A D.F.W. gem from 2006, a  New York Times Magazine profile of Roger Federer.

Please consider the footnotes.

These images are from the La Specola Museum of Anatomy in Florence, which has a large collection of wax models. Though these are mostly of individual limbs and organs, there are several full figures, which are arranged with particular care (the pregnant woman, whose stomach is opened to display the baby, has long, brown, sensuous hair and wears a string of pearls).

If you have an interest in such things, Morbid Anatomy, which surveys “the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture” has an embarassment of such riches (kudos to the cats at Fox and Comet for bringing this site to my notice).

From a recent piece in the New York Times

One night after Christmas last year, in a dark, well-upholstered restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the American poet Frederick Seidel, an elegant man of 73 with an uncommonly courtly manner, told me a story about poetry’s power to disturb. “It was years ago,” Seidel explained in his measured voice, “in the days when I had an answering machine. I’d left my apartment, briefly, to go outside to get something, and when I came back there was a message. When I played it, there was a woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice sounding deeply aroused, saying: ‘Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live. . . .’ All this extraordinary, suggestive heavy breathing, getting, in the tone of it, more and more intensely sexual, more gruesome, and then this sort of explosion of sound from this woman, and: ‘You’re . . . not . . . going . . . to . . . live.’ ”

Wyatt Mason, the author of the piece, writes a very fine blog for Harpers (which also has a fun piece on Seidel that casually bashes Garrison Keillor). I first came across Mason’s work in the LRB, where he wrote an article about DFW, in which he expressed doubts about the level of patience and close reading required to fully appreciate the stories in Oblivion, DFW’s last collection. Though he did not doubt the quality of the pieces, in his opinion an average, literate reader could be forgiven for being unwilling to make the considerable effort required. At the time I disagreed with him, perhaps in the belief that this made me more than an average reader. The fact that DFW’s last few published pieces (particularly Good People in the New Yorker) seemed to eschew such tricks or puzzles suggest that DFW had become aware of the diminishing returns of such forms.

Sculpture in Vigelands Parken, Oslo

Having raised a statue to Vollmann, I should make it talk (Real Player required).

This is from the Conjunctions Audio Vault which features recordings from many existing members of the pantheon, such as William Gass (three times) and Philip Roth.

Interviewer: I want to talk about your artwork on the walls here. There’s so much sexuality- particularly female sexuality- represented. Tell me about it.

Vollmann: Oh, it gets my dick hard, sweetheart.

(from an interview in Tin House Vol. 9 No. 3)

William T. Vollmann, at age 49, has already written too many damn books, more than I will ever write, let alone get published. This is not really a complaint. I am delighted that an author of his ability is able to be so productive: 19 or so large books, some fiction, some non-fiction, the longest being Rising Up and Rising down, which, in its unabridged form, clocks in at 3,300 pages. I have only read a few of these, but from You Bright and Risen Angels alone, it is horribly, wonderfully clear that he is trying to map out territory in very unpleasant lands. The author’s note is fair warning:

This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentleman of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil, to hudle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.

The book is about the long and bloody conflict between Insects and the forces of Electricity (especially the blue globes).

Flicking through the book, which I read several years ago, I see that the page corners are turned in many places, each marking some place where my reading pleasure was so great that I was forced to harm the page. It is often difficult to recall what prompted the triangular mutilation. Without context, they can just seem very fine sentences. And then there is a passage like this, which causes bells to ring in deeply sunken cellars.

Generally speaking, she didn’t have much luck. Being maladjusted she was taken to a psychiatrist, who with his encounter groups and truth serums distorted her social reality so that life lost its cutting edge. At sixteen she stood on a broken bottle barefoot, hoping to bleed to death, but her mother found her and took her to the hospital. At eighteen she jumped off a bridge, but the river below was so polluted with gummy hydrocarbons that its surface merely dimpled to receive her like an immense trampoline and bounced her up and down until she got sick to her stomach. As a freshman in college a year later, having failed both in her exams and in love, she swallowed a bottle’s worth of asprin. Her ex-boyfriend came in to her unexpectedly next morning (for he wanted to tell her yet again how much he despised her in her stupidity and weakness, and she wasn’t even very goodlooking with her long neck and big nose and weak eyes, to say nothing of being a lousy lay, and he was fucking tired of the way she held onto his letters and he was going to get them back); and she was still alive, though red-faced and wheezing, with a suicide note lying on the bureau. Much like mild-mannered Clark Kent in his pre-Superman days, dear Emily was always doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time in some trivial pathetic sort of way like most people one meets in our great Republic except that they are straitjacketed against adverse circumstances by the power grids that run screaming day and night beneath the surface of the neighborhood parking lot and in our furnaces and boilers and air conditioning rerun clamps so that no one ever has to deal with the hot muggy horrible outdoors of reality unless there’s a power failure somewhere, though maybe we get a hint of it when there’s a brownout and the oven takes longer to cook and the Announcer’s voice slows down and his face flickers and melts into an incomprehensible blue globe for just a minute and then all’s back to normal.

There are so many reasons why this appeals to me. At the broadest level, there is the sweep from the personal to the societal, from the interior thoughts of the loathsome ex-boyfriend to the talk of ‘our great Republic’.

There is Vollmann’s shift from horror (her standing on the broken bottle, on purpose) to absurdity (her bouncing on the polluted water) and then onto cruelty (not simply the attempted suicide, but the fact that she is, via the parethetical comment, being mocked while trying to kill herself), all in the space of four sentences.

And then there are the blue globes which scare the beejesus out of me.

Vollmann has also written books about being in Afghanistan, riding in boxcars, povery, violence, and most recently, Imperial Valley in California (a shorter volume of merely 1,344 pages, due out this month).

His most recent essay (on photography) can be found here.

Well, that’s what they claim it is. To me it seems like a trailer for something so horrible it is best not seen. Lynch can always be relied upon to film incredibly beautiful women in such a way that they are so terrifying, or terrified, that it would take a very particular taste to ever find them attractive.

Ladies and gentleman… Mr Donald Barthelme. Who was a writer. Prinicipally of stories. About these stories, it is hard to be certain. Some of them involve pictures. Others contain people. None of them are “constructed mousetrap-like to supply, at the finish, a tiny insight typically having to do with innocence violated”.

This last sentence is one that particularly pains me: God, after he had made several beasts, must have quickly lost any joy at the sight of a creature swimming or flying. It had already been done so well. If it had been worth doing it all.

Something further can be learnt here, here but not here.

Montaigne!

“I came to wonder if the game was really worth the candle.”

I found this in Alasdair Maclean’s Night Falls on Ardnamurchan, his account of the remote crofting community where he grew up. It refers to a situation where the returns from an activity or enterprise do not warrant the time, money or effort required (for Maclean the ‘game’ in question was raising cattle, which was at best an uncertain affair) . This expression, which began as a translation of a term used by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne in 1580, alludes to gambling by candlelight, which involved the expense of illumination. If the winnings were not sufficient, they did not warrant the expense.

Tomorrow I shall be looking for conversations in which to use this, especially with people who wont hate me too much for deliberately using a phrase they don’t know, just so I can then say, “Aha! Well, this is very interesting. It all goes back to Montaigne.”

And so on.

Lobster salad

D. T. Max, who wrote the excellent New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace, answers follow-up questions here.

Also, here is the new memorial entry from the Forest Cafe’s menu (‘The Pynchon’ is, alas, no longer available):

Salad Plate: (Vegan) £4.20
The D.F.W.
3 (as in the basic numerical unit, also denoted by ‘III’ ‘three’, ‘iii’, or ‘㈢)’ (Arabic font unavailable on this computer)) Salads (erroneous use of the plural fully intended, it being never far from our mind that ‘salad’, being an uncountable noun, does not require (let alone deserve) to have the suffix- s attached) with (as in ‘accompanied by’, and also (in this case, correctly) implying that the noun phrase anteceding the term is greater in quantity than that which follows it) Bread (used here non-colloquially i.e. “n. baked dough made from flour usu. leavened with yeast and moistened, eaten as a staple food” (OED) and certainly not implying that we slip some folding green under your flower petals).

Flannery O’Connor died at 39 from lupus. She also raised peacocks, pheasants, geese, swans, chickens and Muscovy ducks, as this picture (which I would like to think a self-portrait) makes clear.

Wise Blood, her 1952 novel, is a parade of Southern grotesques. It details the heresy of Hazel Motes, preacher and sole member of ‘The Church without Christ’. It is a novel replete with cruelty and meaness. A policeman pushes a man’s car off a cliff; another man visits the zoo each day so he can swear at the animals. When a gorilla famous from films comes to town, he is thankful for “the opportunity to insult a successful ape”.

All of this is immensely enjoyable, and written in very sharp prose. But for me these warped (and often comic) characters failed to resonate. I’m not sure if this is a fault of mine, or the novel. As O’Connor says in her introduction,

“That belief in Christ is for some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.”

Whilst I don’t think the struggle to accept Christ a matter of no consequence, I, as a secular reader (probably true of her contemporary audience as well) need some help in trying to empathise with characters for whom it is an essential question. Which could, I suppose, beg the question- Isn’t it one of the jobs of the author to preach to those yet to be converted? To create characters and situations so compelling that we care about those involved, even when, especially when, they are wildly dissimilar to us and our secular preoccupations?

It is certainly possible to do so. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, though its premise is perhaps not initially engaging- an aged pastor in a small town writing letters for his son to read when he is older -is nonetheless one of the most affecting explorations of faith I have read.

Perhaps my problem with Wise Blood was its style- because of the restricted emotional palette, it was too easy to dismiss the characters’ (no doubt theologically interesting) concerns as simply those of grotesques and fanatics. The only other book of hers I’ve read is her Collected Stories, which for many is an unshakeable part of the canon. Whilst this is not a claim I am in any position to challenge- there is too much fine writing in them for that -the thing about reading a life’s work in one lump is that although it allows you to discern certain thematic or formal preoccupations, it can expose a paucity of ambition on the writer’s part. By this I mean an unwillingness to write certain kinds of story or character (it being my assumption that the best writers are capable of doing anything), or an over-reliance on particular narrative forms or plots. Stories that work very well on their own, or in their smaller, original collections, when placed in proximity can undermine each other. With O’Connor, many of the stories start in a comic vein, then abruptly shift to the violent or tragic, a technique I eventually found irksome for its predictability. This is almost true of Wise Blood as well, though it can also be said that no book could fully recover a tragic or even serious tone after a chapter like the one involving Enoch and the Gorilla, which may have started off as a short story then been shoehorned into the novel (purists will certainly know).

Finally, there is at last a definitive biography of O’Connor, of which the reviews are trickling in. I shall read it, if only to learn about the animosity between herself and Carson McCullers, whose work I can imagine she found too whimsical and charming.

A section from the film of Georges Perec’s Une Homme qui dort, one of the few good uses of the second person. I suppose what I enjoy about this clip, and the book, is the feeling of intense passivity both of them evoke. I would write more, but my fingers feel heavy. I shall sit awhile.