World of Leaves

Enjoying literature is not an easy thing to do. At least not if you try to lead a normal life, that is, whatever that is. Because there is so much of it around. Nothing but letters in endless combinations. Sometimes I wonder if I would go mad or start a philosophical or armed war in Borges's Library of Babel, engage in bare-knuckle-fights, bludgeon the skulls and smash the brains of fellow searchers with uncreased spines of books that have never been opened. Would I take a pencil with me and scribble in the margins, multiplying the already infinite number of possible texts further or would I stab my own eyes and pierce my tongue and throat with it to free myself from the curse of written and spoken language? I would have to pierce my eardrum as well as my own brains, too, writing my last unreadable message with lines of dripping blood.

Having just finished Cosmopolis, I am confronted with choices that I can hardly grasp. Every step from now can lead me in the wrong direction. What should I read next? Should I go back to DeLillo's beginnings and read him in chronological order or rather go directly to Underworld? What about Pynchon? Gravity's Rainbow or start with V.? What about the still not finished Barthelme and Barth? Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, because DFW mentioned it in some interview? And DFW himself. Besides Infinite Jest and The Pale King and some of his journalism, I haven't read anything else. What about rereading Infinite Jest? And Don Quixote, the new 70,- € German translation is still waiting for me, as well as Bolano's 2666 and Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Paul Auster after The New York Trilogy, another round of House of Leaves, Catcher in The Rye or turn to Franny & Zooey and Salinger's other writings? Donna Tartt's The Little Friend is waiting on my bookshelf for the last 6 years or so. Maybe 8. I was a totally different being back then (well, not so radically different as I wished I would be.) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or some more Vonnegut or Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, what about Proust and Nabokov and every single Sherlock Holmes story? William Gibson, James Ellroy, William Gaddis, Zadie Smith and Flannery O'Connor. Toni Morrison. I could go on for days, literally, and weeks, losing much of the precious time I would otherwise spend reading some of that (or other) novels. One thing at least seems to be pretty clear to me: After finishing Franzen's self-indulging The Discomfort Zone, he will be off my reading list for a long, long time.

desperately needing a new haircut?

I just finished Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis and once again discovered that he's a tremendously good writer. After encountering him with Falling Man (which I really didn't like too much; maybe I just wasn't ready for him, then) and giving him a second chance with the brilliant White Noise I thought, why not putting in between that self-indulging Franzen blabber the as-of-then unread 209 pages of Cosmopolis which I hadn't read for a seminar two years ago?

Just to lead you in on this: Multi-billionaire Eric Packer decides one morning that he needs a new haircut, gets into his limo on First Ave and orders his driver to make a cross-town trip to Manhattan's far West Side for his favourite barber. Due to a presidential visit to Manhattan, anarchist riots, the public funeral of a famous rap-star (I'm having a déja vu right now, remind me to read White Noise again) and other NYC hassles, this trip takes the whole day, during which he meets various business associates in his car and loses all of his money. Eric has an asymmetrical prostate and is about to be killed at the end of the day.

This novel is dedicated to Paul Auster and since I haven't read anything by him but the New York Trilogy I cannot fail to notice why this is so. At the core of Cosmopolis is language itself:

'There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now,' she said. 'Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing.'

Here's another one:

I thought I would spend whatever number of years it takes to write ten thousand pages and then you would have the record, the literature of a life awake and asleep, because dreams too, and little stabs of memory, and all the pitiful habits and concealments, and all the things around me would be included, noises in the street, but I understand for the first time, now, this minute, that all the thinking and writing in the world will not describe what I felt in the awful moment when I fired the gun and saw him fall. So what is left worth the telling?

Paragraphs like this reveal the true power of DeLillo's writing method. Consider this answer from his Paris Review Interview:

When I was working on The Names I devised a new method—new to me, anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I’d written. And with this book I tried to find a deeper level of seriousness as well.

And consider this from Paul Auster's Paris Review Interview ten years later, in 2003, just after Cosmopolis was published:

The paragraph seems to be my natural unit of composition. The line is the unit of a poem, the paragraph serves the same function in prose—at least for me. I keep working on a paragraph until I feel reasonably satisfied with it, writing and rewriting until it has the right shape, the right balance, the right music—until it seems transparent and effortless, no longer “written.” That paragraph can take a day to complete or half a day, or an hour, or three days. Once it seems finished, I type it up to have a better look. So each book has a running manuscript and a typescript beside it. Later on, of course, I’ll attack the typed page and make more revisions.

Okay, okay, you might say. All this is very nice and interesting but why the fuck do I have to bear that Twilight-fucker Pattinson's face in this post? The answer is very simple, my friends: Because he, like Eric, desperately needs a new haircut. And because he is too ambivalent about changing his style big time all by himself, he gets a little encouragement from David Cronenberg, who is filming Cosmopolis right now and chose Pattinson for the role of Eric Packer. And who else but Cronenberg could provide Cosmopolis as well as Pattinson's career and hairstyle with a surreal twist worthy of DeLillo's writing skills? Did I mention the video screens in Packers white limo? Note: Eric's haircut will also be asymmetrical at the end of the day.

DFW - DeLillo Correspondence

As some of you might know, I'm trying to get hands on the letters of correspondence between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo. I know where they are. But I need some help to lay my eyes and soul on them. In the wake of the opening of the DFW Archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the UT, Austin, pictures of some of the DFW material circulate the net, the internet, that is, but unfortunately the number of links to websites that present them is far greater than the actual # of photographies of that stuff, meaning, they show all pretty much the same stuff. Ransom Center has also a nice digitalized thingy up that shows various steps of what became §9 of The Pale King from first draft to final black-ink-on-white-page-in-buyable-book-draft. A LOT of it is already linklisted over on The Howling Fantods's news by category list titled DFW Archive. This is also by far the most comprehensive website considering DFW. Has also a nice list of conference and master theses papers on DFW up there and so on.

But it is pretty hard to find actual copies of the letters of correspondence between DeLillo and Foster Wallace. This might be because of legal-copyright-stuff-reasons. For what I know the Ransom Center offers to make copies (putting their watermark on them) for money and just demand that whoever wants to publish some of the material make a kind of legal or heritage disclaimer that very clearly states where that material comes from, i.e. the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. So that shouldn't be the problem, if I'm right about this, which I'm of course not quite sure of. And the whole thing is much more non-comprehensive for me, because the letters of correspondence between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo are not even part of the newly opened DFW archive, but they are part of the DeLillo archive, which was acquired in 2004. So lots of people had lots of time to get their hands on them even before DFWs death in 2008 and, consequently, the acquisition of the Foster Wallace material a year later.
However, the letters range from the very first letter in 1992 to 2003. And that's not because they stopped writing each other, but of course because the DeLillo archive, acquired in - see above - 2004, stops in 2003. And just if you're wondering about this: Yes, Don DeLillo is still among the living.

Really the only digitalized letters I could find are those linked below, including the above mentioned very first letter DFW ever wrote to DeLillo.

So: if you are in possession of (il)legal digital (or hard) copies of any of those letters of correspondence between David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo or if you live in Austin, Texas or elsewhere but would be willing to visit the Ransom Center or if you are an employee of or employer at the aforementioned Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas and are willing to make copies of those letters whether legally or illegally and are willing to send them to me via electronic means or quaint ones or if you happen to know anyone in possession of some of those letters and you are able to persuade him/her that it is necessary to make them available to me or otherwise just rob him/her w/r/t the letters/copies so please do by all means all that is necessary to achieve that goal because your moral and spiritual integrity is on the line, even if you feel that you do not know me and have no possible obligation w/r/t the person that constitutes myself, the fact that you chose not to do something about this situation will nag at your consciousness day in day out until finally, eventually, your self-centered self will turn into a self-devouring self and there will be tics and symptoms, physically and mentally, to go with the self-devouring that will make you wish you had done something about my longing, my desire and despair, earlier, in order to keep your normal happy life from turning itself into a permanent state of desperate desirical self-hatred and mourning for lost opportunities like this one to make your personal life and life in general a better place to dwell while time passes relentlessly until the very end and makes you want to wish you had - as mentioned above - given me and the world what I wanted, namely some possibility to lay my eyes and soul onto some of the letters of correspondence between the late David Foster Wallace and the still-among-the-living (as far as my knowledge goes) Don DeLillo and if you do claim you know not where they are, they are right there at the Harry Ransom Center of the UT in Austin, Texas, right there in the DeLillo archive, Series II. Correspondence, Subseries A. Alphabetical Files, Individual correspondents, Wallace, David Foster, with replies from DeLillo,1992-2003, n.d., Container 101.10 or box 101, folder 10.

The letters I tracked down so far

• In a pdf from kottke.org including the very first from Wallace, dated 11 June 1992 and one by DeLillo dated Feb 5, 1997: here
• Ellis from It's A Livre Life visited the Ransom Center in February 2011 and put these fragments up (on what would have been Wallace's 49th birthday, actually) and a little later a full letter by DFW dated 10-10-95