Gus Van Sant Interview with DFW

Yeah. I know. Things are kind of slow and the same around here. What can I say? I'm working on a few posts. I'm writing my thesis and am on a tight deadline. I'm reading Infinite Jest and yeah, it's kind of consuming in a way that my thesis isn't - not that it isn't interesting. But you know, I'm a playwright and I want to write some plays. It's true. I am kind of obsessed here with the Infinite Jest thing. I will say this: the past six months of reading it (2X) has helped my critical writing like exponentially (which I may show off for you in the next few days). To say nothing of playwrighting (which I won't be showing off since I'm not working on anything except in my head at the moment). But ok. Like I said, I'm working on a couple of posts and hopefully I'll get them up in the next few days. Thesis deadline comes first however. I so want to get out from under this thing. In the meantime, here's an interview between Gus Van Sant and David Foster Wallace.

GVS: Who are some of your favorite writers?
DFW: You're really wielding the old baton on this aren't you? To be honest... my faves?
GVS: Yeah.
DFW: Ones that people don't know all that well? Oh, that's right this is a British magazine so they won't have heard of a lot of these. Cormac McCarthy, have you read "Blood Meridian"? It's literally the western to end all westerns. Probably the most horrifying book of this century, at least fiction. But it is also, this guy, I can't figure out he gets away with it, he basically writes King James English, I mean, he practically uses Old English thou's and thine's and it comes off absolutely beautifully and unmannered and ungratuitous. He's got another one called "Suttree," God that one, God that would make a fantastic movie.
GVS: (perks up) What's it called?
DFW: It's called "Suttree."
GVS: How do you spell that?
DFW: S-u-t-t-r-e-e. It came out, oh golly, mid 70s. But it's about a down and out college educated man named Cornelius Suttree who has kind of abandoned everything to live in a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee in the late 40s and early 50s and all of his friends in his entire world are derelicts and retards and twisted people. It's about four hundred pages of the most dense lapidary prose you can imagine about characters who are at the level of functional idiots and are drinking rot-gut. "Suttree" is the book that got him a MacArthur grant and he used the MacArthur to go to Mexico and do the research for "Blood Meridian." Okay, we'll play. Are there any new movies coming out that you like?

Read the rest here. And um, you know? I'm going to be reading Blood Meridian again, so it can really be said that I've become mired down with the novelists (2 of them at any rate).

Infinite Jest: Keep Coming Back! Part 1.

Read this scene from Hamlet, Act 5 scene 2, and note how many times the word "head" is mentioned along with the way Hamlet plays with time.

HORATIO
If your mind dislike any thing, obey it: I will
forestall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.

HAMLET
Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The
readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows
what is't to leave betimes, let be.

If only Orin Incandenza had read Hamlet, he might have known from where/when (or more specifically whence) his sparrow came.

And now later more:
I've realized I'm in a sort of conscious Denial about this quote third possible narrator unquote, if not denial then a resistance to the terrible narrative "under toad" it represents and the deep, deep sadness and despair it evokes in me. The question is how much more of my denial is unconscious and keeping me from reading as deeply as I'd like? So I'm reading bits of Hamlet to remind myself of the strength and determination of Hamlet's quest for revenge.

Infinite Jest: Who Is In There?

WhatABurger, 737 E Mcdowell Rd, Phoenix, AZ, April 2009

So who's narrating Infinite Jest? I can't say conclusively. But I'm looking at three possibilities or even a combination thereof.

Hal: If it is Hal, my vote would be for the Year of Glad Hal (I'm constricted here because I'm trying to avoid spoilers so I'll identify Hal by years instead of actions). Year of Depend Adult Undergarment Hal, while capable intellectually, is not yet able to observe/empathize to the level of detail as say Mario or even to the extent that Don Gately can because YDAU Hal is very caught up in being able to "deliver the goods" to those in authority, something YOG Hal is incapable of due to his biochemical issues - issues whose precise consequence makes it possible for Hal to be temporally in two or more places at the same time.*

Mario: I'd been leaning heavily towards Mario until I started writing this post and started thinking about Hal a little more clearly. I confess. The first time through IJ I was charmed by the character of Mario. Going through again though, well, there's something that's niggling me about him. The narrator tells us that Mario's physical limitations make him a "born listener." Mario basks in a narrative glow of child-like innocence and guilessness. But is this true? What is to be made of the inconsistencies between what we're told about Mario w/r/t his capabilities and what we're given as evidence of his artistic output?

Page 171: Hal is reading the Riverside Hamlet at Mario's request. Hal has agreed to help Mario with a conceptual film-type project based on part of the play. Or is this another case of Mario intuiting something that Hal needs and giving it to him as Mario did when he acquired the O.E.D for his brother?
Page 172: Tennis and the Feral Prodigy, 11.5 minute digital entertainment cartridge directed, recorded, edited, and- according to the entry form - apparently written by Mario Incandenza. If Mario indeed wrote this, he's an admittedly gifted ironist. Can you be a gifted ironist - use irony as a mode of critique - and claim no access to the written word? Is there a one to one correspondence between the two?
Page 188: We're told that Mario was asked to leave Winter Hill Special School in Cambridgeport for "cheerfully declining even to try to learn to really read explaining that he'd rather listen and watch." Again we're told he's "a fanatical listener/observer." Which is true. No argument there. I'm a fanatical listener/observer too and I can tell you I go to enormous lengths to preserve that status.
Page 202: It's pointed out that "a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word." This *fact* aside, here is the narrator pointing out that there's more than one way to learn how to read and that there are some people who "truly" cannot. Okay. After writing this, I feel like maybe I'm over-reaching here. But what the heck. My point is that a fanatical listener/observer would maybe go out of their way to preserve their ability to listen and observe by feeding people's perceptions of their disabilities and that maybe Mario declined to learn to read because maybe he already knows how.

Narrator-I-Can't-Identify-Because-of-the-Spoiler-Line: There is another character who could be narrating, but I haven't spent too much time going this route because it really fucks with my head and makes me sort of fetally-inclined in a Requiem for a Dream kind of way that is very much about anti-entertainment/anti-pleasure. In a word, it is lurid in the same way Kate Gompert describes her depression. It occurred to me during my first read and occurs each time said possible narrator intrudes in a way that I can't identify right now because of the spoiler line (and of which I'm aware of now only because I've read the book before). But passages like this (after Joelle V. D. has pointed out to Gately that "There for the Grace of God" is literally a meaningless phrase) are part and parcel of this narrator's presence:

Gately looks at a rectangular blue-selvaged expanse of clean linen whose gentle rises barely allude to any features below, he looks at her and has no idea whether she's serious or not, or whacked, or trying like Dr. Geoff Day to erect Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish showing off, and he doesn't know what to say in reply, he has absolutely nothing in his huge square head to Identify with her with or latch onto or say in encouraging reply, and for an instant the Provident cafeteria seems pin-drop silent, and his own heart grips him like an infant rattling the bars of its playpen, and he feels a greasy wave of an old and almost unfamiliar panic, and for a second it seems inevitable that at some point in his life he's going to get high again and be back in the cage all over again, because for a second the blank white veil levelled at him seems a screen on which might well be projected a casual and impressive black and yellow smiley-face, grinning, and he feels all the muscles in his own face loosen and descend kneeward; distended...

Is there only one narrator? I think there is. I wouldn't have said that on the first read.

Next: I have to much to talk about w/r/t Orin Incandenza and one-to-one correspondence.

*Bifurcation of space/time is one of my favorite rhetorical devices.

The Art of Perceiving

It seems to me dangerous to believe that a play must be this or that or the other thing because it interferes with your ability to perceive. Listen to the work when it lays down its own criteria, as works always do. They always imply how they are to be judged. Now these criteria themselves can also be judged, but you have to start by trying to see what kind of a thing it is, and not demanding that it be one particular kind of thing. When you see what kind of thing it is, then quite irrespecitve of your judgment of how good or bad it is at being the kind of thing it is, you can make a judgment about it as a good kind of thing to be or not. But I think it is dangerous to come in with a rigid set of rules. And one further thing. In addition to what the artist has tried to do, you've often got to say what has the writer done that he didn't try to do. What is his unconscious doing behind his back? You have to keep open to the possibility of totally unexpected things happening that turn out well. - Julius Novick.

Heading East

I'll be on the east coast next week visiting friends in D.C. It may be possible that we'll get out to see a show - it all depends on the kiddies. This is definitely on the top of the list, but if you have any other show you'd like to recommend, please leave a comment.