This morning, I visited the manuscripts and books in their new homes.
42 archival boxes of manuscripts have been housed into the manuscript stacks,
where they will reside in excellent company.
I was glad to see that, thanks to alphabetical coincidence,
Wallace’s drafts, notes, juvenilia and teaching materials,
have as their closest neighbors the papers of poet James Tate and novelist Leon Uris.
Less than a stone’s throw away sit the archives of many major American
fiction writers of the generations preceding Wallace’s,
including Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Carson McCullers, Bernard Malamud,
Norman Mailer, Russell Banks, and Wallace’s friend and mentor Don DeLillo.
Also nearby are the papers of major essayists Hugh Kenner, Petter Matthiesson,
and Guy Davenport, and experimental fiction writers such as Steve Katz,
Edward Dahlberg, Christine Brooke-Rose, and hypertext novelist Michael Joyce.
Wallace’s richly annotated working library likewise keeps very good company.
Late last week, librarians made space for the 298 volumes in
a room reserved for personal libraries and other special book collections
that are not dispersed among our general rare book holdings.
The Wallace library now resides just next door to the personal
libraries of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Evelyn Waugh.
Just two years after Wallace’s tragic death,
it is bittersweet to list the company that his books and papers now keep,
and to see his works fully cataloged and ready for scholars and students to view.
Wallace was born at least a decade later than any other writer whose archive
is held here at the Ransom Center.
But there is no question that his works have already made a significant
impact upon the American literary scene,
and I cannot think of a better writer to serve as the foundation
for our next generation of collecting.
Since we announced the acquisition earlier this year,
the response we have seen from scholars, students,
and fans has been overwhelmingly positive.
Dozens, literally dozens of researchers,
are already making plans to visit the collection.
And friends and colleagues of Wallace have begun donating to the Center
additional materials relating to his life and work.
The archive proper will grow significantly next year,
when we will receive the working materials for Wallace’s unfinished novel,
The Pale King, upon its publication by Little, Brown publishers.
We are eager to see how our visiting scholars, faculty,
and students here at The University of Texas will make use of this
rich collection in teaching, research, theses, dissertations, and undergraduate papers.
But I have said enough about these material objects. We are here tonight
to hear Wallace’s works read, not discussed.
I’d like to close by offering special thanks to the people who helped arrange
tonight’s event: Matt Bucher of the Wallace Listserv,
Jill Meyers of American Short Fiction, Katherine Rogers of Salvage Vanguard Theater,
and Danielle Sigler of the Ransom Center.
After the readings, please join us for a reception at the Harry Ransom Center,
just across the plaza. There will be people to show you the way,
where you can speak with the readers about their selections,
view a display of materials from the collection, and enjoy special
Wallace-themed refreshments.
Specifically, make sure you get there in time to see the cake before it’s cut.
I hear fantastic things about it.
So without further ado, I am very happy to welcome our first readers:
Wayne Alan Brenner, L. B. Deyo, Kurt Hildebrand, and Shannon McCormick,
who will be reading an excerpt from Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System.
[Applause]
Transcript of a meeting between the honorable Raymond Zusatz,
Governor of the State of Ohio; Mr. Joseph Lungberg, gubernatorial aid;
Mr. Neil Obstat, gubernatorial aid; and Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, Vice President,
Industrial Desert Design Incorporated, Dallas, Texas; 21 June 1971.
Governor: Gentlemen, something is not right.
Mr. Obstat: What do you mean, Chief?
Governor: With the state, Neil. Something is not right with our state.
Mr. Lungberg: But Chief, unemployment is low, inflation is low,
taxes haven’t been raised in two years,
pollution is way down except for Cleveland and who the hell cares
about Cleveland -- just kidding, Neil -- but Chief, the people love you,
you’re unprecendentedly ahead in the polls,
industrial investment and development in the state are at an all-time high.
Governor: Stop right there. There you go.
Mr. Obstat: Can you expand on that, Chief?
Governor: Things are just too good, somehow. I suspect a trap.
Mr. Lungberg: A trap?
Governor: Guys, the state is getting soft.
I can feel softness out there.
It’s getting to be one big suburb and industrial park and mall.
Too much development. People are getting complacent.
They’re forgetting the way this state was historically hewn out of the wilderness.
There’s no more hewing.
Mr. Obstat: You’ve got a point there, Chief.
Governor: We need a wasteland.
Mr. Lungberg and Mr. Obstat: A wasteland?
Governor: Gentlemen, we need a desert.
Mr. Lungberg and Mr. Obstat: A desert?
Governor: Gentlemen, a desert.
A point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio.
A place to fear and love. A blasted region.
Something to remind us of what we hewed out of.
A place without malls.
An Other for Ohio’s Self.
Cacti and scorpions and the sun beating down. Desolation.
A place for people to wander alone. To reflect. Away from everything.
Gentlemen, a desert.
Mr Obstat: Just a super idea, Chief.
Governor: Thanks, Neil.
Gentlemen may I present Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, of Industrial Desert Design, Dallas.
They did Kuwait.
[Laughter]
Mr. Lungberg: Hey, there’s apparently a lot of desert in Kuwait.
Mr. Yancey: You bet, Joe -- and we believe we can provide you folks
with a really first-rate desert right here in Ohio.
Mr. Obstat: What about the cost?
Governor: Manageable.
Mr. Lungberg: Where would it be?
Mr. Yancey: Well gentlemen, the Governor and I have conferred,
and if I could just direct your attention to this map, here….
Mr. Obstat: That’s Ohio, all right.
Mr. Yancey: The spot we have in mind is in the south of your great state.
Right about here. Actually here to here. Hundred square miles.
Mr. Obstat: Around Caldwell?
Mr. Yancey: Yup.
Mr. Lungberg: Don’t quite a few people live around there?
Governor: Relocation. Eminent domain. A desert respects no man.
Fits with the whole concept.
[Laughter]
Mr. Lungberg: Isn’t that also pretty near Wayne National Forest?
Governor: Not anymore. [Chuckles]
(Mr. Lungberg whistles.)
Mr. Obstat: Hey, my mother lives right near Caldwell.
Governor: Hits home, eh Neil? Part of the whole concept.
Concept has to hit home. Hewing is violence, Neil.
We’re going to hew a wilderness out of the soft underbelly of this state.
It’s going to hit home.
Mr. Lungberg: You’re really sold on this, aren’t you, Chief?
Governor: Joe, I’ve never been more sold on anything.
It’s what this state needs. I can feel it.
Mr. Obstat: You’ll go down in history, Chief. You’ll be immortal.
Governor: Thanks, Neil. I just feel it’s right,
and after conferring with Mr. Yancey, I’m just sold.
A hundred miles of blinding white sandy nothingness.
Of course there'll be some fishing lakes, at the edges, for people to fish in.
Mr. Lungberg: Why, why white sand, Chief? Why not, say, black sand?
Governor: Go with that, Joe.
Mr. Lungberg: Well, really, if the whole idea is supposed to be contrast,
otherness, blastedness, should I say sinisterness?
Sinisterness is the sense I get.
Governor: Sinisterness fits, that’s good.
Mr. Lungberg: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state:
the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white,
the sun's pretty bright here.
What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand?
Talk about sinister.
And the black would soak up the heat a lot better, too.
Be really hot, enhance the blastedness aspect.
Governor: I like it. Ed, Roy, what do you think?
Can cacti and scorpions live in black sand?
Mr. Yancey: No problem I can see.
Mr. Obstat: What about the cost of black sand?
Mr. Yancey: A little bit more expensive, probably.
I’ll have to talk to the boys in Sand.
But I feel I can commit now to saying it’d be manageable
in the context of the whole project.
Governor: Done.
Mr. Lungberg: When do we start?
Governor: Immediately, Joe. Hewing is by nature a fast, violent thing.
Mr. Obstat: Chief, just let me say I’m excited. You have my congratulations,
man to man and citizen to Governor.
Governor: Thanks, Neil. You better go call your Mom, big fella.
Mr. Obstat: Right.
Mr. Lungberg: What about a name, Chief?
Governor: A name? That’s a typically excellent point, Joe.
I never thought of the name issue.
Mr. Lungberg: May I make a suggestion?
Governor: Go.
Mr. Lungberg: The Great Ohio Desert.
Governor: The Great Ohio Desert.
Mr. Lungberg: Yes.
Governor: Joe, a super name. I take my hat off to you. You’ve done it again.
Great. It spells size, desolation, grandeur, and it says it’s in Ohio.
[Laughter]
Mr. Lungberg: Not too presumptuous?
Governor: Not at all. Fits the concept to a T.
Mr. Obstat: I take my hat off to you too, Joe.
Mr. Yancey: Damn fine name, Joe.
Governor: So we’re all set. Concept. Desert. Color. Name.
All that’s left is the hewing.
Mr. Yancey: Well let’s get down to it, then.
[Applause]
Shannon McCormick: Ladies and Gentlemen, up next is Doug Dorst who will
be reading from Wallace’s correspondence with footnotes to be read by L.B. Deyo.
Doug Dorst: This is a letter from Wallace to Don DeLillo.
October 10th, 1995
Dear Don,
Since it’s clear from your letters that you’re a person nice,
and since it’s well-known that an overkeen sense of obligation tends to
afflict the congenitally nice,
I again want to implore you not to feel any obligation to read
the bound manuscript any faster...
L.B. Deyo: Or at all, actually.
Doug Dorst: ...than your own schedule and inclinations permit.
If Little Brown’s Pietsch put blurb-pressure on you or something,
I implore you to ignore it.
I did not have the BM sent to you because I hoped for a blurb.
I sent it to you because your own fiction is important to me
and because I think you’re smart and because,
if you do end up reading it and end up saying anything to me about it,
I stand a decent chance of learning something.
Your note of September 19 was heartening and inspiring and
also made me curious about several things.
I would love to know what changes in yourself account for
"And discipline is never an issue (as it was in earlier years)."
I would love to know how this education of the will took place...would
that you could assure that it was nothing
but a matter of time natural attritive/osmotic action,
but I have a grim suspicion there’s rather more to it.
I’d love to know how the sentence quoted above stands in relation to
"The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect."
As I understand your terms "discipline," "respect," "dedication,"
your thoughts have confirmed by belief that what usually presents in
me as a problem with discipline is actually probably more a problem with dedication.
I struggle very hard with my desires both to have
fun when writing and to be serious when writing.
I know that my first book was the most fun I’ve ever had writing,
but I know also that the only remotely serious thing about
it was that I very seriously wanted the world to think I was a really good fiction-writer.
I cringe, now, to look at how so much of my first stuff seems so
excruciatingly obviously exhibitionistic and so seriously approval-hungry.
I have no idea whether this will make any sense to you,
or whether this stuff is too personal to me to make sense about,
or whether in fact it’s actually so banal and mill-run that seeming tormented
about it or thinking I’m uniquely afflicted will seem to you grotesque.
Fuck it -- an advantage to proofreading page-proofs or PP's is that I'm too tired to care.
I think a certain amount of time and experience and pain
have helped me "somewhat" with respect to the immature and selfish stuff.
I think IJ, Infinite Jest,
is less self-indulgent and show-offy than anything I’d done before it,
and that the stuff I’ve done since finishing IJ is even less ego-hobbled.
Part of the improvement inside me, too, I think,
is starting truly to "respect" fiction and realize how very much bigger
than I the art and enterprise are,
to be able not just to countenance but live with how very very small a
part of any big picture I am.
Because I tend both to think I’m uniquely afflicted and to idealize people I admire,
I tend to imagine you never having had to struggle
with any of this narcissism or indulgence stuff,
to imagine that the great gouts of Americana hurled daily at the
page in the stoveless apartment of wherever you wrote
it were as natively disciplined and respectful and humility-
nourished as Libra or The Day Room.
But now I rather hope that isn’t so.
I hope that in the course of your decades writing you’ve done
and been subject to stuff that’s helped make you a more respectful writer.
I would like to be a respectful writer, I believe, though
I know I’d far prefer finding out some way to become that,
without time and pain and the war of "look at me" versus
"respect a fucking killer."
Maybe what I want to hear is that this prenominate war is natural
and necessary and a sign of towering intellect:
maybe I want a pep-talk, because I have to tell you I don’t enjoy this war one bit.
I think my fiction is better than it was, but writing is also less
fun than it was.
I have a lot of dread and terror and inadequacy-shit,
now, when I’m trying to write. I didn’t used to.
Maybe the terror is part of the necessary reverence,
and maybe it’s an inescapable part of the growing-up-as-a-writer-or-whatever process;
but it can't -- cannot -- be the goal and terminus of that process.
In other words there must be some way to turn terror into respect and dread
into a kind of stolidly productive humility...
L.B. Deyo: You are heartily welcome to let me know what that way is,
if you know what it might be.
Doug Dorst: ...I have a hard time understanding how fun fits into the
dedication-discipline-respect schema.
I know that I had less fun doing IJ than I did doing earlier stuff,
even though I know in my tummy that it’s better fiction.
I think that I understand that part of getting older and better
as a writer means putting away many of my more childish or self gratifying
notions of fun, etc.
But fun is still the whole point, somehow, no?
Fun on both sides of the writer/reader exchange?
A kind of pleasure -- more rarified, doubtless, than M&M's or a good wank,
but nevertheless pleasure?
How do I allow myself to have fun when writing -- without sacrificing respect and
seriousness, i.e. going back to exhibitionism and show-offery and pointless
technical acrobatics?
I think one reason why I ask you
this (though I know you not at all as a person, of course)
is that your own fiction seems to me to marry fun and seriousness in a
profound way, somehow -- a sense of play that's somehow even
funner because it's not sophomoric or self-aggrandizing...
L.B. Deyo: I have in mind Mark Leyner when I refer to "self-aggrandizing fun"
I don’t know whether you know his stuff, but he is the Prince of Darkness to me.
[Laughter]
Doug Dorst: ...or childish or even childlike.
This is not coming across like I want it to; I can’t make this clear.
Maybe your work is this form of profound marriage only to and for me;
maybe it’s some weird subjective misprision that has to do with me and not your
fiction; maybe you have no thoughts on how you’ve come to make (apparent)
respect and dedication seem so fuck-all much (apparent) fun.
If you do have any thoughts -- together with a couple of minutes to rub together --
I’d be grateful for them. I’m about as professionally
flummoxed as I’ve ever been.
All Best Wishes,
Dave Wallace
[Applause]
Next is Owen Egerton reading from Infinite Jest.
[Applause]
Owen Egerton: Hello, I’ll be reading from Infinite Jest.
I’ll be reading from a section entitled “Winter B.S. 1960—Tucson, AZ” and it’s a big book
so I’ll just give you the context that this is a man talking to his son.
Jim not that way Jim.
That's no way to treat a garage door, bending stiffly down at the waist and
yanking at the handle so the door
jerks up and out jerky and hard and you crack your shins and my ruined knees, Jim.
Let's see you bend at the healthy knees.
Let's see you hook a soft hand lightly over the handle its subtle grain
feeling it and pull just as exactly gently as will make it come to you.
Experiment, Jim. See just how much force you need to start the door easy,
let it roll up out open on its hidden greasy rollers and pulleys in the ceiling's
set of spiderwebbed beams.
Think of all garage doors as the well-oiled open-out door of a broiler with hot meat in,
hot roiling, hot.
Needless and dangerous ever to yank, pull, shove, thrust.
Your mother, your mother is a shover and a thruster, son.
She treats bodies outside herself without respect or due care.
She's never learned that treating things in the gentlest most relaxed way
is also treating them and your own body in the most efficient way.
It's Marlon Brando's fault, Jim. Your mother back in California before you were born,
before she became a devoted mother and long-suffering wife and breadwinner,
well she had a bit part in a Marlon Brando movie.
Her big moment. Had to stand there in saddle shoes and bobby sox and ponytail
and put her hands over her ears as really loud motorbikes roared by.
A major thespian moment, I tell you.
She was in love from afar with this fellow Marlon Brando, son. Who?
Who. Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it
looks like two whole generations' relations
with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No?
Well it was because of Brando you were opening the garage door that way, Jimbo.
The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed down.
You'll know Brando when you see him, and you'll have learned to fear him.
Brando, Jim, Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o.
Brando was the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type,
leaning back on his chair's rear legs, coming in crooked through doorways,
slouching against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects,
showing no artful respect or care,
yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and
tossing them crudely aside missing the wastebasket so that they lie there,
ill-used. With the over-clumsy impetuous movements and postures of a moody infant.
Your mother is of that new generation that moves
against life's grain, across the warp and baffles.
She may have loved Marlon Brando, Jim, but she didn't understand him,
is why she's ruined for everyday arts like broilers and garage doors and
even low-level public-park knock-around tennis.
Ever see your mother with a broiler door?
It's carnage, Jim, it's to cringe to see it,
and the poor dumb thing thinks it's tribute to this slouching slob-type
that she loved as he roared by.
Jim, she never intuited the gentle and cunning economy
behind this man's quote harsh sloppy unstudied approach to objects.
The way he'd so clearly practiced a chair's back-leg tilt over and over.
The way he'd studied objects with a welder's eye for those strongest centered
seams which when pressured by the swinishest slouch still support.
She never -- she never sees that Marlon Brando felt himself as body so keenly
he had no need for manner.
She never sees that in his quote careless way he was actually really touched
whatever he touched as if it were part of him.
Of his own body.
The world he only seemed to manhandle but for him sentient, feeling.
And no one -- and she never understood that.
Sour sodding grapes indeed.
You can't envy someone who can be that way.
Respect, maybe. Maybe wistful respect, on the very outside.
She never saw that Brando was playing the equivalent of high-level quality
tennis across sound stages all over both coasts,
Jim, that's what he was really doing. Jim, he moved like a careless fingerling,
one big muscle, muscularly naive, but always, notice, a fingerling at the
clear center of a clear current.
That kind of animal grace.
The bastard wasted no motion, that's 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;
they will move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and
yield up their innermost seams to you.
They'll teach you all their tricks.
He knew what the Beats know and what the world's 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.
I know you don't understand. Yet. I know that google-eyed stare.
I know what it means all too well, son. It's no matter. You will. Jim, I know what I know.
[Applause]
Next up will be Jake Silverstein who will be reading from
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, with footnotes by Kurt Hildebrand. Thank you.
[Applause]
Jake Silverstein: So this is from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,
which for those of you who haven’t read it,
it is an account of a trip that Wallace took in 1995 on a Caribbean cruise.
It was a 7-night trip on assignment for Harper’s Magazine
on a ship by the Celebrity Cruises line.
The ship was called the Zenith.
He instantly, in his piece, renamed it the Nadir.
And this is a piece, which I’ll just be reading a short portion of but it’s become such,
I think, an important seminal piece in the last 15 years of magazine non-fiction
that it's just always referred to simply as "the cruise piece"
whenever people are talking about it.
I'll be reading from the skeet shooting portion.
1320h.: The ND neglects to mention that the skeetshooting is a competitive Organized Activity.
The charge is $1.00 a shot, but you have to purchase your shots in sets of 10,
and there’s a large and vaguely gun-shaped plaque for the best 10 score.
I arrive at 8-Aft late; a male Nadirite is already shooting skeet,
and several other men have formed a line and are waiting to shoot skeet.
The Nadir’s wake is a big fizzy V way below the aft rail.
Two sullen Greek NCOs run the show,
and between their English and their earmuffs and the background noise of
shotguns -- plus the fact that I've never touched any kind of gun
before and have only the vaguest idea of which end even to point -- negotiations
over my late entry and the forwarding of the skeetshooting bill to Harper’s are
lengthy and involved.
I am seventh and last in line.
The other contestants in line refer to the skeet as “traps” or “pigeons,”
but what they really look like is tiny discuses
painted the Day-Glo orange of high-cost huntingwear.
The orange, I posit, is for ease of visual tracking,
and the color must really help,
because the trim bearded guy in aviator glasses currently shooting
is perpetrating absolute skeetocide in the air over the ship.
I assume you already know the basic skeetshooting conventions from movies and TV:
the lackey at the weird little catapultish device,
the bracing and pointing and order to Pull, the combination thud and kertwang of the catapult,
the brisk crack of the weapon, and the midair disintegration of the luckless skeet.
Everybody in line with me is male,
though there are a number of females in the crowd that’s watching
the competition from the 9-Aft balcony above and behind us.
From the line, watching, three things are striking:
(a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently
is what a shotgun really sounds like;
(b) skeetshooting looks comparatively easy,
because now the stocky older guy who’s replaced the
trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these
fluorescent skeet away one after the other,
so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir’s wake;
(c) a flying skeet...
Kurt Hildebrand: These skeet made, I posit,
from some kind of extra-brittle clay for maximum frag.
Jake Silverstein: ...when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking
midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector,
and plummeting seaward in a distinctive corkscrewy way that all eerily
recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.
Striking thing (b) turns out to be an illusion,
one not unlike the illusion I’d had about the comparative easiness
of golf from watching golf on TV before
I’d actually ever tried to play golf.
The shooters who precede me do all seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn,
and they all get 8/10 or above.
But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds,
another two are insufferable East-Coast retro-Yuppie brothers who spend weeks
every year hunting various fast flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada,
and the last has not only his own earmuffs,
plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case,
but also his own skeetshooting range in his backyard... Kurt Hildebrand: (!)
[Laughter]
Jake Silverstein: ...in North Carolina.
When it’s finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else’s ear-oil
on them and they don’t fit my head.
The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I’m told is cordite,
small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who
preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10.
The two Yuppie brothers are the only entrants even near my age;
both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch
positions against the starboard rail.
The Greek non-coms seem extremely bored.
I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and
then to place the stock of the weapon against no not the shoulder of my
hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm -- my initial error
in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the
Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.
[Laughter]
OK, let’s not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out.
Let me simply say that, yes, my own skeetshooting score was noticeably lower than the
other entrants’ scores,
then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice
contemplating shooting skeet from the rolling stern
of a 7NC Megaship, and then we’ll move on:
(1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause
everyone in the vicinity who knows anything
about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and
handy tips passed down from Papa.
(2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils
down to exhortations to "lead" the launched skeet,
but nobody explains whether this means that the gun’s barrel should
move across the sky with the skeet or
should instead lie in a sort of static ambush along some point
in the skeet’s projected path.
(3) TV skeetshooting is not totally unrealistic in that you
really are supposed to say "Pull" and the weird little catapultish thing
really does produce a kertwanging thud.
(4) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one.
(5) If you’ve never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at
the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible.
(6) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer:
it does indeed feel like being kicked, and hurts,
and sends you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling widly for balance,
which, when you’re holding a gun, results in mass screaming and ducking and
then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above.
Finally, (7), know that an unshot skeet’s movement against the vast lapis
lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e. orange and parabolic
and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.
[Applause]
Up next is Elizabeth Crane reading from Infinite Jest.
Elizabeth Crane: So this passage comes late in the novel.
Avril is talking to her second son, Mario.
Mario is a well-meaning 19-year-old boy who also happens to be a dwarf
wearing a lot of film equipment. They’re in her office.
Avril Incadenza is the sort of tall beautiful woman who wasn’t ever quite world-class,
shiny-magazine-class beautiful, but who early on hit a certain pretty
high point on the beauty scale and has stayed right at that point as she ages and
lots of other beautiful women age too and get less beautiful.
She’s 56 years old, and Mario gets pleasure out of just getting to look at her face, still.
She doesn’t think she’s pretty, he knows.
Orin and Hal both have parts of her prettiness in different ways.
Mario likes to look at Hal and at their mother and try to see just what
slendering and spacing of different features makes a woman’s face different from a man’s,
in attractive people.
A male face versus a face you can just tell is female.
Avril thinks she’s much too tall to be pretty.
She’d seemed much less tall when compared to Himself,
who was seriously tall. Mario wears small special shoes,
almost perfectly square, with weights at the heel and Velcro straps instead of laces,
and a pair of the corduroys Orin Incandenza had worn in elementary school,
which Mario still favors and wears instead of brand-new pants he’s given,
and a warm crewneck sweater that’s striped like a flea.
My point here is that certain types of persons are terrified even to poke a
big toe into genuinely felt regret or sadness, or to get angry.
This means they are afraid to live. They are imprisoned in something, I think.
Frozen inside, emotionally. Why is this. No one knows, Love-o.
It's sometimes called "suppression," with the fingers out to the sides again.
Dolores believes it derives from childhood trauma, but I suspect not always.
There may be some persons who are born imprisoned.
The irony, of course, being that the very imprisonment that prohibits sadness’s
expression must itself feel intensely sad and painful.
For the hypothetical person in question.
There may be sad people right here at the Academy who are like this, Mario,
and perhaps you’re sensitive to it.
You are not exactly insensitive when it comes to people.
Mario scratches his lip again. "Hey Moms?"
People, then, who are sad, but who can't let themselves feel sad, or express it,
the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike
someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right.
Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant.
Spacey was an American term we grew up with.
Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs.
The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version
of the sadness some sort of expression,
like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds
she'd so very carefully repaired after the last incident.
"Moms, I think I get it."
Is that better, then, instead of my maundering on and on?
She’s risen to pour herself coffee from the last black bit in the glass pot.
So her back is almost to him as she stands there at the little sideboard.
An old folded pair of U.S.A. football pants and a helmet are on top of
one of the file cabinets by the flag. Her one memento of Orin,
who won’t talk to them or contact them in any way.
She has an old mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress small and
perspectivly distant in a knee-high field of wheat or rye,
that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD.
She’s always had her coffee out of the OUTSTANDING FIELD mug, even in Weston.
The mug has a hair-thin brown crack down one side, but it’s not dirty or stained,
and she never gets lipstick on the rim the way other ladies over fifty years old pinken cups’ rims.
Mario was involuntarily incontinent up to his early teens.
His father and later Hal had changed him for years,
never once judging or wrinkling their face or acting upset or sad.
"But except hey Moms?"
‘I’m still right here.’
Avril couldn’t change diapers.
She’d come to him in tears, he’d been seven, and explained, and apologized.
She just couldn’t handle diapers. She just couldn’t deal with them. She’d sobbed and asked him to forgive her
and to assure her that he understood it didn’t mean she didn’t love him
to death or find him repellent.
Can you be sensitive to something sad even though the person isn't not himself?
She especially likes to hold the coffee's mug in both hands. Pardon me?
"You explained it very well. It helped a lot."
Except what if it’s that they’re almost like even more themselves than normal?
Than they were before?
If it’s not that he’s blank or dead. If he’s himself even more than before a sad thing happened.
What if that happens and you still think he’s sad, inside, somewhere?’
One thing that’s happened as she got over fifty is she gets a
little red sideways line in the skin between her eyes when she doesn’t follow you.
Ms. Poutrincourt gets the same little line, and she’s twenty-eight.
"I don't follow you. How can someone be too much himself?"
‘I think I wanted to ask you that.’
She pretends to knock her forehead at being obtuse.
‘Mario Love-o, are you sad? Are you trying to determine whether
I’ve been sensing that you yourself are sad?
Though of course the sun would leave my sky if I couldn’t assume
you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.
There would be no need for intuition about it.’
And plus then to the east, past all the courts,
you can see some lights in houses in the Enfield Marine Complex below,
and beyond that Commonwealth’s cars’
headers and store lights and the robed lit lady’s downcast-looking statue atop
St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Out the right to the north over lots of different
lights is the red rotating tip of the WYYY transmitter,
its spin’s ring of red reflected in the visible Charles River,
the Charles tumid with rain and snowmelt,
illumined in patches by headlights on Memorial and the Storrow 500,
the river unwinding, swollen and humped, its top a mosaic of oil rainbows and
dead branches, gulls asleep or brooding, bobbing, head under wing.
Next up is Chris Gibson reading from the Kenyon College commencement speech.
[Applause]
Chris Gibson: The following is adapted from a commencement speech
given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older
fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
"Morning, boys, how's the water?"
And the two young fish swim on for a bit,
and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes,
"What the hell is water?"
The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous,
important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is,
it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
Here's one example: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief
that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest,
most vivid and important person in existence.
We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness,
because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down.
It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.
Think about it:
There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of.
The world as you experience it is right there in front of you,
or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or
other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of
virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or
getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and
literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.
People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often
described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
An obvious question here is how much of this work of adjusting
our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect.
This question gets tricky.
Probably the most dangerous thing about college education,
at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff,
to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention
to what's going on right in front of me.
Paying attention to what's going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive
instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head.
I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliche about
"teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper,
more serious idea:
learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay
attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life,
you will be totally hosed.
Think of the old cliche about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master."
This, like many cliches, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.
It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms
almost always shoot themselves in the head.
And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before
they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull value of your liberal-
arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your
comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to
your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely,
imperially alone, day in and day out.
By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning,
go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at
the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out,
and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and
maybe unwind for a couple of hours and
then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there's no food at home and so now after work you
have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket.
It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad,
and getting to the store takes way longer than
it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded,
and hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate
pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you
can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge,
overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want,
and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired,
hurried people with carts, and of course
there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD
kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be
polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually,
finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't
enough checkout lanes open.
The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where
the work of choosing comes in.
Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long
checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision
about how to think and what to pay attention to,
I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop,
because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like
this are really all about me, about my
hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home,
and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way,
and who are all these people in my way?
And look at how deeply unfair this is:
I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and I'm tired and I can't even get
home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Look, if I choose to think this way, fine,
lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic
it doesn't have to be a choice.
Thinking this way is my natural default-setting.
It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring,
frustrating, crowded parts of adult life
when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center
of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine
the world's priorities.
The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about
these kinds of situations.
You can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed,
over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout
line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three
straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer,
or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who
just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem
through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it
just depends on what you want to consider.
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is
really important, if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you,
like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying.
But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention,
then you will know you have other options.
It will actually be within your power to experience a
crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred,
on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the
sub-surface unity of all things.
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true:
The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're
going to try to see it.
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.
You get to decide what to worship...
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches
of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships.
The only choice we get is what to worship.
And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type
thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things then you will never feel you have enough.
It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and
you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing,
you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.
Worship power -- and you will feel weak and afraid, and you will
need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid,
a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that
they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious.
They are default-settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into,
day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and
how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings,
because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the
fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.
Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded
extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.
The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized
kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom,
and the kind that is most precious you will not hear
much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness,
and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to
sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways,
every day. That is real freedom.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting,
the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational.
But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon.
None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma,
or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life before death.
It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.
It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential,
so hidden in plain sight all around us,
that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
I wish you way more than luck.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Molly Schwartzburg: Thank you so much to all of our readers,
I welcome everyone to come over to the Ransom Center for a reception. Thank you.
[Applause]
