I have to read David Foster Wallace now, for the rest of the summer, because: ugh, I said Id teach that doorstop of a book this fall, and so I am surrendering a chunk of my inner life, starting now - Mercury direct, and all - to the D/F/W project, and: Ive read that thousand-page-&-pound book twice already, & most of his other books, but here we go again, and I would like to start by admitting a prejudice, which will define the first stage of re-entry: I dont think hes funny. In any case, hes clearly not kidding, and I have trouble with that. Or maybe its that hes not silly. Sometimes hes a vaudevillian, of course, but his little vaudevilles arent sufficiently irrelevant to please me. I think hes talented! But the specific tenor of his self-pity is way different from mine. I love self-pity! Hes a male-type-person, like me, afflicted by what Adrienne Rich calls a mans violent passivity. But Im thinking about the different ways in which different types of white guys grow up self-pitying in America. Or maybe I need to really find out what it means to be bi-polar, to have a personality that is significantly mediated by pharmaceuticals. The 3 AM guy wants me to add that at least hes not Jonathan Franzen!
Posted on: Fri, 04 Jul 2014 20:32:56 +0000
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