by
Zadie Smith
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[...] when wars are fought, perfectly normal people fight them. Alongside the heroes and martyrs, sergeants and generals, there are the millions of average young people who simply tumble into it, their childhood barely behind them. Harvey was one those. A working-class lad from East Croydon at a loose end. [...]
"one those" is a typo in the original
[...] There is "plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us!" This is a cosmic joke told by Franz Kafka, a wisecrack projected into a void. [...]
in a paragraph about a cosmic joke (about death) told by Martin Amis)
[...] Maybe it was the fortuitous meeting of my mournful mood and his morbid material, but I thought his show, “Do I Really Have to Communicate with You?,” was one of the strangest, and finest, hours of live comedy I’d ever seen. It started with neither a bang nor a whimper. It didn’t really start. We, the audience, sat in nervous silence in a tiny dark room, and waited. Some fumbling with a cassette recorder was heard, faint music, someone mumbling backstage: “Welcome to the stage . . . Edward Aczel.” Said without enthusiasm. A man wandered out. Going bald, early forties, schlubby, entirely nondescript. He said, “All right?” in a hopeless sort of way, and then decided that he wanted to do the introduction again. He went offstage and came on again. He did this several times. Despair settled over the room. Finally, he fixed himself in front of the microphone. “I think you’ll all recall,” he muttered, barely audible, “the words of Wittgenstein, the great twentieth-century philosopher, who said, ‘If indeed mankind came to earth for a specific reason, it certainly wasn’t to enjoy ourselves.’ “ A long, almost unbearable pause. “If you could bear that in mind while I’m on, I’d certainly appreciate it.”
about a pretty hilarious-sounding anticomedian named Edward Aczel
[..] that unusual triune skill set--encyclopedic knowledge, mathematical prowess, complex dialectical thought [...]
describing DFW :D
It strikes me when I reread this beautiful story how poor we are at tracing literary antecedents, how often we assume too much and miss obvious echoes. Lazily we gather writers by nations, decades and fashions; we imagine Wallace the only son of DeLillo and Pynchon. In fact, Wallace had catholic tastes, and it shouldn't surprise us to find, along with Sartre, traces of Larkin, a great favorite of his. Wallace's fear of automatism is acutely Larkinesque ("a style/Our lives bring with them: habit for a while/Suddenly they harden into all we've got"), as is his attention to that singular point in our lives when we realize we are closer to our end than our beginning. When Wallace writes, At some point there has gotten to be more line behind you than in front of you," he lends an indelible image to an existential fear, as Larkin did memorably in "The Old Fools:" "The peak that stays in view wherever we go / For them is rising ground." Then there's the title itself, "Forever Overhead": a perfectly accurate description, when you think about it, of how the poems "High Windows" and "Water" close. That mix of the concrete and the existential, of air and water, of the eternal submerged in the banal. And boredom was the great theme of both. But in the great theme there is a difference. Wallace wanted to interrogate boredom as a deadly postmodern attitude, an attempt to bypass experience on the part of a people who have become habituated to a mediated reality. [...]
on Forever Overhead
reminds me of how much I love High Windows. the title alone is perfect
[...] Brief Interviews pitched itself as a counterweight to the narcotic qualities of contemporary life, and then went a step further. It questioned the Jamesian notion that fine awareness leads a prior to responsibility. It suggested that too much awareness--particularly self-awareness-has allowed us to be less responsible than ever. It was meant for readers of my generation, born under the star of four interlocking revolutions, undreamed of in James's philosophy: the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse, and philosophy's demotion into a branch of linguistics. How to be finely aware when you are trained in passivity? How to detect real value when everything has its price? How to be responsible when you are, by definition, always the child-victim? How to be in the world when the world has collapsed into language?
James = Henry James
[...] There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject matter, language that is--at the same time!--childishly scatological and annoyingly obscure. And if one is used to the consolation of "character," well then Wallace is truly a dead end. His stories simply don't investigate character; they don't intend to. Instead they're turned outward, toward us. It's our character that's being investigated. [...]
this is referenced in note with pk 279
There is a weird ambient sameness to Wallace's work. He was always asking essentially the same question. How do I recognize that other people are real, as I am? And the strange, quasi-mystical answer was always the same, too. You may have to give up your attachment to the "self." [...]
[...] It's about as far from an autobiographical portrait of Wallace as one can imagine, but it's fueled with a disgust that feels somehow personal. Wallace was constitutionally hard on himself, apparently compelled to confess not only to who he was but to who he dreaded being or becoming. [...] he is truly selfhood expressed to its unbearable fullness. We get a meticulous description of his self, the exact spot in which he sits (in a lounge, by a pool, in a garden) as well as exact coordinates in relation to the sun (as if it revolved around him). [...] Wallace annihilates him. God help the man who has chosen to worship himself! Whose self really is no more than the awards he has won, the prestige he has earned, the wealth he has amassed. [...]
To Wallace, a gift truly was an accident; a chance, a fortuitous circumstance. Born intelligent, born with perfect pitch, with mathematical ability, with a talent for tennis--in what sense are we ever the proprietors of these blessings? What rights accrue to us because of them? How could we ever claim to truly own them?
It's very interesting to me that this attitude toward gifts should have within it a current that is strongly anti-American, being both contra "rights" and contra "ownership." I've always had the sense, philosophically speaking, that Wallace's ethical ideas were profoundly un-American: he had more in common with the philosophical current that runs from Kant's "realm of ends" through Simone Weil's "sacred humans" and on to John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" than the Hobbes/Smith/Locke waters from which the idea of America was drawn. Wallace's work rejects "goal-directed" philosophies of human happiness, both because they isolate the self (the pursuit of happiness is a pursuit we undertake alone) and because this Western obsession with happiness as a goal makes people childishly "pain-averse," allergic to the one quality that is, in Wallace's view, the true constant of human life [...] His stories repel the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-interested or egoistic individuals, or that it is one's personhood that guarantees one a bigger slice of the pie. (The fat poet's talents or personal merits can't make him more worthy than anyone else.)
(typo in the original: it reads "Simone Weils" without the apostrophe)