when an innovative approach to the page becomes a suspect tic (David Foster Wallace)

I went to see "The End of the Tour," the David Foster Wallace film. I knew that, in some ways, I should not have been there. That Wallace's family vigorously opposed the film, gave no permission, did not want this famously private self to be re-enacted.

I respect that.

And. I was engaged, moved, saddened, heartened as I sat there in a packed theater watching the film. What a man, what a mind, what tender nuance was he. That bandana and those dogs. His wanting to be accurate, not shaped, not distorted by his bitter Rolling Stone interviewer, David Lipsky. His desire to live free of the self-doubt that accompanies both fame and obscurity.

This morning, in the wake of that cinematic experience, I read as much as I could about Wallace's widow, Karen Green—her art, her writing, her memoir. Having watched the film I felt it necessary to balance me out with her words.

Inside a Guardian interview, I was returned to Wallace himself, to words written to Jonathan Franzen in a 2005 email. Here Wallace is talking about the difficulty of writing past the known beats and grammar. Of continuously going out to a new edge so that one does not repeat oneself. His words brought to mind all the writers I've read who burst onto the scene with something new, refine that new over the next few books (if they are that lucky, few are), and then begin to tread the same water, return to the same tricks, become a parody of themselves, become (I have used this word a lot this summer, for I've reflected, perhaps too much, on all I've seen) a brand.

That's it, right? How do writers not become a parody of themselves? How do they avoid getting locked into their own deliberate constructions?

Wallace, who had so much to teach us, was thinking about that here:

 "Karen is killing herself rehabbing the house. I sit in the garage with the AC blasting and work very poorly and haltingly and with (some days) great reluctance and ambivalence and pain. I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic. It's a dark time workwise, and yet a very light and lovely time in all other respects."

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Oliver Sacks, David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max, Joyce Carol Oates, C.K. Williams: A morning spent reading

I had time, just now, that quiet time, of reading the magazines that came in last week.  Oh, the stolen deliciousness of it all.  In The New Yorker, I read of Oliver Sacks on his years dedicated, in large part, to experimenting with large doses of amphetamines, morning-glory seeds, LSD, morphine, and all other manner of neuro-shifters.  I thought of all the Sacks I have read these many years, of the seeming innocence of his beguiling childhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten:  Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, of his great empathy for patients and ferns and other earthly beings. His New Yorker essay delves, skips, and buries time before it rushes, headlong, toward its hard stop.  Sacks had discovered a book on migraines and it had become important to him.  He had a revelation about migraines.  He ...

... had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.

The next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book.  The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.

Writing books, Sacks suggests, saved him.  The next story I read, an excerpt from D.T. Max's much heralded biography of David Foster Wallace (in Newsweek), suggests how writing would and would not save this genius.  The excerpt, which focuses on Wallace's early correspondence with Jonathan Franzen as well as his infatuation with Mary Karr, suggests that this book is well worth reading as a whole.  I've always been a huge D.T. Max fan, and I'm certain I will learn from these pages.

In between the Sacks and the Wallace, I found two poems of interest.  Joyce Carol Oates has a chilling, compelling poem in The New Yorker called "Edward Hopper's '11 A.M.,' 1926"—worth reading from beginning to end.  Oates was one of several authors who contributed to one of my favorite poetry collections (a gift from my sister) called The Poetry of Solitude:  A Tribute to Edward Hopper (collected and introduced by Gail Levin). Clearly this project, all these years later, continues to inspire.

Finally, within the pages of this week's New Yorker is a poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite living poets.  I had the great pleasure and privilege, years ago, of interviewing C.K. in his Princeton home for a magazine story.  Later, I saw him read at the Writer's House at Penn.  He remains vital, interesting, experimental, and honest, and his new poem, "Haste," is a terrifying portrait of time.  From its later phrases:

No one says Not so fast now not Catherine when I hold her not our dog as I putter behind her
yet everything past present future rushes so quickly through me I've frayed like a flag

Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss? ... 

My first corporate interview isn't until 1 this afternoon.  I'm sitting down to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I figure it's time.


(That above, by the way, is my cat Colors, who lived with me for many years.  She's climbing into my bedroom window.  I'm eleven or twelve years old.  And I'm reading on my bed as she pokes her pink nose in.)

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Not perfection (and Jonathan Franzen on David Foster Wallace)

This is not my yard.  This is the perfect lawn of Chanticleer Gardens, where two of my books take place and many of my other books have been considered.  This is the lawn children tumble down, the lawn my own Chanticleer students once traversed as they made their way from prose poems to villanelles.

This is also not my life—this quiet, green perfection.  My life is more like last night—those 45 minutes of sleep that I finally got—or more like this morning, when, after deciding that further sleep was not an option, I turned on my computer only to experience a three-hour computer crash.  My email files have now been restored, thank you very much.  But it's 11:20 AM, and I have not dressed for the day.

What I have done, while wading through no sleep and no connectivity is to read and blurb a book, to talk to my father, and to read Jonathan Franzen's essay, "Farther Away," in last week's The New Yorker.  This is the piece my dear student brought to me on Tuesday.  This is the quality of work she finds inspiring.  And no wonder.  I share with you now the passage my student read aloud to me, on that gray day, in that dark and too-cold room, her voice the warmth, her presence the light.  It's Franzen reflecting on David Foster Wallace:

People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul.  A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure.  Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn't "belong" to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of people closest to him.

What we learn from our students.  What they yield.

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Make People Feel Stuff

This week the impeccable D.T. Max yields to us the life and thoughts of author David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker story "The Unfinished." My friend Ivy Goodman made certain that I saw and read the piece; as soon as her note came in, I stopped all else and did.

The story of Wallace, who took his own life at the age of 46 last year, is the desperately sad story of a man so committed to his craft that his own impassioned brilliance was, in the end, defeating. He could think through and past himself, but that wasn't enough. Indeed, as Max reveals, nothing but an utter reinvention of storytelling would suffice for Wallace, and since he'd done that at least once with his massive novel "Infinite Jest," attempts to write his third novel required an act of even greater transcendence.

"I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff," Max quotes him as saying. And: "It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies...in be(ing) willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet."

Make living people feel stuff. Yes. Isn't that it? Isn't that, in the end, what books are supposed to do? And why is that so hard (because, oh, goodness, that is hard)? And has it become increasingly irrelevant in a world that honors and rewards It books and Twitter books, quick tricks, sleights of hand, ideas that can be captured in a sentence?

We write our books, and then we rewrite them. We make them new every day to ourselves, and the moment they become flat in our eyes, overly familiar, known, processed—well, that's the moment they have died. That's the moment when we must put them away until something stirs in us again. Because if we cannot make ourselves feel stuff, we sure as heck aren't going to move others. The story of David Foster Wallace is a tremendously tragic one. It has the wrong ending. But his life, as told by D.T. Max this week, serves as a reminder about this writerly enterprise of ours. It puts us back in our seats with a whole and right directive:

Make living people feel stuff.

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Writing out of Loneliness

Memorialized this past week at New York University, David Foster Wallace, who recently died of an apparent suicide at the age of 46, was brought to fleeting life once more by those who knew him best—those who had received from him, learned from him, studied him, been sustained by him.

There is this line in the New York Times coverage that stopped me just now: "Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.”

I hold to that, too. I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.

Your fiction is with you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/books/24wallace.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

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Dark Skies

The loss of writer David Foster Wallace to an apparent suicide this weekend darkened skies already darkened by Ike, by skurvy politics, by homes and home lives forfeited to an economy that can't got a hold of itself. Wind, rain, floods, and a man too certain that no more choices existed, that tomorrow wasn't something to be waited for or looked toward. He was a writer, a teacher, a husband, a son. He was loved.

I am reeling for him and for those who loved him, just as I am reeling for the boy at a beautiful college who took his own life last week. I am holding my breath for the freshmen and freshwomen everywhere who are finding their way inside new walls, feeling their way toward light.

Sometimes I think words are the most fragile things there are.

Sometimes they are my grounding, my earth.

Today I do not rise above or even rise to anything but this: Hope for tomorrow. Hope for healing. Hope for a coming easiness.

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