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La noia.
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شاید بشه گفت داستان‌های این کتاب، برای ذهن ما، هم خیلی ملموسه و هم خیلی دوره و عجیب. بعضی از نوشته‌های این مجموعه رو شاید به هیچوجه نشه تفسیر کرد و فقط باید حسشون کرد و بعضیای دیگه‌شون رو، با تمام وجود درک خواهید کرد و از اینکه والاس چطور اینارو میدونه و روشون دست گذاشته تعجب خواهید کرد. انگار والاس جای همه‌ی ما، انسان‌های دنیای معاصر، زندگی کرده و از بالا روایتمون میکنه. شایدم از پایین و شایدم از زاویه‌ای خاص و جدید، نمیدونم...
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David Foster Wallace once said "Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
I can say that many stories in this collection have done this to me.
I can say that many stories in this collection have done this to me.
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This is a hard book for me to rate and review.
I could listen to David Foster Wallace talk all day but his writing is just hard. It requires work, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Although short and relatively simple I adored the first short story ‘A radically condensed history of postindustrial life’ and struggled with the more complex titles such as ‘Tri-stan: I Sold Sisee Nar To Ecko’
I could listen to David Foster Wallace talk all day but his writing is just hard. It requires work, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Although short and relatively simple I adored the first short story ‘A radically condensed history of postindustrial life’ and struggled with the more complex titles such as ‘Tri-stan: I Sold Sisee Nar To Ecko’
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– уявіть, що ви прийшли на вечірку, де мало кого знаєте, а потім, повертаючись додому, раптом усвідомлюєте, що всю вечірку так хвилювалися, подобаєтеся ви чи не подобаєтеся гостям, що просто гадки не маєте, чи сподобалися вам вони.
Звичайно ж, майже завжди з'ясовується, що насправді ви не сподобалися гостям на вечірці з тієї простої причини, що здавались таким зацикленим на собі та стурбованим собою, що у них виникло неприємне підсвідоме відчуття, ніби ви навряд їх помітили, і що, швидше за все, пішли без поняття, сподобалися вони вам чи ні, від чого їм прикро і ви перестаєте їм подобатися (вони, зрештою, лише люди і теж хочуть подобатися)
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Звичайно ж, майже завжди з'ясовується, що насправді ви не сподобалися гостям на вечірці з тієї простої причини, що здавались таким зацикленим на собі та стурбованим собою, що у них виникло неприємне підсвідоме відчуття, ніби ви навряд їх помітили, і що, швидше за все, пішли без поняття, сподобалися вони вам чи ні, від чого їм прикро і ви перестаєте їм подобатися (вони, зрештою, лише люди і теж хочуть подобатися)
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The story 'Forver Overhead' made me realize the one thing that I appreciate most about DFW. Much of his writing is executed with such exquisite, painstaking detail that it not only causes me to visualize the scenario more clearly, but often at the same time a particular scene will make me recall memories that were long ago misplaced. This story is about a thirteen-year-old boy who works up the courage to tackle that youthful right of passage of going off of the high dive for the first time. The memory that this evoked for me was the vague fear that I always had in my pre-teen years of a wet foot sliding off of a wet, metal rung resulting in a banged up knee and potential fall to the concrete below. Another thing that impressed me about this story is that it was written in the second person. I know of very few stories that are well-executed from this point of view (Carlos Fuentes 'Aura' being the only one that comes to mind at the moment). This may have been the reason that I became so immersed in this particular story.
My other favorite in this collection was 'Church Not Made With Hands.' The prose in this story is beautiful and there is a suggestion of magic realism afoot, in my opinion.
The last section of 'Octet' made me laugh, as that nervously bumbling yet still brilliant writer persona that DFW does so well in his nonfiction makes an appearance.
There is one thing that I am still pondering about the title story, 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.' This story, which is divided into sections and spread throughout the book, can be sloppily summarized as the text of interviews with men who would be considered creeps in regard to how they deal with and relate to women. One section, however, outlines the life of an older black man who has spent a majority of his work life as the attendant in a swanky restroom. I'm still struggling with how this section fits in with the rest.
This is billed as "experimental fiction" but I think that it is a mixed bag that contains something for everyone.
My other favorite in this collection was 'Church Not Made With Hands.' The prose in this story is beautiful and there is a suggestion of magic realism afoot, in my opinion.
The last section of 'Octet' made me laugh, as that nervously bumbling yet still brilliant writer persona that DFW does so well in his nonfiction makes an appearance.
There is one thing that I am still pondering about the title story, 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.' This story, which is divided into sections and spread throughout the book, can be sloppily summarized as the text of interviews with men who would be considered creeps in regard to how they deal with and relate to women. One section, however, outlines the life of an older black man who has spent a majority of his work life as the attendant in a swanky restroom. I'm still struggling with how this section fits in with the rest.
This is billed as "experimental fiction" but I think that it is a mixed bag that contains something for everyone.
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Brief Interviews is certainly one of Wallace's better works, though the postmodern meta-stuff is already a bit dated . . . similar to reading William Gass's novellas (from the 1970s), there's a certain sepia-toned "classic postmodernism" about it.
Anyway, I've searched in vain for someone to point out what seems to be DFW's obvious point with the "Brief Interviews" sections of this book. The usual reading is that he's undertaking a funny and vicious critique of hideous men, and that we're supposed to sympathize with the (female) grad student interviewer throughout (see here, for example). It seems clear to me that DFW meant something else entirely.
The key is the earliest interview listed in the book ("B.I. #2, October 1994," on page 91). Crucially, this isn't a part of the interviewer's study, but rather an episode from her life; she moves across the country with her long-term boyfriend, who had been putting off a breakup, only going through with it once she had uprooted her life for him. The point is that this is the first "hideous man"; her anger at her ex-boyfriend launches the interview project and colors the rest of the material in later interviews.
This is made most clear in the climax of the book (and of the "Brief Interviews" themselves), in what is generally seen as one of DFW's greatest bits of writing: "B.I. #20, December 1996." The interviewee relates how he fell in love with a woman who he had initially just been trying to seduce for a one-night stand, sincerely explaining how it transformed him into a better person.
The message that most reviewers appear to take from this story is that somehow the man is still "hideous" here, but the whole point is that the interviewer is hideous. When confronted with genuine love and compassion, she remains hateful and antagonistic, refusing to accept that this very sincere man she is interviewing truly loved this woman, and that this love helped him to see that "connection and nobility and compassion [are] more fundamental and primary components of the soul than psychosis or evil." This is basically DFW's personal motto, and we're supposed to believe that he disagrees with this character? Even when this exact point has already been emphasized by the story of the rape victim in "B.I. #6"?
Anyway the point is that seeing "psychosis and evil" as "fundamental" is exactly the trap that the interviewer has fallen into. She is obviously bitter and antagonistic (as evidenced by the implied contents of each of her "Q." questions). She isn't really listening to her interlocutor, as he is right to point out: "I know I'm not telling you anything you haven't already decided you know. With your slim chilly smile."
In other words, by B.I. #20, the interviewer has spent years descending into a negative spiral of resentment and hatred due to her compulsive, open-ended project of seeking out hideous men -- this is an unconscious attempt to psychologically reinforce her initial hatred of her ex-boyfriend (in B.I. #2), which is now projected onto all men. The fact that the longest and most important interview is placed at the end of the book is meant as a refutation of the interviewer's entire stance, her nihilism and callousness; the ultimate point of the "Brief Interviews" stories is that you're supposed to pity this hideous woman who compulsively interviews men for a decade, including after her experience with the clearly-not-hideous man in B.I. #20 (whose point obviously never got through to her).
Anyway, I've searched in vain for someone to point out what seems to be DFW's obvious point with the "Brief Interviews" sections of this book. The usual reading is that he's undertaking a funny and vicious critique of hideous men, and that we're supposed to sympathize with the (female) grad student interviewer throughout (see here, for example). It seems clear to me that DFW meant something else entirely.
The key is the earliest interview listed in the book ("B.I. #2, October 1994," on page 91). Crucially, this isn't a part of the interviewer's study, but rather an episode from her life; she moves across the country with her long-term boyfriend, who had been putting off a breakup, only going through with it once she had uprooted her life for him. The point is that this is the first "hideous man"; her anger at her ex-boyfriend launches the interview project and colors the rest of the material in later interviews.
This is made most clear in the climax of the book (and of the "Brief Interviews" themselves), in what is generally seen as one of DFW's greatest bits of writing: "B.I. #20, December 1996." The interviewee relates how he fell in love with a woman who he had initially just been trying to seduce for a one-night stand, sincerely explaining how it transformed him into a better person.
The message that most reviewers appear to take from this story is that somehow the man is still "hideous" here, but the whole point is that the interviewer is hideous. When confronted with genuine love and compassion, she remains hateful and antagonistic, refusing to accept that this very sincere man she is interviewing truly loved this woman, and that this love helped him to see that "connection and nobility and compassion [are] more fundamental and primary components of the soul than psychosis or evil." This is basically DFW's personal motto, and we're supposed to believe that he disagrees with this character? Even when this exact point has already been emphasized by the story of the rape victim in "B.I. #6"?
Anyway the point is that seeing "psychosis and evil" as "fundamental" is exactly the trap that the interviewer has fallen into. She is obviously bitter and antagonistic (as evidenced by the implied contents of each of her "Q." questions). She isn't really listening to her interlocutor, as he is right to point out: "I know I'm not telling you anything you haven't already decided you know. With your slim chilly smile."
In other words, by B.I. #20, the interviewer has spent years descending into a negative spiral of resentment and hatred due to her compulsive, open-ended project of seeking out hideous men -- this is an unconscious attempt to psychologically reinforce her initial hatred of her ex-boyfriend (in B.I. #2), which is now projected onto all men. The fact that the longest and most important interview is placed at the end of the book is meant as a refutation of the interviewer's entire stance, her nihilism and callousness; the ultimate point of the "Brief Interviews" stories is that you're supposed to pity this hideous woman who compulsively interviews men for a decade, including after her experience with the clearly-not-hideous man in B.I. #20 (whose point obviously never got through to her).
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This hyper self-conscious metafictional stuff is not my thing, though I did sort of enjoy the "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" chapter (several chapters have this title) that begins on p. 69 (the one that discusses Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning in the context of violent, degrading rape), minus the part about the narrator's father's bathroom attendant job. The "BIWHM" chapters, with their invisible female questioners and hideous male responders, sport a twisted misogyny that is kind of fun.
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Comprendo come questo libro abbia valutazioni così discordanti: non è una lettura per tutti, nessuna presunzione nel dire questo, semplicemente ho la sensazione che per apprezzare questi deliri ossessivi disturbati e disturbanti bisogna essere un po’ “malati”, bisogna non aver paura di seguire Wallace nel gorgo di acque per niente cristalline, di guardare nello specchio che ti deforma sì, però tu lo sai comunque che quel mostro schifoso ha qualcosa di te, sappiamo che siamo noi, brutti sporchi e cattivi e farci i conti senza perdere l’equilibrio è un’esperienza catartica; Wallace non toglie solo la maschera, strappa brandelli di carne per mostrarti il lato oscuro della tua anima.
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Leggere questo libro è un rimestare nella merda. Più sgradevole che mai. Le interviste sono monologhi (le domande non vengono esplicitate) di, appunto, "uomini schifosi" e quello che andiamo a leggere è il manuale dell'allegro psicotico e delle forme di abuso di potere. Proprio la parola "potere" è quella che forse ricorre maggiormente per tutto il libro e che alle interviste unisce tematicamente anche gli altri scritti che completano la raccolta. Il comune denominatore dei racconti è come convincere qualcuno a fare qualcosa per te: plagiando, manipolando, ingannando, sfruttando, costringendo in modo subdolo o con la coercizione fisica fino allo stupro, fate un po' voi, qui c'è un bel campionario. L'USO degli altri, le altre persone annullate, oggetti.
Quando ho letto Infinite Jest amandolo alla follia mi è capitato di domandarmi se DFW fosse in realtà un furbacchione, tanto mi ero innamorato dei personaggi del romanzo e, per usare un termine ricorrente nei suoi scritti, entrato in "contatto" con essi. Ebbene, la risposta me l'ero già data attraverso altre letture, e cioè che DFW è tutt'altro che un furbacchione o un ruffiano ed è anzi sincero in maniera disarmante, ma in questo libro, una volta di più, la conferma: qui si prova solo schifo e neanche la minima ombra di identificazione.
Quando ho letto Infinite Jest amandolo alla follia mi è capitato di domandarmi se DFW fosse in realtà un furbacchione, tanto mi ero innamorato dei personaggi del romanzo e, per usare un termine ricorrente nei suoi scritti, entrato in "contatto" con essi. Ebbene, la risposta me l'ero già data attraverso altre letture, e cioè che DFW è tutt'altro che un furbacchione o un ruffiano ed è anzi sincero in maniera disarmante, ma in questo libro, una volta di più, la conferma: qui si prova solo schifo e neanche la minima ombra di identificazione.
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DFW subjects his characters to a kind of scrutiny that could only be the result of years of self-criticism and crippling overthinking.
Many of these Hideous Men are defined by a kind of manipulative self-awareness. They can narrate how they are being perceived (by the other characters, by the reader) even as the perceptions are being formed. Doing so, they somehow distance themselves from whatever negative conclusion their audience is reaching about them. It’s an odd truth about life that self-awareness reduces the offensiveness of some very negative character traits, even while they’re still being perpetuated. Feel free to use this to your advantage! Love, Adam
Many of these Hideous Men are defined by a kind of manipulative self-awareness. They can narrate how they are being perceived (by the other characters, by the reader) even as the perceptions are being formed. Doing so, they somehow distance themselves from whatever negative conclusion their audience is reaching about them. It’s an odd truth about life that self-awareness reduces the offensiveness of some very negative character traits, even while they’re still being perpetuated. Feel free to use this to your advantage! Love, Adam
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One story was recommended to me recently in a friend's list of best/favourite short stories. Finally got me started reading this which I'd bought in March 2011.
A Radically Condensed History of the World
I am undecided whether this piece simply isn't very good (one GR friend calls this collection uneven) or if it could do with half an hour of seminar time to tease out the relationship between the title and the two pages of story.
Death Is Not the End *****
Absolutely love this. Very, very funny. Like 'Mr Squishy', how worlds are created by jargon (and prestige). How art [sometimes] gets recommended on the basis of awards not by telling someone about content and why they would especially like it. The air of indignance about the Guggenheim. How the highly acclaimed end up beyond reproach and forever entitled to prestige. Tens of thousands will read that new Amis or McEwan even if it's supposed to be his worst. As I write this paragraph I still haven't looked up lists of Nobel winners to check who, if anyone, he's based on. Think I prefer the Schroedinger's approach here.
Wallace's death and subsequent near-canonisation adds to the layers in the title. Conversely, and in parallel with its surely-intended irony, on GR it becomes apparent, looking at Booker or indeed Nobel winners from a few decades ago, most of their remaining contemporary readers are people making a project out of reading winners of said award.
Forever Overhead
Deeply serious and emotive, an explosion of emotion in every tiniest detail. This must be The New Sincerity. Its profound and ultimately comic (but certainly not laugh out loud) contrast with the typical idea & outlook of an early-teen boy. I'd love to see what Beavis & Butthead made of this.
I have had a couple of phases of seeing the world this way for weeks or months, after very bad breakups; but if Wallace was able to / did see this way always no wonder the world got too much for him. The tiniest brush of a hair against skin as a deep gash. Even the thought of writing at this length with so many details this deeply felt is impossible to get my head round. Every now and again, a window, a zoom, yes but otherwise more detached. It's simply necessary in order to live.
To read, it can be too much, short circuiting. Like being kissed excessively on the neck, or even anywhere, especially by someone new, when it would have been so much more fun to hover on the brink at length and then have one or two and then again wait there, tingling, feeling the echoes, for who knows how long. This, though, is over-tingling till something fries and is lost, at once desensitised and oversensitised. The ASMR crowd probably know something about this: ASMR overload perhaps?
Also, I've always been scared of diving boards. This is easy to solve as an adult by never going near them, so you don't have to look like a prat. It's the water, mostly, the hardness of hitting it and it going in eyes and nose and mouth and spluttering and gasping and stinging, tearing at your lungs, and the smell and memory of swimming pools and injury. Whereas abseiling, zip wires, wahey, all kinds of fun once you've pushed through the initial instinct not to launch off a high ledge into void.
And I fucking love the bit where it's interrupted by the guy asking what he's up to, kid. The story so needed it and it's Wallace sending himself up.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
(Typing a list of the subheadings make me think of the journey across America in the track titles of The KLF's Chill Out. 90s... I wonder how many people have listened to that album while reading this book.)
#14 08-96 St Davids PA
This is one sort of thing that makes me think "Genius": when I can't fathom how anyone thought of it. (Of writing a story about it in this way; I knew it existed as a problem.) Also, hilarious.
#15 08-96 MCI Bridgewater
Felt like an 8/10 equivalent of the above. The tied-up father was also very funny.
#11 06-96 Vienna VA
Call me patronising, but I reckon there are a whole load of women in their twenties who shouldn't even read this yet; it would freak them out too much; as it played out their worst fears, they'd be too flooded with panic to ponder the details. Very clever in its verisimilitude of speech; in illustrating a common relationship pattern of anxiety + events, in the subtle unreliability of the narrator with detail mostly off-screen showing that he may have been more of a problem than he thinks, contributed to the situation more than he can admit. But there is truth in its illustration of the pressure that daily fear of being left can create, and that a person can really love someone whilst also being kind of feckless and not very good at relationships. Anyway, I reckon they'll both be better as they get older; she'll grow calmer and choose incrementally more decent guys who suit her better, even if this one maybe did scar her - and he'll eventually be less fazed and more steady and responsible.
#3 11-94 Trenton NJ [Overheard]
And you're, like, a twenty year old girl reading a men's magazine and you think this is a totally normal attitude for guys and cool and you want to be like that too then you blink and you're nearly forty and you don't even know anyone like this any more and it's partly because norms have changed a bit in your world but also the stuff you read and the people you know and their age and your age and these narrating guys would definitely be classed now as immature twats not to bother with. But yeah this woman with the pink fuck-me jeans and nice tits is being taken for a sucker in more ways than one and it's sad she's being made a fool of but she also is kind of a fool.
(Shame about the loss of conversational verisimilitude when excess detail was included in the speaker's descriptions at a few points.)
#30 03-97 Drury UT
I've said a few times that I reckoned that if I were a guy, I'd have been kind of an asshole. That I'd like to have been that kind of bloke, a bloke-bloke of the pre-punching-incident Clarkson sort. (Though it's quite possible that by now I'd have grown up and got a bit nicer - "God, I used to think all that shitty behaviour was cool, what a twat I was." As my female-bodied self has in some, but by no means all, ways.)
I can totally imagine being this guy.
#31 03-97 Roswell GA
Contains a pretty good original-ish insight. In terms of psychological motivation, Mitch Sailor [OMG, I made a detailed Sex and the City reference, it only happens about once every 4 years now, like one of those rarely-flowering hothouse plants] is, in his psychological motivation for sex, very similar to, and just as selfish as, Joe Sixpack the roll-on-and-off pig. (Prompted the idea that magazines like More and Cosmo - as I remember them from the 90s - were effectively trying to create female versions of the "Great Lover".) The reader is perhaps supposed to see the hubris in the narrator's own formula - sex couldn't possibly include communication about what people like and what they're experiencing and maybe doing things differently, it's still a set performance - but the story is also a snapshot of someone mid [Rogerian] process. It's easy to imagine this one a bit older, having got to a further stage of insight. Maybe he'll be less of a weed bore then too. Those interpolations were genius.
#36 05-97 Metropolitan Domestic Violence Outreach, Aurora IL
Not a whole lot to say here, phew. If you know much about the psychology of these situations, it's pretty obvs what it's doing.
How the hell did they make this into a film?
Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)
By being about a dream, it made me remember a dream that was actually half interesting, from this morning (09/02). I was in the house which was also not my house, or it was sort of like having just arrived in a fully furnished let - that gets closer to the feeling - and nearly everything in it was branded as Trump. It was like Trump was Ikea. Or Acme in Looney Tunes. Or Goliath Corp in the Thursday Next books if you've read those. (That's not a recommendation: I'd say don't bother. I think you'd find them facile if you like Wallace.) It wasn't gaudy stuff you'd associate with real Trump, it was pretty plain, like higher quality Ikea or maybe almost White Company, and it had a little grey logo, usually round, which reminded me kind of the old Sainsburys TU one and kind of the little initial-circles for names in Outlook email. It was different on some items because they weren't all the same age. The stuff annoyed me because it didn't actually look that bad, I didn't want rid of it for aesthetic reasons even if I could have afforded to replace it, and it would become easy not to notice over time. I was walking around the house for no reason, looking at everything, and picked up a new, clean, white miminalist well-made toilet brush, in the kitchen for some reason, and this Trump logo was even on the handle, and I said loudly to no-one, For Fuck's Sake.
The story itself: the flowering of empathy as the result of a dream. Details of what an unempathic twat he'd been before, and how deeply he started to feel others' experience afterwards. Reminds me of being in my later twenties when I had started doing a lot of meditation and then therapy and I felt this way, more gradually and about many things, everything. Another of those moments that brings back the idea of Wallace as a writer to read in one's twenties. Except perhaps The Pale King, which I haven't actually read, which I have started to think of, perhaps because of the people I know on here who like it and when they read it, as a book for one's thirties, after having learnt a bit of this stuff, but by no means become perfect.
The thing I keep saying about Wallace is that he is very stuck-in-one's head, whereas Pynchon is all about opening up and wandering around in the world. This isn't quite as in-turned as some DFW, but it still propagates a bit of niggling self-consciousness. (Self-conscious, what a word of the past. I remember when I realised I wasn't especially, continually, self-conscious any more. It's a wonderful moment like being a kid when you first manage to ride a whole street-length on a bike without stabilisers. I don't especially like being reminded of what the Before felt like.)
There are 17 more of these stories. What if they all make me want to write this much? It's almost as bad as when I try to review non-fiction. Maximalist inspires maximalism in one already that way inclined. Nowt new there. I doubt many people will read all this, but I think I've started enjoying it as a writing exercise / prompt.
Signifying Nothing. ****1/2
This is realler than most memoir. The voice, the imperfect remembrance of details, the weirdness of what happened, the way it doesn't quite fit standard concepts of abuse but was as disturbing as if it did. The frank self examination to make sure one trusts oneself. The parental blankness. The abruptness of the ending (otherwise it would have been perfect) sadly makes it too literary and fucks the verisimilitude. Otherwise it could have been someone talking to a therapist at length, as in Portnoy.
A Radically Condensed History of the World
I am undecided whether this piece simply isn't very good (one GR friend calls this collection uneven) or if it could do with half an hour of seminar time to tease out the relationship between the title and the two pages of story.
Death Is Not the End *****
Absolutely love this. Very, very funny. Like 'Mr Squishy', how worlds are created by jargon (and prestige). How art [sometimes] gets recommended on the basis of awards not by telling someone about content and why they would especially like it. The air of indignance about the Guggenheim. How the highly acclaimed end up beyond reproach and forever entitled to prestige. Tens of thousands will read that new Amis or McEwan even if it's supposed to be his worst. As I write this paragraph I still haven't looked up lists of Nobel winners to check who, if anyone, he's based on. Think I prefer the Schroedinger's approach here.
Wallace's death and subsequent near-canonisation adds to the layers in the title. Conversely, and in parallel with its surely-intended irony, on GR it becomes apparent, looking at Booker or indeed Nobel winners from a few decades ago, most of their remaining contemporary readers are people making a project out of reading winners of said award.
Forever Overhead
Deeply serious and emotive, an explosion of emotion in every tiniest detail. This must be The New Sincerity. Its profound and ultimately comic (but certainly not laugh out loud) contrast with the typical idea & outlook of an early-teen boy. I'd love to see what Beavis & Butthead made of this.
I have had a couple of phases of seeing the world this way for weeks or months, after very bad breakups; but if Wallace was able to / did see this way always no wonder the world got too much for him. The tiniest brush of a hair against skin as a deep gash. Even the thought of writing at this length with so many details this deeply felt is impossible to get my head round. Every now and again, a window, a zoom, yes but otherwise more detached. It's simply necessary in order to live.
To read, it can be too much, short circuiting. Like being kissed excessively on the neck, or even anywhere, especially by someone new, when it would have been so much more fun to hover on the brink at length and then have one or two and then again wait there, tingling, feeling the echoes, for who knows how long. This, though, is over-tingling till something fries and is lost, at once desensitised and oversensitised. The ASMR crowd probably know something about this: ASMR overload perhaps?
Also, I've always been scared of diving boards. This is easy to solve as an adult by never going near them, so you don't have to look like a prat. It's the water, mostly, the hardness of hitting it and it going in eyes and nose and mouth and spluttering and gasping and stinging, tearing at your lungs, and the smell and memory of swimming pools and injury. Whereas abseiling, zip wires, wahey, all kinds of fun once you've pushed through the initial instinct not to launch off a high ledge into void.
And I fucking love the bit where it's interrupted by the guy asking what he's up to, kid. The story so needed it and it's Wallace sending himself up.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
(Typing a list of the subheadings make me think of the journey across America in the track titles of The KLF's Chill Out. 90s... I wonder how many people have listened to that album while reading this book.)
#14 08-96 St Davids PA
This is one sort of thing that makes me think "Genius": when I can't fathom how anyone thought of it. (Of writing a story about it in this way; I knew it existed as a problem.) Also, hilarious.
#15 08-96 MCI Bridgewater
Felt like an 8/10 equivalent of the above. The tied-up father was also very funny.
#11 06-96 Vienna VA
Call me patronising, but I reckon there are a whole load of women in their twenties who shouldn't even read this yet; it would freak them out too much; as it played out their worst fears, they'd be too flooded with panic to ponder the details. Very clever in its verisimilitude of speech; in illustrating a common relationship pattern of anxiety + events, in the subtle unreliability of the narrator with detail mostly off-screen showing that he may have been more of a problem than he thinks, contributed to the situation more than he can admit. But there is truth in its illustration of the pressure that daily fear of being left can create, and that a person can really love someone whilst also being kind of feckless and not very good at relationships. Anyway, I reckon they'll both be better as they get older; she'll grow calmer and choose incrementally more decent guys who suit her better, even if this one maybe did scar her - and he'll eventually be less fazed and more steady and responsible.
#3 11-94 Trenton NJ [Overheard]
And you're, like, a twenty year old girl reading a men's magazine and you think this is a totally normal attitude for guys and cool and you want to be like that too then you blink and you're nearly forty and you don't even know anyone like this any more and it's partly because norms have changed a bit in your world but also the stuff you read and the people you know and their age and your age and these narrating guys would definitely be classed now as immature twats not to bother with. But yeah this woman with the pink fuck-me jeans and nice tits is being taken for a sucker in more ways than one and it's sad she's being made a fool of but she also is kind of a fool.
(Shame about the loss of conversational verisimilitude when excess detail was included in the speaker's descriptions at a few points.)
#30 03-97 Drury UT
I've said a few times that I reckoned that if I were a guy, I'd have been kind of an asshole. That I'd like to have been that kind of bloke, a bloke-bloke of the pre-punching-incident Clarkson sort. (Though it's quite possible that by now I'd have grown up and got a bit nicer - "God, I used to think all that shitty behaviour was cool, what a twat I was." As my female-bodied self has in some, but by no means all, ways.)
I can totally imagine being this guy.
#31 03-97 Roswell GA
Contains a pretty good original-ish insight. In terms of psychological motivation, Mitch Sailor [OMG, I made a detailed Sex and the City reference, it only happens about once every 4 years now, like one of those rarely-flowering hothouse plants] is, in his psychological motivation for sex, very similar to, and just as selfish as, Joe Sixpack the roll-on-and-off pig. (Prompted the idea that magazines like More and Cosmo - as I remember them from the 90s - were effectively trying to create female versions of the "Great Lover".) The reader is perhaps supposed to see the hubris in the narrator's own formula - sex couldn't possibly include communication about what people like and what they're experiencing and maybe doing things differently, it's still a set performance - but the story is also a snapshot of someone mid [Rogerian] process. It's easy to imagine this one a bit older, having got to a further stage of insight. Maybe he'll be less of a weed bore then too. Those interpolations were genius.
#36 05-97 Metropolitan Domestic Violence Outreach, Aurora IL
Not a whole lot to say here, phew. If you know much about the psychology of these situations, it's pretty obvs what it's doing.
How the hell did they make this into a film?
Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI)
By being about a dream, it made me remember a dream that was actually half interesting, from this morning (09/02). I was in the house which was also not my house, or it was sort of like having just arrived in a fully furnished let - that gets closer to the feeling - and nearly everything in it was branded as Trump. It was like Trump was Ikea. Or Acme in Looney Tunes. Or Goliath Corp in the Thursday Next books if you've read those. (That's not a recommendation: I'd say don't bother. I think you'd find them facile if you like Wallace.) It wasn't gaudy stuff you'd associate with real Trump, it was pretty plain, like higher quality Ikea or maybe almost White Company, and it had a little grey logo, usually round, which reminded me kind of the old Sainsburys TU one and kind of the little initial-circles for names in Outlook email. It was different on some items because they weren't all the same age. The stuff annoyed me because it didn't actually look that bad, I didn't want rid of it for aesthetic reasons even if I could have afforded to replace it, and it would become easy not to notice over time. I was walking around the house for no reason, looking at everything, and picked up a new, clean, white miminalist well-made toilet brush, in the kitchen for some reason, and this Trump logo was even on the handle, and I said loudly to no-one, For Fuck's Sake.
The story itself: the flowering of empathy as the result of a dream. Details of what an unempathic twat he'd been before, and how deeply he started to feel others' experience afterwards. Reminds me of being in my later twenties when I had started doing a lot of meditation and then therapy and I felt this way, more gradually and about many things, everything. Another of those moments that brings back the idea of Wallace as a writer to read in one's twenties. Except perhaps The Pale King, which I haven't actually read, which I have started to think of, perhaps because of the people I know on here who like it and when they read it, as a book for one's thirties, after having learnt a bit of this stuff, but by no means become perfect.
The thing I keep saying about Wallace is that he is very stuck-in-one's head, whereas Pynchon is all about opening up and wandering around in the world. This isn't quite as in-turned as some DFW, but it still propagates a bit of niggling self-consciousness. (Self-conscious, what a word of the past. I remember when I realised I wasn't especially, continually, self-conscious any more. It's a wonderful moment like being a kid when you first manage to ride a whole street-length on a bike without stabilisers. I don't especially like being reminded of what the Before felt like.)
There are 17 more of these stories. What if they all make me want to write this much? It's almost as bad as when I try to review non-fiction. Maximalist inspires maximalism in one already that way inclined. Nowt new there. I doubt many people will read all this, but I think I've started enjoying it as a writing exercise / prompt.
Signifying Nothing. ****1/2
This is realler than most memoir. The voice, the imperfect remembrance of details, the weirdness of what happened, the way it doesn't quite fit standard concepts of abuse but was as disturbing as if it did. The frank self examination to make sure one trusts oneself. The parental blankness. The abruptness of the ending (otherwise it would have been perfect) sadly makes it too literary and fucks the verisimilitude. Otherwise it could have been someone talking to a therapist at length, as in Portnoy.
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