before: I've been having trouble picking what to read next. I tried Anna Kavan, I tried William Vollmann, I tried Fellipe Alfau. No dice. So I thought maybe some non-fiction, something a little less frivolous, a little less difficult. I kinda pulled this book without thinking, really, refusing to consider myself one of the jumpers-on, someone needing desperately to reread an author right after his sudden, shocking death. I mean, I've read almost all his books before, right? So obvs I should be able to revisit them whenever I want, without feeling like a scenester wannabe.

I didn't remember hardly anything about this one, except a weird snippet of playing tennis in a tornado. So try to picture my shock, in the early pages of the title essay, when I came upon this:

On board the Nadir — especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased — I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.

Cut to me, hair blowing crazy in the wind outside my apartment, with a cigarette in my hand and tears streaming down my face.



after: Oh for fuck's sake, I don't know what to say. Despite everything I said above, it was really difficult for me to really actually read this without feeling like a stupid bandwagon-jumper. I mean, the whole thing's just mind-blowingly sad. And it was really hard to not read these essays and notice all the despair slyly threaded throughout the jokes, the seriousness, the brilliance. And what makes me feel the worst is that I just don't know if I buy it. I mean, if he'd come out of the closet just recently instead, everyone would be piecing together "clues" from his oeuvre about his secret gayness, you know? I guess I just have a serious problem with the soul-baring-ness of the autobiographical writer, and the tacit agreement by readers that they can poke "between the lines" and assume that they have figured out more than the writer is telling.

Ugh. Just like before, I have not been able to articulate at all why this all upsets me. But it does.

So whatever. This book is fantastic, the fact that he is gone is devastating, the whole thing is beautiful-awful. And here are some thoughts on the individual essays.

The title essay and "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All" are just spectacular. Hilarious too, which is something we sometimes forget about DFW, given how super serious & intellectual he is. And speaking of which, in "Greatly Exaggerated" he is so fucking smart that I couldn't even read the essay, because I am not, and never will be, his intellectual equal. "E Unibus Pluram," on the other hand, was incredibly smart but also (for the most part) accessible to us mere mortals, and was incredibly interesting, if sadly a bit dated. "David Lynch Keeps His Head" was a nice middle ground; incredibly obsessive-nerd-y, but made me desperately want to watch Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks again. I only read about half of the Michael Joyce essay because my attention span for tennis (especially its accompanying statistics and arcana) is pretty short. "Derivative Sports in Tornado Alley" was plaintive and sad and the most 'personal' (maybe) of the essays, and though it was the one that stuck with me the most on my first read of this book, this time I think the images of the bovine herds of fat sweaty Mid-Easterners stuffing their faces with funnel cake and hot dogs at the State Fair will remain in my head for a long while.

Oh David. I miss you with a plangency that belies the fact that I never met you, never would have. You were and are a serious force in my life. God damn it.