Category: David Foster Wallace

I Write (/Think) Like…

Kyle 2 Comments

I recently plugged a couple graphs of my review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (excluding quotations, of course) into the Web site I Write Like. The humorous and perhaps unsurprising result was that I apparently write like David Foster Wallace: http://iwl.me/s/d7939cdb

Granted, I’ve always written in a childishly DFW-esque way; that’s part of why an old writing teacher of mine recommended him to me. But I also find that an author’s style will sorta bleed over into my own style–and, more disturbingly, into my internal monologue–when I finish reading a book.

Is this a common experience? I’m wondering if this shows up in book reviews often. The only time I’ve noticed it, actually, is in other reviews of books by David Foster Wallace. I also wonder what will happen when I finish my current book, Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, which changes point of view (and therefore voice) every chapter. I’m preparing for a narratively schizophrenic couple of days in my head.

Thanks, Matt, for passing this tool along!

Brief Review of Brief Interviews

Kyle 2 Comments

I’ve written a fair bit on this blog about one of my top two or three favorite authors, David Foster Wallace. I’m hoping to use this summer’s respite from required reading to finally finish slogging through his rather daunting catalogue. Of the three books that remained for me, I decided to start with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I think the requisite “acclaim for” pages in the softcover version nail it pretty well, especially the blurb from Time’s R. Z. Sheppard:

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is meant to interrogate the reader, to elicit fresh responses to horrors that have lost their edge in the age of information overload . . . It displays a range of intellect and talent that is unseemly for any one writer to have, let alone show off.

My only quibble with Sheppard’s assessment is his implication that Wallace is showing off. I mean, maybe. But I think the truth is probably more innocent and more tragic. I think he’s simply trying as hard as his prodigious talents will allow him. I think more than just about anywhere else in the Wallace canon (at least the 85% or so that I’ve encountered), Brief Interviews is where Wallace fesses up to what seems to account for some or perhaps most of why he writes. Things come to a head in Pop Quiz 9 of “Octet,” which begins, “You* are, unfortunately, a fiction writer” (145).

Ironically, there’s no fiction to be found in PQ9, because it’s where Wallace lays out, in agonizingly self-conscious detail, what he’s up in “Octet” and–as Sheppard points out–in pretty much the entire book. The piece isn’t working as he intended, he comes out and tells us, and so urgent is his desire to quote-unquote bare his soul** regarding the apparently undefinable thematic backbone of the Pop Quizzes that he decides to “address the reader directly and ask her straight out whether she’s feeling anything like what you feel” (154).

I frequently get the impression that Wallace haters think all his formal acrobatics are just some tiring attempt to be cute. I think they couldn’t be more wrong. As I said, I think he’s concentrating really, really hard. And, to borrow from Dave Marsh’s characterization of Aretha Franklin in “Respect”: “[Wallace] when [he’s] concentrating is as good as it gets” (Heart of Rock and Soul, 10). Here’s his description of his own desperation in resorting to this fourth-wall-breaking ploy, “which in the late 1990s, when even Wes Craven is cashing in on metafictional self-reference, might come off lame and tired and facile, and also runs the risk of compromising the queer urgency about whatever it is you feel you want the pieces to interrogate in whoever’s reading them” (146, emphasis his):

The trick to this solution is that you’d have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked — more like unarmed. Defenseless. ‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’ — this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to ‘Do you like me? Please like me,’ which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene. In fact one of the very last few interpersonal taboos we have is this kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else [Ten years later we have an abbreviation for the self-revelation that rhetorically must accompany such prying: TMI. ~KMO]. It looks pathetic and desperate. That’s how it’ll look to the reader. And it will have to. There’s no way around it. If you step out and ask her what and whether she’s feeling, there can’t be anything coy or performative or sham-honest-so-she’ll-like-you about it. That’d kill it outright. Do you see? Anything less than completely naked helpless pathetic sincerity and you’re right back in the pernicious conundrum. You’ll have to come to her 100% hat in hand. (154)

This is the sentiment at the heart of all the material I’ve found most compelling and heartbreaking–but also the most deeply reassuring–about Wallace’s work. For more of what I mean, see the painfully self-conscious Dean or President or Provost or whoever in Infinite Jest (my copy is currently missing or I’d name him for you). Or see that scene in IJ where he’s talking about all the things you learn in AA or the halfway house and there’s like four or five pages of semicoloned subclauses that just make me want to weep because they so thoroughly finger the jagged grain of each of our darkest secrets and most relentless insecurities. Or see, for the closest thing to PQ9’s direct and explicit desperation, the “intertextual quotation[s]” that contain “the really urgent stuff” as part of the “multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit” in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” (Consider the Lobster, 271).

The reason Sheppard’s show off misses the mark is that Wallace’s decision is ultimately a move of deep humility:

[I]t’s not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they’re reading is when they sit down to try to escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather it’s going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do . . . more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from ack at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.*** (159-160)

In the end, Wallace knows all he can do is ask us to think about it: “So decide” he concludes (160). I will be forever puzzled by the people who decide he’s simply putting up a front.

————————

* In all of these pop quizzes, we’re asked to make an ethical judgement or some other decision about one or more of the characters or situations in a short sketch. The sketch of PQ9 is of a writer writing an octet of quizzes (this “Octet” of quizzes, as it were), and so the implicit quiz question is something like “What would you do in my situation?” Thus, it’s important to be clear about the pronoun antecedents in these quotations: “you”–the reader of the Pop Quiz–are Wallace himself.

** See B.I. #20 and much of PQ9 on how we all get reduced to such banalities when we really drill down deep into the big-insights-into-the-human-condition layers of personal experience and attempted expression.

*** I wonder if being a good priest/pastor/preacher is perhaps analogous to learning–to use Wallace’s terms as he’s developed them here–when to be a reader and when to be a Writer, or more appropriately just a writer. I think the great emphasis on cultivating self-knowledge as part of priestly formation is so we can learn to see and get some kind of handle on which of these two impulses is most strongly informing whatever bit of priestly advice bubbles up for us in a particular situation. I.e., “In recommending X, am I actually just responding to the way this situation pokes at my own insecurities, or do I have the kind of critical distance that surely almost all of us need in order to be truly open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit?” Of course, theologically and rhetorically, the ability and desire to relate to fellow human beings as Wallace’s reader rather than his Writer is also really important. Most of us know a seemingly 100% Writer-priest or -pastor, and there’s a good chance he or she is not very effective.

DFW

Kyle 3 Comments

Clark Terry apparently once said “Count Basie was college, but Duke Ellington was graduate school.” I’ve felt the same way, since being introduced to the latter by a teacher and friend of mine a few years go, about Douglas Adams and David Foster Wallace.

In Wallace I found another author unafraid of the bold, if self-conscious, aside; he takes the sentiment in Adams’s “if you don’t want me to digress, then you may find that you are reading the wrong column” and compounds it to a state of near-manic (and hyper-honest) thread exploration and playful formalism. Fans of, in particular, Everything and More‘s “Small But Necessary Foreword” will know what I mean.

In Wallace I found another post-Snow polymath whose rangy prose didn’t so much interpolate disparate disciplines as span them. These guys display first-class knowledge of a sickening variety of really challenging technical fields in addition to their obvious literary prowess. Ask Cory Doctorow or Richard Dawkins or James Gleick if you don’t believe me–or just reread the middle third of The Salmon of Doubt or Infinite Jest‘s footnote 123, which are of approximately the same length.

In Wallace I found another thoughtful writing tutor and pointer-out-of-the-sublime. Wallace on Garner, Dostoevsky, and Federer and Adams on Rendell, Wodehouse, and Bach seemed at times to single-handedly (or would it be double-?) save me from the verbal and spiritual wasteland that is a college curriculum with only six humanities credits.

As I had with Adams, when I read Wallace I always thought: here’s an author with whom I don’t always agree but whose mind, though orders of magnitude more sharp, agile, playful, and generous than mine, at least seems to be organized in more or less than same way. Whose achievements, though light years beyond my reach, were somehow still embracing and empowering rather than intimidating and doubt-inducing.

The final parallel, of course, is that David Foster Wallace is, heartrendingly, also now gone. I somehow only found out a few hours ago. After my Douglas Adams mourning mostly ended, but as sadness that we’d never have new DNA books again remained, I’d occasionally console myself with the thought that at least the prolific Wallace seemed to have so much more to contribute. I have no doubt that he did. But this was a man who was chiefly concerned with forging unironic emotional connections with his readers, and, once you learned that, you didn’t have to read very far to guess that he spent a lot of time in pain. To be honest, as someone who’s grateful for both the joy and the sadness he shared with the world, I now take consolation mostly in the knowledge that he’s free of that pain.

Sunday Judgment III

Kyle

Today’s subject: nauseated vs. nauseous.

As I folded laundry this morning, trying to decide on a “Sunday Judgment” topic, I listened to some especially good moments in today’s special encore addition of Prairie Home Companion. In the “News from Lake Wobegon” segment, Garrison pulled a typically self-conscious SNOOT move: he used nauseated where most of us would use nauseous.

(“SNOOT (n) (highly colloq) is [David Foster Wallace’s] nuclear family’s nickname à clef for a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Satire’s column’s prose itself. This reviewer’s family is roughly 70 percent SNOOT, which term itself derives from an acronym, with the big historical family joke being that whether S.N.O.O.T. stood for ‘Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance’ or ‘Syntax Nudniks of Our Time’ depended on whether or not you were one.“)

My good friend Rachel, whose mom works for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was the one who first alerted me to this (faux?) faux pas. The SNOOTs claim that if you’re “nauseous” then you’re actually causing someone else to feel “nauseated” (that is, nauseous means just “causing nausea” and not “affected with nausea”). David Foster Wallace apparently agrees, both implicitly (he, or rather Hal in Infinite Jest, cares not for Webster’s, which issued the ruling that the SNOOTs “are mistaken” on this issue) and explicitly (“Nauseous for nauseated” makes his list of grievances at the beginning of “Authority and American Usage,” aka “Tense Present”).

Let’s be clear: I’m a SNOOT, though perhaps not a very good one. I do a lot of yelling at the TV when people get expressions wrong, especially when they hone in or confuse run the gamut (I try to) with run the gantlet (I’d rather not). And I relentlessly adhere to the typical advice that, while it’s no longer necessary to use that for restrictive clauses and which for nonrestrictive ones, it’s best to just do so anyway, since there’s no harm in doing it in what used to be the only correct way, whereas someone might assume that you’re unaware that there’s even a controversy if you disregard the outdated rule.

All that said, I’ve never been able to get worked up about nauseated vs. nauseous.

Of course, the very idea of the “Sunday Judgment” feature is that we can all have our own preferences about such matters. However, on this particular day, I worry that I’m perhaps the worst kind of SNOOT, the kind who’s only SNOOTy about the things he’s always known to be SNOOTy about. Is it wrong to feel like I should try to be more of an asshole so that I’ll at least be a consistent one?

—–

On a completely unrelated note, I realized today that Garrison and DFW have another preference in common. They both favor abrupt and less immediately satisfying ultimately more thought provoking story endings over the superficially more witty one-liner types that bring the story full circle by making some reference to the introduction. Would that I had the insight and daring to attempt the latter more often.

Go With The (Nework) Flow, Part I

Kyle

Some preliminaries:

(1) I couldn’t resist posting a link to this New York Times piece about eHarmony, et al. The “Algorithms of Love” in the headline alone made it worth it. (By the way, I love it when copy editors choose to force “EHarmony” and the like when these ridiculously capitalized words come up at the beginning of a sentence. It’s like a little “screw you and your trademark” from the folks for whom sloppy capitalization is almost an affront. Speaking of which, sorry for the up-style headlines on this blog. I abhor up style, but I somehow backed myself into this corner and am not about to back down now.)

(2) My friend Rachel just let me know that you can hear David Foster Wallace reading “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” from Consider the Lobster on “KCET Podcast: Hammer Conversations” (Episode 16), which is available on iTunes. I listened to it this evening, and it’s terrific. Copy snobs will love the little explanation about his use of em dashes, but anyone will almost certainly be moved by the story. Plus Wallace’s reading voice matches his “authorial voice” really well, in my opinion.

OK, on to the main event. I mentioned a couple posts ago that I hope to use this space as a sort of whiteboard for trying out ideas, and I’m expecting to need such a space in the coming weeks. I’m getting ready to start working on the algorithms for matching material offers and requests in GENIUS and as such am learning about solving network flows problems. Wanna learn a little bit about them with me? If so, read on.

We’ll start with the basic first lesson, which I sat through just the other day. The gist of flow networks is that you’ve got a collection of nodes with material traveling between them along directed connections called arcs. Nodes are either sources (supply nodes that create material), sinks (demand nodes that consume material), or transshipment nodes that simply send a material along.

What we try to solve for in these problems is an optimal flow vector, which is just a fancy name for a long list that says how much of the material flows along each arc. The vector is optimal in the sense that it represents the flow for which the problem constraints are met in the cheapest way possible (there’s a cost associated with moving a unit of material along each arc). The problem constraints are flow bounds (upper and lower limits on how much flow must move along an arc) and conservation of flow, which says that the outflow minus the inflow at each node must equal either zero (for transshipment nodes) or the supply or demand of the node (for sources and sinks, respectively). The second set of constraints are also called divergence equations.

Brief mathematical note for those who are interested: network flow problems are special cases of linear programs, albeit much easier to solve ones (via the network simplex method, rather than general linear programming’s modifier-less simplex method). There are also, apparently, special algorithms for solving various special-case problems that can be posed as network flow problems, including Euler’s famous Konigsberg Bridge Problem.

What does all this have to do with the nuclear fuel cycle? Stay tuned as I try to figure that out.

Wouldn’t That Be Nice

Kyle

About a year-and-a-half ago, I started to get into tennis. My friend Emily taught me how to play, but I also learn a lot from David Foster Wallace. His essay “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) is one of my favorites (I also like “Federer as Religious Experience” from the Times‘ Play Magazine). Part of what’s cool about it is his commitment to showing you what the networks won’t; he talks, for instance, about the psychological implications of the players warming each other up before the match, and his overall thesis is pretty well summed up by his observation that

The realities of the men’s professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin.

You know what you should at least be able to see on TV? Those lush finals! Neither the men’s nor the women’s Australian Open final is on broadcast TV, so I’m now forced to choose between going to the bar next door and begging them to switch one of the TVs off the Badger men’s hockey game and onto ESPN2 or heading back to my office to watch it over the internet (Charter Internet doesn’t carry the ESPN360 online channel, but the university’s ISP does). Since it’s a Friday night, I’m gonna go with the former.

I get that most Americans don’t care much about tennis (especially when there aren’t any Americans in the finals), and I know Australia’s especially challenging when it comes to carrying live events, and I know that in today’s information climate watching tape-delayed sports is borderline pointless…But for crying out loud, this is a Grand Slam!

Sorry for the rant. I’m just really sad that nobody much cares about my second-favorite sport. At least my favorite’s only a few months away.

Miscellany

Kyle 1 Comment

Apologies for the week-long absence. I’m sure it doesn’t seem to bode well for the future of this blog, but I’m honestly just trying to enjoy my last couple weeks of relative sanity before the new semester starts. And again, that means we’re pushing back the anticipated release of the CSC Sunday column. (Conveniently, that gives me more time to figure out just what the hell it’s going to be.)

Plus it was my birthday. More on that in a second.

First, here are a bunch of news items that caught my attention in the past week:

Financial Times: Green activists concerned over People’s Car

This has been in the news quite a bit and is a little worrying due to the pure numbers involved.

Science Daily: Mysterious Explosion Detected In The Distant Past

Includes some brilliant science writing:

Most bursts fall in one of two categories: long bursts and short bursts, depending on whether they last longer or shorter than three seconds.

New York Times: Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy, Study Finds

One of the (relatively few) John McCain ideas I can get behind is his point about wanting to inspire people to be willing to make sacrifices for something bigger than themselves (see David Foster Wallace’s excellent “Up, Simba!“). I think efforts like this could turn into our generation’s version of victory gardens and the like. Then again, my roommate and I have been talking about finishing up that insulating-plastic-on-the-windows thing for a couple weeks now (ever since we got our first real winter electric bill to go with our frickin’ hotel room heater), so it’s not like I’m tearing it up on the being-part-of-the-solution tip.

New York Times: Running and Fighting, All to Save Her Son

Why have my roommate and I been watching “Terminator: The TV Show”? (1) I love robots. (2) It’s writer’s strike good:

I propose circumventing the problem with the creation of two temporary critical categories: strike-good and, well, just plain good. To the second denomination I submit “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” a new Fox series that begins on Sunday.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I don’t think Michelle’s actually interested in the series, it’s just that we only have one TV.)

Science News: Small Infinity, Big Infinity

In other David-Foster-Wallace-has-written-a-book-or-essay-or-something-about-it news, here’s a neat little Cantor article. Set theory, meet game theory.

The Chronicle Herald: Another way to fly: blimps

No energy- or technology-related insight here, I just think it would be cool to fly around in blimps.

New York Times: Team Creates Rat Hearts Using Cells of Baby Rats

One of those “I didn’t know we could do that” moments. Well, something like that. Until recently, we couldn’t.

Times West Virginian: ‘Kids think it’s a game’

Another “Officials noted there may soon be a shortage of engineers” sighting.

Waco Tribune-Herald: Hewlett-Packard CEO visits Waco, talks about U.S. technology field

And another.

New York Times: Ford and Chrysler Unveil Their Redesigned Pickups, G.M. Buys Stake in Ethanol Made From Waste, Toyota Will Offer a Plug-In Hybrid by 2010

Thought it was interesting that all three business articles in my NYT email this morning were about auto makers. By the way, if you’re interested in “the alcohol economy” (as an energy, not intoxication source), check out Energy Victory by Robert Zubrin.

New York Times: American Cut Back Sharply on Spending

I don’t want to sound like a total economics ignoramus, but I really want to be excited about this news.

whatsnextblog.com: We Can Use Salt Water as Fuel Right Now

I’m not sure you should believe the hype, but this is interesting. I’d heard about this guy’s “radio”therapy stuff but not the burning salt water.

Lake Superior State University 2008 List of Banished Words

Great leadoff: “perfect storm.”

See, I wasn’t totally neglecting my blogging duties this week. Anyway, here’s a few pics from my birthday Saturday. Thanks to everyone who came out; it was terrific to see you all.


My parents came into town and brought a stadium cake (we were all sitting around watching the Packer victory). Not a good thank-you line: “Wow, did Rachel make it?’

Sarah and co. had just come from a rodeo (well, bull riding only).


The next day, Sarah brought over another cake, one Emily’s mom made. She (Sarah) went a little overboard with the candles.

Sorry about the ratio of pictures of cake to pictures of people. Apparently it’s no longer a good idea to post pictures of adults drinking beverages they’re legally allowed to drink.