viz. - David Foster Wallace

Bob Dylan on Contemporary Literature

Jay Voss — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago a 2001 press conference with Bob Dylan emerged on youtube. Dylan, usually cagey and recalcitrant with reporters, is unusually earnest in the interview. He says a lot about his career and his Love and Theft album, which he was promoting at the time. You can check out a clip above, and the interview’s other five segments can be found on youtube. The reason I choose to bring this to the attention of the blog is that in the interview Dylan makes some interesting comments about the state of literature in America, and in particular some comments about how digital media is affecting the ways we feel. The comments, which I’ll outline below, are particularly relevant after yesterday’s massacre at the Boston Marathon, but I’ll leave that connection to your own reflections – we’ve all seen coverage of that tragedy, and I don’t want to add to the noise. As the version of Bob Dylan who appeared on the day of that interview might suggest, this post isn’t a work of art and thus I have no business telling you how to feel.

(Image credit: brainpickings.org)

Dylan’s comments on literature and the media come after a reporter asked him if there were any new writers he was particularly excited about. After a brief moment of thought Dylan says he “just doesn’t think there are any…we’re living in a different time. The media is all-pervasive. What can a writer think to write that you don’t see every day in the newspaper or on television?” Many of us would disagree with the notion that there aren’t any new writers worth caring about. Few amongst us wouldn’t sing the praises of Zadie Smith or Dave Eggers. Just last week I picked up a copy of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, and I can confidently say it’s a work of genius. It’s certainly worth finding a copy of. So I think I chalk the first part of that comment up as the lament of an older generation. (Ibid Dylan’s later comments on there being no media in late-nineteenth century France.) But nevertheless, despite the factually incorrect way that Dylan frames his argument, I still think he’s on to something. A reporter responds to all this by asking whether “there are [still] emotions that need to be expressed,” and this spurs the heart of Dylan’s argument. “Yeah,” Dylan responds, “but the media’s moving people’s emotions anyway.”

(Image credit: quarterlyconversation.com)

I thought this was a really interesting concept. When I reflect on my own reading or talk to friends who keep up with contemporary literature, there does seem to be a general sense that things have changed. Writers certainly don’t have the cultural heft they once did. Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain had a profound reach in their day. Today people like David Foster Wallace are certainly considered influential, but that influence is reserved for a much less substantial audience than what Tolstoy or Twain enjoyed. Every serious reader I know has their own list of explanations. Some blame e-readers, some blame TV, some blame declining education standards. Who’s to say? Dylan’s point that other media tell us how to feel about our world is novel and valid. At its heart, I guess, is something about effort. Literature requires us to be active participants, while certain new media make it all too easy to be passive viewers. Some would probably say there are other valuable narratives superseding the novel, but that’s not what Dylan’s talking about.

Tennis After Postmodernism

Jay Voss — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: New York Times

This might be my last viz. post for the year, and so I thought I’d take a moment and say something that I’ve been dying to say for about 18 months or so: David Foster Wallace’s “Federer as Religious Experience” (New York Times Magazine, August 2006) is an allegory for what Wallace thinks fiction can (and should) be after postmodernism. Please forgive me if any of this seems obvious. In early July of 2006 Wallace headed over to south-west London to take in Wimbledon for the Times. Ostensibly, the magazine piece that resulted was a long definition of Rodger Federer’s talents as a tennis player. Wallace’s argument turned out to be that “if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon…then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a ‘bloody near-religious experience.’” Religious sentiments are present throughout the article, and Wallace works hard to articulate the ways in which perfect beauty can be found at the highest level of sport. It all has to do with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body,” Wallace suggests. To parse this out, Wallace explains the evolution of professional tennis tactics since the days of Jimmy Connors.

Image Credit: woodtennis.com

Tennis rackets changed significantly around 1980. Carbon-based rackets replaced the wooden artifacts that can now be seen lining any thoughtfully-decorated sports bar, and the effects of this switch were huge. (Wallace likens the revised rackets to aluminum baseball bats.) The composite materials allowed for lighter rackets with broader faces, much like the way iPhones and iPads allow for lighter backpacks that contain more information. Having only played tennis in sixth and seventh grades (well after composite rackets were introduced), I defer to Wallace on how the new rackets changed play:

"A wider face means there’s more total string area, which means the sweet spot’s bigger. With a composite racket, you don’t have to meet the ball in the precise geometric center of the strings in order to generate good pace. Nor must you be spot-on to generate topspin, a spin that…requires a tilted face and upwardly curved stroke, brushing over the ball rather than hitting flatly through it – this was harder to do with wood rackets, because of their smaller face and niggardly sweet spot."

This all forced the advent of power-baseline tennis, in which players could roam the baseline and spin balls at their opponents with great speed. It’s helpful to think of Jimmy Connors here, although Wallace clearly states that Connors was not “the father of the power-baseline game.” Connors played from the baseline (not in front of it, as folks were want to do during the serve-and-volley era), and his shots went barely over the net but with blazing speed. This was a complete revision of serve-and-volley tennis, which had previously dominated the men’s game for decades. Wallace goes on to explain how Ivan Lendl’s game was the first designed specifically around new racket technology: Lendl’s “goal was to win points from the baseline, via either passing shots or outright winners. His weapon was his groundstroke, especially his forehand, which he could hit with overwhelming pace because of the amount of topspin he put on the ball.” This combination of pace and topspin allowed Lendl to hit shots at a number of different angles, which Wallace points out was in some ways reminiscent of the serve-and-volley game but also designed specifically to handle the serve-and-volley game. Lendl’s range took the baseline game of Connors and melded it into the power-baseline game of Andre Agassi.

Image Credit: New York Times

The first time I read all of this, I couldn’t but help think of modernism and postmodernism, and how literary styles are always evolving given what’s come before. Modernism and postmodernism probably came to mind because those aesthetics are entirely grounded in the technologies of their day. James Joyce mused on the relativity of urban spaces lined with advertisements, and Thomas Pynchon attempts to synthesize an ever-increasing onslaught of information. And while pundits have claimed that power-baseline tennis is the final evolution of that sport (similarly, I’ve heard many different people claim that postmodernism is here to stay), Wallace praises Federer for his ability to offer something unmoored from the rudiments of fancy and completely natural to the challenges at hand. Sure, Federer has a great power-baseline game, but, as Wallace notes, “There’s also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace.” And let’s not forget Federer’s humanity. In Footnote 3, Wallace recounts how an International Tennis Federation guy tactlessly asked Federer for an autographed game-worn jersey that might cheer up a very sick neighbor, and how Federer complied with dignity and humanity. “He doesn’t pretend to care more than he does.” Empathy is clutch.

Wallace as Visual Experience

Eric Detweiler — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

"David Foster Wallace mii Playing Tennis" — Image Credit: Nick Maniatis, via Kottke.org

My first spring in Texas left me nostalgic for my Kentucky roots. This, of course, meant I’ve spent the last few weeks watching entirely too much March Madness. For Kentuckians, without a single professional sports team to call their own—and without Texas-sized performance and investment in college football—college basketball is a powerful source of sports identity. The showdown between the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky in this year’s Final Four was an epic, almost state-shattering event.

I’m not much interested in halftime banter or commercial breaks, however, so the last few weeks have also included a good deal of channel surfing. As I surfed, I found myself catching glimpses of another sport I’ve always wanted to watch more of but never have: tennis. My potential interest in tennis has nothing to do with fond remembrances of my single season as a high-school tennis player (I was horrible). It’s a theoretical interest that is largely indebted to David Foster Wallace. Tennis figures prominently not only in Wallace’s well-known novel Infinite Jest, but in his essays.

The first piece in Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again sets the tone. The essay, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” comprises a series of personal reflections on Wallace’s tennis-heavy upbringing in central Illinois, but is also a keen look at the visual tableaux and mathematical geography that made up his childhood landscape. Reflecting on his move from IL to Massachusetts, Wallace writes, “I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates” (3). Consider an aerial view of Philo, Wallace’s hometown:

Image Credit: Google Maps

Lines abound. Wallace’s later description of the town is utterly mathematical—in one sense exhaustively literal, and in another wonderfully metaphorical: “Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid, nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest, fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest … plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north” (8). Wallace attributes his success as a young tennis player to his intuitive affinity with this environment and its mathematics.

Image Credit: Tennis Help For Beginner to Pro

The mathematical precision of the ideal court lent him some theoretical edge, but it was the vagaries of central Illinois courts and weather that really gave him his advantage: “I’d found a way not just to accommodate but to employ the heavy summer winds in matches” (14). The “wind and bugs and chuckholes” of central Illinois’ unkempt courts were not resented imperfections for Wallace, but “a kind of inner boundary, my own personal set of lines” (15).

Image Credit: Photos Public Domain

When I see the court above, I think of the decay of suburban sprawl. For Wallace, it might be something strangely wonderful, a geometric set of “deformities to play around” (15).

Wallace speculates about the origins of his preternatural symbiosis with his environment: “I’d known, even horizontally and semiconsciously as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I’m pretty sure I kept the amorphous mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the Philo children I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw nothing stark or new-worldish in the township’s planar layout, prized nothing crisp. (Except why do I think its significant that so many of them wound up in the military, performing smart right-faces in razor-creased dress blues?)” (8-9).

“Wallace’s birthplace, Ithaca, NY, via satellite” — Image Credit: Google Maps

“Ithaca at eye-level” — Image Credit: Budget Travel

Psycho-geographical ruminations aside, Wallace returns to the visual nature of tennis in one of his last published works, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” Published in the New York Times in August of 2006, the Federer piece positions Wallace as spectator rather than player. His sharp eye for the game, however, remains. The online iteration of the story is accompanied by such images as

Image Credit: NYTimes.com

The dynamic virtuosity suggested by such an image is powerful, though Wallace might see the image as a poor reflection of Federer’s platonic perfection. He notes, “An athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke.” Words fail, in other words. And so does televised tennis, which “is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love”: “[A] TV screen’s image is only 2-D,” squashing the tennis court’s length and thus failing to capture the speed of a professionally-struck tennis ball, which “in person is fearsome to behold.” TV might capture Federer’s intelligence, “since this intelligence often manifests as angle,” but not the sacred beauty of his play. And I might capture Wallace’s intelligence via blog post, but I’d be remiss not to recommend that you encounter his tennis writing for yourself.

Works Cited

Wallace, David Foster. “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. 3-20. Print.

---. “Federer as Religious Experience.” New York Times. New York Times, 20 Aug. 2006. Web. 30 Mar. 2012.

The visual (after)life of Infinite Jest

Kendall Gerdes — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

"Tropium" — Image Credit: WebMD

Infinite Jest (IJ) is more than a novel, as anyone who has carried a copy around for awhile will attest.[1] Elsewhere I have argued that IJ is a performative utterance, following J.L. Austin, that IJ turns readers into addicts on the one hand and then thwarts the jones for textual mastery on the other. Here I wish simply to invite you into the tropium den[2] so you can see what it's like to cook up some of the visual texts that having been using Infinite Jest. I begin with the work of designer Chris Ayers, who created a tumblr called "Poor Yorick Entertainment" with the aim of "bring[ing] some kind of visual life" to the world of Infinite Jest (according to the site's "About" page). Many of the visual artifacts featured on Ayers's blog are also available for incarnation into the physical world through purchase.

"A Sampler of PYE movie posters: Blood Sister, Valuable Coupon, Medusa, Fun with Teeth" — Image Credit: Chris Ayers

Ayers lives and works in an old haunt of mine:[3] Phoenix, AZ, whose metro areas including Scottsdale and Tempe make their own appearances in the mainly Boston, MA- (and Tucson, AZ[4]-) centric world of IJ. But thanks to Ayers, the world of IJ makes its appearance in our own. The fascinating movie posters are not the only way James Incandenza's filmography has actualized—a 2010 Columbia University art school exhibition ran work in several media including film that was based on the filmography.

Image Credit: "Various Small Flames," adapted by William Santen 2010

And then but Incandenza's filmography is only eight and a half pages of endnote out of a 1079 page book, so Ayers and other artists have plenty of fictional world to select from and actualize. Ayers's site has featured posters for IJ's germophobe President's election campaign, its Southwest junior invitational tennis competition,[5] and even Michael Pemulis's dorm room décor.

"A Sampler of PYE posters: Johnny Gentle, Whataburger Invitational, Paranoid King" — Image Credit: Chris Ayers

What all these visualizations have in common is a rhetorical force of inventiveness. It may be highly specific, but each of these images extend the world of the fiction into our non-fictional world. I consider this one in a portfolio of ways that IJ complicates the logic that separates fiction from non-fiction:[6] by "multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply."[7] Digital images become material objects: in addition to a huge print of Ayers's "Visit Tucson" poster, I'm also the proud owner of an Enfield Tennis Academy t-shirt, emblazoned with last name of SOVWAR Air Marshal[8] Ann KITTENPLAN, the only actual character in the entire novel to whom the adjective "butch" gets attributed (p. 330) and so the only character I actually feel to be my own kith and kin.[9]

"Kittenplan" — Image Credit: Kendall Gerdes

The digital images become material objects, and the material objects exert their own kind of force on the world, in the way we move through it, and the way we think about ourselves moving through it. They change our relations to the text, and they generate new relations to one another. I entitled this post "The visual (after)life of Infinite Jest" in part in a nod to IJ's own haunting: the wraith, whose possible measure of very slow wraith-time agency could be responsible for the odd behavior of objects around ETA. But I leave you with Lyle's exhortation for Ortho Stice, the tennis cadet most moved (and disturbed) by the odd behavior of ETA's objects: "Do not underestimate objects, he advises Stice. Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all, which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects" (p. 395).

[1] The printed text weighs in at nearly 2 lbs.[^a]

[^a] Yes, I'm adopting a gimmicky imitation of DFW's endnotes, due in part to the pleasure I take in this digressive style, and due in another part to the disruptive and probably frustrating reading requirements it attaches to the normatively breezy blog post.

[2] Cf. Avital Ronell in Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania, p. 29.

[3] I find the fact of Ayers's and my shared territory striking because of the way the relation between people in the same city who never know each other there itself forms the basis for several of IJ's subtler collisions (and near-misses) of plot.

[4]Tucson demarcates yet another striking-shared-territory coincidence since it is both my hometown and the site of DFW's MFA in creative writing,[^b]as well as the location of Steeply and Marathe's spy-rendezvous.[^c]

[^b]which MFA he received the year I was born (though I was not born in Tucson but relocated there two years later)—

[^c]Cf. Ayers's rendition of the scene as a WPA-inspired tourism poster:

"Visit Tucson" — Image Credit: Chris Ayers

[5] The competition's held in Tucson.

[6] Not a job for "any simple logic"—as Derrida argues in Limited Inc (p. 75).

[7] This is the method Derrida adopts for deconstructing the line between human/animal in The Animal That Therefore I Am (p. 29).

[8] See photos/video of Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan's horribly misguided casting for The Decemberists "Calamity Song" Video in Foley's 4/1 viz post.

[9] --however precarious the thread of identification I've established.

Play Ball

Jay Voss — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Steve Rhodes

I’ve always loved the moment in David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son” when he praises Las Vegas for being the least pretentious city in America. What an astute thing to say. Who among us could have looked at, for example, the Bellagio’s famous fountain, Paris Las Vegas or the Venetian and describe them as not pretentious? (The Wynn complex wasn’t built yet, but everything interior designer Roger Thomas has done there since confirms Wallace’s point.) The irony Wallace is highlighting, of course, is the fact that these institutions pretend to be nothing other than what they are: spaces smartly designed for people to come into and enjoy wasting their money. They don’t pretend to be otherwise. No Vegas weekender sees the Paris’ Eiffel Tower and looks for the Louvre, because that structure isn’t there to trick people into thinking they’re across the ocean: it’s there to encourage people to luxuriate in their extravagance. Wallace makes this point, I suspect, because deep down he was worried that a certain degree of pretentiousness in modern American culture is fostering a strong undercurrent of cynicism. With all the naïveté of Wallace’s ideal citizen, I’m hoping the Miami Marlin’s new stadium, aptly named Marlins Park, isn’t a great example of what Wallace was worried about.

Image Credit: Joe Skipper/Reuters

The 2012 Major League Baseball season will kick off tonight with the St. Louis Cardinals visiting the Miami Marlins. This is not a two- or three-game series. Instead, it’s one-game affair and an opportunity for Miami to show off their new ballpark. (As far as I know, the Cardinals were invited to open the stadium because they are reining World Series Champions.) The new Miami stadium is cozy. It seats 37,000 paying fans, which is a bit on the small side as far as these things go, but, as The New York Times noted over the weekend, the size is probably wise given the team’s history of poor attendance. Like many of the baseball stadiums that have been built in the past ten or fifteen years, Marlin’s Park is designed exclusively for baseball. This is in stark contrast with the stadiums that were built in the 1960s, with exteriors couched in the sleek lines of Modernism and interiors multi-purposed for a variety of different professional sporting events. In this way San Francisco’s AT&T Park, Cincinnati’s Great American Ballpark, and St. Louis’ Busch Stadium all hark back to an ideal represented in Fenway or Wrigley. At the same time, there are some features of Miami’s new Marlins Park that are unprecedented in new baseball stadiums of the past decade, and I’m left hoping a different age isn’t upon us.

Image Credit: Miami Marlins

Most of my complaints center around Red Grooms’ $2.5 million moving sculpture just over the center-field wall (see image above). Whenever the home team hits a home run in this stadium, the sculpture will flash and cutout marlins and sea gulls will slowly make their way around the ascending peninsulas. Moreover, here the outfield wall curves around the base of the statue, leaving a weird acute angle in the deepest part of the park. One has to imagine that Major League Baseball allows irregular outfield patterns because in the old days, when baseball diamonds were shaped by the landmarks of two intersecting streets, or the pattern of oak trees in a friend’s backyard, home advantage did in part stem from familiarity with one’s surroundings. But in the new Marlins Park, the outfield wall makes concessions for a moving sculpture which one of my friends concisely described as “Vegas.” Outfield walls should at least try to pretend that they’re making concessions for neighboring buildings…but a light show? In no way am I suggesting that all outfields should be regular, of course, but there’s a huge difference between varying fence dimensions relative to distance from the plate (the obvious example is Fenway) and the irregular pattern of Miami Park’s outfield wall.

I suppose there are precedents for this sort of thing. Whenever the Brewers hit a home run in Miller Park, Bernie Brewer slides down a yellow slide and into the Kalahari Splash Zone, often soaking fans below. In Houston’s Minute Maid Park, there’s an irregular hill in deep center (known as “Tal’s Hill” in honor of team president Tal Smith), which perplexes visiting players during the most critical moments of ball games. But I guess what’s intriguing about the outfield features in the new Marlins Park is how distant they are from the baseball I knew growing up. The statue reminds me of carnival games I used to see at the town fair. And I say all this out of complete respect for Red Grooms – he’s an important artist who has bills to pay just like the rest of us. After all, he had nothing to do with the aquarium that forms the backstop of Marlins Park:

"This is Water"-- Remediating David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement Speech

Ty Alyea — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Delivered in twenty-three minutes, David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College had an audience of a few hundred. However, in the years which followed, the transcription of Wallace's speech became an internet phenomenon, coursing through millions of email boxes and introducing the writer to people unfamiliar with his complex fiction. "Thanks to the enthusiasm" of people who knew nothing about Wallace's work, and the "magic of the cut-and-paste function," Tom Bissell remarks that the address likely ranks "high among the most widely read things Wallace ever wrote." But perhaps the most significant testament to the speech's popularity is that the short speech would eventually become a book in its own right. In the year after Wallace's passing, the "Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address" became This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009). And yet, even as Little, Brown's publication of the lecture gave the speech permanence and stability, it also aroused significant debate about whether the form of this publication worked with or against the speech's message. In examining the remediation of Wallace's speech, I suggest that the debate refracts core concerns that Wallace addresses.

Image credit: Edrants.com

In the beginning of his address to 2005's graduating class at Kenyon college, David Foster Wallace begins with a parable: "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" Demonstrating a self-reflexivity that marks all of his fiction, he follows up that this anecdote follows a standard convention of the "bullshitty" commencement speech genre, and that he is not going to presume the role of the "wise old fish" that tells the younger ones what the water is like. In the words which follow, Wallace concisely makes an argument about the need for a capitalist society's "students" to reflect upon their surroundings and to be aware of the generative possibilities that might exist behind frustrations and antagonisms we confront every day.

While many of the speech's fans first encountered the speech through an endless chain of email forwards, nested in forwarding arrows [>>>], Little, Brown's publication of This is Water is a highly polished, even reverential rendition of Wallace's words. In order to emphasize the weight of each line, and, undoubtedly, to draw the text out into a saleable book form), each of the 135 sentences of Wallace's speech (minus one--which we will get to in a moment) is given its own page. Hence, the opening page (above) is followed by the subsequent three sentence-pages.

While readers familiar with Wallace's Kenyon speech will find that most of the content has maintained intact, This is Water does include a single, but very substantial, revision that has raised some criticism. Following Wallace's point about the mind being a "good servant and a terrible master," Wallace states in the original speech: "It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master." In This is Water, the final sentence from the quote above was taken out. This line was, in fact, a go-to line for the authors of many of Wallace's obituaries, who see in this moment an ominous foreshadowing of his eventual suicide. For Tom Bissell, the textual excision is understandable because "Any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace's work...now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it." Thus, Bissell suggest that the oft-cited line might distract readers from the core elements of the speech.

Reception of the posthumously-published edition of Wallace's speech has been divided in ways that point to, on one hand, the lasting power of the content of his speech, but also a concern about its place and meaning of a society that has had to "commence" going on without him. While reviews of the content of the speech have been almost uniformly positive, there has been criticism of the format of This is Water. After all, one may ask, does the omission of the line "they shoot the terrible master" and the stretching out of Wallace's prose into sentence units refigure and protect an image of Wallace as the "Wise old fish?" Zach Baron of the Village Voice points out that lines like "I am not the wise old fish," take on the feeling of zen mantras, certainly gaining emphasis, but perhaps doing so in the wrong way. Ultimately, he cannot shake the feeling that the format goes against the principles of the speech: "The net effect is to imply an entirely different kind of wisdom--of the Tuesdays With Morrie variety--than whatever actual wisdom is contained therein. " Fans of the book, on the other hand, including the most "liked" Amazon review of the text, argue that the book format finally gives the speech the "stature it deserves," and argue that the knee-jerk resistance tot he speech is evidence of the kind of cynicism that Wallace speaks out against in the speech. These debates also inevitably intersect with the question of whether Wallace's speech was mostly to be taken as a survival guide to life within modern capitalism or an affirmation of it.

Image Credit: Maniac.com.sg

Hosting a different rendition of the Kenyon speech--one which includes various asides that do not make it into This is Water. Manic.com reframes the issue of Wallace's speech and its relationship to consumer culture by depicting it as a nourishing and replenishing text that is in itself understandable as a commodity. Ironically, the debate over the commencement speech's remediation echoes a kernel of ambivalence within the speech itself. Midway through the address, Wallace suggests that it can be useful to have it within your power to "experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things." Wallace then follows, "Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship." Thus, we might also see our perception of Wallace's speech in its various contexts (for "free" through the hypercaptilized system of the world wide web, or for pay under the auspices of Little, Brown) as a situation in which we can exercise similar choice.

An Audio Transcript of Wallace's speech is available on Youtube. Part One. Part Two.

View a written Transcript of Wallace's speech here.

"Hacking, Tapping, Jacking, Hiding, Faking .. and more!"

Matt King — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:00:00 +0000

"A Tingle Table used by the IRS" — Image Credit: Eric Paul Zamora/Associated Press (at nytimes.com)

A peculiar find in David Foster Wallace’s archive at the Harry Ransom Center points to the intersection of two threads in Wallace’s thinking: questions of fraudulence and authenticity, and the notion of procedurality. Wallace frequently engaged and struggled with the former throughout his career, asking what it means to authentically engage another person and inhabit another consciousness without the needs, addictions, and deceptions of the self getting in the way. That is, what does it look like to operate outside of those mechanisms that turn us back inside of ourselves and translate our experience into the logic of the self?

The notion of procedurality gets us into concerns with systems of rules, processes, logics, and games. Wallace’s writing and his life generally show an engagement with the procedural on multiple levels. His writing frequently takes up procedural systems: the game of tennis, rules of grammar and usage, twelve-step programs and their procedures for recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, the IRS and its auditing procedures. As a student, Wallace was a self-proclaimed “snoot” (“a really extreme usage fanatic” [69]); as an adolescent, he was a nationally ranked tennis player; as a philosophy major in college, he studied modal logic and was heavily invested in Wittgenstein, the theorist of language games; as an adult struggling with depression and alcohol and drug abuse, he (although attribution is complicated) “flummox[ed] 12-Step sponsors over certain obvious paradoxes inherent in the concept of denial” before eventually accepting the processes of 12-Step recovery despite his doubts about the logic behind it.

In the research materials for The Pale King, Wallace’s interests in authenticity and procedurality intersect in a collection of guides published by a mysterious entity known as The Information Center.

Pamphlet produced by The Information Center — Image Credit: Photograph by Matt King

The pamphlets offer instruction in the ways of “Hacking, Tapping, Jacking, Hiding, Faking .. and more!” They are crude, clearly having been produced on a dot matrix printer and then photocopied repeatedly. They contain numerous spelling and grammatical errors and rely on an excessive use of capitalization and exclamation points. The subjects of the guides range from tax and credit fraud to identity theft; from picking locks to hacking into computers, GPS systems, and car garages; from interrogation tactics to brainwashing. In the context of The Pale King, the most interesting pamphlet covers “AUTOMOBILE SABOTAGE,” as the character Toni Ware ends up using a version of one of these techniques on her mother’s physically abusive boyfriend.

CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE: "Automobile Sabotage" Instructions by The Information Center — Image Credit: Photograph by Matt King

CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE: More "Automobile Sabotage" Instructions by The Information Center — Image Credit: Photograph by Matt King

These guides sit among a larger collection of research materials mainly comprised of tax manuals, auditing guides, and notes from accounting classes—documents outlining the many procedures of the IRS. A sort of dialectic emerges out of this juxtaposition of materials: the pamphlets on fraud serve as the negative image or the dark complement to the procedures of the IRS; if the tax system embodies a set of procedures through which we contribute to the larger social welfare and the government’s financial solvency, then these guides serve as an expression of our capacities and desires for undercutting the system and operating according to selfish, destructive, and vengeful logics.

While both the accounting materials and the pamphlets offer insight into Wallace’s imagination of the IRS, they also offer a different perspective on Wallace’s larger concerns with authentic relations. Here I want to turn to the work of Ian Bogost and his thinking on procedurality. Although his work tends to focus on computational systems and video games and the ways that these embody certain processes, rules, and logics, Bogost also draws on this notion of procedurality more generally to think about how the world works, how objects (understood broadly to include things, people, conceptual systems, fictitious entities, etc.) encounter, engage, and relate to one another.

“Fractal.org” Tree — Image Credit: typedow's Flickr

For Bogost, objects are distinguished by the unique “logic[s] of behavior” and “way[s] of operating” that characterize their being (6). These logics can be understood as capacities for expression and engagement, and these capacities differ from object to object. Ontologically, “Within the withdrawn core of an object, swirls of murky logics churn, regulating the ways an object might enter and exit relations with other objects in order to constitute still different objects” (7).

"Procedural art at the UofT Art Centre from students in the architecture department" — Image Credit: hyfen's Flickr

"Procedural city created with Unity3D" — Image Credit: bartekd's Flickr

Procedurality thus offers a way of framing relations as the space through which the murky logics of objects express themselves. We can translate this into Wallace’s terms accordingly: his concern with authenticity highlights the extent to which the logics of the self assert themselves in our relations with others, preventing us from openly and honestly engaging with someone else. This in turn raises the question of how we might escape or operate outside of the logics of solipsism and various addictions.

In The Pale King, Wallace suggests that giving ourselves over to procedural systems—for example, by working at the IRS—offers one such mode of getting beyond the logic of the self. This mode hinges on the boredom that comes from highly routinized and proceduralized work. For Wallace, boredom interrupts the logics of the self and creates a space for us to experience and engage with something or someone else. Different possibilities emerge; we see new things when our own needs and desires don’t occupy the center of our attention.

For now, I’ll leave aside the question of whether boredom offers a satisfying response to the question of authentic relations to give the last word instead to The Information Center. At first glance, these guides to fraud appear to reinforce selfish and solipsistic impulses. Keeping in mind Bogost’s thoughts on procedurality, however, these pamphlets also offer an exploration of the ways that various objects work, from credit cards to pepper spray to graphite pens. Each of these objects has its own capacities for expression, and these go well beyond the ways we normally use them. Furthermore, the author—identified here only as “E Man”—parallels the IRS worker in his attention to the logic of fraud. He thoroughly dedicates himself to its various expressions, and his work (like that of the IRS) offers a way of accounting for a complex system of relations, impulses, desires, and exchanges. The pamphlets make available a different mode of procedural engagement, one that exposes us to the murky logics hidden away in the corners of American culture and global capitalism.

Childishness and Despair in The Decemberists "Calamity Song" Video

Marjorie Foley — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 13:00:02 +0000

Image credit: buzzinemusic.com, amazon.com, and Marjorie Foley

[In honor of the David Foster Wallace Symposium being hosted at the Harry Ransom Center this week (and in honor of how much we at viz. love David Foster Wallace), this week's posts will be dedicated to all things DFW. Look out for guest posts from outside writers and lots of excitement from the viz. staff.]

Two summers ago, I spent ten hours a day for ten days reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. At 1,000 pages, this means that I was spending an insanely long six minutes on each page, reading and rereading sentences in order to first understand the grammatical structure, then to understand the basic meaning of the sentence, then to understand that sentence's relationship to the paragraph, the chapter, the book, and so on. While at times I felt like I was working, and suffering while I worked, Infinite Jest was also one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life--while DFW is often criticized for his overblown prose, his writing is also full of batcrap crazy fun. The Decemberists, in the video for their "Calamity Song," capture the fun, the hilarity, the chaos, and the pain that is always present in David Foster Wallace's work.

Image credit: youtube.com and Marjorie Foley

The subject of the video is Eschaton, a fictional tennis game played by Hal Incandenza, one of the main characters in Infinite Jest, and his peers at the Enfield Tennis Academy. The game is played in a futuristic world in which years are no longer numbered but rather sponsored (the Eschaton bit happens in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and much of the Northeastern United States is destroyed due to a nuclear "accident"--the area is now known as the Great Concavity (into which catapults launch hazardous waste and where babies are born without skulls).

Eschaton, a word which means something akin to "end times," is played across multiple tennis courts, with various areas of the courts corresponding to parts of the globe. The highlighted areas represent the teams, and the combinations of countries, with nuclear capabilities-- North America (AMNAT); the former USSR (SOVWAR); China (REDCHI); India & Pakistan (INDPAK); "the wacko but always pesky" Libya & Syria (LIBSYR) or Iraq, Iran, Libya & Syria (IRLIBSYR), and the somewhat weak South Africa (SOUTHAF). Sometimes, depending on the number of players, one may have other teams "like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas." Players fire 5-megaton nuclear tennis balls at enemy areas, creating playful worldwide chaos, massive civilian casualties, and juvenile tennis rivalries.

Parks and Recreation's Michael Schur directs the video and somehow manages to nail down DFW's weird cheerful pessimism. While the video is not a line-for-line re-enactment of the Eschaton game played on 8 November in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the combination of the colorful, childish pranks in the video and Colin Meloy's super-depressing lyrics (at the end of the song, "all that remains is the arms of the angels") captures the absurdity of 12-year-olds playing a game that "shocks the tall" and is separated "from rotisserie league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables" by its ability to train superior tennis players, and possibly by how high and drunk the players are in the game (at least in the book). The "tanned and energetic little kids" who play Eschaton drink "surprisingly bracing Gatorades" and share a "hand-rolled psychochemical cigarette" while they act out worldwide destruction in a world that's already suffered its share of nuclear destruction.

Image credit: youtube.com and Marjorie Foley

In Infinite Jest, there is some argument about whether or not weather affects the game (it's snowing in the book, raining in the video) and whether or not one can launch nuclear weapons at players, like the young lady who gets hit in the head by a tennis ball (this young woman is SOVWAR Air Marshal Ann Kittenplan, who in the book is described as crew-cutted, "who at twelve-and-a-half looks like a Belorussian shotputter and has to buy urine more than quarter-annually and has a way more lush and impressive mustache than for instance Hal himself could raise, and who gets these terrible rages"). Her following ('roid) rage sparks a brawl between the players: In the book, Ann Kittenplan punches a peer in the top of the head repeatedly, then shoves someone's face into a chain-link fence. In the video, however, the drug use is nonexistent and the violence is downplayed, perhaps to rebalance the childishness of the Eschaton players with Meloy's lyrics. In the video, Ann Kittenplan smiles as she runs after the players, making this game and the violence that follows seems like much more fun than it is in the book. And Ann Kittenplan is now healthy and pretty, rather than violent and ugly.

Image credit: youtube.com and Marjorie Foley

As the brawl plays out, Otis P. Lord, the nerdy and beanie-sporting gamemaster, must first declare a cease-fire in order to work out terms between AMNAT and SOVWAR (which is why he replaces his multicolred beanie with his white one) and it is during that time that Kittenplan gets hit in the head by a 5-megaton tennis ball. After the hit, Lord puts on the red beanie that signifies "Utter Global Crisis," a state which is reached not by destroying whole countries in the game, but by the players resorting to (drugged and drunken) violence. In the book, Lord is criticized for declaring an Utter Global Crisis due to people losing their tempers while playing a game. We must wonder, here, how much DFW was comparing real life nuclear threats to a childish game moderated by someone as silly-looking as Otis P. Lord.

Image credit: youtube.com

The Decemberists sit on the sidelines in the role of disinterested Enfield Tennis Academy staff, and while Meloy ends up against the fence, screaming the lyrics at the degenerate children, they otherwise don't seem to care that the children are playing a game to destroy the world (which is made much, much worse by the existence of the Great Concavity and the skull-less children who are born in that vicinity). Their disinterest highlights the absurdity of Infinite Jest, an absurdity that plays out in how the young players make destruction into something fun, which we real-life people do in many of our games.

While Schur and the Decemberists capture the fun of Eschaton and nuclear warfare (as if that were a thing), they obviously miss much of the despair that's at the heart of Infinite Jest. They miss the drugged pre-teens who work from morning to night to be tennis stars. They miss Hal Incandenza's social anxiety. They miss the other, far more depressing characters at the halfway house; they miss the overdoses and the guy who kills all the neighborhood cats. I'm not really sure what to make of that--does removing the worst of Eschaton show us that humans are better people than we think they are or are they much, much worse?

See the full video here.