill themselves on purpose or by over-self medicating.

I was going to delete the blog but Kevin's right, it can be an homage and the pain of seeing the title every day will lessen in time.

So here are some words from Himself to remind us to make the most of right now, from the Kenyon commencement speech:

"The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."

From Mark Leyner

Fellow post modernist:

"What we're losing is someone who saw a
kind of profundity in almost everything as a human being and as a
citizen and as an artist. ... He's irreplaceable and at a moment in
the culture when he's desperately needed, he's gone."

From the Onion

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008
NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace's Death

LOUDON, NH—Shock, grief, and the overwhelming sense of loss that has swept the stock car racing community following the death by apparent suicide of writer David Foster Wallace has moved NASCAR to cancel the remainder of its 2008 season in respect for the acclaimed but troubled author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.
In deference to the memory of Wallace, whose writing on alienation, sadness, and corporate sponsorship made him the author of the century in stock car racing circles and whom NASCAR chairman Brian France called "perhaps the greatest American writer to emerge in recent memory, and definitely our most human," officials would not comment on how points, and therefore this year's championship, would be determined.
At least for the moment, drivers found it hard to think about the Sprint Cup.
"All race long on Sunday, I was dealing with the unreality presented me by his absence," said #16 3M Ford Fusion driver Greg Biffle, who won Sunday's Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the first race in the Chase For The Cup, and would therefore have had the lead in the championship. "I first read Infinite Jest in 1998 when my gas-can man gave me a copy when I was a rookie in the Craftsman Truck Series, and I was immediately struck dumb by the combination of effortlessness and earnestness of his prose. Here was a writer who loved great, sprawling, brilliantly punctuated sentences that spread in a kind of textual kudzu across the page, yet in every phrase you got a sense of his yearning to relate and convey the importance of every least little thing. It's no exaggeration to say that when I won Rookie of the Year that season it was David Foster Wallace who helped me keep that achievement, and therefore my life, in perspective."
"I'm flooded with feelings of—for lack of a better concept—incongruity," said Jimmie Johnson, the driver of the #48 Lowe's Chevrolet who is known throughout racing for his habit of handing out copies of Wallace's novels to his fans. "David Foster Wallace could comprehend and articulate the sadness in a luxury cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign, anything. But empathy, humanity, and compassion so strong as to be almost incoherent ran through that same sadness like connective tissue through muscle, affirming the value of the everyday, championing the banal yet true, acknowledging the ironic as it refused to give in to irony."
"And now he's gone," Johnson added. "He's taken himself away. We can't possibly race now."
David Foster Wallace's work came to stock car racing in the mid-1990s, just as the sport began experiencing almost geometric yearly growth. But the literary atmosphere of the sport was moribund, mired in the once-flamboyant but decidedly aging mid-1960s stylings of Tom Wolfe, whose bombastic essays—notably "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!"—served as the romantic, quasi-elegiac be-all and end-all for NASCAR fans and series participants alike. Racing was ready for new ideas, and when a new generation of young drivers like Jeff Gordon arrived on the scene, sporting new sponsorship deals on their fireproof coveralls and dog-eared copied of Broom Of The System under their arms, an intellectual seed crystal was dropped into the supersaturated solution of American motorsports.
"Suddenly DFW was everywhere," said #88 Amp Energy Chevrolet driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., whose enthusiasm for Wallace is apparent in both his deep solemnity and the Infinite Jest-inspired Great Concavity tattoo on his left shoulder. "My Dad was against him, actually, in part because he was a contrarian and in part because he was a Pynchon fan from way back. But that was okay. It got people reading V and Gravity's Rainbow, and hell, nothing wrong with that. But now, to think we'll never see another novel from Wallace...I can't get my mind around it."
"David himself said that what he knew about racing you could write with a dry Sharpie marker on the lip of a Coke bottle," said NASCAR president Mike Helton, who announced the season cancellation late Monday after prompting from drivers and team owners in a statement that also tentatively suggested naming the 2009 Sprint series the Racing Season Of The Depends Adult Undergarment in referential and reverential tribute to Wallace's work, a proposal currently being considered by Depends manufacturer Kimberly-Clark. "But that doesn't matter to us as readers, as human beings."
"Racing and literature are both huge parts of American life, and I don't think David Foster Wallace would want me to make too much of that, or to pretend that it's any sort of equitable balance," Helton added. "That would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever cultural deity, entity, energy, or random social flux produced stock car racing also produced the works of David Foster Wallace. And just look them. Look at that."

Is this Really Happening?

Trying to escape into entertainment; yes, that was the ploy, despite the layers of irony surrounding the action, it is what we do; well, what I do anyway. Then only to come face to face with a noose, on a new episode of Weeds. Someone actually making a noose and putting their head in it.

There is no escape from it. It is really happening.

Then watching the movie The Fall, the ominous soundtrack a loop of Beethoven's 7th, themes of lost dreams and a suicide. A monkey named Wallace, dies, but his death is explained as a happy one, one that is in the natural order of things.

There is no escape from it. It has really happened.

Remembrance: David Foster Wallace

I'm going to post some remembrances over the next few days that I'm collecting from other places. Please feel free to post your own as well. Then I'm going to discontinue the site. At best, the title is too ironic; at worst, it's too depressing.


He was my favourite. I didn't feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod. In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let's at least only say true things.1 The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It's what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential. The only exception was the math one, which I was too stupid to understand. One day, soon after it was published, David phoned up, sincerely apologetic, and said: "No, look ... you don't need anything more than high school math, that's all I really have." He was very funny. He was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind—and he was that, too. He was my favourite, my literary hero, I loved him and I'll always miss him.

1 And let's say them grammatically.

—Zadie Smith

We first contacted David Foster Wallace while we were putting out Might magazine back in 1996. We had read Broom of the System and so asked him if he would send us something—an essay, a story, a note on a napkin. He sent an essay, about sex in the age of AIDS, that was easily the best thing we ever published. I remember it came in flawless, without any errors or punctuation mistakes at all; it was not really editable. But one of our editors dug right in and began red-lining it like it was something by a first-timer. We all came to our senses just in time and realized the man knew more about writing than we did or could.

It was a year or two later that I first met him in person. I was living in New York and working at Esquire; he had just written a short story in the magazine. Adrienne Miller (then the magazine's fiction editor) and I took him out to a diner around the corner. I was relieved that he seemed to know as little about food as I did, or care as little as I did. The diner was a relief to us both. We talked about how he'd grown up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and how I'd gone to college there, how his father taught there, about the pleasures and quirks of east-central Illinois.

There's something very strange and uniquely powerful about meeting a guy whose writing you find world-changing but who also comes from your part of the world—and who seems exactly like someone who would have come from your part of the world. He was funny, decent to a fault, and thoroughly unpretentious. He was, as everyone has said and will say, exactly what you would hope; he was the human you wanted writing those books. You knew it within two or three minutes with him. He was an actual human, far more colloquial and normal than you could imagine, given what he engineered on the page.

During dinner he kept a cup right below the table, semi-out-of-view, into which he spit his tobacco juice. Until that time I had no idea he was a dipper. It was hilarious, because it's such a strange habit, and so problematic for any life lived indoors. For a cowboy or baseball player, there's always the dirt to spit on, but for anyone else you always have to carry around a cup full of brown spit. Which is what he had below the table all during dinner. I had to stop looking at it.

A few months later, Dave was the first person we asked to contribute to McSweeney's, thinking we could not start the journal without him. Thankfully, he sent a piece immediately, and then we knew we could begin. We honestly needed his endorsement, his go-ahead, because we were seeking, at the start at least, to focus on experimental fiction, and he was so far ahead of everyone else in that arena that without him the enterprise would seem ridiculous.

Along with his first piece, he also sent a check, for $250. That was the craziest thing: he sent a donation with his contribution. Thus he was the first donor to the journal, though he insisted that his donation remain anonymous in that first issue. I had such a problem cashing that check; I wanted to keep it, frame it, stare at it.

The note he wrote was printed in 8-point type, with a serif font, and was cut so that no paper was wasted. This was before he e-mailed; he was a very late adopter to that method. Until that point, he would send envelopes from Bloomington, Illinois, with one single piece of paper inside, cut so that only the paper that had been used for the note was included. He cut the rest away, or used it for other notes. So you would get a four-inch-high-by-eight-and-a-half-inch-wide note in your envelope. And again, never a word out of place.

These letters in the mail became the main way I personally communicated with Dave. Though I admired him as a man and a writer more than I could ever express to him, we remained professional friends. I asked him to send us any work he could, and we published whatever he sent.

My in-person anecdotes, though few and not deeply evocative, will be posted as the week goes on. But part of the reason we so badly want to hear from those who knew him is that we didn't know him as well as we wished we had. I certainly did not. But even reading the contributions so far has been, however painful, so enlightening and healing and warming, and in an absolutely necessary way. Let's continue.

—Dave Eggers

DFW's words on Kafka

"[T]he horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self
whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our
endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. ...
[E]nvision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly
hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing
it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total
desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally,
the door opens...and it opens _outward_ -- we've been inside what we
wanted all along. Das ist komisch."

David Foster Wallace is dead

Sad, sad, sad.

Apparently David Foster Wallace committed suicide last night. It's not on any of the news sites except the LA Times, which confirmed it with the Claremont Police Department.

He has been my favorite author for years, since I read Infinite Jest in 1997. This blog is named for a concept in Infinite Jest, his most famous book.

I don't know what to say.

Hold for... the Apocalypse

You've probably heard about the incredible storm that went through the valley on Thursday night. I was just beginning to understand the enormity of it when I called Kevin around 10 p.m. to tell him it was hailing by my house, but he was already four zones in to freakytown, because his response was not, "Hello"... it was, "CAN'T TALK LONG - GOTTA SAVE BATTERY - IT'S THE APOCALYPSE!!!"

To which I just muttered, "hail," before we hung up. I guess you gotta save the phone battery in case the 4 Horsemen call.

At about that point, the sky lit up in about 90 different directions, like the gods were having a 70s style party with a bunch of strobe lights, and oversized speakers with the bass turned up. "Oh, You need the Base!" Hail drummed at the windows, sounding like someone wanted to come in, NOW.

The sky went from white to yellow to black, and back. I was thinking, "Who needs cable?" when the power went out. Rats! I need cable!

But it was not to be. The power did not come back on. All I could hear was thunder, and then sirens.

The rain stopped after a couple of hours, and the temperature dropped to the mid-70s, unheard of in August. Turned out it was a record low for August for all time. I opened up all the doors and slept til morning.

It was cool until about 10 (well, moderately cool - around 85) so I painted and did some other things that didn't require electricity. Then I walked the dog, and all the neighbors we passed reported their stories. Donnie saw the manhole covers on the street tilting back and forth from the force of the water passing below. Telephone poles were swaying 3 feet. Trees were split in half.

But the scary part was that one called APS and they said the power would be out for 2 days. I went home and packed up, and headed to Tempe where some friends were already holed up in a cheap hotel room, hoping to beat out the masses who would soon realize their holiday weekend was gonna be about slumming.

Next chapter tomorrow.

Fonts are People Too

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.