Wait...what's this? A new blog entry? Sac me bleu!
All right, so March hasn't been the best blogging month. Due to visitors and four full days of NCAA March Madness* my blog has been neglected though I'll try and finish the month strong, especially since I'll be hopefully going to a couple concerts this week. Stay tuned.
* Which was awesome by the way, one of the better tournament opening weekends I've seen, which makes me wish I'd followed the season more closely as it probably would've been even crazier. Especially loved the KU-NIU game, the Cornell games, and the St. Mary's-Nova game. The Murray State upset was pretty great as well.
Anyway, for now, my third* installment in catalogued my newfound affection for David Foster Wallace. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a compilation of non-fiction essays published in the 90s. I finished most of the book a couple of months ago, but one of the essays (more on it soon) dealt with the films of David Lynch and I felt I had to educate myself on the relevant films before reading that one. Thus, I only formally completed the book last week.
* Part one was about his incredible commencement speech and part two was his equally awesome short story collection Oblivion.
So, naturally, I liked some of the essays more than others. Some were not as culturally relevant two decades after their writing and some were too dense for me to get out of them what he likely intended, but others still resonated and were a joy to read.
My favorite was the title essay, one that was a lengthy (100 pages) first-hand account of DFW's trip on a luxury cruise at the expense of Harper's, the magazine he was writing for at the time. What I appreciate the most about his writing is the way he looks at society in a specific way. He often writes essays more broadly (more on those momentarily) but I like hearing of him interacting with individuals and groups and then drawing interesting conclusions about human nature. Never having been on a cruise myself, it was fascinating to have the experience explored by someone so observant and literate in that he could really convey to me the cruise culture: the kind of people that go on the cruises, the kind of people that work on the cruises, what the intentions of the cruise line company are, how the cruise is marketed, what kind of activities they are, how one passes time on the cruise, and so on and so on. Like most good writers, Wallace thinks about everything when he's in a place. He wonders about the parts of things (cruises in this case) that go mostly unseen, he likes to examine all sides of things, which I as the reader really appreciate. I also like it when he's at the center of the essay as I'm always curious about how someone as smart as him fits into normal situations, especially knowing that he was privately very depressed and, eventually, sadly, took his own life.
He treads similar ground in Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All in which he visits the Illinois State Fair near where he grew up. In this one he strictly adheres to kind of a log-type structure (e.g. starting each section w. something like 08/05/0905h) which sometimes works against him as certain parts of his visit were far less engaging than others -- in contrast to the cruise essay, with a generally chronological structure but still able to jump around for the benefit of the narrative. Nevertheless, the bits about discovering where in fact all those strange people buy those full-of-attitude shirts that say things like (and I'm quoting from the essay), "We'd Get Along Better...If You Were A BEER!" and "What Part of NO Don't You Understand?" were funny but also enlightening as such observations led to some pretty excellent ruminations on the difference slices of American society and geography and so on. I imagine I could someday write a similar essay that's about half as good on the Common Ground Fair back in Maine.
The more difficult essays to crack are the more broad ones in which, to put in bluntly, he talks about things I can't quite understand. For example, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction lost me in some points, due sometimes to the fact that (as it was written in 1990 or so) most of his TV examples were ones that I was not even vaguely familiar with. Now, to be clear, since I'm a writer myself and furthermore a writer who watches and wants to write TV, some parts of the essay were right in my wheelhouse. But, even then, with some of them, like a discussion of TV as low-art vs. high-art, I had to ignore the fact that, thanks to HBO and a shift in TV that happened about a decade ago, some of the programs on TV now are as good as anything being produced in films or novels*, which wasn't really the case in 1990. What was really tricky though, was the way he referenced other essays and repeatedly referred to things as being "postmodern" when I didn't quite see how they were. I'm not exactly describing my difficulties with it the way I want, but I'll just leave it at that it was too dense at times and he's quick to coin terms and then use them frequently, often to the detriment of the average reader (i.e. me). This was also the problem in the short essay, Greatly Exaggerated which dealt with literary criticism instead of TV and begins with the alienating, "In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along..." and then goes onto to discuss Foucault and Derrida, people I know very little about. I can barely even tell you what that essay was about.
* I could name those shows, but if you've read this blog before you know what I think they are.
His two essays on tennis were interesting, and worked well with each other. The first, Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, telling how his smarts and strategy as a young tennis player, especially in contrast to other immature opponents, led him to a lot of success, though he was eventually derailed by a lack of athleticism. Though, like most Wallace essays, it's about far more than that. So, by the time we got to an essay about mid-level ATP pro Michael Joyce (the essay has a long name and I don't want to type it) Wallace's credibility and background were established and he was able to, like in the cruise line essay, delve into a world (mid-level and low-level tennis pros) that most people know little about. And not just what it's like to be such a tennis pro, but the childhood and life decisions it takes to get there and some other really good stuff.
The last essay, as I've now mentioned all the others, was the previously alluded to David Lynch Keeps His Head. It was written before Lost Highway came out (one of the movies I watched before reading) and DFW talks eloquently about Lynch's status in the film world, his influence on writers with Blue Velvet, and conjecture on how, if really at all, Lynch judges and thinks about himself. What I really respect about DFW is that he does his homework (though I imagine for someone as wicked smaht as him it's more just living and learning instead of homework) and can expertly discuss film and Lynch's career in this essay, and then come back with a seemingly endless knowledge of literature and TV and tennis and anything under the sun. The Lynch essay worked on that level, though I don't think his movies have the same effect they have now, though as Wallace would surely argue that's because he's so influential that elements of his style are present in the movies of so many directors that, in retrospect, his films don't seem as revolutionary*.
* I kind of talked about this in this entry when analyzing Vonnegut.
Though more up and down for me than Oblivion (my hunch is that I prefer Wallace's fiction to his non-fiction, which may put me in the minority) I still thoroughly enjoyed the collection. In the same way it's fun to talk to someone who is really smart and has a lot of theories about the world, it's fun to read that kind of writer. While my next few books will probably be catching up on some heavyweight 20th century writers that I've missed along the way, I'm sure I'll be checking out more DFW in the next few months, though I'm torn on whether to tackle on his novels or another collection of fiction/non-fiction. Time will tell I suppose.
Back tomorrow with probably something about a movie or movies I've seen recently.
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