The Tree of Life, The Pale King and Enter The Void

Some of you (who, actually?) might wonder what I think about Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and DFW's The Pale King, because I fell pretty silent after having watched and read those works.

Well, the reason is that both of em pretty much leave me speechless. There is not much to say about The Tree of Life other than: Go watch it. Wherever and whenever you get the chance to see that movie on a big screen, do it! This is a cinematic experience that you will rarely encounter in your life. If you plan to see it but don't feel the urge to do so in a movie theater: Don't. By which I mean, rather never see it in your whole life than not on the big screen. You would not want that. You will want to avoid your emotions of regret and loss for having avoided it in the theater. A couple of weeks ago I strained an ankle because I tried to get the best possible seats for a one-time screening of Kubrick's 2001 in a local theater. The pain kept me from being able to watch the darn thing. But nevertheless, 2001 on the big screen is exactly the thing you want to be willing to strain an ankle for. So is The Tree of Life. (As well as Gaspar Noé's radically visionary Enter The Void, of which you can see the trailer here, the opening credits here and the first 10 minutes here, just to make you want to watch it on the BIG SCREEN. This is a physical experience that "essentially flips the brain-off switch for you"). I've seen The Tree of Life two times already and will do so a third time next week. Anyone with an interest in cinema will want to see this visual masterpiece. Again, on the big screen. It does not work in any other way. It makes no sense at all to watch it any other way.

Regarding The Pale King: I do not dare put my words to anything, really, that DFW put on page but, again, read it (this time not on screen though, not even a big one, whether it is standard Kindle, IPad or 24" wide-screen sized, but on page in a published book). His writing and ideas are far from boring. It is true, yes, that The Pale King is unfinished, and you will notice it when you arrive at the last pages, especially at the appended notes and asides found with Wallace's manuscript. From the feel of it, with its about 560 published pages, about the same amount is missing. But what is actually there between the covers, is still among the best literary achievements you will be able to find by any living (or dead) American writer.

emotion and irony in contemporary fiction

"What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be 34 in this country."

This is from a DFW interview from Spring 1997 that can be found here and it pretty much sums up what is going on and what has to be done in serious contemporary fiction, i.e. the turning-away from postmodern irony and the turning toward emotional truth. You can see it in DFWs work, most recently in The unfinished Pale King, you can see it in Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, it is what Bret Easton Ellis did in Lunar Park, what Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was all about, as well as Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and also recent TV-shows as Bored to Death - although sometimes they hide it very well -, it is what Terrence Malick does and what Jonathan Franzen's Freedom tries to do. Also Running With Scissors comes to mind, and quite strongly though, i.e. the movie version, I haven't read the memoir. And this is what an LA Times critic had to say about it :

"Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it."

The critic herself doesn't seem to lack the ironic distance that she is actually begging for, though. I don't know where to find it right now, but Jonathan Franzen said it in one of the myriad of interviews he gave in the wake of Freedom. He said that in The Corrections he used irony also and especially to distance himself from certain ideas and emotions presented in the novel. You can basically say anything you want with irony and then easily back out of it if people disagree with you, thus you don't have to stand your ground on very intimate issues, issues that are and feel way too personal to let anyone attack or make fun of them. He said that he wrote a wholeheartedly unironic novel with Freedom, that he eschewed former techniques of irony to get closer to the emotional core of what he wanted to say. And that he is quite aware that exactly that makes him so much more vulnerable if people dislike his work because now the work is much closer to what being Jonathan Franzen really is like. Closer to the emotional truth that is Jonathan Franzen. But people might misread that for sentimentality and naiveté.

Here is something I found in an IRC chat transcript with DFW* shortly after the release of Infinite Jest (and if you are too young to actually have been in one yourself or are now like, my age, and want to get a nice pretty nostalgic trip into the early times of the internet and 90's chat-rooms, you have to read the whole thing (if it doesn't redirect you, click on the Impatient? link). This is pre-facebook stuff. There were actually online chat-rooms BEFORE the internet. Grab yourself a cup of coffee or your beverage-of-cozy-choice and travel into 1996's cyberspace):

"The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion" and

"I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."

Irony can be a lot of fun, no doubt. And as Dave puts it, we can't escape it because we breathe the stuff everyday. And that makes it actually hard to snap out of it sometimes. (Is the transition to this paragraph too rough? I had a hard time coming up with a coherent one after the quotes.) And I think that is exactly what happened to the LA Times critic a couple lines above. She sees the lack of ironic distance and wants her ironical borders restored immediately to not have to look too closely at something that intends to produce exactly this: a close emotional relationship with its audience. It is precisely not about irony, not about safe distance, not about making fun of everything. It is about emotion. And in the case of this critic, and a lot of others, I fear, about the misreading as being naive and sentimental.

*almost all DFW-related sources are found and taken from The Howling Fantods.

Boredom, DFW and Temporal Dynamics

"Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from." - David Foster Wallace "The Pale King"

"Sein [des Menschen] Leben schwingt also, gleich einem Pendel, hin und her zwischen dem Schmerz und der Langeweile, welche in der Tat dessen letzte Bestandteile sind." - Arthur Schopenhauer

I have distracted myself. I think. Or have I?

I came along a post about boredom and The Pale King earlier and a little essay (link is in the comments) about how to go through full boredom to make it more interesting and a rewarding experience. Having been bored at the time and also tired I didn't pay much attention to it. Yes, my boredom hadn't ceased for the time being. Also I think it did not make much sense. But that may solely be linked to the fact that sense-making and clarity are qualities that don't go well with boredom. The point made in the post (if I'm not mistaken) is that voluntarily entering a state of boredom makes the whole thing much more interesting and even rewarding because what follows is a better level of attention. And, well, yes, better attention is on the way, all right, because some form of attention always follows boredom, since lack of attention is one of the things at the dead center of boredom. Hence (symplified): boredom = no attention --> attention = more attention than no attention. But the other thing is quite impossible, to enter a state of boredom voluntarily. There's a twist in it that does not work.

I feel a strong connection to the impossibility of a perpetuum mobile and an inventor I once corresponded with regarding his plans to build one exploiting oceanic maelstroms. There was a point in his theory where he was mixing warm and cold water-masses and thought they would add up and thus provide the extra amount of energy that not only kept his machine running on its own but could also turn the lights on somewhere. But of course the temperatures of a cold and a hot mass of anything do not add up, they even out. Creating a lukewarm mass of something and that is what we call entropy (simplified). And entropy is certain. The only way to heat a lukewarm mass up is to heat it up. From the outside, that is. The water can't heat itself up just by entering a mental state of voluntariness. There is no voluntariness and thus no free will in the water. And we could have lenghty arguments over if there is free will in human beings or any living (or dead, what's that all about anyway?) matter, for that matter.

Now consider boredom a lukewarm mass of indifference, an entropic state of the mind. There is no way to voluntarily enter such a state other than yearlong sensory deprivation. And that is also not possible because our body needs input from the outside (and gives output from the inside) and this serves as massive stimulation if the other senses are shut down for awhile. And even the momentarily giving in to boring activities with the purpose to come up with another level of attention requires a not insignificant amount of attention and thought-provocation that renders the former boring and tedious task indeed very interesting. So what was proposed in the post is not going through boredom to gain better levels of attention but to come up with ways and techniques to instantly turn boredom into something useful, thus interesting, beforehand. It is a prepared stimulus that is supposed to kick in every time your mental state goes boredom. It is a machinery set up to provide you with impulses (from the outside) to prevent boredom. And doing so is a very paranoid form of dealing with boredom and brings us back to the underlying pain in human beings and the quote from The Pale King: "which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from."

Let's imagine time as applying to the laws of thermodynamics, since a feeling of slowly passing time is also associated with the concept of boredom.

• First Law of Temporal Dynamics: there is a fixed amount of time. There is no way to produce more time than there is. No new time is added. No past time is lost. The present is the focusing of one's attention on a particular spot of time.
• Second Law of Temporal Dynamics: Time strives toward entropy.
• Third Law of Temporal Dynamics: Time with absolutely no content to focus on is it's dead center. This point of absolute zero can not be reached.

From these Laws of Temporal Dynamics we can further deduce (I never paid much attention in that Poe/Peirce seminar considering the differences between deduction/induction/abduction) some concepts:

• We can work with time. We can accelerate it or slow it down by putting it to use, filling it with various content and actions, structuring it.
• The quality of time's absolute zero is full entropy, an equilibrium of time. It is time that is completely unstructured by the mind.
• Boredom is the approximation of one's mind to time's dead center, approaching a mental state without impulses, without stimulation, without structure, without content.
• The underlying psychic pain that is associated with boredom is the experiencing of time's true nature, which is eternity.

So far for now. Any comments?

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

last week's literary downpour...

...among other, non-literary, gifts. Besides The Pale King not necessarily in reading order.

DFW, Karen Green and MZD

I just found this in a Newsweek article considering the David Foster Wallace archive at the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas:

After his suicide, Nadell drove out to join Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, who was eager to move out of a haunted house.

What struck me immediately upon reading Infinite Jest (upon a myriad of other things) - I had read House of Leaves before that - was the connection between Wallace's superdrug DMZ and Danielewski's initials MZD. Infinite Jest is, through its footnotes, framed inside a network of drugs. House of Leaves - through Johnny's introduction - also dives right into it. The other thing is the Karen Green connection.

Does anyone know more about if Wallace and Danielewski knew each other or what each other's work meant to them? Did Karen and Dave already know each other before House of Leaves was published? This Guardian article about Karen gives at least the hint that they first met after he published "The Depressed Person" in Harper's Magazine in 1998, which would later become part of his short story collection "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men". With House of Leaves being first published in 2000 this gives definitely time for character name corrections on MZD's account.
In that article is something else, very remarkable I think, in it:

Green became an amateur expert on the diagrammatic language of psychiatric records: "That's a depressed person's brain," she says of a little grouping of Technicolor splashes. "It's coded differently."

And it reminds me of how DFW always used to speak and write about the hardwiredness of clinical depression and addiction. Karen Green also says this, which I will leave without a comment (although, isn't the bare fact that I say I will give no comment, a very strong comment in itself? Whatever, the autopsy report is right here):

"What do you do when your husband's autopsy report is on the internet and is deemed a subject worthy of fucking literary criticism?"

Regarding publishing of the unfinished The Pale King, she remarks:

"The notes that he took for the book and chapters that were complete, were left in a neat pile on his desk in the garage where he worked. And his lamps were on it, illuminating it. So I have no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted. It was in as organised a state as David ever left anything."

and also:

One of Green's many fears for the publication of The Pale King is that it will be read as an extended suicide note, as an explanation for the ending that Wallace gave himself.