I have what I'd like to describe as ambivalent feelings about the wedding that took place today. It falls under the rubric of things I almost couldn't care less about. However, the nuance comes in when I consider the variety of things like the Super Bowl, particularly when the Steelers are playing, that I think are a big deal that a lot of people who love hats probably don't give a crap about. A lot more could probably be said on this particular matter as it relates to things like democracy in the Middle East, earthquakes in Japan and the result of any reality television show or sporting event. I actually have a rather long and tedious argument to make on the subject that stretches back to the earliest stages of mankind, but I think I'll spare everyone until another day. For now, enjoy videos of people screwing up their weddings.
"To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. 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. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down." TPK
Laughter as defined by Merriman Webster-to show emotion (as mirth, joy, or scorn) with a chuckle or explosive sound. Editorial comments: Really, MW, the first definition of laughter is mirth followed a bit too closely by scorn. And is it really an explosive sound?
a) In a sentence. John walked down the street wearing a pair of plaid pants that were decidedly out of season. Nevertheless, he was aware that the pants were considered unfashionable but he found himself not particularly troubled in the matter as the more pressing type thing was that his shoes were rubbing at his heels in such a way as to make them raw. Also, his girlfriend had just left him, and he was locked out of the apartment on account of her new beau and had no way to access his shoe closet to find something more appropriate. Upon seeing him in the ridiculous plaid pants several children engaged in explosive sounds that he interpreted as derisive laughter.
b) To find amusement or pleasure in something.
She had perfect white teeth. This was the first thing that any normal sort of person would notice about her. She was moving a piece of ice around in her mouth in a deft manner. Rain was making grey puddles in the street, pigeons, always full grown, weaved and bobbed like boxers between the trash cans. At around seven the happy hour started to wind down and people came by to pick up spouses and boyfriends, but at least three of us just kept watching her perfect white teeth from across the table. "Porcelain minus the price tag," was a fairly apt description. At some point, with the three of us literally hanging on every word as the saying goes, she said something about an old co-worker who'd undergone a sort of deep end breakdown that made us all laugh.
C) To become amused or derisive. (Glad to see that we have options on this one).
The red paint was chipping from the wall revealing exposed wood. The dog was sitting on the porch watching a butterfly or a moth. The dirt road was lined by poplars that were at least twice the age of the dog. In the evening, a fly landed on the dog's nose, and he let it sit there for upwards of an hour before twitching his nose. The dog in this paint chipped house with rooms full of light could not find anything amusing or derisive. He engaged in very little laughter.
Examples:
What are you laughing at?
He was laughing at the peculiarity of her hat and the way she crossed her legs when she became upset.
The audience was laughing hysterically?
All artists desire is approval. The audience, somehow aware of this themselves in their daily charades on the bus and in the shower, in the daily water cooler talk, in never quite feeling themselves, never at home, felt a strange kinship with the sad comedian and laughed hysterically.
I've never laughed so hard in my life?
Patently untrue. The years was 1976. We were riding on a train through green hills striped with corn and ribbons of water. We were talking about the names of other people's children and the name Ginger came up, which sent you peeling into laughter for no explicable reason. Soon I was doubled over as well, and I remember touching your leg with two fingers on my right hand and wondering if you noticed. That was the hardest you've ever laughed.
I couldn't stop laughing when I saw what he was wearing?
Really, the whole ensemble was ridiculous. I suppose you would have had to have been there, but if you were, rest assured, you'd have laughed your ass off.
I laughed out loud when I saw him?
It was more of a yelp, and the majority of the mirth was kept inward. It was on the street near dawn, the cobbles all wet with morning dew and shopkeepers hosing down sidewalks. A few battered roses lay in the street, and after I tipped the driver and stepped out into the morning, she laughed.
He laughed so hard I thought he'd die laughing?
Refer to Steven Millhauser's, modern short story master, Dangerous Laughter for further remonstrances on the perilous nature of laughter.
The movie was hilarious. We laughed our heads off?
The movie was passably good. All around us that night seemed to be couples. Couples every damn place you looked. Couldn't a pair of old friends catch a movie without feeling like they were strangers in a strange land? Bleh. Coupling. The two of us had sworn it off years before in a lengthy conversation that took place by the ocean where gulls flew in from the horizon and pecked at sand all afternoon. I suppose that was our first date.
"I've never seen anything so ridiculous," he laughed.
Please refer to Alby the racist dragon for further instances of how one should appropriately insert a laugh reference. Ex: Laughed the boy.
Facts:
Middle English, from Old English hliehhan; akin to Old High German lachēn to laugh
First Known Use: before 12th century
From Wikipedia: It is in most cases a very pleasant sensation. (Thank you kind sirs, I was wondering what I was feeling. I rarely laugh).
and the laughter of one person can itself provoke laughter from others as a positive feedback.[2] This may account in part for the popularity of laugh tracks in situation comedy television shows. (Nothing can account for the abject stupidity/annoyingness of laugh tracks in a sitcom)
Laughter is anatomically caused by the epiglottis constricting the larynx. The study of humor and laughter, and its psychological and physiological effects on the human body, is called gelotology. (I'm thinking of becoming a geltologist on the grounds that I'm fairly certain that I could get folks to conflate it with geology, who would then suspect that I have a good job).
The most interesting quote followed by a picture that did not make me laugh:
"Laughter is a mechanism everyone has; laughter is part of universal human vocabulary. There are thousands of languages, hundreds of thousands of dialects, but everyone speaks laughter in pretty much the same way.”
Here is a picture of an elephant laughing. (Allegedly, the laughter, not the picture of the elephant, which is evident below).
Everyone knows that writing is a dying medium. I mean, I wouldn't be sitting here sending this off into the ether if it wasn't. I'd have a band of people hanging on my every word while I strummed a guitar. Wait a minute, I think I'm conflating the death of the ancient story teller bard with the advent of reading. Anyhow, the point still remains, no one reads anymore, except maybe you and me. Thus, I'm going to tell a story using pictures like cave painters of old.
A seed. In the beginning s was just a little ball of crying. The plus side of this time in her life was that (yeah, I lied about not writing above, and I'll do it again) she was new. And, like most people in the world, I enjoy new things. The down side of the lil skipper at this age was that she wasn't super aesthetically pleasing. She had a head that I was fairly certain wouldn't ever come back down to size.
Like most people we were really excited about our new house. We weren't specifically excited about the yard, but we were excited about having a yard. Sure the only visible growth was a giant weed that was channeling Little Shop of Horrors and, as I was later to discover, some poison ivy lining the fence, but at least it was ours. The problem was, it just wasn't all that aesthetically pleasing. It was hard to imagine how it might ever get whipped into shape. Although we did have good trash can visibility at that point.
Phase 2: The work.
s went to work feverishly trying to get her head to be a proper shape, and we were pleasantly surprised by the second month that she resembled a normal human baby. We were obviously excited because their was a brief fight when I accused S of cheating on me with an alien. We also liked to dress her in Vasco De Gama type pajamas during this phase to help make sure she was a cultured lady when she grew up.
Phase 2:
Despite our amazing trash can density and propensity for growing giant weeds we decided that the yard needed to change. As with a baby you can't just rush into a change with the yard. You have to kind of ease your way in. I eased my way in by spraying vast amounts of Round Up on poison ivy and our weed friend. Nothing says welcome to my neighborhood like poison. I guess cookies also work. Anyhow, after that brief battle we decided to give the yard a little better shape. So we bought a grill and a table to fill up the blank cement space.
Phase 3 Things just keep getting better.
By phase three s had decided to just get incredibly cute. She also decided that everything in the known world should be tasted. We started her with her hands rather than mushrooms because we are good parents. During this phase she decided to start sleeping more regularly and cooing more frequently and generally just whipping herself into appropriate cute baby shape.
Phase 3
Having attempted to make our yard look nicer we decided that we were rushing things. What if our yard didn't have to look nice? What if we just used it as an extra basement/trash dumping station. We could embrace our squirrel problem by keeping them occupied in our yard at which point I'd probably shoot them. It was a strange kind of embrace. I jest. Really we put a toilet in the backyard because we thought it would be nice to be able to relieve yourself in the quiet of the great outdoors.
What we didn't realize is that we'd flubbed the order of our projects. It turned out that neither one of us felt comfortable urinating under the watchful eye of our neighbors, so we put in a fence. I think if we'd have just switched the order we'd still have an awesome toilet in our yard.
Phase 4 Making nice things look nicer. Look, when it comes to being cute, it doesn't get any better than 4-6 months. You are the cutest you will ever be in your entire life. It's time to develop a personality, smile a little and live it up because that glorious window of cuteness is short. (Somewhat rivaled by when you turn two, but I'm sticking with 4-6 months). s headed full force into this phase of life demanding all sorts of cute clothes and trying to fake having a dimple. The whole scene was really quite divaesque.
Phase 4
Having removed our amazing outdoor toilet and having put up a fence we realized the yard felt lonely. We'd fenced out our neighbor's only to realize that they had nicer yards. We've made a huge mistake. Thus, we contacted Casey trees about helping us out with our mistake. They came by and put in a nice red maple, which we both wish was a dogwood, but hindsight is 20-20.
Phase 5 Bringing things together.
After admiring our tree for weeks we realized that it was lonely. We became concerned for it's welfare. We spent evenings sitting at its feet and rubbing its roots and listening to it talk about its day. We gave it glasses of champagne as opposed to water. I mean, we needed to do something. Thus, we again contacted the good people of D.C. to help us put in some bayscaping. According to them it was to reduce runoff into our water system, but according to me it was to give out tree some friends. Thus, our yard turned from a repository for trash cans, poison oak, and dead dogs (long story) into something approaching respectable.
And it occurred to me that we'd been working on a couple of things over the past few months and that the fixing of the one was definitely related to the other. So what if we brought them together? Could it look even better?
And it did! The last phase is maintenance and care. I'd bet more money that s looks better in five years than our yard, but that's probably okay.
And a little shout out to that other thing we've been at for 7.5 years that reminded me of S and the sort of things you decide early on, like where you're going to make your home.
7:15 A.M. Awake to Sadie crying. I enter her room and notice that she's managed to roll over. This is the sort of thing that gets parents really excited. "Yay," I tell her, "You rolled over." She seems uninterested and continues to cry. If she cries every time she rolls over maybe it isn't the greatest thing in the world that we're encouraging her to do it. Maybe we should invent some sort of contraption that holds her in place all night on her back, so she sleeps for fifteen hours.
7:15-8:15
The usual drill. Hey, s, it's tummy time. You love tummy time. s does not love tummy time, and I end up having to jump down on the floor and squeak a giraffe in front of her face and talk like I just swallowed helium to keep her interested. I guess I wouldn't have to talk like that, but I'm pretty sure Sophie the giraffe is a girl. Anyhow, I'm trying to work on my ventriloquism, so she can't tell it's me talking and will think instead that she has a magical giraffe, which, I assume, will raise her self-esteem.
8:15 Nap. I giver her a small flat pink toy blanket but not quite sort of thing that she shoves happily in her mouth. As soon as I've put her down I make big plans to go mow the lawn before the landscapers arrive, so they don't think they're putting shrubs and flowers in for some person who can't even mow his own lawn.
8:16 Landscapers appear. I take pictures of the yard through the window/of the landscapers...creepily.
8:55-10:00
I take pictures of the developing yard from the upstairs window, so the landscapers won't see me and think I'm creepy. At some point I realize that hiding while I'm taking the photos may make the whole thing even creepier. Mentally curse all the dandelions. At least I planted wine bottles.
10:50 Sadie wakes up from her second nap and develops a personality. Okay, that's probably not true, she's usually a smiley little ball of cute, but I noticed something about her today for the first time while I was feeding. She decided that she wanted to give herself the bottle rather than me. The only problem is that she doesn't really have gross motor skills yet, so she can't really do it. However, this didn't prevent her from crying when I held it there without her assistance. The whole process was entirely frustrating and would have sort of been like if I had gone outside and advised the landscapers on putting in the proper flora for our region. Or like a kid showing up for work on the first day and telling the boss what to do.
However, I lose every argument because s just starts crying when she doesn't get her way. Believe me, I've considered crying in response to try and make her feel bad, but I'm pretty sure, based on prior experience, that she'd just laugh. So I'm left instead playing tug of war with a five month baby and looking like a jack-ss. And that's when I realized that my little girl was going to have a personality and cry at not getting things her way and such, and I think I speak for most parents when I say that a little part of me died inside.
Of course you get mostly good things from your child having a personality like good conversation and friendship and the joy of watching them grow into a real live person.
11:30-12:00 I continue to take pictures of the landscapers and the yard from various hidden places in the house. It would be like the worst Mission Impossible movie ever. At one point as I'm about to snap off a shot one of the guys walks into my frame, and I pulled the camera down and pretended to be inspecting it. This despite the fact that I was inside and he hadn't even noticed me.
12:00-1:00 Take Sadie out into the new yard, so I can mow the lawn and do some weeding and stop sucking at having a nice yard. Meanwhile Sadie leaned over in her bumbo and tried to pick up pieces of grass to eat. She only got one, and it was old anyway and she threw it down. I'm glad she's developing a good taste for food as well. It's one thing to eat grass, but it's not okay to eat old grass. I also snapped off a few photos of her and worried about mosquitoes because that is the sort of thing that you do when you're a parent.
1:00-4:00
Walk around trying to keep the little master happy. Attempt to discover if we have the same shrub as our neighbor by walking across the street and peering into their yard. Apparently this is just what I'm to today. Eventually I determine that I'm probably just grooming our white flowering shrub wrong or it would look glorious like theirs. However, just to make sure that I am right I start using Google to find out if our shrub matches a picture. At which point, by clicking on Anne Russel Vibernum (sp) and trying to look at a picture my computer gets hijacked. I mean, are people really putting up viruses on Anne Russel Vibernum? Who has the time? I thought these all went up on adult sites. Well that's the last time I try and figure out what that shrub is. I'm just going to let it grow ten feet tall and take over the neighbor's yard and look terrible.
Periodically I like to just pick an MSN headline at random and create a nice blog out of their amazing material.
Today:
14 ways you can lose weight all day:
1) Don't eat....wait for it.....all day. This plan seems simple but a lot of folks are going to miss it. If you're not eating...all day, you're probably losing weight. I can't be sure because I'm not a doctor. I'm a writer for MSN. Sort of.
2) Buy a tiger. Why? This seems simple. If you've ever encountered a tiger you'll know that a human beings normal reaction is to cower in fear or flee. You know what burns calories? Fear and fleeing. That's right, imagine coming home every day not entirely sure where that tiger is going to be lurking. All that heart pounding will be great for burning fat, and when it does show up and you sprint off into the neighborhood tripping down some steps on the way, you'll be pretty happy when you hit the bottom because you are still alive, and also have a nice waist.
3) Eat citrus only. Why? Because it will keep you from getting scurvy. That and heavy doses of quinine. I suggest the citrus. Of course, it's a well known fact that scurvy is an excellent way to lose weight because without teeth it takes forever to eat a hamburger. So maybe I'm rescinding this one and changing it to, travel back in time to the early nineteenth century and go on a boat trip of over a month. I don't know why they don't employ me at MSN. This is all gold.
4) Turn up the heat...wait for it.....all day. Sweating is a great way to lose weight because it's pretty much just water weight, which is useless anyway. Human beings are comprised of like 80 percent water, so if you could get that number down to 40 percent or so you'll see some real substantial gains.
5) Build a new wing on your house. No building permit needed. People who work outside and are handy intimidate me, and I mainly just like to ask them why they aren't wearing an ascot with their cute utility belts. However, it's important to note that doing things....wait for it...all day is a great way to lose weight.
6) Buy a great white shark and store it in your flooded basement. (Flooded basement needed). Every time you're eating dinner just think of how hungry that poor shark probably is, swimming around in your basement and eating your dry wall. His plight will teach you portion control because you'll want to give him a delicious treat at the end of the night like your arm or something.
7) Start skipping everywhere. Why? Because skipping got a bad rap for being girlie when you were a kid. Skipping burns eight times as many calories as normal manly walking and after a while everyone will realize how amazing skipping everywhere is and will be secretly jealous that they didn't think of it first.
8) Walk to work. I don't care if you live thirty miles from your job or ten feet. Walk to work. Sure you might have to start sleeping in a bungalow during the week to be able to make it in ever day, but you'll feel great at the end of the week when you get home to see your family and they all compliment you on how good your new skinny legs are, unless they've moved out of town to avoid the stigma of having a crazy person as a parent.
9) Hanglide to work. I realized that walking is for poor people. No, buy yourself a nice hanglider and do it up. It sort of operates like the tiger. I mean, hang gliding has got to be terrifying right? Therefore your stomach will be in knots all morning and you'll probably skip breakfast but who cares, you hang glide to work. Next time your boss starts giving you guff you can point to your flat abs and then just hang glide for your lunch break and cast aspersion on him from above like Icarus. Who was awesome.
10) Eat only pies. After a while you'll get really sick and tired of eating pies and this will cause you to eat fewer of them. Plus, your breath will smell better than it would on the Atkins diet.
11) Adopt seventeen children. This sort of operates like the shark. With seventeen children no one will have enough food to go around and you'll all learn a lot about each other because you won't be wasting time eating all that dirty food. Maybe you'll all wind up being really good at that game Simon Says, which was like Bop it for smart people.
12) Fourteen tips....really. Too many. I started skimming after number two MSN? If I had written that article it would have been around seven, but real pertinent ones.
13) Subsist entirely on art. This is mainly recommended for people who majored in the humanities. You've got nothing else to do besides go home and live with your parents, so it's probably best to just start eating pages out of books and literally devouring pieces of modern art that you'd never understood. Tell fellow folks that you're trying to internalize them. Talk about differance. Speak only French even though you only know one word. Insist that if you just had a kite string long enough that it would reach the moon. Talk about how On the Road is the greatest book ever, even though it isn't. Live art.
14) Go to live with a badger. Emulate all of its habits. Even if you don't lose weight at least you'll have made a friend and answered that age old question, Can badgers and humans be friends? No. No they can't.
His funeral was held that Sunday at the Episcopal Church
on Second Street. The church was a large white building
with a towering spire that cut across the dark sky. In front of
the church was the cemetery of parish members from the last
two hundred years, the gravestones growing moss and
collecting mold while, underneath, the bones waited for the
flesh of the second coming.
“When God came down from heaven, it was to slay
death,” the preacher said. “He became one of us, to reconcile
us to this life, so that when it is over, He may dwell in us and
we in Him. Not even one of the lilies of the field passes
without His notice. How much more do you think He will
do for each one of us? For Brian, who is now in the house of
His Maker?”
“But He rose again. His disciples did not recognize Him
on the road to Emmaus, nor did Thomas believe until he put
his fingers in Jesus’ palms and felt the wounds in his flesh.
Nevertheless, He rose. He rose again, so that we might all
have the hope of eternal life. Amen.”
She woke up at three A.M. with her chest heaving and her
ear lobe still tingling. The bedspread was tangled with the
sheet and pillows on the floor. He was gone for good, she felt
it in the pit of her stomach. Her fingernails, her fingernails, why
didn’t she ever think to rake at him, to trap some of his celestial
skin? Then someone would believe her. The world made little
sense through the cold, dark, sinless night.
“Lord, do you believe me?” She shut off the light and
watched the moonlight at her small white feet. In the
morning, his scent was not even on the pillow. She walked
through the empty house, running her hand along the
furniture and walls, feeling the shape of things in his absence.
“I didn’t even get forty days,” she muttered. Mary pulled
out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. She took a long drag.
“Ain’t no use waiting for a dead man to come back,” she
whispered to the cloud of smoke.
Counterpoint to the story: Unless there is....Every year at this time I think back to that Easter when I was seventeen or so. The light was coming through windows that seemed miles away, leaving a thick beam on the black floor. And I closed my eyes as the preacher recited that old tale of His death, and instead of paying attention to the lesson I imagined what it must have been like that day, the dirt, the crowds, the overwhelming pain. And I thought of Him saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." And I wept.
We were looking at the sorts of clothes that babies wear in the spring. We were confused about the ages, whether it was supposed to be for kids who were six months old, or whether it was supposed to last until they were six months old. At the restaurant we were still puzzling over these things with a couple of old friends who politely smiled as we talked to one another.
The sun was setting out west as it always does, like a fireball dropping into the ocean. Turkey vultures were riding updrafts over a series of dry cattails, and we pretended as though they were hawks. At some point during the dinner, after salads but before the main course, we finally decided that it was probably the date that they could wear it until. Our old friends were trading stories of their own now, and laughing behind their upraised glasses, faces turned from us.
The restaurant was old and wooden. An aging cherry tree covered the courtyard in wilted blossoms, and a few old men smoked cigarettes against the railing and laughed over the open water. We looked at them with disgust and made a joke about second hand smoke. By this point the main course had come, and we were passing the baby back and forth in order to get at crab's legs. But talking to the baby while we did it, including it in every last damn little thing we said. By the time we were splitting up the check the sky was dark and a fine rain was falling. We worried over the babies hat and mittens, how quickly it could catch a cold. We worried whether it was sleeping well, or enough, whether drooling meant teething was coming soon. It was during the tail end of our reverie that our old friends slipped away like a ship into the night. And we both knew that we'd never see either one of them again. The baby was warm and quiet in the backseat. The sycamores that lined the road were ancient and beautiful.
"Father forgive them for they know not what they do"
We were all that year waking up in the middle of the night to show a sort of solidarity with our wives who were sleeping peacefully when we met in the neighborhood to discuss the possibility of traveling through time. An idea that none of us really thought much about. We were mostly there to drink whiskey and think about Frank's wife. She was sleeping upstairs like the rest of our wives, the children were all too old to worry over, and we now felt guilt for all the nights that we had missed when they were young, but we knew we couldn't ask them, grown as they were, to sit around and let us read them a story because of some deep guilt we'd associated with them from the first few months they'd been in the world. So we didn't talk to them much, the differences hurt too damn much.
"If I had hair like that I'd stay single forever"
The difference between Frank's wife and all of ours was not a thing that anyone would describe as subtle. The woman was getting younger. While all our wives were starting to fade up same as us, Frank's wife had started living backwards around thirty or so. She looked like she was in her mid-twenties again, and no one said a damn thing about it. We covered her, created fake trips to L.A. where she'd had plastic surgery. We said that she'd been seen on a daily basis at the new yoga studio on Main street where it seemed not a soul could ever be seen.
I guess the thing we were all waiting for, this group of aging and strange men, was for Frank's wife to get up some night and drag herself downstairs for a cup of water. On at least three different occasions a couple of us remember actively trying to imagine her having a dry throat and even going so far as to cough loudly in an attempt to wake her up, or get her to mimic it as though it was a sneeze. To be honest, we hadn't thought the whole thing through.
You see, we were all wondering if time travel was possible. I hope it's implicit now that we just wanted to go back to those first few months of our children's lives to try and convince them not to hate us. We'd make bottles and stay up all night holding them if they liked that sort of thing. We were, none of us I swear, planning to go visit Jerusalem or Rome or anything. We had enough of our own problems to not go digging around for more. It was clear to us all that she'd traveled.
Frank was sitting to my left chewing on a toothpick and trying to figure out whether to fold or play. At times, we'd forget the charade of talking about traveling and just play a few hands of cards. And we'd pass around a few bucks for hours while we waited for Frank's wife to come downstairs for a glass of water and just maybe tell us how she'd done it. I was up 2.58 and using two separate mirrors in the dining room to assist in my betting. The cheating was less about the money and had everything to do with compulsion. We all loved her.
This part was added at the conclusion of the post and may seem to contradict what lies below. This post contains somewhere on the order of 3,500 or so and took me just under two hours to construct. In fact, if you posted it, spaces included, into a new word document it would stretch on to nine pages. An interminable nine pages, I hear you. It's even reasonable to ask why I'd bother sharing that sort of information up front. I just don't won't to break the contract that an author has with his readers, few though they may be. And I feel that promising something light or in any way vaguely short, or artsy, or kind of smile inducing would be fraudulent and on the order of inviting you over to my house for steaks only to reveal upon your arrival that I meant vegetarian ones. 3,500 words are a lot of words to spend on case building, but then, I always hear people in the sciences complaining about the amount of page space they have to spend just explaining results. How tedious. The following blog post does not contain any mention of a) my daughter b) certain slants of light c) the reasons why it's irritating to always see muscle adds that say scientists in Cambridge discover new muscle building miracle d) economic growth e) suburban sprawl f) the likelihood that literature is a dying medium g) the budget h) either S or s (though I thank them both for their assistance in allowing me the time to construct this thing, S, ((pact noticeably broken)) for bustling about, paying taxes, doing dishes and only grumbling a bit while I acted as an aggregator for more than an hour and s for being so damn cute that it hurts). This post is mostly about trying to prove a point that David Wallace was the best writer of his generation, so, now in a way. And the author is forced to humbly submit to the reader that he finds this to be greatly important. And that he believes, the author, that literature provides us not with great entertainment, but at its best, with a reminder that we are not alone in our thoughts and worlds. And, if you accept, or at least willing to consider that that might be the case I'd encourage you to read on despite the heft of the texty monolith below.
This post isn't that long, but I'm fairly certain that in the current annals of skimming it qualifies as an obscenely long piece of aggregation. More below. It's long because I'm trying to build a case that the reason I was always prattling on about David Wallace during graduate school, much to some folks chagrin, is that he was the best writer of his generation. Not, one of the literary greats, or, a great writer, literally the best American writer of his generation. Now, in order to make such a claim it's important to find relevant data to back it up. This is a problem we struggle with in the humanities, building cases. We're forced, unlike a mathematician, to rely on our own ability to discern gold from dross to determine what the best sort of writing is. Note: it seems strangely appropriate to be writing this note after the publication of The Pale King, a book, which is mostly sad and sometimes funny, but what has at its core the assertion that the great trick in life is deciding what to pay attention to because you will receive a myriad of impressions, sights, smells, textures, opinions, facts, fictions disguised as facts, and you, particularly as a member of a democracy, will have to decide which of those you are going to pay attention to. And what you choose to pay attention to will almost certainly determine the sort of person, useful member of a democratic society that you will become because we have the option to pay attention to nearly an infinite number of things now. Choose wisely.
Listen, that note was excruciatingly long and even grew a bit preachy towards the end, which is rarely the way to reach anyone. Sunday's excluded. Anyhow, as I watched my classmates eyes glaze over as I talked about the incredibly wonder that a book like Infinite Jest I regret that I didn't have all of the ammunition that I've supplied below. Note: Inwardly the author of this piece was, on some small level, most definitely engaging in some internal eye rolling at people who dismissed his recommendation out of hand without actually having ever read the text or even considered it after his sterling recommendation, even though he's perfectly aware that this sort of not paying attention to recommendations is the sort of thing he engages in daily. But still, read the damn book you ignoramus, he sort of thought because the attendant eye rolling was probably at least a little bit warranted for the sorts of folks, literary types, that he was talking with who hadn't bothered to read what was, at the very least, the most interesting (caveat that had hit the mainstream. Kind of). American writing being done and that the sort of eye rolling oh here he goes again on his high horse was not only perceived as insulting but almost vulgar coming from people who by all rights were interested in writing or reading and analyzing the next great work of American literature. It seemed to me a sad hint of hubris, and I suppose I'm sort of offering up here a not so vague f--k you to the eye rollers. (Some folks who I just plain like excluded such as those who at least provide me with playlists about IJ or have all sorts of good intentions about reading stuff like me but just didn't get around to it). It all winds up sort of tying back into X generation type stuff, of which I'm nominally a part where it is much easier to be sarcastic and self-deprecating about oneself and the status of the world because there's almost no attendant risk, and to be sincere, risks ending up sounding saccharine or end up with sentences like a not so vague f--- you when the sincerity isn't attended to. This whole post is aggressively lacking in paragraphs at this point as well, but I hope it's clear that the form is supposed to be mimicking the content. Should I even include this? I mean, what's probably easy to misunderstand about a person who seems cynical, sarcastic, word du jour, is the degree to which they too are sensitive. But now it's just the author, me, whining about people's inability to pierce the wall between two human beings, a problem that is not unique but a central problem of being a human being at all. This is all already too long. Though, to add, the oddest part about the above irritation is the shocking amount of time this very author wastes on inconsequential type stuff when he could be reading Ecclesiastes or something rather than checking on the 3rd quarter score of a first round NBA playoff game 2 to see if Brandon Roy is getting minutes. The appended note above is the sort of thing that Wallace mastered, no comparison here, light years difference in intellect, but, the brain voice. What I mean is, the voice that tells you to write something like f--- you but then minutes later is saying, "Wait, was that such a good idea?" maybe we should append something to that. The brilliance of Wallace is that he was willing to follow that chain of thought down to its core where he generally came up with the meaning as something both unifying and sort of insidious the need to be perceived in a certain way by others, or by ourselves that wasn't authentic. And if we couldn't be authentic, even with ourselves, how the hell were we supposed to go about this daily job of living without our collective heads exploding?
What's collected below? Well, let's just say it's like that fantasy where you get the genie who grants you three wishes.
Doesn't this sort of undercut the whole argument? I have a weakness for things that I perceive as funny. No, what's collected below are a series of excerpts from some of the reviews written about The Pale King, which help illustrate, with what is about as close as we're going to get in the humanities to scientific data that David Wallace may well have been the best writer of his generation as I've asserted above, and asserted in conversation with many generous, and not so generous folks that I've spoken with in the last few years. Note: I don't have as much guilt as I pretend to have about the humanities. I believe that things like science, particularly related to health or interstellar space travel are more important for our future than Robinson Crusoe, but I also firmly believe that a world without the sort of consideration that we get in our best fiction, non-fiction, commentary etc. would be a pretty shitty place to live. Author exits stage left.
From The Telegraph:
This was perhaps an inevitable occurrence for a writer who had produced a novel justly considered by Time magazine to be one of the top 100 novels written since 1923, and even if he wasn’t always producing his best work, Foster Wallace remained arguably America’s most important author.
Montreal Gazette:
Wallace was, and is, one of the titans of contemporary literature. He was the writing equivalent of a Swiss army knife; whether as a scholar, an essayist, a journalist, a novelist or a short-story writer, he had the right tool. His 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, a footnoteladen epic, is one of the pillars of post-modernism - you don't read it so much as get flattened by it. His journalism was detailed and illuminating
Tumblr:
Hear me out: I love David Foster Wallace. That I’ve grown into the person I am today is partially his doing. That I’ve grown up at all is partially his doing! More than any other writer, artist, or thinker, DFW has shaped my moral consciousness. His words make sense of an otherwise illogical world.
With every well-placed turn of phrase, his writing reminds me that I’m not alone - and neither is anyone else. With every achingly true observation, he sets off mental fireworks that (just like real ones) make me feel like I’m part of a bigger and more meaningful experience. Yeah, it sounds stupid, but that’s just how sincerity is.
Harvard Crimson Review:
It’s a matter of fact that Wallace’s life and his relationship to the writing process informed his work. But rehashing this fact pays mere lip service to what makes the manuscript a unique and formidable artistic achievement in its own right, and to what made Wallace himself the voice the loss from which American literature has still not recovered.
15 years after the release of his sprawling masterpiece “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s aesthetic—a metaphysical hunger sheathed in self-referential flourishes of both high- and low-brows varieties—has influenced a generation of writers who themselves now dominate the cultural moment in English-language prose, dubbed ‘hysterical realists’ by pejorative and endearing turns each
Sunday Post:
Often cited as the greatest American writer of his era - most famously he wrote the novel Infinite Jest -Wallace committed suicide in 2008, and his long-time editor Michael Pietsch has pieced together this final work from the drafts he left behind.
The Independent:
Of all the myths that have spread about David Foster Wallace in the years since his death, the most frustratingly pervasive was that he was a difficult writer.
It came about mostly because he wrote a very long novel, Infinite Jest, that was exceptional for its intelligence and its vaulting ambition to summarise the meaning of life in an era of information overload. But those characteristics never made it punishing. More than anything else, it was fun to read: the size of the thing just meant you could relax in the knowledge that you still had plenty ahead of you.
The Pale King is pretty long, too, but you can never quite relax in the same way. This is all we have of the book that Wallace, maybe the most talented American writer of his generation
Chris Hayes on Rachel Maddow:
Eamon Brennan from espn.com
In the 1960s, an American philosopher named Richard Taylor made his colleagues weak in the knees. His paper, "Fatalism" -- which would achieve renewed renown as the subject of beloved late author David Foster Wallace's undergraduate thesis -- made a disconcertingly logical argument. Given the apparent choice of fighting or not fighting in a battle, a naval captain cannot actually choose to do anything other than what he would have done the following day.
Christian Science Monitor:
n turns satiric and sad, thought-provoking and funny, “The Pale King” is ultimately a compassionate view of the individuals who make up the IRS, the institution we have all grown to hate. It’s awe-inspiring that David Foster Wallace, one of the greatest writers and social critics of our time, should make the IRS the subject of his final novel, and that a man for whom no institution was sacred, in essence found the sacred in human beings struggling to survive that institution: the machinations, the promotions, the fear of demotion, the craziness, and paleness that it breeds, along with the humor. Pages turned endlessly, workers taught to clinch their bottoms to avoid discomfort, tedium tolerated to support a child, and yes, in the face of all this, contemplation of suicide.
The Spectator:
When David Foster Wallace took his own life two and a half years ago, we lost someone for whom I don’t think the word genius was an empty superlative. He was an overpowering stylist, and a dazzling comedian of ideas. He could be gasp-makingly funny, but had an agonising moral seriousness. There’s more on one page of Wallace than on ten of most of his contemporaries. His mind seemed to have more buzzing in it than the rest of us could imagine being able to cope with, and perhaps than he could.
The Sydney Morning Herald:
n the years following Infinite Jest, his genius had been confirmed by several collections of journalism and short fiction. The quality of Wallace's writing that his death illuminated was its receptiveness to the sense-impressions, feelings and ideas of the attentive mind. Its effect was to transport the reader to the innermost corners of his characters' consciousness.
Of course, this is what most novelists attempt; Wallace was just the best at it. Every time I have read him, I would return to the world with a sharper set of eyes.
From the New York Times book review by author Tom McCarthy:
But there’s an older ghost haunting “The Pale King” even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying — or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.’s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America’s greatest writer, the author of “Moby-Dick,” spent his final 19 years as a customs officer — that is, a tax inspector. To research “The Pale King,” Wallace trained in accounting. We’re moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad — and the battle is the right one to engage in.
Slant Magazine:
Lovers of literature will embrace the chance to gobble up further ruminations from one of their favorite philosophical minds, just as readers feverishly inhaled Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and his other books. Wallace is often compared to some of the greatest minds of the literary world, Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut to name just two.
The Millions:
But Wallace’s canonization, now close to complete, means these criticisms no longer have much bite. Mostly we feel that Wallace’s headlong, encyclopedic, garrulous manner was born of necessity, not indulgence, that the stylistic innovations, including the massed detail, grew not from vanity but from some kind of mimetic imperative to reflect back to us our dizzy, painful, teeming, inconclusive lives.
The Globe:
He went on to pen Infinite Jest, one of the most critically lauded novels of the last quarter-century. His short stories garnered wide acclaim; several pieces of his long-form journalism are rightfully celebrated as classics of the genre. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the “genius” grant. In 2008, after discovering that his antidepressant no longer kept the symptoms of his illness at bay, he killed himself.
Boston.com
So what do we have here then? And how are we supposed to read it? These are important questions because American literature will rarely, if ever, give us another mind like Wallace’s. He was at once the recorder, the mimicker, and the synthesizer of our Age of Information. He showed how corroded our language had become; the way this loss radically ablated our spiritual lives; and he knew, intimately, how hollow we all felt, filled up and emptied out — interior life no longer this vaulting space, but a series of chemical loops and trip wires, entertainment an escape so irresistible that, in his masterpiece, the 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,’’ people die from it.
Wallace’s genius was that he could absorb the infernal logic of data — all those vectors of complexity, its relentless torrent — and still give us the magic of narrative. That moment when we, as readers, become co-imaginers of a text because there are characters in whom we believe, and a story we learn how to anticipate. Information and storytelling: They are opposing forces, like certainty and faith, yet Wallace stood across this divide and proved that if there was, in fact, a social novel of our time, here is where it would be built. Not by papering over the ruptures in realism, but by writing right through them.
Thought Catalog:
Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t bother to read it. You most certainly should. Just be aware that it’s not the kind of book designed to be a blockbuster, to keep you turning pages late into the night. Which you’ll be doing a lot of, if you’re a fan of literature. But it won’t be because the plot is so engaging (it is indescribably tedious at times) but because DFW was so damned good at writing that you can’t really believe what you’re reading. If it renders you speechless it won’t be because the prose has taken your breath away, but because you suddenly feel unworthy to be speaking the same language as someone who has so obviously and completely mastered the art of bending it to his will. And if it makes you sad, it will have less to do with the book itself and more to do with the fact that The Pale King is the last you’re ever going to get from the greatest American writer of this generation. That’s it. That’s all. Show is over, folks. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
The Observer:
David Foster Wallace, the most gifted and original American novelist of his generation, took his own life in 2008. His widow, the artist Karen Green, talks of the struggle to deal her loss and her decision to publish his unfinished work, The Pale King
From authors Darin Strauss and Charles Yu:
Charles Yu: There’s nobody else, for me, who, when you just hear the voice, you have to stop and just get into it. It’s like when I’m in the car and flipping through the radio and I’m not looking for anything in particular—and things kind of blend into a murmur of the radio. And all of a sudden I hear something I kind of wanted to hear that I didn’t realize I wanted to hear. And it’s like: “Wow.” And that’s what reading The Pale King was like, to me. I had been kind of avoiding [Wallace’s] fiction for a while; I’d been reading a lot of his nonfiction. And when I started slam-reading this I thought, “Oh man, I gotta go back and read his fiction again, things I haven’t read for years.” The Pale King just really stayed with me.
Strauss: Beyond even having appeal for outsiders, he was just the most talented and engaged writer of his generation, I think. And that was just something that was fun and intimidating to watch as his career unfolded because you knew whatever he was doing was going to be worth reading—and something you could look to for the kind of instruction we look to all the great books for. After he appeared on the scene, people’s fiction voices sounded a little different—a little slangier, a little looser, and also at the same time often a little more mathematically precise. It was that mixture of precision and looseness that was so influential.
London Review of Books:
In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I’d said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time
The Hipster Book Club Review:
About 15 years ago, I fell in love with David Foster Wallace. Although, at first I didn’t like him. I saw an article about him in The New York Times Magazine, and thought, Cute, but I bet that book sucks. The New York Times has bad taste. And the stupid book was ridiculously long and about tennis. TENNIS! Who cares about tennis? Not me! I almost failed tennis in college(1)! I read it anyway.(2)
It’s not an overestimation to say that Infinite Jest changed my life. I was a big reader before, reading all the hipster classics of the ‘90s, but Wallace opened up my world to authors like Barth and Barthelme and Sukenick, to philosophers like Rorty and Lyotard and Barthes. I know, too many Bs. I started writing essays about my love for Wallace online and became known as “the girl who stalks David Foster Wallace.”
GQ Review:
Here's a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That's what Wallace's suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow.
In the evening she'll be five months old. In the morning she bunches the blankets in her hands and chews on it vigorously turning her head from side to side, rooting, but appearing to be some confused lion cub on the Serengeti.
We sit on the front porch and I point the people passing by. "That's a car," I say, as she watches it roll by. I don't bother explaining to her the complex relationship we have with vehicles, fossil fuels, green house gases, wars overseas, that can wait for another day. Today I am trying to teach her what a car is.
I arrive home after midnight and spend five minutes trying to figure out what type of flowering shrub we have in our side yard. AS it nears one I concluded that it probably doesn't matter, the flowers won't be any whiter.
Yesterday I walked outside to say hello to our neighbor. She said, "I saw you planting flowers. I called my family to come help out. I told them that you probably didn't want to live next to the ugly house." I say something in response but wish I'd said that we put up a fence to hide how lazy we were in our own yard. Self-deprecation is a fine art.
After her nap I bring her downstairs, so I can finish my workout. I talk to her while doing push ups. I giver her a large fuzzy polar bear that she starts to gobble up only to realize that the hairs from its back are unpleasant. I say, "This is the sort of thing that is going to help you get the President's gold medal in fitness," not knowing if they still make kids do that and remembering my own flexed arm hang of fifteen seconds. She starts to cry.
I had the impression this morning that the sun was shining, that Sadie had a dimple on her left cheek, and that today was the first day that things were going to change. I eat cereal in the morning, pears in the afternoon, this all feels so familiar. At noon she goes to sleep, I boil pacifiers, stuff diapers and refrigerate milk. I wear a shirt that says I am modern man, hear me help facilitate.
As we stand outside I say to her, "Perhaps I should have bought a rhododendron that was already in bloom." And as I'm about to ask her if she thinks the white blossoms with the pink borders will look okay she reminds me that all things will die in their time. And how in the morning, when the sun was streaming through the blinds and making shapes on the tile, I was making her bottles and thinking that I had met the first person who would almost certainly be at my funeral. And I wanted to tell her that they should plant something that day but to make sure that it was already in bloom. "You see," I'd tell her, pedantically, "you don't always have time to wait for the flowers."
Grey day outside, pale clouds are all making the same amorphous shape, squirrels up and around the wires, near the electrical box, chittering, while I try and decide if it would be worth losing the electricity to see one go down, the maple sprouting small green buds, azaleas all pink blooms, the musty smell of bark after rain, sitting on the front porch and pointing out the geraniums to s.
Inside, greyer day, windows and blinds open, lights off, s is sitting in her new jumperoo glowering at the plastic monkey in her hands. She spins a little wheel and looks up at me in confusion. I lean down and turn the jumperoo on. She spins the wheel and an orange light flashes and the monkey calls out oooohhhhhh, oohhhhhhhh, ahhhhhhh, ahhhhh, and she looks up at me again, expectant or proud. "You did it s," I tell her, and she smiles.
It's been quite fun to watch s learn about cause and effect in her new jumperoo. I didn't know if she had the concept down until a couple of days ago when I noticed her repeatedly spinning the wheel to make the monkey go. I see a bright future for her now. Now we just need to make sure that she has the capacity for empathy connected to the cause and effect. I don't think she quite has this one down, or she wouldn't spend so much time pulling S's hair out of her head with a sublime look on her face.
Inside, pale light coming through unwarped glass. On the radio, three people are talking about literature as if it might matter. On the floor, the little girl, cradled between her daddy's legs to keep from tipping over looks off into the distance. The pale light illuminates her face, red cheeks, wheat colored hair, eyes the color of whatever dark color she's wearing. She looks away from her toys off towards where the voices are coming from. Her three chins turning as one, and then turning back. Disembodied voices are still a new thing.
"Those are ghosts," I tell her, talking about a person who has died.
But by now she has forgotten about the disembodied voices as she idly chews the leg of a giraffe named Sophie.
In the morning she takes the smallest bits of naps, like edges torn from a paper to make it look worn. In the afternoon, when we stand outside, looking back at our house, I imagine that all we need is more color.
"Color," I tell her, "Color can save the world."
And she is too young to remind me that color doesn't exist, merely properties of light, wavelengths.
"We'll plant wavelengths of light," I tell her, but she is busy trying to hold on to her toes.
In the evening she sits in a purple chair and laughs as I prepare dinner.
"There is nothing funny about warming pita in the oven," I say, already knowing that I am wrong that to be a child is to find humor in the strangest things rather than the distance between what is said and what is meant.
"Some day," I tell her, "we'll pull out the Juniper, which is almost like a weed where I'm from, and replace it with wavelengths of light embodied in all sorts of flowers." But she is already sleeping the frequent sleep of a child.
Last spring I got really good at planting flowers. Okay, really good is probably taking it seven steps too far. I planted a few flowers. There, that felt better. I went on to detail that the pansies turned out to be pansies and that my azaleas died, according to some people they need water, poppycock, I say, and often. I can't say poppycock enough. I also planted some sunflower seeds and after a few weeks of ignoring Steph's pleas to cut the weeds in the yard we had some nice big stalks for a period of time until the squirrels ruined them like they ruin everything. I also planted geraniums, which blossomed well into summer and are pretty much the sort of flower that was made for me.
So this year I decided to get smart. No pansies. No azaleas. If you need water and attention I'm not the gardener for you. I enjoy planting and then forgetting about you like a friend from junior high. Note: Gardening is one of the single greatest activities because you actually do something when you do something. Ie, you get results quickly. When I plant a geranium after fifteen minutes or so, it is planted and looks nice, until I stop watering it, and generally gives me that swell feeling of accomplishment that so often evades us. Note: This same type of accomplishment is rarely achieved through the completion of any task online. The two accomplishments, which could theoretically be similar, seem very far apart.
So now I've got some dirt under my fingernails.
M: Gloves are for sissies
S: Our soil might have lead in it. And, that's just disgusting.
M: Don't tell me what to do.
S: Stop doing gross things.
M: Where's Sadie? I want to hold Sadie.
S: And this is why...
And we've got six, hearty if the bastards know what's good for them, geraniums in our front yard and also a rhododendron, hard to spell but hopefully easy to kill and a nice feeling of accomplishment. I don't think it's too big of a stretch to say that if the whole world took up gardening we would never have any more wars and that people everywhere would be raving about how good Kale is. Also people would always have dirt under their fingernails, and we'd see an overwhelming revival of the saying, "God made dirt and dirt don't hurt." Note: I also planted some purple flowers, lavender of some sort, in an entirely haphazard way, and I don't suspect those seeds will bother me ever again, and the whole process was less like planting and more like a burial.
I'd like to say that our whole yard is getting whipped into shape, but every time I look outside I feel mild disgust at what I see. Despite what my parents tell me I feel that some part of me, the gardening part, is vaguely Germanic, and resists anything that looks disordered. Unfortunately, the other aspects of my personality lead me to just look at the window and shake my fist at the problem rather than plunging headlong into a working solution, in spite of today's exploits. I'm more of a brooder than a doer. And really, who's to say which is more valuable in the end? actually putting a garden in order or looking out at the garden and being disgusted at the lack of order? Again, I've no earthly clue where this impulse comes from as I'm perfectly content to accrue dishes in the sink for days and only clean them on a fairly regular basis because I think S likes it.
So, yeah, no promises of hummingbirds and butterflies and bees doing some saintly dance in my yard if you ever stop by. No, you're still more likely to catch me swatting at mosquitoes or picking up sticks that stop my all powerful push mower in its tracks. Oh well, at least I have a lot to brood about.
When my wife arrived home from an appointment to a sink full of dishes she acted annoyed.
"Entropy," I told her, it is the order of the universe.
Apparently entropy is not a suitable answer to dishes in the sink. Relatedly, I told her, quite pedantically, entropy is often misused by those not in the know to indicate chaos when it is something closer to energy's persistence in changing and its potentiality. So I stood by the sink and wept. Even entropy has abandoned me.
I learned today that I may not be suited to take care of s on Saturdays. You see, I had a football game that I wanted to watch, and children who are four months old do not enjoy football as much as they should. I mean, they essentially sort of look like bald old men/extremely cute babies and bald older men love football. Such reasoning does not work with a child because children are unreasonable. A lot of folks will try and chalk it up to their inability to understand language, but I think it's just laziness. English isn't that hard to learn.
Anyhow, as I was preparing for the game to begin s got hungry. And I, dutifully I might add, prepared her some milk. Unfortunately, I didn't notice that I had forgotten to put an insert in the bottle, (our bottles have these little plastic inserts that hold the milk while keeping the exterior clean. This lead the manufacturers, stupidly, to leave holes in the sides of the bottle) and breast milk (which I've been told by the wife is like gold. I've begun actually storing bits of it in my basement in case the economy continues to derail because I'm thinking that if the gold standard doesn't cut it we'll probably go to breast milk next) started pouring out on the sink. At this point I had to unscrew the cap and quickly pour the contents into a regular glass and then sop up my gold standard with a few paper towels. I then put the lid back on s's bottle and proceeded to feed her and as my little one began to cough I pulled the bottle away thinking that she was drinking too quickly, but as I leaned closer to her I noticed small black flecks all across her lip. It was at this point that I realized that the bottle nipple had a bunch of coffee grinds on it from its stint on the counter and that I had given s her first taste of food, coffee grinds.
Well then I spent the next few minutes playing with s while wondering if a baby could choke on a coffee grind and convincing myself alternatively that I could her breathing just fine and also that she was acting strangely and in a manner somewhat reminiscent of people choking in movies and wondering whether a finger sweep might be necessary to save her while simultaneously not really wanting to because she was probably okay and getting little kid slobber all over your fingers is still kind of gross. So finally, after exchanging a few pleasantries, raspberries and stuff, essentially blowing spittle on the couch at one another, I gave her a finger sweep and she promptly began gnawing on my finger, and I realized that it was going to be okay for now but that she might not be interested in solid foods for a while if we only gave her coffee grinds.
At some point after that I began watching the game and s went down for a nap right as it started and either slept for an hour very peacefully or cried quietly enough for me to ignore it without feeling too guilty. And then I brought her into the bedroom, and she sat on my lap and watched football, and I suspect that she loved it.
If you're like me, (and as what follows is about paying taxes I sort of hope that you aren't like me. I paid my taxes once as a functioning adult before my wife took them over the following year and every year since, filing them via TurboTax or whatever, while I've no earthly clue how one goes about properly paying taxes or what our income is or any of that sort of stuff) you really enjoy that old saying about certainties and "death and taxes" because it is funny and true.
But if you're also like me it's funny to think about where all of your taxes actually go. I assumed that the majority of my taxes went to funding NPR's leftist/communist agendas, funding the EPA's continuing interference in the business of God-fearing Americans with trumped up ideas about climate change, and maybe a small bit was left over for things like Social Security and Medicare (why oh why can't we figure out health care. The people who have it are already financing it for others. Ugghhhh). Anyhow, a friend of mine put up this handy dandy tax calculator that helps you to understand where all of your tax dollars are actually going. Hint: It's not all being devoted to the stipends of guest on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay watershed. This is the sort of thing that you should immediately check out so as to educate yourself about your tax dollars (insert joke about the federal government and something along the lines of your tax dollars sort of trying to work amidst reams of red tape if you're so inclined).
http://www.whitehouse.gov/tax-receipt
No really, do it. Go back up to that previous link and at least do the shortcut where they let you roughly estimate your income. Or hell, just estimate someone else's income to see where their tax dollars went. Just look at your taxes. Who knew taxes could be this fun?
And look, if you still haven't done it you're a lot like me. 1) You don't like being told what to do. 2) You are too busy, though not too busy to be reading this blog. 3) Lazy in the sort of way that so much of the American populous is now. We've sort of ceded a lot of our civic duties to the government, and now we're pissed that they're running over budget. And this sort of laziness, of which this author is most certainly guilty, is probably going to become problematic at some point in the future or perhaps we'll just go bumbling along. "This country has a lot of big problems. Congress is one of them."
Fact:
Article below that talks about how NPR and the EPA are ruining the world by taking up all of our taxes. Hint: This turns out to be untrue. Also, read on particularly if you were too lazy to use the link to see where your hard earned dollars went. If your dollars were earned easily don't worry about it.
Relevant Portion from Rasumessen Reports. Bolded sections mine.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 27% of Likely Voters say the United States does not spend enough money on the military and national security. Thirty-two percent (32%) say America spends too much on defense, while a plurality (37%) thinks the nation spends about the right amount. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
But only 25% of voters believe the United States should always spend at least three times as much on defense as any other nation. Forty percent (40%) do not think the country needs to spend this much, while 35% are not sure. Interestingly, if the government were to actually spend only three times as much as any other nation, it would imply a significant cut in U.S. defense spending.
For fiscal year 2011, the total budget for defense is estimated to be around $719 billion. That does not include the cost of veterans’ care, which totals another $124 billion. By comparison, no other nation in the world spends more than $110 billion on defense. Earlier polling showed that just 58% recognize that the United States spends more on defense than any other nation in the world.
Underlying voters’ opinions on how much the United States spends on defense is the fact that many don’t know where most of the government’s money already goes. Just 40% can correctly identify that most federal spending goes towards national defense, Social Security and Medicare. Roughly the same number (38%) believes this statement to be false, while another 22% are not sure.
So yeah, we might have some bigger fish to fry in this whole budget debate then public radio and the clean air act and food stamps.
A modest proposal related by this same friend and an NPR commentator related to decreasing our budget deficit. The other option is to tax more, which it seems that no one likes, so even though the idea listed below is a form of taxation, it doesn't have the dirty word association like taxes do and gives the added benefit of relieving the debt burden on the middle class type folks who have large things like student debt hanging over their heads.
Inflation - the reduction in the nominal value of currency - reduces the real value of debts. While lenders take inflation into account when they decide the terms of a loan, unexpected increases in the rate of inflation cause categorical debt relief.
And yes, this does mean we wouldn't be able to purchase as many things and it would slow economic growth, but perhaps it's good to ask ourselves whether we want a swiftly growing economy ad infinitum and whether things go about making us any happier...Okay enough on budgets. Note: The historical antecedent that would argue against this is the fall of Rome, which some speculate was brought about by hyperinflation and an increased tax burden its citizenry due to regular infrastructure needs on a constantly expanding empire, (I think we're done expanding though Canada is tempting) and an increased amount on defense spending. (Please no more wars in the middle east) Note to Note: The real downfall though if we're going the tax route was their eventual inability to collect much revenue at all. But this has all gotten a bit long and even reasonable people who have checked on their tax returns cannot be expected to read about the tax problems for palatines in the 440's without eventually glazing over.
Due to a request from one of my three readers, on a good day, I'm going to take a brief respite from my never ending quest to have David Wallace read by every man woman and child in American to talk about Sadie.
Listen, I haven't written about the little bundle of joy... Note: We don't always bundle here now, so sometimes she's just a many chinned round mound of joy. because the biggest secret that nobody tells you about raising kids is that it's easy. I mean, sure it takes up almost all of your time/energy on a daily basis, but it doesn't take more than that. What I mean to say is that, for the most part, barring the occasional fit, which I generally understand the origins of anyway, it's a pretty rewarding gig.
Not only are you spending time with probably the cutest human being on the face of the earth. And yes, I'm well aware that every parent thinks that about their own offspring, and that's probably a good thing anyhow because it would be weird to look at your child and think, "Huh, we could have done better than that couldn't we have hon?" Also, this extremely cute person, see above, has your blood coursing through their veins, which means you're genetically predetermined to be extremely interested in just about everything they do. The way that they interact with the world is a direct reflection on you, yes as a parent, but also just from a generic science stand point. As in, heh, my offspring should be smarter than to put a share knife in their mouth because that's certainly something I wouldn't do. I mean, the person that people find most interesting in the world is generally staring at them in the mirror each morning, and you're getting the next best thing only cuter and younger and therefore more full of potential, succeed or fail.
I'm probably making parenting sound a bit more selfish than it is. I'm just trying to get at that feeling that you get when you stare at your child and just feel so much intense love of the sort that generally comes from early romantic attachments, except, just a guess, I think the honeymoon period on this one is longer. I probably have a lot more to say about how to properly raise a child, or at the very least a girl who is roughly Sadie's age, though boy girl distinctions prove to be more important starting around age 1.
Anyhow, my advice, which I've related to S a number of times has to do with allowing a baby to queue you for nap time rather than you trying to force it on them. I'd say more, but I'm planning to write about putting your baby to bed properly and all the queues you should follow. I'm fairly certain that I can get at least 230 pages out of the idea as long as I'm free with diagrams and bullet points and the like. Anyone who has read Malcom Gladwell or virtually any book of non-fiction about an Idea, emphasis intended, can relate to the seeming interminable nature of the text after the first 125 pages or so when the point has been proven and the writing goes on and on illustrating that point again. This to me would be like laughing at every cat video on YouTube, I mean, at some point their just a bunch of f-ing animals, go give a homeless person a buck and stop wasting my time.
You have to admit the cat is pretty cute.
On an unrelated note in my never ending quest based on the movie The Never Ending story. Note: For years, literally until I watched it again in college, I thought the princess at the end of the movie was bald, and it turned out she just had her hair pulled tightly back. I think the point I'm trying to make here is that she probably should have been bald. The movie would definitely have been made more strangely creepy for children if that had been the case.
From Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen, a New Yorker essay oddly aimed at demythologizing the apparent hagiography of David Wallace that Franzen feels has been going on. Though his points seem well taken in some instances, he's also widely regarded as kind of jerk in the literary world.
From Father Away
David and I had a friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete. A few years before he died, he signed my hardcover copies of his two most recent books. On the title page of one of them, I found the traced outline of his hand; on the title page of the other was an outline of an erection so huge that it ran off the page, annotated with a little arrow and the remark “scale 100%.” I once heard him enthusiastically describe, in the presence of a girl he was dating, someone else’s girlfriend as his “paragon of womanhood.” David’s girl did a wonderfully slow double take and said, “What?” Whereupon David, whose vocabulary was as large as anybody’s in the Western Hemisphere, took a deep breath and, letting it out, said, “I’m suddenly realizing that I’ve never actually known what the word ‘paragon’ means.”
Introductory Note:
In the early 1980s, American writer David Foster Wallace suffered a nervous breakdown while away at college and retreated to his parents’ home to recover. He drove a school bus for a while. He was diagnosed with depression and started taking medication. Eventually, he returned to Amherst, where he took courses in creative writing. He went on to pen Infinite Jest, one of the most critically lauded novels of the last novels of the last quarter-century. His short stories garnered wide acclaim; several pieces of his long-form journalism are rightfully celebrated as classics of the genre. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the “genius” grant. In 2008, after discovering that his antidepressant no longer kept the symptoms of his illness at bay, he killed himself.
Relevant Portion:
Like its predecessor, The Pale King is an electric novel of ideas. Wallace uses the tax system as a means to explore our obligations to one another, what it means to be bored and the problem of information, which is to say, what happens when there’s too much of it, overwhelming our ability to make meaningful choices.
My take: The review begins by trying to elaborate the plot of TPK. Thus, we spend about four paragraphs with the author sort of gallantly floundering to elucidate just what the hell was happening in TPK. The big reveal comes in the last ten pages of TPK though. Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, chose to include ten pages worth of notes on possibilities for where the plot might lead. And, if you are familiar with Wallace's work you'll know that ten pages worth of notes is probably 300 pages or so of actual text. Thus, the project that the early portion of the review sets, explaining the plot, is misguided. This book, even more so than Infinite Jest, is about characters, voice, ideas, polyphony in the grand tradition of Faulkner. The plot hangs together loosely at best, and it's probably unfair to expect it to do anything else. The work was unfinished.
From Boston.com
Relevant portion:
Wallace’s genius was that he could absorb the infernal logic of data — all those vectors of complexity, its relentless torrent — and still give us the magic of narrative. That moment when we, as readers, become co-imaginers of a text because there are characters in whom we believe, and a story we learn how to anticipate. Information and storytelling: They are opposing forces, like certainty and faith, yet Wallace stood across this divide and proved that if there was, in fact, a social novel of our time, here is where it would be built. Not by papering over the ruptures in realism, but by writing right through them.
My take: Uh, yes. I think the thing that I'm saddest about is losing the enormity of Wallace's talent and ambition. I haven't read any other contemporary authors who are as interested in attempting to synthesize everything that it means to be happy and hail in these data tinged days. The largest manifestation of this in Wallace's work comes when characters spend time doing things like thinking about thinking or in TPK, the awkwardness of flying on a plane, all the little details that make it a strange type of hell. And I'll miss his ability to catalog all of those things that generally pass by us because we are so rarely truly aware. I suppose the last bits seem unrelated, however, they are central to TPK. Ie, when we have five thousand things to pay attention to, what do we choose?
From the Kansas City Star's review by Kevin Canfield:
Relevant portion, which Canfield actually pulled directly from TPK.
“I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity,” explains David Wallace, a fictionalized version of the author and the book’s occasional narrator. “About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. … And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull.”
In what is as close as he comes to a direct explanation of his decision to write about boredom, Wallace notes the lengths to which many of us go to avoid it: “Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everybody knows it’s about something else, way down.”
My take: Yup.
Thought Catalog's Phil Roland
Although, to be pedantic, I suppose no one will be finishing it. David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel is incomplete, after all. Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t bother to read it. You most certainly should. Just be aware that it’s not the kind of book designed to be a blockbuster, to keep you turning pages late into the night. Which you’ll be doing a lot of, if you’re a fan of literature. But it won’t be because the plot is so engaging (it is indescribably tedious at times) but because DFW was so damned good at writing that you can’t really believe what you’re reading. If it renders you speechless it won’t be because the prose has taken your breath away, but because you suddenly feel unworthy to be speaking the same language as someone who has so obviously and completely mastered the art of bending it to his will. And if it makes you sad, it will have less to do with the book itself and more to do with the fact that The Pale King is the last you’re ever going to get from the greatest American writer of this generation. That’s it. That’s all. Show is over, folks. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
I never even heard of David Foster Wallace until a few days after his suicide in 2008. And I likely wouldn’t have heard of him until long after were it not for my desire to impress the cute, bookish librarian and the honest realization that Salvatore’s Icewind Dale trilogy wasn’t going to quite cut it. So I chose the weightiest, smartest-looking tome I could find, which turned out to be Infinite Jest. (Atlas Shruggedwas on the short list; I declined on the grounds that I was having a good day and didn’t feel like hating everyone.)
“For the kids,” I lied, seeing the smirk on my cute, bookish librarian’s face as she scanned my selection of fantasy novels.
“It’s so sad,” she said when she came upon Infinite Jest.
“I know, right?” I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought she meant the book.
“I still can’t believe he could just kill himself like that.”
Oh. Oh.
Cont:
It’s a fractured, potholed mess of intentionally dull descriptions of white collar government work and “Realism, monotony. Plot a series of setups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.” While most of this can be ascribed to the book’s unfinished nature,
Like the last few cigarettes in the pack before another attempt to quit, I’m making the The Pale King last. And then I plan to give up when I get close to the end. Because right now I can’t conceive of living in a world where I’ve read the entire oeuvre of one of the greatest literary minds to ever exist–a human iceberg whose depths will never be fully charted–knowing that there will never be any more. Rather nonsensical, true, but I will at least have ensured myself that there is some measure of beauty and mystery left unexplored in my world at least, and I can tease myself with those final, unread pages for years to come, each time thinking the exact same thing I was thinking when I first found myself lost in his work:
God I wish he hadn’t killed himself.
My take: Extra points for being a more personal review. I'm not going to touch the NYT review by
Michito Kakutani because her reviews are all over the map. She called Franzen's Freedom, a good but decidedly not great or excellent novel, a masterpiece. She also reviewed Infinite Jest and called it essentially a work authorial selfishness. When reviewers miscast, or seem to misunderstand books I don't generally give them much credence even if they review for The Times.
On Endings by Robert Douglas from The Telegraph
Wallace seems to have recognised as much all along. His first novel, The Broom of the System, ended mid-sentence, with fictional editor Rick Vigorous explaining that “You can trust me… I’m a man of my ”. Automatically we find ourselves filling in the missing “word”, which is both a joke about publishers always having the last word and a reminder that we have been Wallace’s collaborators from the start. His short story “Good Old Neon” ends twice, once with the phrase “Not another word”, and again two pages earlier with a footnote that concludes “THE END”.
It is, then, a wonderful example of editorial tact that the fragment chosen to end The Pale King has “you” as its final word: “She’s right there, speaking calmly, and so are you.” Because that’s what Wallace’s writing came down to: not him, but “you”, the reader.
Everything he wrote was unfinished, because it was offered as one side of a bargain: he would extend his readers’ sense of the possible, and all he asked was that they populate his fictional world to make it feel less lonely. It made everything he wrote into a work in progress. But then, as a character in one of Tennessee Williams’s plays points out: “Humanity is just a work in progress.”
