|
July 29
|
|
Tal
gave
to:
Infinite Jest (hardbound)
by David Foster Wallace
|
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
|
| |
read in July, 2008
Tal said:
"It was a year ago, almost to the day.
I was sitting on the southeast corner of 54th & Park; the first day I worked with Simon, king crawdaddy of the axe slayers, hardhat in hand shining like an unpeeled orange in the sun. Opened up the book an...more
It was a year ago, almost to the day.
I was sitting on the southeast corner of 54th & Park; the first day I worked with Simon, king crawdaddy of the axe slayers, hardhat in hand shining like an unpeeled orange in the sun. Opened up the book and page one was already impenetrable and confounding. Tried to read a couple pages and put it down--looked over at Sy, did a children’s puzzle book to hair metal bands. Two weeks of non-stop conversations with a guy I now barely talk to. Then I quit my job.
It was a year ago, almost to the day.
I was sitting in my room. It was hot. Damn hot. Plastic vines, ivy, bushels, the checkerwork of leaves. No wise shoulders, just the imitation greenery adorning the corners and edges of my blanched windowsill. Small towel wrapped around my neck, pouring sweat. Damn hot.
I was unemployed, no air conditioner nor a foreseeable future in any sort of writing career. I had come to New York City just shy of a year earlier, and there I was sitting soaked in my own grease with nothing to show for it but twenty-odd reviews and a couple essays. That’s it.
And that’s where I began, reading page after page, complex word after real talk after fractured idioms. But forcing myself to read, in that teal sofa chair with the Ottoman—supported by flimsy wheels. Yom Kippur I didn’t do anything but sit in that chair and just pound away, tearing through 200 pages like it was nothing. Smoking cigarettes until my face went gray. Listening to Tusk and Burial and walking to Tom’s in the noontime, snug in a booth eating eggs bathed in hot sauce while foggy swing music faintly played in the corners. Daydreaming through an acne-scarred visage, imagining halos.
It’s weird, right when I finished round one of IJ my life turned around. Completely. New job, love, writing in bigger outlets and getting noticed in places I thought I never would. EMP. The stars began to align, images began to tessellate where once they were a broken jigsaw. And what I couldn’t understand was, had IJ changed my luck because I had read it, or had I changed my luck by putting down the accursed book?
I’ve spent the past year reading IJ, twice over. August 1 to November 15 and then April ‘til now, both times in doses with other books interspersed between and each time with all the footnotes. No hyperbole (well, except the five stars, but that’s to denote its significance, not as a work so much as a time in my life, a time in my life in which I had to figure out just when am I going to stop wallowing in the sounds pocketed in nooks and crannies of the recorded universe, letting notes flow in and out, seeping in juice—how much longer would I wait before my hands reached out and GRABBED what they wanted), no bullshit.
Many days I would just look down at my bulky paperback copy and bristle. Often I dreaded reading it, and would subsequently divert my attention to films. I plowed through Netflix envelopes like junk mail, devouring Ophuls and Godard and Kiarostami. So I read without enjoyment, pining for more film-watching, begrudging my state even as I was relishing my freedom. Then I got a full-time job, read more books, and tried again. Apparently, lifestyle makes a big difference.
If IJ reflects anything about how we live today—at least in the eyes of this tiny reader—it’s that there’s just too much: too many people, too much art, too many products. And so the length here is justified, because it takes something of this breadth and this disruption and this understanding of…excess, that the real perspicacious observation is not trying to encompass all of it but to parse what is the essence of what’s underneath. Which is us. As the world becomes increasingly variegated, where information is filtered through sundry jargon ranging from slang to chemical equations and technical argot, we begin to understand less--and not just about the world, but also about each other. How we interact with one another. IJ’s fascination with drugs doesn’t have to do with their pervasiveness, but why we choose to take them. This book isn’t so much about Hal Incandenza or a videotape. It’s not about media and trash and corporations. The book is, in fact, about Don G. Don G is unfettered by the rush of media and superfluous product--he’s just a fucked up dude from a fucked up family. There’s no scene more touching or disturbing than him and Fackelmann, sitting in the apartment, sun streaming through, plowing through a mountain of Demerol, plopped down in a stream of their own piss and feces. And it’s not for anything but inescapable emptiness. Nothing.
Now of course all these things feed into each other, but ultimately Don G is us at our most human. When the punks, juncos, jesters, and street urchins dance their wasteful bonfire at the end—in a carnival of torture and madness—it’s a bizarre, Fellini-esque death disco. The cinematic nature of the ending is just like James Incandenza’s films: The predilection towards melodrama, a flair for the oddball, the elemental depravity of human beings. My serendipitous relationship with IJ this past year has been about its ability to instill a vague sense of perspective: Film and literature have always been my true callings. I just haven’t been ready to pursue them.
But these tangents aside, I would recommend IJ to someone—despite the slog and wear and intense concentration and pretension and twitching—because ultimately it has a lot of foresight into what is very much the now. Obviously certain events are exaggerated, but the clinical distance that most of these characters maintain with each other—and alternately, how external forces that are societal and infrastructural affect that detachment—is pretty much spot on to how we experience the world around us. The added pleasure is that DFW accepts his own limitations (yes, he has them) and is able to find the humor in so much shallowness, smallness, pain, and inhumanity. Because those things, while stronger, will never replace the mushy sentiments that are essentially ineluctable: love, loss, joy, sorrow. And that’s what Hal vs. Don is about: Regret cannot triumph o’er them, no matter how much we search through our past through repetition.
Today a quarter century of my life is gone. Nothing seems to burn through but discrete strands and memories.
Yet here I stand with this knowledge and its yuks and tears stored deep within.
Time has been wasted, but I face forward against the vast vistas of waste!
I am here, thinking of being on the green grass looking out over the horizon, where the sky resembles grapefruit and ice.
And I smile....less
"
|
|
July 24
|
|
|
New comment on Tal's review of
Infinite Jest
(see all 3 comments)
|
|
July 22
|
|
Tal
is currently reading:
The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (Paperback)
by Marquis de Sade, Richard Seaver
bookshelves:
currently-reading
|
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
|
| |
|
|
June 17
|
|
Tal
gave
to:
1984 (Paperback)
by George Orwell
|
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
|
| |
Tal said:
"It's strange and nauseating to read 1984 for the first time, at the present time. Can't say that telescreens don't conjure images of FISA, Military Commissions Act or Telecom Amnesty right now--nor am I optimistic.
In a way, O'Brien sort of remind...more
It's strange and nauseating to read 1984 for the first time, at the present time. Can't say that telescreens don't conjure images of FISA, Military Commissions Act or Telecom Amnesty right now--nor am I optimistic.
In a way, O'Brien sort of reminds me of Marlo Stanfield: undiluted, insoluble, impartial hatred and power-hunger will always be the more powerful life force. We can deny all we want, and I hate to take the angle of pessimist, but essentially the Darwinist structure is the correct one. God? Love? Find a number of people who couldn't find either in a Bible and shit's looking pretty grim. Arm 'em with an Ivy education and a military arsenal and the bucket's already fallen off the ladder.
I abhor the concept of conducting my life without love and appreciation for it, because ultimately time is valuable. But I can't say that I feel like everyone shares the same emotional base WITHOUT complete selfishness and avarice. Joy is not an easy buy, mostly because you can't give it a price tag.
I often reflect on the concept of perceived reality because ultimately it is perception and nothing else that guides us, much as we'd like to think that all the reason and logic and experience and erudition can lead us beyond that, ultimately we're limited by our senses, despite the fact that our consciousness is unmapped and uncorralled and ineffable.
Orwell was so aware of these concepts that he wrote this novel of such foresight and concision that it scares you, makes you realize how dangerous and, mroe importantly, EASY something like this can be. Fuck "Orwellian." Fuck "Big Brother." This is humanity year X, all alone in the wasteland universe and not a phone with one ear nor a postcard with one author. The collective consciousness is the all-power. Fear it. Inject it with the love and lust for life else be consumed by the single ambition, the manipulative wielder of the red trident. Welcome to the Inferno. Five Fucking Stars....less
"
|
|
June 16
|
|
Tal
is currently reading:
What Is Cinema? (Vol. 2) (What is Cinema?)
by André Bazin
bookshelves:
currently-reading
|
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
|
| |
|
|
July 22
|
|
Tal
gave
to:
What Is Cinema? (Vol 1) (What is Cinema?)
by Andre Bazin
|
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
|
| |
read in July, 2008
|
|
June 04
|
|
Tal
gave
to:
Forever Changes (Thirty Three and a Third series)
by Andrew Hultkrans
|
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
|
| |
read in May, 2008
Tal said:
"Didn't expect to read a book about Gnosticism, the Manson murders, and strange, opulent isolation. But hey, it's L.A., and this is a Canonical Album Made By A Total Weirdo. So, did I learn things? Yeah, sure, about how flower power is more like poiso...more
Didn't expect to read a book about Gnosticism, the Manson murders, and strange, opulent isolation. But hey, it's L.A., and this is a Canonical Album Made By A Total Weirdo. So, did I learn things? Yeah, sure, about how flower power is more like poisonous thorns power, or how I learned to stop loving God and start loving ourselves as direct particles of God. And more again. Pretty sure Hultkrans forgot to mention how much these word combos might have to do with Newspeak, and how that may have a lot to do with Lee's disgust with decadent Angelenos, but that's minor....less
"
|
|
June 02
|
|
Tal
gave
to:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Paperback)
by Ken Kesey
|
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
|
| |
read in May, 2008
Tal said:
"Well, RifftRafft has made it so that every paragraph review here is kinda chumpy, which is great. Motivate through sheer length, I'm down. Impose LB-style and hope that the people will do the work in return.
So, while I'm about 750 into IJ rd. two...more
Well, RifftRafft has made it so that every paragraph review here is kinda chumpy, which is great. Motivate through sheer length, I'm down. Impose LB-style and hope that the people will do the work in return.
So, while I'm about 750 into IJ rd. two, I spent subway time reading this woozy on the recommendation of confidante and general counsel Uncle T, who essentially said that this book could only make a deep impression on a fifteen-year-old. I disagree. I'm not sure if I've ever read another book where the creation/adaptation can be experienced in either order without diminishing either's impact.
There are some moments of genuine beauty here, Kesey describing Bromden's past with almost Faulkner-like majestic grandeur. Geographic detail is achingly beautiful, and McMurphy is less of a caterwauling loony than just a round-faced, ebullient, crimson freight train. Nicholson has his charms in the flick, but I keep thinking I'm watching Batman. He was better as the Joker.
The film missed a few steps, mostly in that Bromden isn't quite as effective as he is in the book, which probably explains why Kesey didn't like it (excluding the tremendous toll one's mind and body take after ingesting various hallucinogens for the better part of a decade, along with the aftereffects of shock therapy). Bonus points for Billy Bibbitt, though, and Louise Fletcher made one helluva nurse. But I'll take the book: You don't need the music to drive home madness, and you don't need mawkish sentimentality to achieve pathos. All you need is language. This 'uns got it....less
"
|
|
May 08
|
|
Tal
took the never-ending book quiz.
|
|
May 07
|
|
Tal
gave
to:
Brave New World (Paperback)
by Aldous Huxley
|
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
|
| |
|
