Cleanup Time: Notes & Quotes from Miscellaneous Scraps of Paper

I have a half dozen half-completed blog posts on various themes from the Founding of America to the Madness of Crowds, the Genomic Revolution and Dylan's "Absolutely Sweet Marie." With nothing quite complete I decided to straighten my office and discard all the scraps of paper the gather on every surface like house dust. Here are some notes from a few of these miscellaneous scraps as they were discarded.

The sources, in many cases, are identified. Unfortunately, some of these are lines from films that I can no longer identify. The best way to enjoy poetry and notes from scraps of paper is to read slowly, in a contemplative frame of mind.

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Sing Your Song 

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Be Your Best Self

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In the immortal words of Popeye, "I am what I am."
Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, in Truth

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"The problem with remembering everything is that you can't forget anything."

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Why it is so important to see the night sky.

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A big lie, if repeated enough, becomes truth.

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Notes from End of the Tour

"We can't be direct so we end up saying the weirdest things."

"If you're just operating by habit, then you're not really living."

"Things don't affect people the way they used to be."

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"As great as you are you'll never be greater than yourself."
--Bob Dylan, High Water (for Charley Patton)

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"Not all who wander are lost."
Second line of JRR Tolkien's poem "The Riddle of Strider."

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Favorite Childhood Games

Geography
Battleship
Stratego
Risk
Manhunt

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Do Justly
Love Mercy
Walk Humbly
--Micah 6:8

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And so it goes...

Word of the day: Turgid

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.

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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.

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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. 

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...")