"An ethical way to continue teaching Wallace, Hayes-Brady suggested, would be to rigorously study the latent misogyny in his work, for what it can tell us about 'the texture of the world Wallace lived in.'"

"She spent the last stretch of her speech demonstrating exactly how that might be done, rigging a blacklight to an excerpt from Brief Interviews [with Hideous Men] and forensically analyzing the stains — say, the double-silencing of its female protagonist, whose rape is described solely by a man, to another female character who is never heard in the text. You could also, Hayes-Brady suggested, defuse and enhance Wallace’s work by studying him in tandem with thematically similar works by writers he influenced, like Porochista Khakpour and Zadie Smith. I thought these concepts were compelling, and mostly persuasive, but then I would think that, as would everyone else in the room. Hayes-Brady’s talk gave us exactly what we wanted; perhaps what many of us came to Normal to find: a cogent and nuanced permission structure within which to a) continue reading Wallace (none of us were ever going to stop doing this, anyway) and b) justify our continued reading to others — others who, like anyone with a political conviction in 2018, are fundamentally unpersuadable, and who either way wouldn’t take well to being accused of neoliberalist sympathies."

From "Academics Explain David Foster Wallace to Me/A report from the 5th-annual David Foster Wallace Conference, where the author’s most devoted readers are wondering how to approach him in 2018" by Daniel Kolitz. Explaining what's so bad about DFW the man, Kolitz writes:

Wallace taught at ISU for nearly a decade; he wrote almost all his major works there, including the 1996 behemoth Infinite Jest. He also liked to sleep with his students, was abusive to his girlfriend at the time, the writer Mary Karr (whom he’d tried to push from a moving car not long before moving to Illinois in the summer of 1993, and also once hurled a coffee table at), committed statutory rape while away on book tour (or at least told a friend he did), and wrote to his friend Jonathan Franzen to say that he sometimes thought he was “put on earth to put his penis in as many vaginas as possible.”

The essay title "Academics Explain David Foster Wallace to Me" is a play on the famous essay by Deirdre Coyle, "Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me."

That reminds me of an obligation that's been hanging over my head all year. Remember, back in January, I wrote:

Fiction and nonfiction: "Cat Person" and Aziz Ansari.

Lately, I've been thinking about fiction and nonfiction. I've said a few times that I love the nonfiction essays of David Foster Wallace but I can't force myself into the fiction. Just last month, I got some insight from his interview with David Lipsky:

I can tell by the Lipsky interview that Wallace put much less effort into those essays than he put into his fictions, but the fiction doesn't work on me the way it's supposed to, which is — Wallace says this in the long interview — that it's supposed to be great fun....

Lipsky emailed me and challenged my resistance to reading Wallace's fiction. I've tried to get into "Infinite Jest," and I can see how much fun it's supposed to be, but it's just not fun for me.

I'm working my way to saying something about Aziz Ansari, so let me preview the nonfiction sex story about him that's in the news today. He's quoted as saying, during the incident, "Oh, of course, it’s only fun if we’re both having fun," and afterwards texting, "It was fun meeting you last night," to which the woman responded, "Last night might’ve been fun for you, but it wasn’t for me."

Anyway, Lipsky recommended 2 short stories that might awaken me to the joys of reading fiction from David Foster Wallace: "Good Old Neon" and "The Suffering Channel" (both in  the collection "Oblivion"). I've read them and I've been mulling over what to say to Lipsky, something about the difference between fiction and nonfiction. I was thinking the answer is something like: In Wallace's nonfiction, we see, through his eyes, people and situations that are really out there in the world. In his fiction, his mind has created a world, and everything in it he made for reasons that came out of his head, and that's just too intense, too nightmarish, too sad. In his nonfiction, he goes on a cruise ship or to a state fair or a lobster festival or to the porno film awards ceremony. He comes up with perceptions and ideas about those real things that other people created, that are not figments of his imagination. He didn't invent things for the purpose of making us feel awful about them (or good about laughing at them). That stuff really exists, and he's our fascinating companion, looking at it with us. We're not alone.

The work of fiction that's got so much attention these last 2 months is "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian, in The New Yorker. Many people who were talking about it didn't really seem to fully register that it was a work of fiction. As Laura Adamczyk wrote (in AV Club):

Debating over who’s the bigger jerk in this [story about a short male-female relationship], or any, work of fiction misses the point.... And yet because so many people came to the story through social media, as opposed to having the print issue delivered to their mail boxes, they clicked through and read without seeing its “fiction” designation. This no doubt encouraged some people to read the story not only as nonfiction but also as something that was up for debate, something they should or should not agree with....

And now we have the turnaround, a nonfiction account of a date with the charming young comedian Aziz Ansari that people are reading and comparing to "Cat Person." But Aziz Ansari is a real person, and the story told by the pseudonymous "Grace" is exposing him to devastating contempt. He's not a fictional character, like "Robert," the "cat person" Roupenian created for us to loathe. Grace's story is presented as true, which of course doesn't make it true, and for all we know, "Cat Person" squares up more accurately to something that happened in real life, but "Cat Person" is called fiction.

Here, I'm having the reverse feeling that I have with David Foster Wallace. I prefer the fiction. I prefer "Cat Person" to Grace's story, because "Cat Person" excludes the question of what should we do to this man who pushed his way through a sexual encounter without noticing how not-into-it the woman was. We can observe and analyze the details contemplatively because there are no real people, just stand-ins for people who might exist, and there's no issue of whether the author is being fair to anyone or whether "Robert" should be arrested or otherwise ruined. We watch and judge and learn. We — all of us — have the woman's vicarious experience. But the decision to tell the stark details of a bad sexual encounter with Aziz Ansari feels so dismal and sad. I'm not able to think about the story itself. I'm completely distracted by the exposure of the frailty of a particular individual, a real person.

A problem I've had with fiction is the sadism: The author creates characters who will be amusing to torment. But Grace's story entails finding a real person, someone we already like (or love), and telling a story about him that demands that we hate him.

Updike update.

Yesterday's post about an Updike quote that I figured had to be a paraphrase is now updated with new information after the author of the book I was reading emailed me to explain why he had that confusion. That was very cool for me, because I was enjoying reading his book. I mean, it was also kind of weird, because when you read someone's book, you don't think of them observing your reading it. Anyway, he was able to point me to the Updike quote, which makes an interesting contrast to the paraphrase.

Questions asked of a photograph of oneself as a 5-year-old: "I’m what you wanted me to be... You got me into this: now what do I do?"

A passage in David Lipsky's "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace." I found this so interesting but it is a little confusing. The book is based on a transcript of an interview with David Foster Wallace. The words are the voice of Lipsky, the interviewer. And the key quote, which is why I'm writing the post, comes from John Updike's memoirs ("Self-Consciousness") — and Updike is talking to a photograph of himself. Got that? So the "you" Lipsky is talking to is Wallace, but the "you" in the quote within the quote is the younger version of Updike to whom old man Updike is speaking:

This is just for color; so the fact that you’ve gotten the readership that you might have wanted in your midtwenties … quote from Self-Consciousness: photograph Updike sees of himself in his mother’s house, as a five-year-old boy, which now looks kind of sinister. "I’m what you wanted me to be,” you know what I mean? “You got me into this: now what do I do? I await his instructions.” I mean, in a sense, you fulfilled the ambitions that twenty-five-year-old had in terms of the kind of impact you wanted to make …

I didn't really mean to be so labyrinthine, but I'm fascinated by the idea of an old man confronted by a photograph of his younger self, seeing that boy as sinister, and sort of chewing him out and demanding to know what to do now.

I wonder what your comparable encounter with a photograph of your child-self would be like. Maybe Child You didn't get what he wanted and you have to say, tough luck, kid, you didn't get what you wanted. But then you'd have the advantage Updike didn't have. You wouldn't await further instruction from the sinister kid. He'd have no power over you. What does he know? He got it all wrong.

But that's just me trying to untangle what I encountered as labyrinthine but too good not to share. I can do better. I can get the Kindle of "Self-Consciousness" and try to find what Lipsky was quoting. Ah, Lipsky was paraphrasing! I bought the ebook and tried many searches. "Sinister" is certainly not Updike's word for his five-year-old self. Lipsky's version of the scene is all I can give you right now. That, and Wallace's response to the prompt:

You know, it may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided. Right? So that it’s a weird paradoxical link. If you didn’t have the ambitions, you’d never find out that they were sort of deluded. But there is, you’re right, once you’ve decided those delusions are empty, you’ve got a big problem, because... you can’t kill off parts of yourself. You have to start building machinery that can incorporate that part.

I wish Wallace had done more with that wonderful prompt, but I don't think he liked Updike too much. Earlier in the Lipsky transcript, he'd said:

Because Updike, I think, has never had an unpublished thought. And that he’s got an ability to put it in very lapidary prose. But that Updike presents one with a compressed Internet problem, is there’s 80 percent absolute dreck, and 20 percent priceless stuff. And you just have to wade through so much purple gorgeous empty writing to get to anything that’s got any kind of heartbeat in it. Plus, I think he’s mentally ill.

Here's hoping this post — being on the internet — is no more than 80% absolute dreck.

ADDED: Imagine President Trump encountering this photograph:

What is his version of the Updike-like conversation? I’m what you wanted me to be. You got me into this: now what do I do? I await your instructions....

IN THE EMAIL: The author David Lipsky writes to say that I'm first person who's noticed that the Updike "quote" is just a paraphrase and to help me find the verbatim Updike quote (on page 238 of "Self-Consciousness"). Here:

I rub my face. My forehead, full of actinic damage from all those years of seeking the healing sun, hurts. My public, marketable self—the self put on display in interviews and slightly “off” caricatures in provincial book-review sections, the book-autographing, anxious-to-please me—feels like another skin and hurts also. I look over at my younger self on the wall: a photograph taken in Earl Snyder’s studio on Penn Street when I was five, wearing a kind of sailor collar, the edges blurred away—“vignetted”—in old-fashioned studio style, an image cherished by my mother, nicely framed the workmanlike way they do things in Reading, and always hanging here, in this spot, for me to admire and remember: little Johnny, his tentatively smiling mouth, his dark and ardent and hopeful eyes. For a second he looks evil. He has got me into this.

I like Updike's version and I like the extra spin Lipsky put on it. I also think it's very cool that Lipsky wrote to me, and his explanation of the confusion makes good sense: The book is a transcription of audio tapes, and the transcription included whatever mistakes DFW made (and was no longer in a position to correct), so it seemed "only fair" for Lipsky to refrain from correcting his own mistakes.

"I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people."

"It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can’t see me. And, and, they’re there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive. The problem is it’s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I’ve gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there’s also, there’s something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we’ve all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it’s more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn’t have any of the nourishment of real food. And the thing, what the book is supposed to be about is, What has happened to us, that I’m now willing—and I do this too—that I’m willing to derive enormous amounts of my sense of community and awareness of other people, from television? But I’m not willing to undergo the stress and awkwardness and potential shit of dealing with real people."

David Foster Wallace, quoted in "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace," by David Lipsky.

I'm reading this book after watching the movie based on this book, "The End of the Tour" (which is free on Amazon Prime). The movie is good for those who (like me) enjoy watching 2 people have a long conversation.

ADDED: "I mean, I can see them, they can’t see me." But just the other day, on one of his Periscopes, Scott Adams deadpanned the joke that the app had been upgraded to enable him to see his viewers. And remember how "Romper Room" regularly assured children that it was able to see them through the TV:



And of course the TVs in "1984" were spying on everyone everywhere, and who doesn't worry that our computer/phone screens are 2-way?

DFW was expressing sadness about the 1-way quality of television. But that was in the context of also feeling sad about using TV as a substitute for in-person human interaction. He confessed to an "addiction" to television and — in the book — says "I’ll watch five or six, I’ll zone out in front of the TV for five or six hours."