Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

by David Foster Wallace

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

In all things they are proud of you, satisfied, and they have retreated to the warm distance from which pride and satisfaction travel. You all get along well.

You decide this needs to be thought about. It may, after all, be all right to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself. Not when not thinking turns out to be wrong. At some point the wrongnesses have piled up blind: pretend-boredom, weight, thin rungs, hurt feet, space cut into laddered parts that melt together only in a disappearance that takes time.

When it all turns out to be different you should get to think. It should be required.

Two black spots, violence, and disappear into a well of time. Height is not the problem. It all changes when you get back down. When you hit, with your weight. So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time? The lie is that it’s one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy. The board will nod and you will go, and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever. Step into the skin and disappear. Hello.

Does that sound shallow? Tell me what you think. Or does the real truth about this kind of thing always sound shallow, you know, everybody’s real reasons? What do you think? How does it sound?’

Seeing themselves as a Great Lover doesn’t mean they give any more of a shit about her than the pigs do, and deep down they aren’t one little bit less selfish in bed. It’s just with this type of fellow what they get off on in bed is their own idea of themselves as a Great Lover that can make the little lady just about lose her mind in bed. What they’re into is a woman’s pleasure and giving her pleasure. That’s this type’s whole trip.’

Then all day at work then I’m incredibly conscious of my eyesight and my eyes and how good it is to be able to see colors and people’s faces and to know exactly where I am, and of how fragile it all is, the human eye mechanism and the ability to see, how easily it could be lost, how I’m always seeing blind people around with their canes and strange-looking faces and am always just thinking of them as interesting to spend a couple seconds looking at and never thinking they had anything to do with me or my eyes, and how it’s really just a lucky coincidence that I can see instead of being one of those blind people I see on the subway.

think about getting gang-raped and degraded and beaten down to within an inch of your life for example. Nobody’s going to say that’s a good thing, I’m not saying that, nobody’s going to say the sick bastards that did it shouldn’t go to jail. Nobody’s suggesting she was liking it while it was happening or that it should have happened. But let’s put two things into the perspective here. One is, afterwards she knows something about herself she didn’t know before.’ Q. ‘What she knows is that the totally most terrible degrading thing that she ever could have even imagined happening to her has really happened to her now. And she survived. She’s still here. I’m not saying she’s thrilled, I’m not saying she’s thrilled about it or she’s in great shape or clicking her heels together out of joy it happened, but she’s still here, and she knows it, and now she knows something. I mean really knows. Her idea of herself and what she can live through and survive is bigger now. Enlarged, larger, deeper. She’s stronger than she ever deep-down thought, and now she knows it, she knows she’s strong in a totally different way from knowing it just because your folks tell you or some speechmaker at a school assembly has you all repeat you’re Somebody you’re Strong over and over.

POP QUIZ 9 You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer.

You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it happens are not contes philosophiques and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as ‘short stories’ (not even as those upscale microbrewed Flash Fictions that have become so popular in recent years—even though these belletristic pieces are really short, they just don’t work like Flash Fictions are supposed to). How exactly the cycle’s short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe. Maybe say they’re supposed to compose a certain sort of ‘interrogation’ of the person reading them, somehow—i.e. palpations, feelers into the interstices of her sense of something, etc…. though what that ‘something’ is remains maddeningly hard to pin down, even just for yourself as you’re working on the pieces (pieces that are taking a truly grotesque amount of time, by the way, far more time than they ought to vis à vis their length and aesthetic ‘weight,’ etc.—after all, you’re like everybody else and have only so much time at your disposal and have to allocate it judiciously, especially when it comes to career stuff (yes: things have come to such a pass that even belletristic fiction writers consider themselves to have ‘careers’)). You know for sure, though, that the narrative pieces really are just ‘pieces’ and nothing more, i.e. that it is the way they fit together into the larger cycle that comprises them that is crucial to whatever ‘somet...

reflective of these stories themselves?

Five of the eight pieces don’t work at all—meaning they don’t interrogate or palpate what you want them to, plus are too contrived or too cartoonish or too annoying or all three—and you have to toss them out. The sixth piece works only after it’s totally redone in a way that’s forbiddingly long and digression-fraught and, you fear, maybe so dense and inbent that nobody’ll even get to the interrogatory parts at the end;

okay, no doubt any longer

somebody else, viz. to some total stranger who’s probably sitting down at the end of a long hard day to try to unwind by reading this belletristic ‘Octet’ thing.

lying, not sitting, but otherwise on point

It may well be that all it’ll do is make you look like a self-consciously inbent schmuck, or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit Artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimension and commenting on the fiasco itself.

this PQ9 itself relates to what i'd been thinking about brutal honesty earlier

Ndiawar complains to Yang that his one best church leaves no hand free to open the door.

And that, as such, they’re naturally going to want what any human being faced with two irresolvably conflicting sets of responsibilities is going to want. Meaning that what they’re really going to want is some way out of these responsibilities.’ E——:‘An escape hatch.’ K——:‘Psychologically speaking.’ E——:‘A back door.’ K——:‘Hence the timeless importance of: passion.’ E——:‘They want to be both responsible and passionate.’ K——:‘No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, over-whelming, powerful and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.’

Codependae then elects to afflict Agon M. Nar with the following dream. A.M.N.’s Pac 10 daughters Leigh & Coleptic are being held hostage by some extremely serious militant CA Hispanics who threaten to hang them by their own lustrous locks if Nar doesn’t complete the single telemarketing labor they demand: he is to find a hypnotic avatar of the ancient-Greek Narcissus & air him, i.e. broadcast his irresistible image over & over, in order to entrance the Anglos of medieval CA into the glazed narcosis that will make them easy pickings for lean hungry barbarians from the Latin south.

10? binary?

At home in his body as only one whose body is not his job can be at home.

[PAUSE for episode of severe dyspnea; R.N.’s application of tracheo-bronchial suction catheter, pulmonary wedge pressure; technician (1)’s application of forcipital swabs; location and attempted removal of mucoidal obstruction in FATHER’s trachea; technician (2)’s administration of nebulized adrenaline; pertussive expulsion of mucoidal mass; technician (2)’s removal of mass in authorized Medical Waste Receptacle; technician (1)’s reinsertion of O2 feed into FATHER’s nostril]

2 technicians attending as The Mother and The Father did the son being discussed

Oh and all too well I know how this sounds; te jude, Father. But know the truth: I knew him, inside and out, and this was his one only true gift: this: a capacity for somehow seeming brilliant, seeming exceptional, precocious, gifted, promising. Yes to be promising, they all of them said it eventually, ‘limitless promise,’ for this was his gift, and do you see the dark art here, the genius for manipulating his audience? His gift was for somehow arousing admiration and raising everyone’s estimate of him and everyone’s expectations of him and so forcing you to pray for him to triumph and live up to and justify those expectations in order to spare not just her but everyone who had been duped into believing in his limitless promise the crushing disappointment of seeing the truth of his essential mediocrity.

Without the entirety of union we had promised one another before God and Church and her parents and my mother and brother standing with me.

no father

The point is that, from as early an age as she could recall, this mother-to-be loathed herself. She viewed everything in life with apprehension, as if every occasion or opportunity were some sort of dreadfully important exam for which she had been too lazy or stupid to prepare properly. It felt as if a perfect score on each such exam was necessary in order to avert some shattering punishment. 1 She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

‘No, not at all, because I am trying to explain that the typology here dictated a tactic of what appeared to be a blend of embarrassed confession and brutal candor.

this theme again