David Lipsky on David Foster Wallace: A Slow Descent into Idolatry

Hi fellow DFW fans (obsessives?) I went to the Lipsky event last night. I thought about cleaning up my notes of the event, but as you will see there wasn't much to actually report, sadly. Essentially, Lipsky, in a disconcerting nervous manner, regurgitated many facts he collected for his book(He spent a considerable amount of time just quoting other people, of which he includes in his book,) and actually just read quotes from his book for at least an hour. I left after an hour so I cannot attest to the end of the program, or to the intelligence of the question and answer part, but I can attest to the fact that Lipsky seriously phoned this one in.

For the most part, I didn’t understand the actual need for this event. He wrote the book many months ago, and it was safe to assume that most people read the book, and yet, he still just read from the book, and told anecdotes that he uses in the book, or, if you are any sort of DFW fan you already knew. I could understand that perhaps he wanted to discuss the aftermath of the book, or DFW’s legacy today, but for him to just get up there and not safely assume that we read the book, or that we did, but still go on to just read from it, well it felt a little patronizing. I hope someone else at the event disagrees with me. Lipsky seemed like a nice enough guy, but the event seemed truly pathetic, and wasteful, though the free wine was a nice touch, and because of the Wallace list serve, I bought Parallel Stories, and so far, it has been quite enjoyable. Anyway, instead of a synopsis of the event, which I can’t actually do, I thought it would be fun to give you a slightly edited stream of consciousness of the event. Enjoy, I hope.

Um, ok, not sure where to start one this one. At least there is a great deal of variance, I think, if you count every type of white person as variance. Mostly women, it seems, which is different from other DFW events, but it’s still a fucking hipster fest, which makes me kind of feel like shit. Am I this desperate? Feels like the substantiation of the book Stuff White People Like, and the website Look at these Fucking Hipsters. Cool shoes, where did you get them Urban Outfitters, or a vintage shop in Williamsburg, let me guess are you getting a master or doctorate in something pointless? The ironic point, because we all know DFW loved irony, is that he railed against this over-intellectualization.I KNOW

The place, The Center for Fiction, which is a pretty ballsy name, seems like a white person haven, full of indie books,  a baby grand piano; as if its the last place where slavery is allowed, OK, just kidding, but not really, you know…busts of famous authors, wearing Christmas hats, how fucking quaint. A first generation air conditioning, lights hanging from the ceiling that ooze elegance. OK, maybe too much self-hatred here, perhaps, perhaps.

Also, what makes Lipsky any sort of authority on anything? An opportunistic book? I can't fully imagine the demographics here, a Pale King members group, cool, a bunch of old people that are perhaps Lipsky family or more likely members of the Center for Fiction. So much corduroy. ugh, I think i hate myself, what does this to people. The room feels like a mirror to what I must look like to other people. I basically can see what I will look like and be doing at every stage of my life. Old with circular glasses, chintzy sweaters, wiry hair. Oh man, I can feel the loneliness in the group. stop, it hurts, please, stop. Somehow, I've never seen more red heads in a room. It's odd. I don't really know what Lipsky looks like, so he could pretty much be anyone in this room, I think.

There's a strange assumption about a roomful of DFW obsessives. You assume some sort of kinship, not only because you've read pretty much everything, even those pdf of the archives and his first poem (oy vey), but because somehow, you think, that someone who gets DFW will get you, which, well, I can't tell if that's a bad assumption, elitist, desperate, or correct, or a nice mix of everything. I don't know why the ambiance makes me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it highlights how elitist I truly am: I am that guy, sitting next in front of me, sloppy hair that he think looks cool, hipster clothing that is purposefully disheveled, interested in esoteric movie, nay, film theory. It's funny, this gap between who DFW chooses to write about, and the people who read him. What passes, often, as challenging fiction, sometimes just mimics elitist fiction, fiction that cannot be fully enjoyed without the leisure of substantial time, a deep vocabulary, the skill to sit and read etc etc etc.

Overhead conversations: “this is my grandson, he's on the editorial staff of New York magazine. Shepping some serious nachas.”

“I read like 20 manuscripts today, I described one as a masturbatory exercise of intellectual showoffery,” Sheesh.

The women sitting next to me looks desperately sad, like she clings to books the way someone in the water clings to a life-vest.

I feel comfort from the dude wearing a harley davidson sweatshirt.

Hasty made up statistics of the event:
1. skinny jeans and cool shoes - 87%
2. amalgam comfort with sexuality - negative 27%
3. prescriptions of anti-depressants - 90%
4. logged therapy hours - ugh
5. existential angst - see previous question.
6. iphones- 98%

Lipsky sits down in the front: Handsome in a sort of politician manner. Tall, wearing a well fit suit, blue shirt, and red tie, a young republican in the making.

The introduction is given by some nice guy named Bill who teaches at the center for fiction. He described his class as “plunging deeply into DFW.” too easy, I know. Stop, please. He described teaching Infinite Jest as “stimulating and exciting adventure as their ever was.” Dude needs to get out more.

I think we can agree that no one actually gives a shit about Lipsky, and that it's getting stranger and stranger to hold these vigils. Lipsky feels like a relic, a bone of a saint, a clothe the saint touched.

Bill actually makes the comparison that Lipsky is the equivalent of Boswell to Johnson. Nope. Incorrect. Lipsky knew DFW for six days.

Lipsky now speaks. Tells us how he came to write the book - (forget me if I'm wrong, but you knew him for like six days, at most?) Tells the basic story - why he chose to write this book, (It’s starting to feel more and more that he wrote the book to capitalized on a situation and he didnt actually know DFW at all.)  Quotes Costello, a lot. Quotes more Costello.

He keeps on referring to DFW as “Dave.” He needs to stop doing this. He really likes laughing at his own jokes, oh man. Lipsky is seriously nervous. Sweating, a nervous tic of scratching at the back of his neck, drinking a lot of water. What’s Lipsky actually thinking right now? Maybe he really just doesn't realize that people read his book? because he just says the same thing from his book over and over again. Lipsky can’t emphasize enough how jealous he was of “Dave.” He keeps asking us really patronizing questions - “do you know how book tours work?”  Well, probably not from our own experiences, but we do know how they work because we read your book, that came out a while ago. “Are any of you graduate students?”

Best part of the night: Lipsky’s gf wanted to sexy-time DFW.

Lipsky tries to make it seem that his book was meant to show how electric of a person DFW was, how awake, and alive, despite the fact that in the book, DFW, comes off as seriously neurotic and anxious, obsessed with image. So, at the end of an hour, we end up were we started, still saddened by the loss of a mythic character, obsessively holding on to him anyway we can, looking for answers, for clues both to his death, and to his power, ever more leaning towards some form of worship.

That truly was an hour of our time. Not sure what happened afterwards. But I hope it redeemed the hour that came beforehand. I think we need to stop talking so much about DFW the person and considerably more about his work. Which seems obvious, but apparently not? 

Ten Years Later: The Lessons of 9/11

Soon we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the day that changed contemporary American life forever. We as a nation stand embroiled in two endless wars. We created a homeland security sector of the government, we feel less naive, more vulnerable, and less certain of ourselves as a country. Airport experiences are more of a nuisance, but when it comes down to it, on a day to day, basic level, has 9/11 changed the lives of the masses in America? Obviously, those who actually lost friends and family in the attacks, those who suffered trauma from the attacks, their lives have been changed irrevocably and I dont mean to make light of their burden and suffering, but for most Americans, even most New Yorkers, does it matter, does it affect our lives, or better yet, do we care? Do we care about the politics, has it made us more active in anyway, whether in a need to know more about world politics, or in the desire to help other people, or to bridge cultural gaps? I don’t know.

This isn't to say that the day isn't vividly stained on our memories. We can all remember where we were when we first heard the strange news. I was in class, Jewish History class in my junior year in high school, with a teacher who we made fun of most of the time, and someone came in an announced the news, “A plane hit one of the Twin Tower,” and like that this bearer of awful news flew away probably to tell another class.  At first, we all laughed. We didnt actually understand, or we couldnt understand the words. A plane hit the Twin Towers. Apparently, when an event falls so far out of the range of expectancy or normalcy it takes your brain some time to actually process it. We thought a dinky little toy plane crashed into one of the windows. We simply, as 16 year old teenagers ,could not fathom the actual destruction. As people obsessed with events of terror we knew of terrorism, in Israel, we knew of bombs tearing through restaurants, but like so many other people, in our minds, that danger stayed out there, never in our home. This supposedly, was different.

The administration then ran an ad hoc assembly in which they attempted to allay our fears, though I dont remember many of us fearing anything in particular, because as teenagers it takes something truly personal to break through our shell of self-involvement and insecurities. Some people cried, I think. Some parents immediately took their children home for reasons I didnt fully understand then. No one really knew much of anything, and some people started to use the day as social currency. “Well, I saw ash rise from the roof, I saw it with my own eyes. Well I found a document floating in the air.” Some teachers allowed their classes to watch the news, to watch the towers fall in real time, while others, like myself and my group of friends watched it on endless replay later as we got home. Traffic came to a standstill so my house, a mere ten minute walk from school, became a haven for six of my friends stuck in brooklyn. We all watched TV, hungrily waiting for news, seeing all the newscasters without their jackets on, sweat all over their face, and a strange look of calm as they continuously replayed that famous footage. But even on that day, on that day itself, we ended playing video games, probably mario kart, or mario tennis, or more likely goldeneye, because what else could we do?

Eventually, it seems, we as a people acclimated. Life continued, we forgot the fear and striking excitement of the day. We laughed at the anthrax jokes, at the random color coded levels of alert, and life went on day in and day out, and for me, as I imagine for many others nothing actually changed, at all. We went to war, I think I watched some of it on TV, possibly I argued about it, but most likely not. We went to war again, and again, I watched it on TV and definitely did not argue about the merits of invading Iraq. I knew nothing about the details, and I still no very little about the details. As a people we’ve grown tired of the wars, but dont seem to care that much how to end them.

I’m not sure what this says about me, or if I am correct in my generalizations, about my generation that 9/11 is a blip on our radar. In fact, 9/12, strangely represents a more important day, the day David Foster Wallace hanged himself. But I imagine I am not alone in my apathy. I dont know anything about the two wars. I dont read the news about them, I dont know the names of the general, or the stages set up to lessen the presence of our troops their. I dont know how the number of casualties. For the most part, If you asked me is my country at war i would know to say yes, but the words would feel false. I dont know if this brings up some pressing questions such as: Why do most of us care so little about politics? Is it the more pressing economic needs, because even then most of us do not care about the process or the details of the economic plan, we just want happy results. Is it embarrassment at the outcomes, or lack thereof, of the wars? Why do movies that discuss the topics of our wars, and 9/11 mostly fail? Do we need more distance, or do we simply not care.

Does this experience, our general ability to simply keep calm and carry on, speak to resilience or to apathy, and how can you tell the difference between the two? What would it look like to take the “lessons” of 9/11 to heart? Are there lessons of 9/11? Is it that America is a vulnerable state that needs to beef up its security, its military, or is it that we need to understand extremism better and fight it not with similar tactics military prowess but with understanding and connection, is that a pipe dream? For the most part, as an American and a human being I feel the pain of the loss, of the victims murdered on that day, and on the loss of life the fight on terror continues to take, but as an American citizen, I feel wholly at a loss to understand the lessons of the day, and as the start of a pretty widely agreed upon awful decade I feel some lesson from history must be heeded, but what, I do not know. I’ve read the tenth anniversary remembrances from different magazines, intellectuals, and cultural critics, and I still dont know what to think. We like our historical lessons to be clear: never forget, tyranny fails etc. but I cant seem to think of anything concrete to think about on this upcoming day of remembrance, anything tangible to inculcate into my life. Maybe I am alone in these sentiments, but if not, then I think that scares me the most. 

Thanks for reading, 

JoeTalk.

The Humility of David Foster Wallace - In response to Maud Newton

A note of introduction: This blog is a response to the article. posted on the side, written by Maud Newton entitled Another Thing to Sort of Pin On David Foster Wallace (Which is already a somewhat lame way to make fun of Foster Wallace.) It’s a fun article about David Foster Wallace, and blogging, but if neither of those topics interest you, then neither will this blog post.

In this blog, I attempted, as much as possible, not to indulge in my obsession with David Foster Wallace. I often quote him, my ideas are clearly mostly watered down versions of his ideas, and my style, if I you can refer to how I write as a style, mimics, weakly, his style. But now, I think it’s time to indulge in some DFW dorkiness to defend some claims made against his writing. Listen, I love DFW, but I think we’ve sainted him too early, and I do think problems exist in his writing, both theoretical and technical problems, but this argument against his writing just seems reductive.  Maud Newton, in her somewhat endearing though ultimately simplistic article, argues that DFW always equivocates in his arguing. He constantly uses qualifiers, changes register from high brow to low brow, and use all sort of verbal tics to make him liked by the audience. This essentially closes the argument by encompassing the whole argument because in truth, she claims, he’s not making an argument but just having a friendly conversation in which he cuts off any possible criticism by alluding to all possible criticisms. In essence, she claims, he makes the arguments through establishing both his intellectual credentials and his home grown normalcy so you trust him completely when he finally makes some kind of ambiguous argument. Newton, as does Geoffrey Dyer goes on to use this as a stepping stone to decry some of the annoying tics of bloggers, which is not the topic here. Here is my straightforward response. Newton and Dyer misunderstand DFW’s rhetorical tools and their usages both in his fiction and his non-fiction.(There are many holes to puncture in Newton's argument, but this should suffice.)

I claim that Newton and Dyer misunderstand DFW’s rhetorical tools in that they believe he uses them either because he cannot transcend the postmodern ironic stance without indulging in naiveté, or he wishes to ingratiate himself so as to not come off as an ass trying to force morality upon us, which to them, lacks directness and bravery in argumentation about important matters. Ultimately though, it’s his and our obsessive need to be liked as opposed to our ability engage in true debate that pushes us to write with qualifiers and in a style that makes you feel like we are just friends, talking, not trying to actually argue for anything.

But, to make an argument based on DFW’s own work, mainly from some of his stories, and his essay Deciderization, I contend that much of these rhetorical tools and examples stem from DFW’s humility, not arrogance, from his clear understanding of the smallness of his opinion relative to the complexity of the topic, of his constant self-doubt regarding his judgments in life, even towards the complexity of topics such as race, eating animals, and abortion. Let us for a minute run with this explanation i.e. that at the root of much what we refer to as DFW’s tics lies humility and not arrogance or an obsessive need to feel liked.

            In his essay, Deciderization¸ DFW explains that we lived in an unprecedented time of total noise in which it becomes increasingly harder to know who to trust, what to read in the news, and how to form an educated opinion on the whole spectrum of issues facing the normal human being. I still, despite my attempts to read up on the topic, understand little in the ways of economics. I cannot remember the last good clear argument on a topic, whether, abortion, or the economy that did not smack of bias, which of course exists in every argument, but what DFW captured so well, was the trouble with forming an opinion in our world. Hence the need for footnotes, and qualifiers, because when it comes down to it, there is no simple argument about whether we should or should not eat meat, or whether we can judge the porn industry, whether McCain is a calculated manipulative politician or a genuine believer in his vision for the country because of the need to take into account too many factors.

Additionally, why do we judge DFW by foreign standards? When did he claim to attempt to write arguments in the old Mark Twain Fashion? Why should we judge his output as if he was an ethical philosopher? In fact, DFW really only contended to make an argument, explicitly, once, in his essay on TV.  In his other writings, he opted to present the complexity of what it means to live as a human being today, as a person bombarded by leftist and right wing propaganda that both kind of sound intelligent, but never seem to present the full picture, as a person who lives in a time in which knowledge and opinions are tenuous at best because we know how entrenched they are in our personal experiences, and how much arrogance about our opinions ruins relationships, causes global issues, and just steeps a person in narcissism.

Here’s another straightforward contention, maybe we shouldn’t outgrow this type of thinking. Maybe we should always cling to this humility in our opinions. Now of course, some decisions must be made in life, but many decisions I make, or many of the beliefs I take do not matter in the larger scheme of things until I insert arrogance into the equation. For most people, it would seem, the question of an abortion remains abstract. Now, despite this fact most people assume an opinion on the matter, which can cause adverse affects, arguments, extremism etc. I would like to contend that DFW understood this problem, he understood that most of the moral quandaries of life are not the moral quandaries philosophers refer to as borderline cases, i.e. those cases that are all but impossible to actually argue for without making fundamentally unfalsifiable assumptions. Instead most of the moral heavy lifting involves how we relate to other human beings, how we feel towards them, how we judge them, how we balance the onslaught of self-centeredness with the need to transcend ourselves. Because most of the moral quandaries Newton wants some direct argumentation on do not affect the normal life of a normal person. That is, until we begin to think we actually fully know the answer to those unanswerable problems.

For DFW, most knowledge should be treated as precarious, as tentative because most knowledge stems from our self-centeredness, which doesn’t always bring harm, it just colors our view always, as a default. I would like to contend that qualifiers battle this self-centered arrogance, the arrogance to not see that my opinion, though internally justified in my being, might actually be wrong. Perhaps then acting upon it without fleshing out all of the sides of the argument, without seeing its complexity takes away the dignity from the human choice.

Again, why should we expect that DFW will answer the issues of abortion, when did he ever attempt to? You cannot fault an author, or an essayist for not writing an opinion on a matter. DFW wrote on what he found interesting, meaningful, relevant to everyday life, and possibly morally instructive, but the morally instructive part came from inside the object under scrutiny not external to it and in some senses, this leveled a stronger argument, which undermines Newton’s point. From the Big Red Son, I came away, if we must feel forced to talk about the practical value of any literature, which appears to be a strange assumption, feeling dirty, like I needed a shower partially because the subtly scathing criticism came from an inside view, from an attempt to not judge, to really immerse the author in the culture under investigation. To talk about the ambivalence, ambiguities, complexities, confrontations that plague these people. He humanizes everything and in doing so provides a lesson in day to day morality, not in the borderlines cases of morality that most ethical philosophers’ cannot give uncontested answers to. The lesson he gives, if a lesson must be given, is one of the complexities of human complexities, how even in the places we normally assume the worst, beats the heart of a human being we can understand and relate to, even find beauty in (the elder cop in the Big Red Son Essay).
 Similarly in his essay on vegetarianism he opts not to give his personal opinion not so as to be liked by all but because it's simply too complex a topic to confidently say one side is right and the other wrong. Instead, he forces us to confront the issue of why we choose what we choose as opposed to attempting to force us to think one way. In our world, do we not need more people like this, more people who see the multi-faceted side of all issues as opposed to those who push one path?

So perhaps, all these annoying tics are really just a smart person’s way to say, “Hey look, here is an issue I care about. It’s complicated, as is pretty much anything important in life, but it still demands our discussion. So let’s try to discuss it like friends, without resorting to simplistic argumentation, or snap judgments, let’s try to first truly understand both side of the topics and then you, as an autonomous dignified human being can draw whatever conclusion you want because that’s how we respect each others autonomy. Not by brow beating us into opinions, but by presenting the whole picture so we can then choose for ourselves.” Maybe.

I apologize for the hastiness of this post. In the next post, I hope to provide more examples of some real moral claims found both in DFW’s fiction and non-fiction, and also to hone in on some more subtle arguments Newton makes, but I believe this provides one quick answer to a reductive claim against an author who fought tooth and nail to bring morality back into literature.