dfw

Infinite Jest was a title that rang in my head for some reason, so I picked up the $5 British pressing paperback at Barne’s and Noble while looking for something of decent length to read on my first post-college vacation in spring of 1999. On the flight from Indianapolis to Seattle (via Detroit) I opened the massive novel and dived in.

One of my favorite memories of the trip was lying in the hostel in downtown Seattle and reading Infinite Jest. Just out of college and truly broke, there wasn’t a lot of night-time entertainment available.

I remember talking about David Foster Wallace with my friend Nathan when we stayed at his apartment where I read the first story of ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ and I was taken. The rest of the vacation involved hunting through multiple used-book stores to purchase the rest of his work. I spend the rest of the summer reading everything I could find by him, finally finishing IJ at the music camp I worked at that year. I spend a Friday evening in the dorm room while the rest of the team went out drinking.  After finishing the book, I had to get out and socialize, albiet briefly, just to get out of my own head for awhile.

I remember reading ‘The Girl With Curious Hair’ on the beach at Interlochen and finally ordering ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’ from Amazon when I had nothing left to consume.

Reading DFW made my brain echo in a funny but enjoyable way. The struggle and reach to comprehend was always worth the effort. It reminded me of the first time I heard Stravinsky and the opening bassoon of ‘The Rite of Spring’ ran through my head like warm water. Something about it just fit my chemistry and made me care more about what sounds I heard (and with DFW, what words I read).

Last week I was rereading ‘Consider the Lobster’ and surfing around to try and see if any new work was coming out. I’m looking forward to revisiting his work in the near future. The unfortunate passage is going to make the going a bit darker.

“This is water. This is water.” – DFW

September 15, 2008 | Filed Under Books, personal | Comments Off 

My favorite writer commited suicide yesterday. Looking at my bookshelves there’s not many left. Bukowski,  Burroughs and Carver are long gone, Selby and Thompson much more recent.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

Alongside with his commencement address, I’ll be re-reading my favorite short story by him as well, ‘Good Old Neon’.

(Good Old Neon – excerpt)

The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever. And that forever
is no time at all. I know that sounds like a contradiction, or maybe just
wordplay. What it really is, it turns out, is a matter of perspective. The
big picture, as they say, in which the fact is that this whole seemingly
endless back-and-forth between us has come and gone and come again in the
very same instant that Fern stirs a boiling pot for dinner, and your
stepfather packs some pipe tobacco down with his thumb, and Angela Mead uses
an ingenious little catalogue tool to roll cat hair off her blouse, and
Melissa Betts inhales to respond to something she thinks her husband just
said, and David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos
from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook and seeing my photo and trying,
through the tiny little keyhold of himself, to imagine what all must have
happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he’d read
about in 1991, like what sorts of pain or problems might have driven the guy
to get in his electric-blue Corvette and try to drive with all that O.T.C.
medication in his bloodstream ? David Wallace happening to have a huge and
totally unorganizable set of inner thoughts, feelings, memories and
impressions of this little photo’s guy a year ahead of him in school with
the seemingly almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic and
athletic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies, as well as
of every last cutting remark or even tiny disgusted gesture or expression on
this guy’s part whenever David Wallace struck out looking in Legion ball or
said something lame at a party, and of how impressive and authentically at
ease in the world the guy always seemed, like an actual living person
instead of the dithering, pathetically self-conscious outline or ghost of a
person David Wallace knew himself back then to be. Verily a fair-haried,
fast-track guy, whom in the very best human tradition David Wallace had back
then imagined as happy and unreflective and wholly unhaunted by voices
telling him that there was something deeply wrong with him that wasn’t wrong
with anybody else and that he had to spend all of his time and energy trying
to figure out what to do and say in order to impersonate an even marginally
normal or acceptable U.S. male, all this stuff clanging around in David
Wallace ’81′s head every second and moving so fast that he never got a
chance to catch hold and try to fight or argue against it or even really
feel it except as a knot in his stomach as he stood in his real parents’
kitchen ironing his uniform and thinking of all the ways he could screw up
and strike out looking or drop balls out in right and reveal his true
pathetic essence in front of this .418 hitter and his witchily pretty sister
and everyone else in the audience in lawn chairs in the grass along the
sides of the Legion field (all of whom already probably saw through the sham
from the outset anyway, he was pretty sure) ? in other words David Wallace
trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what
this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the
interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and
doubtlessly painful way ? with David Wallace also fully aware that the
clich? that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside somebody else
is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very conciously to
prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line
of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting
anywhere (considerable time having passed since 1981, of course, and David
Wallace having emerged from years of literally indescribable war against
himself with quite a bit more firepower than he’d had at Aurora West), the
realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part
to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud,
‘Not another word.’

September 13, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off 

minor progress

Hit a small personal goal in the gym this week with a squat of 315. It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to get over 300. I’m going to try for 350 by the end of the year. With a current 365 deadlift that I want to try to bring up to 400 by the end of year I’m feeling pretty happy with my progress. If the shoulder holds out I’m going to start working on my bench again. The long term goal is a 300, 400, 500 for bench, squat, deadlift. I did a pretty easy 275 bench before shoulder surgery, so I’d like to get that back in shape.

I’m about halfway through the Cressey training cycle. After that I’m planning to focus on power lifts and cutting some weight. I found a great power lifting cycle that I want to start in January to try and really bring up my strength and building a little bit of size. The one thing I’ve really learned from Cressey is to cycle effort rather than constantly blowing out every time I hit the gym.

September 10, 2008 | Filed Under personal | Comments Off