Infinite Summer: Week Two

Week Two. Hamster herds. Feral babies. Wheelchair assassins. Weird, perhaps interesting, not quite fleshed out. More metadata—endnotes with footnotes with endnotes. Linkage ad nauseum.

Meh.

Yes, it's erudite and well-written, and, yes, the stories are gelling, and, yes, the heroin-Drano part is kick-ass, but maybe this book isn't so daunting/earth-shattering/amazing after all...



...and then Brando happens.

Hal's grandfather's section/chapter titled "WINTER B.S. 1960 - TUCSON AZ" is brilliant and could stand alone as a short story, a tale worthy of canonization. I mean, come on:

[Brando] moved like a careless fingerling, one big muscle, muscularly naïve, but always, notice, a fingerling at the center of a clear current. That kind of animal grace. The bastard wasted no motion, is what made it art, this brutish no-care. His was a tennis player's dictum: touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will move or stay still or move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and yield up their innermost seams to you. He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you. p158

All thirteen pages are written this well, this tight. And there's even an homage to Soylent Green:

We're so present it's ceased to mean. We're environmental. Furniture of the world. p168

The section's rhythm has metronomic precision, and the style, I'd call it DeLillo-esque. Over at A Supposedly Fun Blog, Kevin Carey's words describe this section to T:

They’re some of the most un-put-downable parts of the novel, both in the sense that they’re compelling to read and that there’s really no way to make sense of them without imbibing from start to finish in a single, breathless, no paragraph-breaks-allowed gulp. That forces the reader to engage with the mental state of the character directly, to approximate the feeling of succumbing to a larger, implacable and seemingly arbitrary force...

The words of Hal's grandfather are funny and sad and neurotic and perfect, and they suck the reader into his mind and into DFW's world. A literary Federer Moment if you will.* Fucking genius.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that after a slight lull in interest, I'm reengaged and looking forward to week three, page 223 and beyond.

*I wish DFW could have seen Saturday's Roddick/Federer match. He would have loved it. So it goes.

Infinite Summer: Week Two (Leah)

Week Two has been a breakthrough week for me, in a way. For one, I no longer care about deadlines. After reading Eden's post on Infinite Summer, I realized I'm not the only one whose life keeps me from sticking to the schedule. So I plan to keep reading and posting at my own pace, such as it is.

Translation: I'm still behind but am waaaaay more okay with it now.



I realized that, while plugging away at a "paper brick" like IJ, I will find pieces that I love and pieces that I don't. For example, I am still thinking about Kate, a week later, and I have yet to read a passage about Hal that doesn't suck me in. But, no matter how hard I try, I can't get into the whole Wheelchair Assassin thing [I keep thinking Blind Assassin, which must mean I have Margaret Atwood on the brain]. I got bogged down in end note 304—it took me all last week to read, one agonizing page at a time, and Steepley and Marathe's exchanges bore me to tears...for now. I realize they may do something interesting at some point, so I will do my best not to skim over their dull conversations and the detailed descriptions of Steepley's absurdly cockeyed breasts. I'll keep reading, if only to see what happens with the herds of feral hamsters (um, what?).

And I'll leave you with a random passage from the page where I stopped reading last night (page 114 for anyone keeping tabs on me):

He lies there very slack, visualizing Smith pounding overheads down onto Ingersoll's skull. Hal some weeks back had acquiesced to Lyle's diagnosis that Hal finds Ingersoll - this smart soft caustic kid, with a big soft eyebrowless face and unwrinkled thumb-joints, with the runty, cuddled look of a Mama's boy from way back, a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself - that the kid so repels Hal because Hal sees in the kid certain parts of himself that he can't or won't accept. None of this ever occurs to Hal when Ingersoll's in the room. He wishes him ill.

Yowsers!

And by the way, my paperback copy is already becoming quite tattered and dog-eared. I'm sure I will crack the spine, too, before all is said and done. Charles has already taken a picture of our two copies together, and when we finish, we'll post another. His will be pristine—mine, a God-forsaken, crumpled mess!

Beck Covers The Velvet Undergroud & Nico [Video]

Beck | Waiting For My Man



Beck | Sunday Morning

Infinite Summer: Week One (Leah)

Well, it's the end of Infinite Summer's first week, and sadly, I've fallen behind. Already. Not a lot behind. But behind.



To be fair, I have a good reason for falling behind. It's called "I work full-time and have an active one-year-old daughter." I start my days at 5am, attempt to get myself ready and reasonably attractive by the time Zoe wakes up (6:00 at the latest). Charles and I go to work, and Zoe goes to school, where the day passes us by. After work, it's playtime with Zoe, dinner time, clean-up time, bath time and suddenly it's 8:00 and I'm wondering where my day went. Then I have 60 minutes in which to squeeze all the things I loved to do, pre-parenthood.*

So that's me. And I'm behind in Infinite Jest. But for once, rather than feeling all "poor me, this sucks, I quit," I keep thinking, "I am going to persevere." In fact, I know I have to persevere. Because, from the 84 pages I've read, I've determined that David Foster Wallace was brilliant.

I was dubious during the first few pages, but by the time I finished Hal's first section, I was hooked. DFW's writing oozes off the pages for me, slowly and methodically, engulfing me in its magnetic descriptions and quirky dialog.

In particular, I remember page 11, when "the Moms" sees the putrid mold eaten by one of the younger Incandenza sons, when poor Orin "gaped at his first real sight of adult hysteria." I remember the first time seeing raw emotion from one of my parents. It was my mother, sobbing, after my father found our Cairn terrier, Oliver, dead in the highway on which we lived. I was barely five and yet I can still see her standing there, leaning against the kitchen sink, arms clenched in against her chest as if trying to keep her heart from falling out. How scary is that memory? How helpless, to be a child witnessing a moment such as that. If I were to fictionalize it, I feel like I would write about Avril Incandenza.

'Help! My son ate this!' she yells in Orin's second and more fleshed-out recollection, yelling it over and over, holding the speckled patch aloft in a pincer of fingers, running around and around the garden's rectangle.

In 84 pages, I have laughed at the Professional Conversationalist, been sucked into the paranoid world of an addict, and hurt for Kate, the patient in a mental ward who so desperately want to stop hurting.

And so, since the first 84 pages have been so utterly engulfing, I will persevere. I may not meet deadlines, but I will keep reading. And you can (hopefully, time-permitting) find my future notes here.

*Case in point: the writing of this post was interrupted midway by the cries of an antsy child, unable to fall asleep.

Infinite Summer: Week One

Last night I thought I'd make it to today's goal of p94, but then p89 happened. The Footnote-39-links-to-Footnote-304 thing stopped me cold [shaking my fist at you, DFW]. I'll still make it p94 by the end of the day, however, so huzzah for me not falling behind. Yet...



In regards to my thoughts about week one, the first tenth of Infinite Jest sways haphazardly from side-to-side, most of the time staying on the road but every now and then dropping off the shoulder, where it kicks up mud [or dust, depending on recent precipitation] at the reader's face. This recklessness makes for an entertaining—and, yes, occasionally annoying—read, but the pros way outweigh the cons, so I'm tightening my seat belt and looking forward to the next nine-tenths.

Okay, enough of the [tenuous] car-and-driver analogy. Lets get to some quotes.

During week one, three sentences/paragraphs jumped out at me—one for its descriptiveness, one for its humor and one for its unblinking look at depression.

The jet's movement and trail seem incisionish, as if white meat behind the blue were exposed and widening in the wake of the blade. -p16

You're here to converse with me, Hal, yes. I'm almost going to have to implore you to have a lemon soda. Your mouth is making those dry sticky inadequate-saliva sounds. -p27

The last thing more I'd want is hurt. I just didn't want to feel this way anymore. I don't...I didn't believe this feeling would ever go away. I don't. I still don't. I'd rather feel nothing than this. -p72

The p72 paragraph is from the first Kate Gompert section, which is brilliant—best part so far. The Erdedy jonesing-for-pot section comes in a close second.

And now, back to Footnote 304...

Infinite Summer

I can't think of better way of rebooting Ashcan Rantings than to use it as a vehicle of discussion for Infinite Summer, the online summer-reading project devoted to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The summer is just getting started, so it's not too late to grab of copy of IJ if you want to join in—all the cool kids are doing it. Oh, and if you do take the 1079-page plunge, I recommend reading these articles/posts as prerequisites:

David Lipsky | The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace
Marcus Sakey | Decoding Infinite Jest
Matt Bucher | How to Read Infinite Jest

As for my involvement, I plan on sticking to the IS schedule and chatting with other readers via the #infsum hashtag on Twitter (@charlesrh). And as I progress through the novel, I'll use Ashcan Rantings to jot down thoughts, favorite quotes and anything else that may (or may not) be applicable to Infinite Summer. Oh, and Leah (@leah_beth) may blog a bit too, as we're both taking part:



That's all for now. Hi ho.

Neko Case: People Got a Lotta Nerve [Video]

John Updike (1932-2009)

John Updike was one of my heroes, and he will be greatly missed. So it goes.

W. Earl Snyder

Requiem, by John Updike, from The New York Times:

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

Ian McEwan, from The Guardian:

The Updike opus is so vast, so varied and rich, that we will not have its full measure for years to come. We have lived with the expectation of his new novel or story or essay so long, all our lives, that it does not seem possible that this flow of invention should suddenly cease. We are truly bereft, that this reticent, kindly man with the ferocious work ethic and superhuman facility will write for us no more. He was intensely private, learned, generous, courtly, the kind of man who could apologise for replying to one's letter by return of post because it was the only way he could keep his desk clear.

Contrary to what his work might suggest, Updike was in actual life devoted to his large family that sprawled across the generations, so why not let one of his youngest characters take the parting bow on his behalf. When Henry Bech goes up on stage in Stockholm to make his Nobel acceptance speech, he takes with him on his hip his one-year-old daughter. She wriggles impatiently through his lecture and when at last he has finished, she reaches out for the microphone "with the curly, beslobbered fingers of one hand as if to pluck the fat metallic bud". Bech feels the warmth of her skull, he inhales "her scalp's powdery scent ... Then she lifted her right hand, where all could see, and made the gentle clasping and unclasping that signifies bye-bye."

Roger Angell, from The New Yorker:

As a contributor, [John Updike] was patient with editing, and pertinaciously involved with his product: an editor’s dream. My end of the work was to point out an occasional inconsistent or extraneous sentence, or a passage that wanted something more. Almost under his breath over our phone connection, while we looked at the same lines, he would try out an alternative: “Which one sounds better, do you think?” Sighing, he would take us back over the same few words again and again, then propose or listen to a switch of some sort, and try again. All writers do this, but not many with such a lavishly extended consideration. He wanted to see each galley, each tiny change, right down to the late-closing page proofs, which he often managed to return by overnight mail an hour or so before closing, with new sentences or passages, handwritten in the margins in a soft pencil, that were fresher and more inventive and revealing than what had been there before. You watched him write.

Sam Anderson, from New York Magazine:

Updike’s best sentences are as funny, as stylistically bulletproof, and as present as any sentences have ever been. They’re so consistently springy and alive, in fact, that, while you’re reading them, it’s impossible to accept that he’s gone. They seem to have been written, just a few seconds ago, by the young man whose picture is on the back of the book.

Adam Gopnik, from The New Yorker:

Despite the lyrical surface of his prose, Updike was a realist, as comedians must be, and never even marginally a romantic. He was genuinely unseduced by all the myths of American romanticism: gorgeous Daisys and vast sinister Western landscapes are equally absent from his books. His girls and women are real, with scratchy pubic hair, and his American landscape of car dealerships and fast-food retreats held no place for doomed, exciting, existential gunmen. He was, for all those perfect shining sentences, a realist; the sentences sing, but they don’t ennoble.

Charles McGrath, from The New York Times:

What other writers, young and old, prized most about Mr. Updike was his prose — that amazing instrument, like a jeweler’s loupe; so precise, exquisitely attentive and seemingly effortless. If there were a pill you could take to write like that, who wouldn’t swallow a handful? Equally inspiring was his faith in the writing itself. He toyed once or twice with magic realism, but the experiment never really worked and he gave it up. Though he loved Jorge Luis Borges, he didn’t in his own work go in for Borgesian mirror games, and he was free from the postmodern anxiety about the fictiveness of fiction, the unreliability of language. He was an old-fashioned realist, with an unswerving belief in the power of words to faithfully record experience and to enhance it. If other writers, younger ones especially, couldn’t quite subscribe to that belief, still it was reassuring to know that there was someone who did.

Sam Tanenhaus speaks with Updike [NY Times Video]

A multitude of writers discuss Updike, including Garrison Keillor, from Granta:

When I last saw him, a year ago, we were at a literary function in far uptown Manhattan, where he’d read a moving tribute to Kurt Vonnegut. He walked with my wife and I to the subway and I got to compliment him on Gertrude and Claudius, which I had just read. We rode downtown together, and a band of seminary students boarded our car and recognized him and said all the things I’d made myself not say years ago. He was very gracious with them, jokey and off-hand. He was a great man, and when he wrote me a note saying he liked a story of mine, I treasured that more than one should. He was an uncomplaining writer, a genius but also a workman, and he seemed to pick up energy in his last decade, which is encouraging to the rest of us. The Centaur is still my favourite of his books, a work of filial devotion, with the Olinger stories a close second. God bless his memory.

Joseph O'Neill, from Granta:

The death of John Updike is an instant literary disaster: with immediate effect we are deprived of the three daily pages that, Sundays aside, were his to write, pages that operated as perfect verbal rovers upon even the most inhospitable critical and imaginative terrain. There will be printed posthumous delights, of course; but we can no longer find security in the knowledge that John Updike is at his desk, producing Updike.

Jonathan Lethem and Joseph O'Neill discuss Updike and fatherhood [MP3]

Robert Spencer

Martin Amis, from The Guardian:

He alone could hold his head up with the great Jews - Bellow, Roth, Mailer, Singer - it was entirely typical of him that, as a sideline, he became a great Jewish novelist too, in the person of Henry Bech, the hero of several of his books. That seems to me to be an essential Updike trait, never being satisfied with any limitations always demanding far more than his fair share.

Gish Jen, from The New Republic:

All I can do is pay, here, my heartfelt homage to him, a great writer--protean, as many have noted, and spectacularly, tentacularly gifted--a prolific, old-fashioned man of letters, yes, but finally, I think, a writer without whom the necklace of 20th century American literature could not be judged complete. Crack chronicler of America that he was, he reminded us of the role literature has always played in our national self-fashioning even as he showed us that that role could be played aesthetically: with gorgeous writing and a cool intimacy that in his best work keeps the reader on the cusp of moral judgment.

Clyde Haberman, from The New York Times:

“Once I got here,” he said of New York in the 2005 interview, “I realized that immense as the city is, your path in it tends to be very narrow. I only knew people I went to college with and other writers, and felt I wasn’t really getting a fair picture of America here. And there were too many other writers and editors and agents and people who were willing to give me ideas of what I should do with my life.”

Lorrie Moore, from The New York Times:

Mr. Updike’s novels wove an explicit and teeming tapestry of male and female appetites. He noticed astutely, precisely, unnervingly. His stories, some of the best ever written by anyone, were jewels of existential comedy, domestic anguish and restraint.

Richard Ford, from The New Yorker:

These, then—with my drenched, sweated-through Brooks’ suit—I was wearing as I pounded my way down Old Bond Street, headed for the Arcade and my cigar and silk finery, when whom should I suddenly look square in the eyes but John Updike—on his way God knows where, out ahead of our scheduled collegial lunch at Brown’s. And I will say that the look he gave me—because for some reason he seemed to know it was I—was a look of profoundest dismay, shifting instantly into embarrassment, and then on to sincere regret. It was a look that said, “My God, Ford, what’s happened to you? You’re soaked though, you look wild as a dingo, and you’re wearing these idiotic sunglasses. You seem like an escapee from someplace you might better have stayed. And in an hour I’m having lunch with you.”

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, from The New York Times:

He wrote about America with boundless curiosity and wit in prose so careful and attentive that it burnished the ordinary with a painterly gleam.

Michiko Kakutani, from The New York Times:

He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.

Sam Anderson, from New York Magazine:

I always go back, first, to his essays, which strike me as the purest expression of his personality: easy, sociable, curious, smart, funny, generous, and almost pathologically cheerful. He was, for my money, one of the greatest belletrists of all time — a master of the short, casual, elegant, whimsical, roving piece about absolutely anything...He could take the fruits of high culture — obscure philosophy, art history, sociological scraps — and translate it, for a wide audience, into little miracles of focused thought, all written in an elegant verbal music.

T.C. Boyle, from The New Yorker:

He enchanted me. He led the way. I will miss him in the way I would miss one of the peaks outside the window here if some natural catastrophe were to take it down. There is an absence, surely, but there is the memory of what was once there—and, better yet, a full shelf of books to recollect and reread.

George Saunders, from The New Yorker:

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did. I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but, as I expect is the case with many readers, I internalized him, and am a better person for the urbane, hopeful, articulate voice he put in my head.

From Ashcan Rantings:

• Updike Times Two by Charles Rhyne
• Updike: America's Man of Letters by Charles Rhyne
• Rabbit Reborn by Charles Rhyne

Rest in peace.

The New Yorker: A Short Story by Steven Millhauser and Tributes to John Updike

The latest issue of The New Yorker offers a Steven Millhauser short story titled The Invasion from Outer Space, which I would define as concise, literary sci-fi.

From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times?—the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer . . . And so, when it finally happened, because it was bound to happen, we all knew it was only a matter of time, we felt, in the midst of our curiosity and terror, a certain calm, the calm of familiarity, we knew what was expected of us, at such a moment.

For more Millhauser short stories, check out Dangerous Laughter.

In the same New Yorker, the anniversary issue, there are pieces by Adam Gopnick and Roger Angell regarding and remembering John Updike. The magazine also contains an Updike retrospective titled Picked-Up Pieces -- an homage to Updike's 1975 collection of essays and criticism. Fitting fifty-three years of writing on fifteen pages is an impossible task, but if you want a taste of Updike's prose and poetry, it's a good place to start.

Congratulations, Mr. Gaiman.

The Graveyard Book wins the Newbery Medal.