Nota Bene: Take Careful Note

David Foster Wallace, known for his intricate and linguistically rich prose, had a deep-seated passion for language that was displayed in his habit of compiling extensive lists of words. He did this primarily to fuel his writing process, seeking out precise, evocative, or obscure terms that could add layers of meaning, texture, and innovation to his work—such as in novels like Infinite Jest, where his vocabulary often included jargon, archaisms, and neologisms to create a distinctive voice. 

I'd read of this habit of his and later was gratified to find a lengthy list of his words in one of his books whose title I can no longer recall. I found it interesting to read through a catalog of words someone else was fascinated by.

One of James D. Nickel's several 
books on Mathematics

What brought this Wallace habit to mind was stumbling into another collection of interesting words on the website Biblical Christian Worldview. which features the research and writings of math scholar and author James D. Nickel. It was fun to skim through his lists of words on a page titled Nota Bene, which is Latin for Take Careful Note. Of this page on his much broader website he writes, This page is devoted to an investigation of the depth, versatility, and heritage of English words; i.e., here is a vocabulary list with some "bark and bite."

Here's a taste from a portion of words in the category E.

e pluribus unum: from many, one (the motto of the United States_
ebullience: the quality of being optimistic in speech or writing
ecce homo: behold the man
eccentricity: odd or whimsical behavior
ecclesiastical: pertaining to church
echelon: a level of command; military organizational structure
eclectic: choosing from a variety of sources or origins; something that offers a diverse selection of items, styles, or approaches
eclipse: any obscuration of light ecumenical: universal
edification: to instruct or enlighten in an encouraging way
educe: to draw out (education)
effeminate: more reminiscent of women than men
effete: lacking robust vitality; sterile; without force
efficacious: having the power to produce a desired effect
efflorescent: blossoming
effrontery: shameful boldness
effulgent: radiant; brilliantly shining egalitarian: arising from a belief in the equality of all persons
egocentric: selfish
egregious: flagrantly incorrect or bad

* * * * *

Before posting the above, I email James and asked, "Since you are a 'math guy'... what prompted you to build these lists of words?"

James replied: A "math guy" interested in words (i.e., the humanities)? Seems oxymoron, but no.

For a math guy to have interest revealed in "Nota Bene" is meant to show that Math/Technology/Science/Servile Arts and Humanities (High tech, high touch) flow together.

Ed: Two thumbs up.

* * * * *

I encourage you to not only check out the rest of the E-words but all the other lists as well. And while you're in the neighborhood, explore his primary work on the history of mathematics and his understanding of the relationships between math, science, God and meaning. 

Here's one additional word, for James, from his pages devoted to the letter K:

kudos: honor or accolades

Throwback Thursday: Three David Foster Wallace Blog Posts, an Essay and Four Quotes

The very talented DFW. (Photo: Creative Commons 2.0)

In 2016 I got into a Davd Foster Wallace groove after being inspired by his superb Roger Federer essay. Here are three blog posts from 2016, plus a few extras which I will label as icing on the cake. If you don't much care for cake, then call it cheese. 

Thoughts about DFW's last interview, captured in Quack This Way 

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/11/quack-this-way-dialogue-on-language-and.html

David Foster Wallace Skewers the Current State of American Literature 

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/09/david-foster-wallace-skewers-current.html

 

Magical and the Marvelous: DF Wallace's Roger Federer Essay

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-magical-and-marvelous-df-wallaces.html
The original essay that got me jazzed about DFW: Roger Federer as Religious Experience

DFW QUOTES

The Role of Fiction
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
--From an Interview by Larry McCaffery

On Psychic Pain
Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
--A note from one of Wallace's notebooks

On Thinking
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being "an excellent servant but a terrible master."
--A note from one of Wallace's notebooks

On Despair
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
--From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Reflections on Bob Dylan's "Not Dark Yet"

‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’ — this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish."
– David Foster Wallace, “Octet”

Something I’ve often wondered is why we’re so fascinated by things that frighten us. When I say “we” I do not mean to suggest that this is universal, but it does seem fairly pervasive. When sitting around a campfire we enjoy ghost stories that succeed in actually scaring us. We get a rush out of the horrors that give us nightmares. It’s a strange thing when we’re forced to choose between competing desires, whether to cover our eyes or to stare.

Sometimes I wonder if Death, or what is euphemistically called the Void or the Grim Reaper, is the real horror behind many of these stories and thereby the thing that fascinates and frightens us most deeply. Just as Victor Frankl identified the search for meaning as man’s ultimate quest, so it is that death renders all our quests meaningless. Meaninglessness is the close companion of Despair.

Despair is a scary matter that has been part of the human condition from the beginning. The Bible addresses this strangely suffocating mindset in the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. From the outset the tone is set: "Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” Many of the passages in this book were so devoid of hope that Martin Luther wanted to extract it from the Sacred Scriptures.

And yet, the despair found in Ecclesiastes may well be one of the foundation stones of wisdom.

There's something compelling about despair in a certain sense. It's akin to resignation, a resignation to fate, to a recognition of one's powerlessness and life's futility, a futility that may be the first step toward the humility that gives birth to wisdom. It's the ultimate undercutting of one's sense of self-importance, as Borges lays out in A Yellow Rose.

"Not Dark Yet" speaks directly to this matter.

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day 
It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away 
Feel like my soul has turned into steel 
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal 
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Christopher Ricks in his Dylan’s Visions of Sin begins his fifteen-page discussion of this song with a one-word summation: Apocalypse. I can see this and he easily demonstrates that an apocalyptic theme is a recurring thread throughout Dylan's five decade career, explicit examples a-plenty beginning with "A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall" and "All Along the Watchtower" to "Whatcha Gonna Do When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky", and now here in "Not Dark Yet".

A portion of his segment on this song deals with how much Dylan’s "Not Dark Yet" corresponds with Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale", a poem that attempts to put into words what one senses when standing on the precipice, at the edge of the abyss.

As Ricks puts it, “'Not Dark Yet' seeks – in the great phrase from Freud – to make friends with the necessity of dying.”

Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain 
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain 
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind 
She put down in writing what was in her mind 
I just don’t see why I should even care 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

There’s that written letter again. You may recall it from the last stanza of "Desolation Row". Something about seeing it in writing cuts us more deeply than just hearing it. We hear it, and then somehow alter it so we don’t quite hear it the way it was meant, or in some way we conveniently forget, or soften it, or dismiss it because… well, she was just frustrated and didn’t mean it. Now it’s right there, in ink, and it can’t be denied or ignored.

It’s the reality of the thing that especially hurts, causing us to distrust the beautiful, to recognize the ways in which we deceive ourselves when things seem good, forgetting that nothing ever really lasts. We’re outside the Gates of Eden now.

Well, I’ve been to London and I’ve been to gay Paree 
I’ve followed the river and I got to the sea 
I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies 
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes 
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Yes, this is what Camus wrestled with in his essay on Sisyphus. “Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear.” And what’s the use in looking for hope in someone else’s eyes at this point of the game. Death will render all my achievements meaningless in the end anyways.

‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’ — this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. – David Foster Wallace, “Octet”

For two years or more one of the websites to which I returned for thought stimulation was The Floating Library, which appeared to be hosted by a man named Dr. Sineokov. I had always assumed this was some elderly Russian philosopher who migrated to the West, something akin to a reclusive Solzhenitsyn in New England. What a surprise, and shock, to one day visit The Floating Library only to find that the caretaker/webmaster of this literary site was a young man of 27 who now committed suicide, at age 27.

The shock hit me more deeply than I expected. In part, because I identified with so many of the quotes he seemed to unearth on such a regular basis. Nevertheless, there were clues here, too, as toward the end they seemed to be especially bleak. Quotes from Orwell, Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Yeats, Louise Glück, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and E.M. Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born.

In what we have agreed to call “civilization,” there resides, undeniably, a diabolic principle man has become conscious of too late, when it was no longer possible to remedy it. — E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Dylan reflects similar sentiments in the final stanza.

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will 
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still 
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb 
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from 
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

“Suddenly I was alone with . . . I felt, that afternoon of my childhood, that a very serious event had just occurred. It was my first awakening, the first indication, the premonitory sign of consciousness. Before that I had been only a being. From that moment, I was more and less than that. Each self begins with a rift and a revelation.” — E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

For Dylan this rift and revelation occurred early in life. You don’t write songs like "Hard Rain" as a jester.

But Ricks takes a different tack here. He examines this song in a chapter titled Fortitude. In spite of the apparent futility of our life situation, our human condition and circumstances, we press on. Camus concluded that Sisyphus can choose to live for those special moments of relief from eternally rolling that boulder up the hill and utilize his time sauntering down the hill to take in the fragrance of the flowers, to absorb the splendor of the vista before shouldering his burden again.

Despair is a fiercer companion for some than for others. This is why a wise man once exhorted us to "be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Four centuries ago one of the foundation stones of the Reformation was the profound insight that “the just shall live by faith.” That message delivered countless millions from the burden of a crushing works-based medieval Catholicism. But in our modern/postmodern world it would seem to have become an overused coin, and two other “heavenly graces” have become even more necessary and needful: hope and charity.

In a world full of lies, in a world as dark as ours, hope is a miracle whose source is unseen, for what we see is a sinking twilight.

Artwork on this site is produced by ennyman

A Writing Lesson: Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." 
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

This past month I listened to a set of lectures from the Great Courses series on the subject Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft. This is a seriously good set of lectures that I believe can help anyone serious about their writing. (EdNote: If money is a barrier, you might try your local library, or wait for this set to go on sale.)

The course description begins like this:
Great writing begins—and ends—with the sentence. Whether two words ("Jesus wept.") or 1,287 words (a sentence in William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!), sentences have the power to captivate, entertain, motivate, educate, and, most importantly, delight.

In an early lecture by University of Iowa Professor Brooks Landon he dares to kick over one of the sacred cows of nearly every writers conference, the venerable Elements of Style by Strunk & White. Nearly every serious writer I know has a copy of this little volume by their writing desks. It's ideas have nearly Biblical authority in the writer's world, drumming home at least one fallacy that Prof Brooks deplores, that shorter is always better.

We think of Hemingway as a prime example of powerful short sentences, but Professor Brooks cited Hemingway sentences of more than 100 and 200 words, putting the kibosh on this fallacious notion. 

Since listening to this lecture series I've been paying closer attention to sentences again -- their composition, the relationships between words and ideas --- with renewed enthusiasm. For this reason, while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up this week I decided to make use of this essay as an example of a central point of Professor Brooks' lectures, that sentences can be really interesting, and cool. Here's the opening paragraph of Fitzgerald's essay:

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick—the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.

Look how that first sentence, which says so much, is followed by a contrast, with the third summing up what has just been set before us. In paragraph two, Fitzgerald then makes it clear that this story of a breakdown is going to be his story. The subject matter has been studied at length under the lens of a high-powered microscope, to be solemnly shared by this man who has spent a lifetime honing his craft. Note the variety of sentences, and even though none are exceedingly short, the manner in which the sentences have been constructed is worth examining.

Now to paragraph two:

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man – you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived – you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied--but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.

* * * *

In the follow-up essay, titled Pasting It Together, Fitzgerald dives deeper into some of the causes of his malaise. Here are some additional sentences with heft and nuance, artistic beauty and unveiled truth intimately woven together.

In this silence there was a vast irresponsibility towards every obligation, a deflation of all my values. A passionate belief in order, a disregard of motives or consequences in favor of guess work and prophecy, a feeling that craft and industry would have a place in any world—one by one, these and other convictions were swept away. I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. ...there was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinate to another power, a more glittering, a grosser power…

I can so identify with these sentiments, as did David Foster Wallace, whose life was also cut short by his own undoing. What he's saying is that in Hollywood, special effects (SFX) have taken over. Character development and storyline have become marginalized. How many times have you heard people complain about movies with action and no substance? (Fortunately, the Pixar leadership team held fast to their vision that Toy Story had to be, above all, a good story, not just a new kind of SFX animation process.)

The same shift has been happening in other aspects of our culture as well. Instead of character being the most important feature of a political candidate or business leader, the culture values charisma. Do they look good on camera? Do they make good sound bytes? This values shift, Fitzgerald laments, helped contribute to his breakdown.

*

Lest we drift too far, let's get back to the point. Writing is a craft. If you're a writer, learning how to build great sentences is invaluable. Words and sentences are the tools of our trade.

* * * *
Read The Crack-Up in its entirety here. Pasting It Together, can be found here.
The three essays which appeared in Esquire have since been compiled in a book along with material from his notebooks as well as letters. You can find the book here on Amazon.

Quack This Way: A Dialogue on Language and Writing

I've been thinking of calling 2016 "the year I discovered David Foster Wallace." His linguistic alchemy and straight talk have cast a spell over me. As I've many times stated, if a man is worth knowing at all he's worth knowing well. DFW's become someone I've been doing my best to get to know, to internalize his ideas and views in order to see and feel and communicate like a real writer.

Having just finished Quack This Way I felt a need to put in a plug for what is essentially a transcript of a 90-minute interview of DFW by another writer whose obsession is usage, as in how words are used. Garner placed DFW in front of a camera and grilled him for juicy bits that could be shared with others. Yumm.

As a result of Quack This Way I'm now adding Garner's name to my list of people I'd like to know better. Check out these volumes he's produced. Yes, I realize that at first glance these look like books that will bore you to tears. No prob. Most of them, maybe all, are not for you. If writing well is not important to your career or life aspirations, take a pass. If you believe writing well is an essential skill to have in your life toolkit, both these men have something to offer.

Here's a pair of insights from the early part of the book:

In my experience with students the most important thing for them to remember is that someone who is not them and cannot read their mind is going to have to read this. In order to write effectively... you never forget that what you're engaged in is a communication to another human being.

And...

Probably the second biggest lesson is learning to pay attention in different ways. Not just reading a lot, but paying attention to the way the sentences are put together, the clauses are joined, the way the sentences go to make up a paragraph.

A little further along Garner probes Wallace to squeeze out a more defined understanding of what it means to write well. This spoke to me.

Writing well in the sense of writing something interesting and urgent and alive, it actually has calories in it for the reader – the reader walks away having benefited from the 45 minutes she put in your reading the thing – maybe isn't hard for a certain few. I mean, maybe John Updike's first drafts are these incredible... For me the cliché that "writing that appears effortless takes the most work" has been borne out through very unpleasant experience.

Wallace and Garner got along because both were fanatical about words, especially how they get used. Garner's catalog includes numerous books for the legal profession. Two that caught my eye were Legal Writing In Plain English and Making Your Case: The Art Of Persuading Judges, which he co-authored with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The HBR Guide to Better Business Writing seems a worthwhile addition to a corporate executive's bookshelf. Don't buy it just to show people you own it though. This is surely a volume to be studied and used, not displayed. If I myself were doing time, though, I'd find a away to get my hands on Making Your Case.

Here's the first paragraph of the Amazon.com review that persuaded me to purchase Quack This Way:
This is a transcript of an interview between Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace. The original interview lasted less than 90 minutes, and won't take you as long to read. But I've just completed my first read, and I've highlighted so many nuggets that I am certain I will want to go back and re-read this a few more times. The conversation between Garner and Wallace is riveting - revealing as much about Wallace's thoughts on writing as it does his own peculiar personality.

If you're serious about your writing and seem to be struggling with where to go with it,  how to make it more alive, I'd encourage you to more familiar with David Foster Wallace. Whether you begin with Quack This Way or one of his collections of essays is up to you. The essays in Consider the Lobster are a great starting point. I'm currently bouncing around inside A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's delicious.

A Good Day For Lists: 35 Items of Greater or Lesser Insignificance

I've been recently bitten by the David Foster Wallace bug. That is, I keep finding myself drawn to reading more of his work. Impressive is an understatement. Pow! Blam! Ouch.

Wallace liked lists. Or so I've been led to believe. Here's a list of miscellaneous observations, notes to myself of things to read or do, and ideas to ponder. There's always more to do than there is time, so a list is all we end up with in the meantime.

1. Game 1 of the World Series is tonight featuring the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians, the two teams that have gone longest without winning a World Series championship.
2. Today is World Pasta Day.
3. Who comes up with these things? World Pasta Day?
4. Why is it called the World Series when it only involves a competition North American teams?
5. Blog topic: young bull, Death in the Afternoon, good and bad bulls.
6. Last Friday's Fall Art Show at Goin' Postal was a lot of fun for a lot of people.
7. Blog Idea: Series of blog posts featuring the songs on Dylan's Oh Mercy album, beginning with "Political World."

We live in a political world
Love don't have any place
We're living in times
Where men commit crimes
And crime don't have any face

8. Trivia: Teddy R changed name of Executive Mansion to White House
9. Worth re-reading: How To Lie With Statistics
10. Don't forget to pay your bills.
11. Learn more about Will Rogers.
12. Einstein was a pacifist who became a non-pacifist because of Hitler
13. Item 13 is now removed and has been replaced with this sentence.
14. What are your goals for the next 30 days? Do you have goals or do you simply drift?
15. Submissions are now open for the Water-Stone Review through December 1. They are seeking original, unpublished creative fiction, essays, poetry.
16. In 2009 the richest man in Asia had 168 cars. The average income in India at that time was $500 a year.
17. Jay Leno had more cars than the richest man in Asia.
18. I'm curious how much money the DAI raised last Friday in their Make Your Mark fund raising event.
19. A million square miles of land was added to U.S. as a result of the Mexican War.
20. WikiLeaks: No one likes what Mr. Assange did yet everyone seems glad to have found out about what's been going on underneath Washington's skin.
21. Most dangerous jobs in America #1: Crack Dealer #2: Logging
re: crack dealers... 1 in 4 killed who serve four years on job
22. Fear of being shunned causes people to avoid honesty; takes courage to speak honestly
23. “A hard day’s work never really killed anyone, but why risk it?” ~Ronald Reagan
24. The great virtue of capitalism is that it decentralizes power and minimizes coercion. One nation’s gain does not necessitate another nation’s loss, and it doesn’t discriminate; it is open to anyone.
25. The Man by Irving Wallace made an impression on me as a teen in the Sixties, a novel about the first black U.S. president and the special challenges he would experience.
26.  "Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God." ~Corrie ten Boom
27. In Muslim culture hypocrisy is not as serious of a vice as here because it is better to uphold ideals we fail to live up to than to just give up and say “anything goes.”
28. Blog Entry idea: Great Gatsby and Lady Chatterley’s Lover both have as a theme the difference between good adultery and bad adultery.... A noble adultery and ignoble....
29. Blog Exploration: Do the strong stay strong forever or do they weaken over time (eg. Buddenbrooks)
30. Blog Exploration: What if our brain lost its "sort" function.
31. Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards." ~Kierkegaard

32. In the "good old days" New York City had 40,000 horses that generated 400 tons of manure a day, 20,000 gallons of urine and nearly 200 carcasses. (19th century stat.)
33. “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” ~Eleanor Roosevelt
34. What are you doing today that will make a difference tomorrow?
35. Another verse from Political World:

We live in a political world 
Wisdom is thrown in jail 
It rots in a cell 
Is misguided as hell 
Leaving no one to pick up the trail

The times are most definitely a-changin'.

"The future depends on what you do today." ~Mahatma Gandhi

Is This Really the Third Golden Age of Television? Stick a Fork In It.

I once threw a television set off a bridge. I called it an art project at the time. The authorities would've called it littering. Had I been more into the showmanship aspect of this conceptual expression I would have gathered an audience. As a college art student I was making a statement, I believed. I was also going for a certain explosive effect that I was anticipating as the glass onion hit the rocks.

I'm not trying to be mean. Television is an incredibly powerful medium, but as more than one person has noted -- David Foster Wallace most vividly -- it is a powerful distraction from getting other things accomplished. At its essence, network television is clickbait.

Google defines "clickbait" as "content, especially that of a sensational or provocative nature, whose main purpose is to attract attention and draw visitors to a particular web page." It's an internet-era term that I think applies to TV as well.

Wallace notes that one major feature of television is that it's an effortless medium to imbibe in. He writes,  "Easy and undemanding, requires nothing of us, as a result we as a nation are mentally lazy. This is normal to avoid work, which is why few people strive to paint like Leonardo da Vinci or play piano like a virtuoso. We pretend to be philosophers but we really don't do the heavy lifting of philosophers."  

* * * *

It's in this context that I wanted to share a few observations, prodded by my recent re-reading of Difficult Men by Brett Martin. Martin's book is a detailed examination of the players and proceedings of what he argues is "the third Golden Age of television. His premise is that the original Golden Age (fulfilled in the 50s) and the Second Golden Age (a period in the early 1980's) has been experiencing a third, led by a host of influential HBO shows such as The Sopranos and The Wire. These story serials have taken viewers into new territories, producing cult-like fan followings. Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, and The Shield are premiere examples of the form.

Martin's book highlights the bold writing, as well as the manner in which exceedingly flawed characters are regarded heroically. It's heralded as a "raw realism."

The chief aim of Difficult Men is to put these groundbreaking scriptwriters on a pedestal and throw accolades.

But at certain points Martin shows too many of the cards in his hand. No question these scriptwriters are exceptionally influential. Are they making the world a better place?

Raw. Realistic.

What was the secret to HBO's success? Martin expressed the problem like this: How can we (HBO) make people pay for our content when they already get more than enough on Network TV... FREE? Well, the answer was not complicated. Show things that you can't get on prime time: breasts and the kind of language that is forbidden there.

From its racy beginnings more than three decades ago today's shows make early HBO look like grade school.

After reading Difficult Men I decided to test the waters a watch one of the series that got raves from the author of this book: The Wire. The story takes place in the inner city of Baltimore. Drugs, gangs, crooked cops, crooked officials higher up the political seawall... corruption and social cancer, all authentically portrayed with solid acting, interesting characters, etc. etc. etc.

As we're going along in episode four the script writers did something that made me roll my eyes. It's well known that Hollywood insiders love to see how much they can get away with. As in any field, people are competitive. So a screenwriter looks for an opportunity to get into the record books for something as meaningful as, um, "Let's see how many times we can get the F-word into a movie?" Yes, a noble pursuit that we all want our children to aspire to. The Wolf of Wall Street packed 506 of them into its 3 hour feast. There was such a buzz about this achievement that you knew ahead of time it was not "a family movie." 

But those screenwriters are competitive and that Scorsese film has been surpassed already with a 900 word F-bomb massacre.

What's the point? It's obvious. People are still watching and this confirms their cynical view of human nature.

Episode four of The Wire (someone can correct me if I'm wrong) takes a page from the Scorsese playbook with a bit of dialogue that is so unreal only a screenwriter could write it.

Remember, the main idea of writing fiction is verisimilitude. That is, the story needs to give the appearance of being real. What you don't want is for the reader (or audience) to have a mental pinprick that produces the thought, "Pshaw, that would never happen." Which is exactly what I experienced in the scene I am about to describe involving detective William "Bunk" Moreland played by Wendell Pierece and detective James "Jimmy" McNulty, played by Dominick West.

There has been a shooting at a residence. These two detectives arrive to check it out. The dialogue our screenwriters apparently provided went as follows. (I have mis-spelled the critical four letter word and replaced it with a euphemism.) Here's the dialogue, as delivered:

Fork
Mother Fork
Fork, fork, fork, fork, fork.
Fork, fork, fork, fork.
Fork
Fork
Fork
Fork
Fork
Mother Fork
Aw Fork
Aw Fork
Fork, fork, fork, fork, fork.
Fork.
Oh, fork, fork, fork.
What The Fork
Forking-A
Fork
Mother Fork
Fork me.

On paper this must have been funny to someone. Raw? I guess. Realistic? Do you think this would be how two detectives would talk for ten minutes when investigating a crime scene? Now I am not suggesting they do not us the F-word. What I am saying is... where are the in between words, like, "What happened here?" or "Oh man, like whoa... Is he still breathing?"

Maybe I lack the experience as a television watcher. The scene struck me as too stupid to be taken seriously. So much for The Wire.

Alas. No wonder our visions of the future are so dystopian. 

David Foster Wallace Skewers the Current State of American Literature

"Some writers specialize in the away- from-home experience. They’ve safaried, eaten across Italy, covered a war. Wallace offered his alive self... cutting through our sleepy aquariums, our standard T.V., stores, political campaigns. Writers who can do this, like Salinger and Fitzgerald, forge an unbreakable bond with readers..."*

* * * *

The aim of this blog post is to get writers interested in reading David Foster Wallace's essay Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young. It's an indictment of the (American) writing scene in the late 1980s, though the trends he skewers seem as relevant today if not more so. Naturally anyone who writes this kind of scathing commentary might get accused of sour grapes. Here's the opening salvo:

THE METRONOME OF literary fashion looks to be set on presto. Beginning with the high-profile appearances of David Leavitt’s Family Dancing, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Ellis’s Less Than Zero, the last three-odd years saw a veritable explosion of good-willed critical and commercial interest in literary fiction by Conspicuously Young writers. During this interval, certain honored traditions of starvation and apprenticeship were inverted: writers’ proximity to their own puberties seemed now an asset; rumors had agents haunting prestigious writing workshops like pro scouts at Bowl games; publishers and critics jockeyed for position to proclaim their own beardless favorite “The first voice of a new generation.”

I remember when these books came out. I writing stories with the aim of becoming the next Hemingway (fat chance) at the time, and included these then-contemporary books in my reading alongside my continued study of the classics. I thought Bright Lights was an interesting experiment in producing a work in second person. (You walk into a room. You see a man with a gun, or is it a mop? You reach for your cell phone and notice your reflection out of the corner of your eye. You turn, see that look in your eyes...) It's a short novel, and McInerny got away with it. Less Than Zero soon followed, and hmmm.

I remember when Tom Wolfe proclaimed that the novel would soon be dead, that reality-based New Journalism would crowd it out like Capote's In Cold Blood and his own The Right Stuff. There have sure been a lot of novels written since that bit of bravado, including his own Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man In Full. It's human nature to make pronouncements, I suppose.

Wallace's commentary on the literary scene was written maybe fifteen years further down the road and it's got some barbs in it. Here are excerpts from page eight:

Today’s journeyman fiction writer finds himself both a lover of serious narrative and an ineluctably conditioned part of a pop-dominated culture in which the social stock of his own enterprise is falling. What we are inside of—what comprises us—is killing what we love...

And, even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It’s a narrative art that strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient—not necessarily even to “entertain”—but merely and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end— openly acknowledged—is to ensure continued watching. And (I claim) the metastatic efficiency with which it’s done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the level of people’s tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of which narrative art is art.

A half paragraph later he's stirred this dish to a simmering boil:

Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by—has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that understands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster.

There are so many thought-provoking points Wallace makes from this point on that I just wish for you to read the essay itself. (Here's the link again.) The next paragraph, at the end of this page begins...

I’m worried lest I sound too much like B. Tuchman here, because my complaints about trash are different from hers, and less sophisticated. My complaint against trash fiction is not that it’s plebeian, and as for its rise I don’t care at all whether post- 8 industrial liberalism squats in history as the culprit that made it inevitable. My complaint against trash isn’t that it’s vulgar art, or irritatingly dumb art, but that, given what makes fiction art at all, trash is simply unreal, empty—and that (aided by mores of and by TV) it seduces the market writers need and the culture that needs writers away from what is real, full, meaningful.

In the next section he fillets Sidney Sheldon, writers programs, the poetry scene -- "more people in this country write poetry than read it" -- and Creative Writing Programs among other things. Of this last item he states, "a lot of Creative Writing Programs are an unfunny joke. Few require of applicants any significant preparation in history, literature, criticism, composition, foreign languages, art or philosophy; fewer still make attempts to provide it in curricula or require it as a criterion for graduation. 

* * * *
I guess I've gotten a temporary itch for more DFW. Have been reading The Last Interview and Other Conversations this past week. It also has some keen insights for writers.

Here's another quote, and after this I'll let go.

"I think if there is sort of a sadness for people under forty-five or something, it has to do with pleasure and achievement and entertainment. And a kind of emptiness at heart of what they thought was going on, that maybe I can hope that parts of the book will speak to their nerve endings a little bit."

You can find the essay I've been encouraging you to read here at neugierig.org/content/dfw/ffacy.pdf

* * * *
Meantime, life goes on all around you. Get into it.

* I copied this quote from somewhere, intending to use it. I now seem unable to find where it was taken from. I will cite it here if you come across it somewhere.

The End of the Tour: A Review of the Film Based on David Lipsky's Account of a 5-Day Interview with David Foster Wallace

I don't know if it's a given for all, but based on my own experience and observations of others, writers enjoy movies about writers. In one way or another they usually reflect aspects of the writer's own struggle, or shine a light on aspects of the process that we've all been through in our efforts to craft an article, story or more substantial work. And since all films begin as an idea that is translated into a screenplay by writers, there are quite a few movies about this dreadful profession such as Capote, Misery, The Hours, Sunset Boulevard, The Shining, Adaptation, Stranger Than Fiction and Wonder Boys.

A short list of personal favorites might include The Ghostwriter, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Midnight In Paris. And having just finished The End of the Tour for the second time, I may need to place it somewhere here. It's about a writer on assignment from Rolling Stone covering the last days of David Foster Wallace's book tour promoting his opus, Infinite Jest.

The film was not a big box office hit. There were no special effects, no dead bodies. No chase scenes. No sex. There's a sense in which it compares to My Dinner With Andre, which is essentially two men talking about life over dinner. In Tour, Wallace and his interrogator, I mean interviewer, are in various settings though the thread of the story is essentially the banter between them. Since Wallace is a fan of tennis, we could describe the action as a series of volleys, which ultimately serve to reveal both players' characters.

* * * *
The film begins with Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky noticing a Newsweek review about David Foster Wallace whose 1000+ page book is getting notice. Lipsky manages to get the assignment and flies off to spend five days with Wallace, in his home and in Minneapolis/St. Paul, the last stop on Wallace's promotional book tour. (The one scene takes place in The Hungry Mind, a book store we used to frequent when we lived in the Midway district.) In the end, these five days become the basis for Lipsky's own book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself which he produced after Wallace's suicide in 2008.

David Ulin, in his LA Times review of the film states, “The End of the Tour is all about our relationship to image, both in the story it tells, of a writer at the very moment he became an icon, and also in the way it tells that story. The movie makes this explicit by framing its main narrative as extended flashback, a memory play provoked by Wallace’s death. It gives the action a bittersweet, nostalgic edge it did not have — could not have had — in actual life."

Because Wallace himself was a writer who had skewered other writers, he was keenly aware of the power Lipsky was being given to shape the public's perceptions of Wallace. How much should the object of a profile dictate the final shape of the observer's observations?

Nat Hentoff ran in to this conflict when he wrote the first Playboy Interview of Bob Dylan in the 60's. As part of the arrangement Dylan had the right to see the final manuscript before it went to press. Hentoff wrote years later that Dylan spent two hours making changes, re-shaping how he would come across in the final version of the piece. Hentoff vowed to never be put in that situation again.

In reality, Wallace didn't like the role of being a specimen in Lipsky's petri dish, especially when it appeared that Lipsky was reading things into Wallace that weren't there.

DAVID 

I’ve written enough of these “pieces” to know that 

you could present this in a hundred different ways. 

Ninety of which I’m really gonna come off as a 

monumental asshole. But it seems like your read 

of this is, “Huh: what an interesting persona Dave 

is adopting for the purposes of this interview.”

In the LA Times story Ulin goes on to write: "And yet, that raises the question, doesn't it, of what it means to see Wallace portrayed as a character in a film? 'A writer who courted contradiction and paradox,' Christian Lorentzen described him this month in New York magazine, 'who could come on as a curmudgeon and a scold, who emerged from an avant-garde tradition and never retreated into conventional realism, he has been reduced to a wisdom-dispensing sage on the one hand and shorthand for the Writer As Tortured Soul on the other.'"

When I first saw the film, I had not yet read anything by Wallace, so I didn't grasp many of the key elements of the story. What I did get out of the first viewing was a measure of prodding to find something he'd written. After completing a set of his essays the film took on more significance.

Though it was Jesse Eisenberg (who is also a writer) as David Lipsky who I'd tuned in to see, Jason Segel stole the show with a superbly nuanced performance.

Here are excerpts from three reviews on Amazon.com that I thought might help finish this portrait of the film for you.

1. Prior to seeing this film, I had limited knowledge of David Foster Wallace and his works. After seeing the film, I wanted to learn more. The End of the Tour (dir. James Ponsoldt) is a very reflective film, highlighting author Wallace on the last stretch of his book tour for his novel Infinite Jest. Our entry point into this intriguing man is David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone reporter hired to do a piece on him in the late 1990s.

2. Few times this year, or in the past few years, have I thought "Wow, this performance, or for that matter this film, is revelatory", but I had that while watching The End of the Tour and specifically Jason Segel. What's most impressive here is the lack of any false drama. It's these two guys talking to each other, in the respect of a formal interview, over the course of four days, and while Eisenberg is quite good, it's Segel who is just mind-blowingly good here. Like, this is the guy from Forgetting Sarah Marshall? And The Muppets? He plays David Foster Wallace as disarming, shy, clever, engaging, engaged, at times appropriately miffed (or p'd off) and can also be funny and genuine and witty. These are all written in the script, but Segel makes them real, and it doesn't feel like a put on, which would've been the death knell here.

3. I didn't realize when watching the film that the dialogue is all based on, if not directly taken from, the tapes journalist (and protagonist) David Lipsky (Eisenberg) recorded of his interviewee, universally acclaimed novelist David Foster Wallace (Segel). The dialogue is rich with insight into the character's thought processes and their observations on life (but mostly those of Wallace). I was riveted at every moment the two were talking, feeling as though being revealed before me were the truths of life. The thrill of being a fly on the wall. And it's not just the words containing the wisdom of the thoughtful and complicated Wallace, but the delivery via the actors and the way in which the many hours of tape are edited to allow Wallace's ideas and observations to resonate. Even beyond Wallace's ideas, the film cuts to the core and observes Wallace as a human being, not different for his brilliance but the same for his humanness.

* * * *
This film isn't for everyone, but I do believe there are some real takeaways for writers. Here's the rest of that LA Times review.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. And if you're a writer, write on. 

Tech Tuesday: A.I. Journalism Is Present, Not Future

When we moved to Duluth in 1986 to start a family my first task was to find employment. Seeking a writing position, I pounded pavement with a portfolio of published freelance work I'd rustled up over the previous four years while paying the bills with a "day job" painting apartments. Over a period of two months I was able to meet people and show my portfolio at least twice a day and occasionally more. Duluth was making a late recovery from the "Reagan Recession" as it had been dubbed, and jobs were scarce, but I was confident that all the talented writers had either found positions or moved to the Twin Cities, which meant I was only competing with writers who had lesser talent. (This self-talk strategy kept my confidence level high and ultimately paid off when a writer position opened at AMSOIL.)

I mention all this as a lead into how during that time I met Howie Hansen, a young writer who was also a hustler. Howie is currently a city councilor (District Four) and the founder of Howie's Blog, which bills itself as "Duluth's Finest News Source." In the mid-1980s Howie produced a "good news" newspaper called Twin Ports People (or something like that) but earned his rent money by freelance writing. The stories he scrapped for paid $20 bucks a pop or sometimes a little more (30-50) with tight turnaround times for deadlines. He covered local sports for the Trib, among other things, and learned how to string words together with an almost machine-like efficiency.

This was the picture that came to mind when I read the following story about a computer journalist in China that wrote 450 articles in two weeks about the Rio Olympics. That was a strange sentence to write because I would prefer to write about a journalist who wrote than a robot that wrote.

Just last week I wrote here about how writing jobs were going to be among the next to go by the wayside as AI emerges. An Ad Age story this weeks announces, IBM Wants You To Know That AI Is Not Futuristic -- It's Here Now.

The Futurism article about the Chinese bot assigned to cover the Olympics is intriguing, however. Evidently the owner of the machine is a Google equivalent with its own advanced AI technologies in the works. "Chinese search engine and news outlet Toutiao is using an artificial intelligence known as Xiaomingbot to publish articles on the Olympics. The bot was able to write a total of 450 articles during the 15-day event."

You're not likely to see anything like David Foster Wallace's Wimbledon stories, but I can imagine that sports summaries like the kind Howie once produced could be replaced, making those kinds of writers obsolete. Even when Howie was at his most productive he still had to sleep once in a while. Toutiao's machine never even needs to stop for a meal.

If anything, this might serve as a prod to contemporary writers to avoid bland prose and lazy verbs. If we can't keep our writing lively and compelling, we're not going to keep our jobs. I don't want to produce words that just any old bot could assemble. Do you?

Then again, if I can find an affordable machine to write this blog for me every morning then maybe I could finally go on a vacation.

Meantime, life goes on.

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The Magical and the Marvelous: DF Wallace's Roger Federer Essay

When I was an art student at Ohio University we had an instructor my third and fourth year named Frank Holmes who had just returned, I believe, from a two year art fellowship in Italy. He painted incredible scenes in the classical style that has become a lost art but which Jeffrey Larson is aiming to pass on to a new generation of painters.

After I graduated I kept track of a few of my classmates and instructors as able and learned that Frank had gone to New York City, the Big Apple, and acquired a loft somewhere in Manhattan. The last I heard he was doing a painting of a piano. A former classmate of mine had gone to see him and found that he'd been working on this painting for over a year. In order to do the painting he'd not only been doing preliminary drawings, he'd spent a great deal of time learning to play the thing, becoming intimately acquainted with not only its appearance but also its aural qualities.

This effort by Frank Holmes to become so fully immersed with the piano so as to experience the meaning of piano, this was the image that came to mind as I read David Foster Wallace's essay "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," the selection chosen to open his posthumous collection of essays assembled under the title Both Flesh and Not*.

This essay is a remarkable achievement. Here's the opening paragraph to whet your appetite:

                               CC by 2.0

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.


Remarkably, reading David Foster Wallace's prose has -- for the astute reader -- the same effect. As I read this essay, in an attempt to see what all the hoopla was about this legendary author (featured in last year's superb sleeper, The End of the Tour) I come away feeling something akin to the thrill that one must have felt after witnessing a Houdini performance.

The film (End of the Tour) may have failed to fill Hollywood billfolds with greenbacks, but it did succeed in introducing a few more readers to the Wallace sensation. I was not one beforehand, so I'm admittedly late to the party.

But this all misses the point of my blog post here, and I'd best return to it quickly. The point is, Wallace is at times a magician with words, especially in this essay where he paints in excruciating detail the godlike talents displayed in this mortal tennis player, Roger Federer. What Wallace does, however, is demonstrate his own intimacy with the game of tennis, and not only tennis today but its past history, its great players of the past, its challenges in the present, and the context in which this remarkable human has come into existence. Wallace paints a picture so vivid that a photograph could not capture more detail.

One of the words he keeps returning to is the word beauty. "Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports,," he writes, "but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war."

The purported subject of this New York Times article is a men's Wimbledon tennis final between Roger Federer and his Spanish opponent Rafael Nadal. What's striking here to me is that this story probably didn't require Wallace to pour so much sweat equity into the piece. Undoubtedly he could easily have compromised, produced a lesser essay, a suitable, even better than average story and gotten paid the exact same amount. But he didn't.

After a great deal of setup, and a fascinating amount of detail about the ceremonial coin toss, Wallace returns to a description of Federer's beauty as a performer/player.

A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact.

Roger's signature                            (Public Domain)

What makes the account come so alive is the detail. A little further along he describes how quickly these top tier pros must react to a serve.

Mario Ancic’s first serve, for instance, often comes in around 130 m.p.h. Since it’s 78 feet from Ancic’s baseline to yours, that means it takes 0.41 seconds for his serve to reach you. This is less than the time it takes to blink quickly, twice.

And when he describes Federer's performance on this fateful day, the descriptions are themselves delightful, magical and marvelous. And it's all done with so naturally, unpretentious. There isn't a hint of the intentional showiness that Katherine Anne Porter derided when she wrote, "When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit."

I used to do magic tricks when I was growing, card tricks and fumbling sleight of hand. It can be fun to see the befuddlement on other kids' faces when you pull something off. Bur when you see the dazzling handiwork of a master magician, making things disappear and re-appear elsewhere directly in front of your eyes, it can be breathtaking. And that's the feeling I had as I read this essay. I was watching a magician at work, just as he was describing the magician Roger Federer working to put away Nadal, his opponent.

Federer isn't the only sports superstar who appears to bend the rules of physics. Wallace cites Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky in a similar fashion. But the essay always returns to Federer, and it's my hope that you will take the time to read this wonderful piece.

Or you can go for the whole book. You'll find some excellent insights on writing, and a really superb smackdown of Hollywood's love affair with SFX, which essentially amounts to a blistering review of T-2.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Dig it.

*EdNote: Since Both Flesh and Not is a posthumous collection I can't give GFW credit for the clever title. It's ambiguous and leaves much to the imagination. It could make sense to assume it's Flesh and Bone, with some suggestiveness attached to the latter, though as Freud famously quipped, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

The title could be completed with another common conbo, Flesh and Spirit. Wallace grew up going to Sunday School and no doubt heard the admonition to live by the Spirit and not the flesh, the two warring factions of the Self that Paul writes about in his letter to the Romans, or his warmup on the theme in his counsel to the church of Galatia.

Flesh and Blood is another possibility. This pair is also featured in many a quote from literature (eg.: “The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood” --George Bernard Show) as well as the Bible. ("Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but principalities and powers...")