#213 Another Pioneer- David Foster Wallace

By now you should all know how much I love and admire the writing of David Foster Wallace. You’ve heard my gushing diatribes about the genius of these stories, so I will try not to over-hype this—any more than I already have, that is.

What begins as an off-hand description of a passenger’s surroundings aboard a commercial airline, turns into a 26-page running tangent. 26 pages—one paragraph! How very DFW. You either like this type of literary challenge or you don’t. I can picture DFW siting in the airplane himself letting his mind wander where it will, and him just writing down what goes through his mind. This is what came out. One flight, 26-pages, one paragraph, pure brilliance.

Word of the Day: Heuristic-enabling a person to learn or discover something for themselves (google dictionary)

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on. Do I sound biased here? Who cares, it’ds my blog and my rating system.

#155 Incarnations of Burned Children- David Foster Wallace

#155 Incarnations of Burned Children- David Foster Wallace

“If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child.”

What a horrifying title! As it suggests, this story is about a child burned, or scalded really bad by a pot of boiling water. Mother is overwhelmed trying to both cook and hold the child, Father is busy outside fixing the tenant's front door.

Once again DFW pushes the boundaries of what short fiction can be. This isn’t a vintage DFW weighty novelette. In fact this story is just a single paragraph…a single paragraph three pages long of course. These are the thoughts of the Father as he attempts to understand the situation, calm his child’s pain, quiet the voice blaming the mother and angry at his own failure to see the obvious.

Notable Passages: “Daddy bent in and was face to face with the child on the table’s checked edge repeating the fact that he was here and trying to calm the toddler’s cries but still the child’s breathlessly screamed, a high pure shining sound that could stop his heart.”

Rating: 10-8-10-8 Total= 36

#119 The Soul Is Not a Smithy- David Foster Wallace

#119 The Soul Is Not a Smithy- David Foster Wallace

Reading David Foster Wallace can be a commitment. The length and meticulous detail in his works don’t lend themselves to “light-reading.” However, if you are willing to put in the effort, and keep focus (something missing from a lot of internet-aged readers) the payoffs can be huge.

To some, this style of over-prose may seem to be a bit tiresome, but I assume these are the same people that would rather fast forward the first 2 ½ hours of Die Walkurie, a tough opera to get through for a novice, just to listen to the 3 minutes they know…The Ride of the Walkurie. For an opera fan, or an avid lover of the long-form in any of the arts, the adventure and ride of the exposition makes the payoff so much sweeter.

Speaking of focus and boredom, Terence Velen is a fourth grade student having a hard time concentrating at school. He spends his days staring through the classroom window, subdividing his attention through small, reticulated metal mesh squares and letting his imagination create his own reality. Meanwhile in class, his substitute Civics teacher, Mr. Richard Johnson (a nice name for a civics teacher in the 1960’s) “had just written KILL on the chalkboard.” Then KILL THEM, and finally KILL THEM ALL.

We learn that Mr. Johnson had an obvious nervous breakdown and while most of the class fled the scene in a panic, there were four unwitting hostages, including Terence. These four were among the perceived "slow" or "deficient" students. But its seems that they were neither slow, brave, unlucky, or unwilling to leave. And it seems they weren’t really hostages, as much as daydreamers confused about what exactly was going on around them.

“In testing many school children labeled as hyperactive or deficient in attention are observed to be not so much unable to pat attention as to have difficulty exercising control or choice over what it is they pat attention to.”

Many of DFW stories follow a style such as this, a frenetic accounting of an unfocussed mind. Some have used his writing (unfairly to both him and the mental health profession) as a peek inside the mind of such young people who have suffered misdiagnoses or misunderstandings or worse, mis-medications. Beyond the obvious technical skills of these works, and beyond the comedic or tragic circumstances of the plots, there is a deep truth here, a soul that calls out to be recognized.  At once, impressive, touching, heartbreaking, and hilarious...there is only one DFW.

Notable Passage: “There is something about someone throwing up anywhere within a child’s earshot that serves to direct and concentrate his attention with an utmost insane force…”

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on. Do I sound biased here? Who cares, its my blog and my rating system.

#85 Good Old Neon- David Foster Wallace

#85 Good Old Neon- David Foster Wallace

Another round of O.Henry (award winner) Friday, this one is from my favorite author David Foster Wallace. DFW was included in the annual Prize Stories collection three times, this one is from the 2002 O.Henry awards. 

Good Old Neon is the mental stream of a troubled man going through psycho-analysis. We learn early on that he will commit suicide so there isn’t much hope in this story, but there is intrigue. It reads like a lecture in an Ethics seminar discussing the philosophy of a paradox, the fraudulent paradox in fact. Can you fake being a fraud? If you could, wouldn’t that automatically make you a fraud?

“…I’d been fraudulent even in my pursuit of ways to achieve genuine and uncalculating integrity.”

“I just couldn’t see myself talking pills to try to be less of a fraud.”

“how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good.”

It has always been DFW’s strength to tap into the manner in which we think:

“I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head.”

We can have a thousands of thoughts go through our head at any one moment and somehow, DFW will find a way to verbalize it, make it real, and have it make sense.

“This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.”

“…and yet we all seem to go around trying to use [spoken language] to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking…deep down everyone knows it’s a charade…”

Speaking of paradoxes and DFW’s mathematical mind, did you know that “the very smallest number that can’t be described in under twenty-two syllables” can be described by using that previous sentence containing twenty-one syllables. I thought that was a fun aside that was thrown in.

The ultimate paradox about this piece is that by reading someone’s self-awareness about his own fraudulence, really about the fraudulence in all of the human psyche, we’re reading about as truthful a thing as I can imagine. 

Of course knowing that DFW was destroyed by his own mental problems, it is also heartbreaking to imagine that this was a glimpse of his own torment. And hearing DFW use a narrator to talk about his own suicide is unspeakably sad. Like what he says in here about the horror of knowing that his analyst isn’t smart enough to help him, all he wanted was somebody smart enough to disprove the logic of his own fraudulent paradox. With a mind like DFW, there simply wasn’t anyone out there smart enough to out-logic a genius.

Notable Passage: “The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever is no time at all."

Rating: Once again…Not Rate-able…it is unfair to compare DFW to anyone else. To do so I’d have to develop a whole new system.  He ruins the curve…so lets just say he gets a perfect score and move on.

#58 Mister Squishy- David Foster Wallace

#58 Mister Squishy- David Foster Wallace

Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy!  I’ve been waiting for this since I started this project.  David Foster Wallace is such a pleasure to read.  Since his death in 2008, I’ve been reading or re-reading his catalogue of work.  This collection of short fiction, Oblivion, is one of the only things he published I have not yet read.  So, with absolute joy and without trying to temper my impossibly high expectations, I plan on reading one of these a month until the book is complete.

DFW is truly a singular figure in literature. There is absolutely nobody who understands, or can craft the english language as fully as he does. He once wrote an in-depth book review of a new Dictionary edition…and it was truly entertaining in a completely non-ironic way. 

Mister Squishy isn’t really a short story (perhaps short for a man who wrote an 1,100 page novel) This short fiction is a 6o-page, small font, wide-margined, novelette-sized satirical running dialogue on the buffoonery that occurs during a product test focus-group to choose the next great sugary snack cake, and of course, all the adjacent tomfoolery and hi-jinx attached to such an endeavor. The new snack cake in question is called:

“Felonies—a risky and multi-valant trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin…”

It’s the brilliance of DFW that such a long descriptive work can be so engaging, but it is beyond that.  Nothing escapes the eye of the narrator, nothing goes past the lens without comment and clarity. If this whole view looks like a image distorted through a fun-house mirror, its only because that’s what we’ve become in a all-consumer-all-the-time world.

The piece reads as a longer and smarter George Carlin Skit. It’s Satire at its finest.  I wish I could print the whole thing, but here is just a random sampling of DFW’s brilliant description of modern commercialism:

“…the familiar Mister Squishy brand icon, which was a plump and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its eyes squeezed partly shut in an expression that somehow connotated delight, satiation, and rapacious desire all at the same time. The icon communicated the sort of innocuous facial affect that was almost impossible not to smile back at or feel positive about in some way, and it had been commissioned and introduced by one of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt’s senior creative people over a decade ago, when the regional Mister Squishy Company had come under national corporate ownership and rapidly expanded and diversified from extra-soft sandwich breads and buns into sweet rolls and flavored doughnuts and snack cakes and soft confections of nearly every conceivable kind; and without any particular message of associations anyone in Demographics could ever produce data to quantify or get a handle on, the crude line-drawn face had become one of the most popular, recognizable, and demonstrably successful brand icons in American Advertising.”

In case you were wondering, that last sentence is 126 words, which for DFW is miniscule.  The reader of pieces like this must keep focus. If you lose the thread all could be lost, however, follow along and the entertainment is endless.

Rating:  Unrated*

*It is unfair and impossible to rate these pieces. The quality, scope, craft, and impact of Wallace’s writing is unlike anything else. If I had to rate it, clearly it would be 10’s across the board.  But since i don't want to ruin the curve for everyone else, lets just set these aside as something different.