David Foster Wallace Is My Boyfriend

Summer: Books and iced americanos amiright. Here's how I wiled away my splendid underemployment and hedonistic afternoons sweating in public.

Persepolis II, (2001) Embroideries (2006) and Chicken With Plums (2006), Marjane Satrapi

I know, global politics are not that sexy. Until you've met Satrapi. Her graphic novel Persepolis breathes humor and humanity into the Iranian revolution with the intimacy of a friendly conversation. Embroideries is an afternoon spent with her aunts and mother's friends as they chat about sex and love, and Chicken is an elegy to her late uncle that manages to be touching and funny. Satrapi is a rare storyteller of heart and wit.

I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales From NPR's National Story Project, edited by Paul Auster (2000)

A lengthy collection of non-fiction short stories from Americans of every demographic. Some pieces are powerful, some aren't, but together they form a wide view of American life in the past half century. Not a particularly hard-hitting collection; racism is mentioned approximately once in this version of American history and sexism, classism, etc, not at all. But perhaps the collection is most successful when the reader eschews all notions of what "America" means and instead listens to the voices of these ordinary people.

Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism, James Agee (2005)

Agee: not an ordinary American. The author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the Pulitzer-prize winning A Death In The Family was also an extremely prolific critic and essayist. His essays on film here from the 1940s and 50s are insightful, honest and art in themselves. In the era of blockbusters, or when all you need to sell a movie is tits and terrorists, it's hard to believe that American cinema was once an art form. Does anyone take movies seriously anymore? Peter Travers doesn't count.

Everyone Loves You When You're Dead, Neil Strauss (2011)

A collection of interviews by a marathon journalist. He deals mostly in the music business, and covers every pop and rock star you've ever heard of, plus a few stray CIA agents and lawyers. Because his subjects include the Britneys and Robert Plants of the world, there isn't too much in this volume in the way of existential truths. But it is compulsively readable and Strauss is sneakily ruthless in exposing his subjects as vapid, drug-addled, self-obsessed children, which of course most of them are. Except for Springsteen, but that goes without saying.

How They See Us: Meditations On America, edited by James Atlas (2010)

A collection of essays about America by international writers. There are a variety of sentiments on display here: America has stolen an Iraqi author's homeland and history, America has given a Chinese writer the freedom to realize his artistic ambition. America has failed the world, America has redeemed itself with Obama, America is a "tyrannical prom queen" (as one Nigerian writer's contribution states). One overarching theme materializes: America is everywhere. It does not know cartographical boundaries but instead has permeated the entire globe with its influence and hamburgers. If reality is informed by perception, all Americans need to read this book to discover exactly what "we" are in the 21st century.

And The Pursuit Of Happiness, Maira Kalman (2010)

Instead of the question of whether America is "good" or "bad," Kalman explores what America is. The daughter of Israeli immigrants, New Yorker Kalman spends a year exploring American history and notions of democracy in an attempt to discover if the founding fathers would be satisfied with what their vision has become. She travels around New York, to Washington, to California exploring the government, schools, farms. Most importantly, though, this book is completely illustrated in beautiful full color by Kalman. She paints Jefferson, she paints her lunch. The type is her handwriting, and she incorporates her own musings into the facts she picks up. The book is charming and whimsical but it's not simple.

Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best Of The Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize Editors (2011)

I want to marry this book. It's smart, sensitive, brutal, sharp, sweet, bearded... um what? The title sums it up: a collection of the best non-fiction, fiction and poems from small, independent publishers. Over a hundred pieces form the collection and while the subjects and voices are all unique, they are all united in their sheer truth and power. This volume has done nothing less than actually inspire excitement in me to live in a world where art of this caliber is being created by so many people. This book is a gift.

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky (2010)

Oh, David.

In 1996, David Foster Wallace was 35 and had just published Infinite Jest to international acclaim. After seeing a photo of Wallace in his trademark scruff and bandana, Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone decided he was "one of them" and sent David Lipsky to follow Wallace on his book tour. Lipsky spent three days with Wallace, smoking, eating, driving and talking. After Wallace's 2008 suicide, Lipsky published the complete transcript of the interview. For the small but fervent world of Wallace-philes, this is a rare conversational glimpse into Wallace's world, but part of Wallace's unique genius (and hence his devout followers) was that his prose was a direct route to every corner of his unique, crazy, gifted, super-human beautiful mind. Nothing he says here comes as a complete surprise; it serves as more of an addendum to his essays and fiction. Lipsky himself takes some liberties with the format and inserts some commentary which comes off as extremely clunky (to say nothing of the strange feeling one gets that this is Lipsky's attempt to cash in on Wallace's suicide, finding that these three days has suddenly appreciated a shit-ton of value). But those who love Wallace's writing, and his humanity, really, will take any scrap they throw at us, and end feeling a little emptier knowing that the supply is always diminishing.

Next Season: Foucault and more Wallace, the Vietnam War, probably some Sweet Valley High.

THE RUMORS ARE TRUE:

Meredith and I are lending our profound insight into the "world in gen" to the subject of literature. BUT WAIT: It's on teh internet SO YOU CAN READ IT!

Don't add this to your "internet to do list" unless you're in the market for a MMB (major mind blow).

from "Free Association"

"Nietzsche said a person must discover twenty-four truths every day before he can sleep well. First of all, if a person found that many truths, the supply of truth in the world would exceed demand. Secondly, a person who discovers that many truths isn't going to want to go to sleep."

--Xi Chuan

Prized Possession

It's really not even mine. It's Meredith's; she lent it to me two years ago when we shared a wall and the yard that I first read it on. She had read it for a class, said I might like it. I'd never heard of it, didn't consider the great depression among my realm of obsessions. But immediately after opening it, the book became a road map, a compass, a sacred ancient tome by a prophet not of this world, a paper limb.

I could have bought my own copy in the past two years-- whenever I'm in a bookstore I head straight for the A's, hoping there's more by him there, or that James himself will be perusing the beginning of the alphabet too, ready to share more secrets. But usually there's only another copy or two of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. A muscular volume, the the humble pale green of the spine greeting me like a friend I skinned knees with. And I always think of buying it, nine or so bucks to own it myself. So I flip it open, scan the pages. And they're bare. No underlines, starred passages or creased corners Meredith made during class (the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by its wings, or however else one may faintly designate the human 'soul,' that which is angry, that which is wild, that which is untamable, that which is healthful and holy, that which is competent and most marvelous and most precious...), lines that I've marked, and copied and recopied and since adopting (seizing, really) the loaner.


And the one at the bookstore was never on that yard, when we were still students, children on a blanket in the sun on a weekday afternoon. And it didn't come with me west, to California, then Portland, on to Michigan, then to Thailand, sitting in my carry-on like my only friend in the world.
(what's the use of trying to say what I felt.)






And somehow, between the months and the pages my own story has been seared into this volume. Vital scraps stuck absent-mindedly between pages: the ultimate safe-keeping place, an impeccable record is kept.


I open the front cover-- that face lined with exhaustion and dignity that has become Agee's own in my mind-- to find first a postcard from a friend visiting San Fransisco, addressed to my first house in Portland-- the address now a synonym for both infinite freedom and deadening defeat in equal measure, and nothing in between.


Next, a postcard bearing Frida's photographed portrait, purchased at the SF MOMA on my 23rd birthday, spent with Kelly-- art museum and burritos in the mission-- we owned the world.


A photograph taken my last spring in Burlington, later tried to draw its young leaves and new sun but couldn't come close to their brilliance.


A flier from a local winery in Portland.


And over the face of the first portrait in Walker Evans' series, on a sticky note: a website and number of a student loan agency, to whom I owe money, the rest of my life. I've never called the number.


Halfway through the book-- a flier for a booking/design collective in Burlington. The fall show schedule. Our social calendar in a town with just enough going on. Franzia, board games, b-movies when there wasn't.


Reciepts from a sushi dinner in Seattle-- my first week out West. $11.04-- avacado role and a Sapporo. Another receipt-- $3.50-- another Sapporo. Playing dress-up with other adults. I felt childish and mature at the same time, fearless and terrified. On the brink-- of the world, of what I would be in it. The sun set orange over the water and the warm June breeze sighed through it and I took a breath, found a home, in that.


"Small wonder how pitiably we love our home, cling in her skirts at night, rejoice in her wide star-seducing smile, when every star strikes us sick with fright: do we really exist at all?"





Tree bark I intended to press and write a letter on: the bronze paper skin of the Madrona. Its home Northern California, where Kelly and I spent a summer in the river re-organizing what we'd collected over the years in our minds re: our lives in the world. the futures that laid sprawling before us, boys. Suddenly the bark is a postcard from that time and place, far and away and long ago, now.





And finally, toward the end, between 292 and 293, a January letter from my sister, one of the hundred since we've been apart, since I left where we were for some idea of "more." Two young girls on the front of the card she made: "They remind me of us... although I'm quite thrilled that neither one of us have the boney arm belonging to the girl on the left," she says. "This weather reminds me of last winter, when we were together.... I only hope it can be that way again."
(what's the use of trying to say what I felt.)

And now, it sits on my desk in Thailand, in a school where I am somehow a teacher, not a student. Nine thousand miles from where I first picked up the book, but somehow closer than I've been in a while.

(but I am young: and I am young, and strong, and in good health; and I am young, and pretty to look at; and I am too young to worry; and so am I, for my mother is kind to me; and we run in the bright air like animals, and our bare feet like plants in the wholesome earth: the natural world is around us like a lake and a wide smile and we are growing: one by one we are becoming stronger... and one by one we shall loosen ourselves from this place, and shall be married, and it will be different from what we see, for we will be happy and love each other... it will be very different.)

DFW on Life

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

from DFW's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, which has since been published as "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life".

Makes the world seems that much emptier without DFW, who killed himself a year ago. A highly recommended, incredibly enlightening read.

Things I've Been Silent About

Continuing with the theme of being too poor to function and therefore forced into hyper-literacy, I thought I'd update with adventures in the wonderful world of the written word (while employing literary devices popularized in 7th grade Language Arts classes).

Since exiting the womb of formal education into the cruel indifference of the global economy and the world it's doing a pretty awesome job of fucking up, I've learned to take solace in two facts: I don't have kids, or a masters degree. Now, after reading Things I've Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi, I can add not living in Iran to that list.

Nafisi is jarringly unsentimental in her recounting of a life in a politically tumultuous environment, eventually overhauled by a regime so oppressive it makes the reign of Bush seem sane. Now a professor at Johns Hopkins, Nafisi began her career as a writer and liberal activist in an Iran so fearful of women that it viewed women in any position of power as "prostitution," punishable by death. More than just an "inspirational tale", this is volume is a fully-rendered and effective portrait of the human spirit as able to transcend external forces hell-bent on negating the value of human existence.

You can read Nafisi's blog here.

Reading: Kind of Like Fun, but for Poor People

*or muppets.

Being poor is sad.
Lack of funds means you can't spend money on copious amounts of crap that you'll get rid of in a few months. Luckily, there are plenty of things that you can do as a human that don't involve consuming goods. One thing I've been doing these past couple decades to beat the recession-blahs is going to my local library to browse the shelves, pray that my idle scanning of literature will one day lead me to fame and fortune on Jeopardy, and cast furtive glances at the bespectacled, bearded babe in the 900s. (heh. just a little Dewey Decimal System humor.)

Some of the books I've picked up in the last few months and would recommend to you:

Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azzerad. Could not put this down. From Henry Rollins to Calvin Johnson, and everything that mattered in between. Wow. Worth the read for the chapter on the Butthole Surfers alone.

Girls Like Us by Sheila Weller. Perhaps a little too embarrassing to read in certain public places, this was pretty damn riveting, in that guilt-laden, voyeuristic way.

Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period by Michelle Mercer. This book had almost no point except to extrapolate on the genius of Joni Mitchell, which is alright with me.

Across the Great Divide: The Band and America by Barney Hoskyns-- Music journalism by British people is a delectable treat indeed. And this book does a great job of making that case that The Band is the only band that has ever made music worth listening to.

Can't get enough of music bios. Like reading US Weekly about actually interesting humans, who also don't deny rampant sex with other famous people and cocaine use.

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates. Do not read when you're "pondering the deep questions about life in Amerika."

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson. Didn't actually finish this, it's like 600 pages. Stick to Che's own "Motorcycle Diaries" instead. All the drama and none of the bulk.

What I Talk about When I talk About Running, Haruki Murakami. This book is like the center of the Venn diagram for running and writing, which you'll like if you're into either or both of those.

A Wanderer in the Perfect City- Lawrence Weschler. This man is a prince among cultural "critics." This book chronicles numerous talented artistic individuals who perpetually exist on the fringe of breaking through into the cultural conscience, and is a very enjoyable read. Also, if you're interested in art or anything else, run, don't walk to pick up a copy of Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Put out by McSweeney's, and is incredibly smart and fun at the same time.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace. What can you say about this (late) guy that hasn't been said? It's hard to read words written by anyone else after reading DFW, but probably not as hard as it will be to watch the movie version of this book starring that guy from "The Office."

Another book that I've spent the past two or so years mulling over is Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. It chronicles various forms of resistance to the capitalist tendency to commodify everything in it's path since World War I. It's exhaustively researched and full of fascinating parallels like the one Marcus draws between Johnny Rotten and a 16th century German tyrant. It's been ruining my life since I picked it up but I can't put it down. What more could you want from a read?

Just picked up The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clezio, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize, and Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson, he of the same esteemed college preparatory school as yours truly. It was on the list of banned books, and as this is Banned Books Week, I thought I'd celebrate the freedom of the read.

Other fun things to do when you're poor include "getting back to nature" by walking around a park or otherwise outside space, riding your bike really fast down hills, working on your memoir, and having your friends buy you beer.
And remember, stealing toilet paper from work is a right.