David Foster Wallace, Peanuts and a Prize

An idea-free young typist in Axl Rose bandana is holding our collective critical faculty at gunpoint. In a bank vault. And he’s talking a mile a minute!

Post-Literacy’s Poster Child; the Bard of Save-On; The Lilliputian Confucian. Yeah, it is unreasonably cruel to pick on a dead pharma-guy, unless until it can be shown that his critical and commercial beatification flows from that sorry and admittedly tragic aspect.

I’ll confirm the basis of your already delicious contempt by stating outright that this essay will follow Steve Martin’s dictate to ‘criticize things you don’t know about’. I’ve never deeply ‘read’ David Foster Wallace, the thrice-named statue covered in the shit of our most mindful birds. I read a bit of ‘Broom of the System’ and waded with arms and legs bound into the speed-freak printout ‘Infinite Jest’; a conundrum wrapped in a dumpling, buried in absolute flapdoodle. It was immediately clear in both cases that the guy was a blinking neon fraud.

But I’ve been stunned over the years since his terribly sad but, it must be said, stagey demise, to see his Gas Giant of a star continue to rise, his crummy ideas and jarring sentences taken out periodically and waved about like the Queen’s silverware, his published lines and phrases and dimwit neologisms taken up by our normally discerning literati and declared ‘brilliant’ and life-affirming, his boosters (seemingly everyone) falling into line and throwing even more tender kindling on the rank and uncontrolled flaming shit pyre of praise. It boggles. dfw states the sophomorically obvious in a reverently mumbled, broken Freshman English. His revelations both include and are limited to: We’re each alone and struggling not to be. This is a consumer society. We’re very busy. Buying groceries is a strange ritual. We’re isolated from each other. We’re each alone and struggling not to be; and so on.  He says Postmodern a lot and once said ‘glabrous’. His whispered epiphanies are the sort that were thoroughly worked over long before Mark Twain had a mustache, yet dfw earnestly and unknowingly disinters the obvious with great declamatory aplomb and then illuminates his own late-blooming scholarship by elaborately flogging stuff most of us stopped mulling in high school. His jaw-dropping flunkie word processing is the foul icing. Like the guy at the bus stop who stares down at his shoes while yelling at you, dfw is not a gifted eccentric but wishes he were. His enablers lavishly convinced him of his ‘unshaven avatar’ status, and then he killed himself. It’s a very very painful situation.

This is just my opinion, but I’m right. Below I’ve included several rage-fueling examples of a doomed dimwit on Nardil who could not stop typing. Let’s start with this satiny sentence that takes John Updike’s novel Toward the End of Time to task. But for the dated Axl Rose headgear and cultivated air of superior resignation, this may have been scribbled by a caffeinated 8th grader trying not-hard-enough to impress the cute new English teacher:

“It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.”

Nuf sed? Good. Why would any author worth dfw’s now-celebrated regard even think of publishing a book in that kind of shape? One is right to ask. We take a well-advised step back, though, on being assured by dfw that he has read 25 Updike books. whew. Seriously? whew again. To be called clunky and self-indulgent by dfw is like being told by Hitler you have a stupid little mustache. It rises to the level of irony and then continues noisily on through the ceiling. dfw’s entire oeuvre is a pill-driven edifice of wildly clunky self-indulgence, and the sort of brand-x writing that, if English were a corpse (and thanks to culture-choking algal blooms like Wallace, soon enough will be), would be clawing her way out of the crypt and roaming the moors with an aluminum baseball bat.

*sigh!*

And now I’ll allow this onanistic Chance the Gardener to regale us with more knee-weakening kryptonite. He really is something, you know. Ask anyone.

**

What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves.

Lane Dean summoned all his will and bore down and did three returns in a row, and began imagining various high places to jump off of. – The Pale King; dfw’s thankfully incomplete final slap at literature.

I’d like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time, instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them.

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer.

The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness.

We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?

Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.” My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect.

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.

The cruel thing with depression is that it’s such a self-centered illness – Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his “Notes from Underground”. The depression is painful, you’re sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.

Gifted salesmen explain how people are always most vulnerable, hence frightened, hence persuadable, when they are approached solo.

…a song of tough love for a generation whose eyes have moved fish-like to the side of its head, forward vision usurped by the numb need to survive the now, side-placed eyes scanning for any garde of which to be avant.

A toxic sampling. This is bold, exquisite junk, and highly praised. dfw wins this round. Somebody tell his estate. Sorry, John. This shit is killing me, too.