Doug Bruns

Posts Tagged ‘Infinite Jest’

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a pandemonium of myths…

In Mythology, Philosophy, The infinity of ideas, Thinkers, Wisdom on August 19, 2010 at 1:45 pm

Nietzsche held that a problem of modernity is that the modern man (and woman) is a “mythless man.” As a result, we take the mundane and lift it to the glorious, making it “shine.” As Julian Young says, “the problem, in fact, is that too many things shine in modernity, and that their shine rubs off too soon.” He continues to cite cultural examples of what so cheaply shines. (You can fill in the blanks; it’s not hard.) As a result there is a “pandemonium of myths…thrown into a disorderly heap,” [Nietzsche]. We live, as Zarathustra puts it, in a “motley” town.

This resonates with me. It feels true and is at the center of a personal quest for authenticity. One effort, along these lines, is the rejection of the shiny.  Or at least a severe analysis thereof. Regardless of what shines, glamor, consumerism, materialism, personality, this, that and the other thing, so often–always?–the shine wears off. We live in a neo-Guilded Age. There is no sustainable myth. (David Foster Wallace wrestled with this theme in Infinite Jest, the idea that our energies are spent on the mundane, seeking addiction in something, so as to fill some nascent unrealized need.) A mindful challenge of the assumptions of modernity correlates with a minimalist approach to living–which brings me to the most emailed New York Time’s article of last week, But Will It Make You Happy? The piece takes a look at the growing American phenomenon at personal down-sizing. (Can you live with just 100 things?) I will not attempt to encapsulate the article. Read it. (I expressed similar thoughts on happiness and the gross domestic product in previous blog entries, which can be found here and here.) There is also a wonderful blog linked in the article which warrants consideration, a collection of musings  advocating “social change through simple living,” by Tammy Strobel, called RowdyKittens.

As the slow cooking movement began as an Italian reaction to a new Rome-based McDonalds, so might a minimalist, non-consumptive living movement gain purchase against the drive to the abyss which our species seems hell-bent in completing. To paraphrase a personal hero, Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, We have marched to the brink of existence, now we have to turn 180 degrees and take a step forward. Backward is no longer backward. It is forward. Can we escape this motley town?

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Infinite Jest, Longfellow Books and a bike ride to the Y

In Literature, Reading, The Examined Life, Writers on April 26, 2010 at 8:33 pm

I am a swimmer. Every morning, weather permitting, I get on my bike, peddle across the peninsula, and swim at the Portland YMCA. (Bad weather? Walk. Really bad weather? Drive.) I always assumed I’d end up in a pool, having torn, twisted and generally f”-ed up everything a guy can f-up: shoulders, hip, back, hands. (The knees are in good shape, surprise.) The pool is the refuge of the aged-maimed athlete. My swim is good. I can’t hurt myself. It’s also good for my head. It can be a meditation or a lesson in tedium, both of which are beneficial and have intrinsic value. Today was different. I wanted it over. I wanted to return home, to my chair,  and finish a book, specifically, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I’ve been working on this book for two and half months. It’s a three-pound book, three pounds and two ounces precisely. One thousand twenty-seven pages, including footnotes. It’s a monster and I had only twenty pages left. The sprint to the finish. Get the swim over. Finish it. But more. I love this book. Two and half months living with it, studying it, reading the footnotes and the on-line commentary. It was in my blood, under my fingernails,  and with only an hour or so left with it, like it was a lover going off to war, I wanted its company–its company until the last. Period. In fact, finishing it was the most remote of my motives. Make it last. That’s the ticket.

Tonight: I am ten pages from the end as I write this. I don’t want to finish it. It’s like sex and holding off until the very end ’cause that’s when it’s best. But really, it’s more like losing a friend, and knowing DFW is no longer with us, well, not yet closing the book is not yet accepting that salient sad fact–so the friend is still with us-me. In a bit, an hour or so, I will complete it, close it and then it will be over. (I will write about it, a review or more properly, the experience, in the next week or two. Check Mostly Fiction dot com where I write about reading books.)

So, my head is spinning with all things Infinite Jest, a book that has effected me like quite no other. But this isn’t about the book. Rather, I want to discourse on reading. More specifically, reading in the nature and manner of dead-trees reading: A book, specifically, the definition of which would be agreed upon one hundred years ago. Two hundred years past. I read Infinite Jest in the dead-wood sit-it-in-my-lap version, (It’s a renewable resource, relax.), not on a Kindle, an iPad or any other device. I’m not a Luddite. To the contrary. I have a Kindle. It is in a drawer. (It’s been in a drawer for a year, uncharged.) Before that, I used it. I love it, actually. But I have seen the light–and that light is shining from a window that is local. When I buy a book on my Kindle I am taking money out of Chris and Stewart’s pockets and giving it to Amazon. (Just where is that exactly?, I wonder. Where does Amazon live?) Chris and Stewart? They’re the guys who own my local bookstore, Longfellow Books. (I should mention too, Phyllis who bakes the goodies we eat at the Thursday night readings. I don’t want to lose those.) You see where I’m going here, I trust. Longfellow is the dead-center of Portland, figuratively, literally and spiritually. Every dollar I send to Amazon is a dollar my community looses, a dollar less for the heart-dead-center of my town. If that happens frequently enough, my community goes away, replaced by the insipid one-size-fits-all wash-and-wear culture we seem so unwittingly fond of. (How does that happen?)

This, this so-called culture in which we struggle to thrive, is a theme and subject of Infinite Jest. (But there are ever so many themes to IJ.) Culture has been sold off. Corporate America bought it and ate it for lunch, between two pieces of Wonderbread. It is an appetite that knows no satiation and watch out you too might be consumed. See this picture? It’s Saturn Devouring His son by Goya. I saw it first in the Prado in Madrid. I had to be pried away from the wall. What a work! The idea, again, you obtain, yes?. It is the apex of irony (should irony be a bell curve) that a country founded, built and realized on/of individualism–a/an historical and political anomaly–is and has been rushing hellbent to a state of homogenization–except at the fringes (that scary radicalization, best saved for a future rant). So, back to my point: Reading a book, the tangible nature of which can be procured at your local establishment of reading pleasure–and a pleasure it truly is–shifts the universe toward an intent local and more pure and can help maintain a degree of security you, the individual, enjoy and support. The option is to be devoured. Saturn’s son ain’t having such a good time there, eh? Avoid that. Avoid the strip mall, the mall and all things associated thereof.

This all sounds so very effusive. But that is the nature of IJ, a book that will send you spiraling off somewhere to which you had no inkling you might travel. That is the wonder of it all, no? Read. It transports. And so much more. It even makes one think.

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Friday Odds and Ends

In Nature, Reading on April 2, 2010 at 7:05 pm

I haven’t seen the loons for three days, not since the storms of earlier in the week. Then, they seemed perfectly content, bobbing and riding the little crescent waves in my corner of the bay, the rain falling in sheets. Wind blowing. They wintered here, a pair of them. The thing about a loon is the call. It is simple magic. There is no other way to even think about it. But in the winter they are silent, hunkered down like the rest of us, just quiet and getting through. In the fall they leave the freshwater lakes and ponds and migrate. Some head far afield, covering up to two hundred miles a day. Many, here in Maine, head east and find refuge on the coast, like the pair camped out below my kitchen window. But they are gone now, I think. I’m told they usually don’t leave until May, after ice out is assured. But the weather is all different now and maybe they know it and took off to build a nest and all that entails.

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Walking down Congress street tonight overheard man on cell phone: “It’s abandonment. I just met your fucking boyfriend. Oh, yeah. That’s bullshit. Abandonment, I tell you.” And he slammed the phone closed, grabbed the door to Starbucks and about tore it off the hinges. We are surrounded by short stories.

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I am at half-way. Infinite Jest. One thousand Seventy-nine pages of dense prose, with footnotes. A universe of words. I am half-way through David Foster Wallace‘s magnum opus. This is my second go at it and I got traction a month ago, pacing myself at a meager ten pages a day. Ten pages. I love reading. But an hour and ten pages and my head spinning and I walk away. But I come back. And come back again–because a great novel is like entering a beautiful hotel, filled with smells and people and sounds and knowing that you get to stay in the hotel as long as you wish, dipping into this corner and sitting in that lobby chair, watching that woman and that man and hearing that kid scream.  You get to enjoy a drink and perhaps flirt with the barmaid, swim in the pool and at night, when the boats are plying the river and the lanterns are glowing and the band has relaxed with a drink or two, you get to crawl into your nine-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton-sheeted bed and sleep until you smell the coffee being delivered in the morning. That is why even ten pages a day can be enough.