Guilty

Am I guilty, on occasion, of spending a lil' too much time in the bathroom with a smartphone to get away from the helter skelter of two kids and chores?

Yes.


     Was having pizza delivered to the bathroom over the top?

     Maybe.


          Was reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest a tad insensitive?

          Perhaps.


               Did I conquer too many levels of Candy Crush?

               If beating Candy Crush is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Using DFW in General Psych

I am teaching an intro to Psychology course this semester. After dispensing the syllabus I put together a little Prezi to get them a little jazzed about Psychology. I read this section from DFW's Infinite Jest to highlight disorders and depression. The collective jaw dropped.

"Katherine Gompert seemed to come out of her dark reverie for a moment. She stared full-frontal at the doctor for several seconds, and the doctor, who'd had all discomfort at being stared at by patients trained right out of him when he'd rotated through the paralysis/-plegia wards upstairs, was able to look directly back at her with a kind of bland compassion, the expression of someone who was compassionate but was not, of course, feeling what she was feeling, and who honored her subjective feelings by not even trying to pretend that he was. Sharing them. The young woman's expression, in turn, revealed that she had decided to take what amounted for her to her own gamble, this early in a therapeutic relationship. The abstract resolve on her face now duplicated what had been on the doctor's face when he'd taken the gamble of asking her to sit up straight.
'Listen,' she said. 'Have you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were going to throw up?’
The doctor made a gesture like Well sure.
'But that's just in your stomach,' Kate Gompert said. 'It's a horrible feeling but it's just in your stomach. That's why the term is "sick to your stomach." ' She was back to looking intently at her lower carpopedals. 'What I told Dr. Garton is OK but imagine if you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldn't, and you felt that way all the time, and you're sure, you're positive the feeling will never go away, you're going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this.’"

More DFW - Isn't That A Song By The Vaughan Brothers?

Just finished David Lipsky's book on DFW. 

Fun read. The moral of the story, for me, is how satisfied he was with Infinite Jest essentially (from the greek ontos - that without which a thing cannot exist) because he worked so hard on it. He is heavy handed in the conversations that the fluff is superfluous (insert Woody Allen line from Mighty Aphrodite: "I'm superfluous. What you don't feel good?" Oddly enough, DFW found Allen "schticky") and that the satisfaction is from the hard work he put in on the book. This is not debatable. Well maybe it is debatable but that would be superfluous ((insert Woody Allen line from Mighty Aphrodite: "I'm superfluous. What you don't feel good?" Oddly enough, DFW found Allen "schticky")

Seriously folks, I was class clown in 1988 for a reason and this class clown would have loved to have traded some "crackin'" with DFW. He and Lipsky riffed a few times and it made me want to jump in there and wordsmith right along. 

And of course the quote on the back, the bit about treating ourselves as precious. Somber. Bittersweet. 

Futile?

(The Vaughan Brothers' DFW )

Thoughts on Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max

I have been trying to get this in for a while but in my defense, my wife and I had our second child just as I was finishing the book. (I took the book to the hospital one day.)

The book is a completely thorough look into the life of David Foster Wallace (DFW). I can remember commenting one night to my wife in bed that it has been as if I have been next to DFW his entire life. Now of course the upshot is that DFW took his life and of course, usually only fans will want to read a bio but this does not mean that the book isn't well written. It is. And one strength is that Max doesn't try to write like Wallace (who could you quip?), instead opting for fewer flourishes and mostly nourishment. Consider DFW's philosophy thesis at Amherst as a prime example.

So given such a well written bio, we can focus on the life of DFW and what a life. Now I studied philosophy and can remember, I believe while studying Spinoza's pantheism, one question reared it's head more than once: Can you have the good without the bad? And with some of these artists like DFW that have an expanse of intellect and ability with profound depth attached; can they produce without the, for lack of a better word, madness? Could they have and create greatness without the suffering?

Now please understand that when it comes to drugs, I consider myself a libertarian, but a libertarian who is fully appreciative of the dangers of addiction. One wonders what DFW would have been like had he not began smoking marijuana at such a young age? Is the research complete on what marijuana does to a brain before it is fully cooked?

In his writing, Max also opened up some doors for me in regard to Infinite Jest. As a reader just getting into postmodernism, Max helped me put into context some of the angles of Infinite Jest.

Some surprises during the book were learning of DFW's philandering and promiscuity and his dedication to teaching though he knew teaching was often a cost to writing. Probably a favorite moment while reading this book was busting into laughter in bed while reading of DFW pulling a student out of class and telling him (paraphrasing here) that was one of the most collective dick suckings I've ever witnessed. But it was clear he went above and beyond for his students and I admire that, especially from someone so gifted.

Be careful, you are what you love, no? Is this the spirit of Infinite Jest and DFW? Is writing to help us battle loneliness? Maybe DFW was always lonely because so few brains processed the way his did and when he put the pen to the paper he was able to be "matched" in some sense.

One last random thing I thought of while reading this book. It is clear that readers have to "earn" Infinite Jest and that while supremely gifted, DFW still "earned" it; what with grades, teaching, and his dedication to writing. So why wasn't he attracted to jazz music? Maybe he carried his loathing of writer types from Amherst just a little too far. Maybe, he could have been "matched" listening to a little Miles and Coltrane?

Maybe?