Spending Some Time Thinking About David Foster Wallace

I've referenced David Foster Wallace before, I'm sure, when I talked about going to the fair earlier this year. Back, back, back, through the sands of time when I had pretensions of becoming a writer or an English professor I actually presented a scholarly paper on Infinite Jest at a conference and all that kind of thing. Just about the only constant between that period of my life and now is I still like Wallace's writing. Reading an article in the Buffalo News reminded me that I had heard a radio broadcast of a talk/reading Wallace gave at UB some years ago. I remember it was kind of funny and also very cool because he was basically pulling out pieces of writing that were in very rough form and just letting the audience in on what he'd just been writing possibly fifteen minutes before the talk was scheduled to begin. He also seemed to be in the midst of a constant, midlevel anxiety attack, but that didn't make the reading any less remarkable. This is what I wrote a few days ago:

I’m deeply upset all this week. I know it’s not all about me or anything, but I just want to riff about David Foster Wallace who is one of my all time favorite writers. One of the ongoing themes of his writing was always about depression and mental illness, and one of the things that I read in the Buffalo News about hearing that he was gone was that his eventual suicide was a shock but not a surprise. Instead of just writing about what this means to me, I’m going to just say that, even if the writing is difficult, anyone who wants a one of a kind reading experience should pick up any magazine article, essay, short story or novel by this man and give it a try.

There are two main reasons why people have been so deeply affected by the loss of David Foster Wallace. I would say that the main quality of the writing is a kind of deeply personal connection. In his novels, there is a tendency for him to get caught up in his own word games and plot devices. There are long sections in Infinite Jest which are just experiments in voice, where plot information is advanced through the point of view and the language of a very minor character who then never reappears in the narrative. These little pieces of editorial indulgence are some of the features of the writing which have drawn criticism.

If the reader will turn to the nonfiction essays, however, where Wallace is writing ostensibly in his own voice, there is a deeply personal connection which develops. Part of the reason for this is the format and the premise of the writing. A good deal of these essays and articles were the result of a mundane assignment: go to the fair, go on a cruise, etc. which Wallace then approached with an interesting and slightly disturbing mix of hypervigilance and a willingness to minutely document the variety of thoughts which sailed through his unusual bean while he was in the midst of these events. The fact that he had the ability as a writer to cobble together this giant ball of experiences and maintain an identifiable point of view is a testament to his creativity more than either of his long and difficult novels could ever be.

There are tons of blurbs on web sites all over the world that say how brilliant his writing is. The citation which I find most interesting, however, are the negative criticisms of the writing. Few people had bad things to say about Davis Foster Wallace’s writing, but his work has on occasion been accused of being ugly and just technically monstrous. I think this is absolutely valid. This is the second, and maybe more important thing, which is notable about the work of David Foster Wallace. Plenty of writers have developed an impeccable use of personal voice, but very few have created a style of writing that is instantly recognizable.

Wallace is best known for his pioneering use of footnotes, end notes and massive digressions which are tacked at odd angles all throughout his work. Think of the ways we are traditionally taught to write. I worked for years to learn how to carefully fold one thought into the next, outlining and trimming and rewriting. Wallace’s writing is grammatically correct, but each sentence is so elaborately constructed, so linguistically packed with bizarre references and games (some of which only become clear if you take the analysis of specific word choice down to the Latin root and the subsequent historic usage of a word), that it hardly matters that there are technically no rules actually being broken. The overall structure of the writing is , conversely, entirely transparent. The paragraphs appear under headings. Instead of a carefully planned segue, the writing just stops, a new theme is introduced under a title which often takes less time to explain than the actual length of the title.

The writing is like a giant Pull Me Push You machine constructed out of spare parts from a Dadaist found objects art installation, designed to go in about five directions at once while still having been cleverly constructed so that integrated cutaway sections allow any observer to witness the internal meshing and clashing of disparate parts. And then there are those digressions and foot notes and end notes which are tacked onto the work like so many beer cans dragging behind a car on its way to a firehall wedding reception. Reading Infinite Jest requires something of a wrestling match with the actual book. By the end, the spine of the book has gone wobbly, there is so much flipped between the main texts and notes and references. While the “rest of us”, as writers believed that if there was not an orderly way to integrate thoughts and events and observations into the body of the work, those things just didn’t belong, no matter how good the writing was and how central the thought was to understanding what was actually happening, DFW found a way to make his writing into an actual physical thing that not only communicated but was shaped more like the actual thoughts that it conveyed. How fantastically wonderful that throughout his career as a writer, he also consistently taught writing to undergraduates.

The writing is fun, too. It’s not depressing. Even the parts in various books which discuss suicide, depression, mental illness, substance abuse, and various crushing phobias, all of which obviously he wrote from a position of experience, have a spark of humor to them that is not just irony but true humor in the Shakespearian comedic sense. It’s not about the irony of the human condition, more like the humanity of the ironic condition, which is an entirely different thing.

Right now, though, I’m thinking of the end of Infinite Jest which kind of collapses and does not end into a kind of scary nightmare where everyone is kind of ruined and everything that people hoped would never happen to them basically does happen. But whole thing still has that kind of wonderful mental palate cleansing effect that happens when you come in contact with a real piece of art.

I hope that the relatively small body of work he left behind doesn’t cause his really valuable contributions to both literary and popular writing in America to fall by the wayside as a mere premillenial oddity. Too many artists and writers and musicians who end their own lives become the objects of a kind of morbid hipster/poser cache, and if that were to be the fate of David Foster Wallace, it would be a shame that the end of his life would unfairly color the way people are able to read his work from now on.

August Was Busy. September Will Be Worse!

Hello!

Gosh, it's been a while! I had to get a full time job, so I've been realloting my time to other things. I actually worked in a factory for about three weeks before I found a cushier job where they actually cared whether or not I had actually graduated from college let alone high school. One good thing about the factory was I was able to earn some money while looking for a better job, and I’ve given up cussing. I’ve seen where these things can lead, and I’m done.

A quick note about “American manufacturing”. The town where I live is a really typical rust belt town with a lot of little machine shops and steel mills which are only still there through a combination of miracles and ruthless management. (And, judging by the number of government vehicles that park regularly outside one of the forges, the defense industry, of course.) None of these factories maintain more than a token human resources department and instead, bring in waves of people through a bunch of different temp agencies.

The job that I was doing involved assembling presewn pieces that were brought in from China. Literally, it was the job that wasn’t worth having the Chinese do and absolutely depended on having a high turnover among the workers. There was no way to do that job without getting severe repetitive motion stress on your arms and hands, and if anyone was able to actually work as long as you had to work to get on the real factory payroll, there would be so many workers’ comp claims that the business would go under. The majority of the permanent people were men, the majority of the temps women. Men who came in as temps at the same time as the women who came in the same week I did were already getting bumped up into shipping while the women were being threatened with lay off because they weren’t meeting the number of pieces completed an hour that management wanted. Meanwhile, we were all getting paid what people in Erie get paid for working fast food because the temp agency gets contracted to provide a certain number of workers and then pays a smaller salary than what people would have earned had they been employed directly by the factory. Additionally, the temp agency is able to further skim the workers’ pay by offering “health care” for $18.00 a week which, of course, if you were too sick to work and actually needed, you’d no longer be purchasing. I’d like to see some of the political candidates this year address stuff like this!

But that’s not why I’m here! I’m here to tell you that food prices are going ot spike in September. Things seemed to have stabilized over the summer, but that’s not going to be the case anymore, and now is the time to think about stocking up, even if you’ve never done it before. I took my first full pay from the factory and went to the dry goods store. I didn’t buy the finest little hat in the store, but I did get a lot of dry cereal and sugar which I spent the day vacuum sealing into quart jars. Oh, people mock now, but when the fit hits the shan, they’ll be asking me for my jars of oatmeal. (And I’ll say, sure, glad to keep you from starving.)

I really couldn’t read Cormac McCarthy’s latest book “The Road”, even though I usually just pounce on all of the stuff he comes out with. I thought it was too horrible that the man was just wandering around with his starving kid and everything was dead and ruined, and I would rather just sit in my basement and chew on old cornmeal if things are going to go that way. I’m not sure that I’ll even go and see the movie of that book, despite the fact that it has Viggo Mortensen and was filmed on Beach 10 up at Presqueisle. They also filmed in Conneaut Lake Amusement Park which is partially burned down, and I happened to be at the movies down that way one night over the spring and I saw the filming truck coming in which was cool. I love movies, and the only bad thing about living in the country is the seventy mile round trip to go and see a movie.

But I’m not here to tell you this! I’m here to tell you that you need no special equipment whatsoever to freeze beans!
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And if you’ve seen the prices for frozen beans lately, it may be time to give bean freezing a try. Everything is late this year, and there’s a good chance that you can still get beans either out of your garden or out of the garden of someone who is tired of them and just wants them gone before you even need to think about buying them.

Here’s how you do it:

You need plenty of cold water, a stove or heat source, a colander or sieve, a pot, and zipper bags. You can also use bags with twist ties. When I was little, we always used a vegetable freezing kit that you could get with bags and little white boxes so your frozen veggies looked kind of like the boxed ones that came commercially and stacked up in the freezer better. I’m not sure they even make those anymore. Then, of course, you need beans. Green, yellow, filet, bush, pole, flat, doesn’t matter. Also, the amount doesn’t matter, either. That’s what’s great about beans! Some beans freeze better than others, but they’re all okay as long as they’re pretty fresh.

Prepare the beans: Wash them, of course. Then, snap the stems. I usually snap the tails, too, and them break them into about one inch pieces. French beans don’t freeze too well, but they’re still nice in the middle of winter, so just snap the stem and leave the beans whole on those. You can also go to the kitchen store or even an upscale grocery store and get a bean “frencher” which is a neat little gadget you can run beans through end to end and get long strips like French cut beans. That’s a good option and easier on the hands than snapping pounds and pounds of beans, but we are talking no special equipment here, so you don’t need one.

Get a nice big pot of boiling water going. Then, you want to blanch the beans. This just means boil them for a couple minutes until they turn bright, bright green but are still hard and uncooked on the inside. Make sure the water is really hot before you dip in the beans. Blanching breaks up the enzymes in the beans that makes them ripen, so you are kind of freezing your beans in time before you freeze them. You can’t skip this step!

Take your bright greeny beans (or they could be yellowy) and dip them out of the water with the colander. If you’re not doing multiple pots of beans, I suppose you could just dump the water, but I usually have to use the same boiling water three or four times before I am done with my beans. You don’t have to boil new water every time. Run cold water over them until they get cold. This keeps them from actually cooking and holds them at the blanched stage.

Shake off excess water. Stuff whatever sized portion you think you would like to cook when it is time to cook into the plastic bag. Squeeze out excess air. Seal. Throw in the freezer.

Congratulations, you’re done. You just gave the Man a thumb in the eye. Especially if your beans were free.

Canning beans is much, much different. Unless you are going to make a pickled or a dilled bean, you can’t use regular canning methods to put beans in jars because they are not acidic enough, and you need to can them under pressure. A pressure canner is not cheap, and I don’t have one yet, but my aunt cans everything from beans to venison stew. But she is also the one that I have to borrow a bean Frencher from, as well

My Garden Notebook Gets a 2008 Entry

Hello!

I haven’t written for a while, because, really not a lot is going on. And I’ve been sick for about a month! I finally gave in and went to the doctor’s office. I have a sinus infection, but I couldn’t get the antibiotic that actually treats sinus infections, because it was too expensive. Instead, I have whatever might do the job that is available from the $4 prescription list as Walmart (AKA the devil’s playground) plus some free samples of allergy nose spray which will probably work since I never take antibiotics. I know it’s very American and all that private enterprise is filling in the gap for cheap prescriptions, since we don’t have a discount system like they have in other countries, but I was kind of annoyed.

I’m not a Walmart shopper. I know people like it and all, but most of their business practices are very bad, and I take buying as little as possible and buying locally seriously. There I was, kicking my heels for the twenty minutes I had to wait to get the prescription filled. They lure people to the store with their cheap prescriptions and take a long time filling them so people get tricked into buying things they don’t need and that they wouldn’t have bought had they not been waiting and waiting and waiting! I didn’t buy anything else. Ha.

Being sick has a good side, too. I haven’t minded half as much as my mother that he weather has been really quite awful the last few weeks. We usually expect a nice thaw in February and even a few sixty and seventy degree days, which never really happened. We also expected to be able to get a little more wood in February, and that didn’t happen either, between the weather being bad and the chain coming off the chainsaw. I figured out how to put it back on, but I haven’t figured out how to control the weather yet!

I’ve been doing a lot of spinning. I have a lovely alpaca fleece that has grey and silver and white and black in it. I also have the baby fleece from the same alpaca. My mother has been hovering looking at the yarn as I’m plying and skeining it, making plans for what to do with it. These alpaca fleeces are not exactly mine, however, and a portion of the yarn has to go back to the owner of the alpacas. That is going to hurt. It’s the prettiest yarn, dyed or undyed, that I’ve ever spun.

I’m also working on a cross stitch nativity scene which is going to be really big and kind of impractical. The Holy Family are in a frame, but the other figures are going to be stuffed and free standing. I can’t imagine keeping it clean and in good condition, but I have a bee in my bonnet about this nativity scene which I saw in a book of Christmas cross stitch years ago and have wanted to make ever since.

And yes, I’ve been reading a lot. Well, a lot for me. I read fast, but I hardly ever find anything I like enough to finish. Right now, I’m just finishing up Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It’s a cute, little book about little kids growing up during the Great Depression. I’m also leafing through a couple of books about the Depression and the third volume of Winston Churchill’s history of the Second World War plus An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson. That’s about the Allied landings in North Africa, and it’s the second time through that one for me. I read most of it last year and kind of set it aside. It’s been long enough that I started from the beginning. Interestingly enough, I met an older gentleman by chance last year who fought with Patton’s Ghost Brigade at a later stage in the war, and he said the same thing the book did about the North African campaign being important because it taught the American army how to actually fight a war.

My mother has been insane with cabin fever, and she has read the entire history of the Civil War by Shelby Foote, which I read a while back and come back to occasionally, as well. My little nephew is going to fit in well with the family. My sister’s first real job was as a history teacher, and my nephew’s “bedtime book” for the last year or so is about Soviet military equipment. He’s seven. I went and saw “Atonement” a few weeks ago, and I mentioned I’d seen a World War II movie. My nephew was like: “You went and saw a World War II movie, and you didn’t take me?” until I told him it was more like an “Oh, will my true love come back from the war” war movie. He plays those war games on his video game player all the time. I’m waiting for one to come out about Stalingrad before I think about playing one.

But enough of that! The seed orders are in the mail! Soon, they will coming winging their way back to us, and it will be the busy time again. The closest I’ve ever come in my life to keeping a journal is this “column”, and so I had initially rejected the idea of keeping a garden notebook until I realized how helpful it could be. Using my garden notebook, I can keep track of what I have planted where just by drawing rough diagrams of my gardens. I also can create a schedule of what seeds need to be started when and what plans I have for the garden. (As well as if I actually did them.)

My garden notebook is a combination journal and catalog and to do list. My best idea for my notebook was taking the empty envelopes of seed packets and stapling them to the actual pages of the notebook. I leave one side unstapled and just write on the page itself. I make all sorts of notes. When was ti planted? What was the weather? How it is doing? Which bugs are being pests? How long did it take to grow? Did it taste good? Was it prolific?

This is really a good trick, because each kind of plant gets a little spot, and nothing gets really forgotten about. Also, a lot of things are pretty unpredictable. For instance, last year, when I planted a polygonum “Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate”, I had given up on seeing more than a few of them and was even getting ready to use the soil from the seemingly failed flat of Kiss Me’s to plant some other plants. Then, they started coming up like mad. Because of my dated notes in my garden notebook, I’m able to see just how long the flat just sat and sat before the flowers started coming up.

And that’s where I am right now! It is time to start the polygonum! The very first plants of the year. These are interesting because they need to be “scarified” and “stratified” which are just fancy words for sandpapered and frozen. The little black seeds in the wild would be eaten by birds and left out on the ground to grow after the winter was over. They won’t germinate without a period of being cold. The first year, I grew polygonum, I scarified them, but I just planted them where I wanted them outdoors during a winter thaw. I got a plant or two, but ti was disappointing. Definitely, the way to go is by putting them in flats.

Scarify and Stratify:

To scarify: Use sandpaper. Medium to coarse is okay. This is not easy. It just gets mentioned as easy-as-you-please, but the little seeds shoot all over the place, and they knock the sand off the sandpaper a lot easier than the sandpaper will wear through the seed hulls. You don’t need to sane all the way through, but there has to be some kind of damage to the hulls.

Stratify: This can be done many ways. You can put the seeds in envelopes in the freezer or in a cold spot in the basement. One method calls for actually just digging a little ditch in the yard and laying all the seeds that need to be cold treated in it. Every kind of plant needs a certain length of time in the cold. If you are planting from saved seed and don’t have a seed packet with all the information, al lot of time a seed catalog or web site from a seed company will have the information that would have been on the seed packet reprinted. If not, try gardening books or web sites. I’d go with the books, since they have been vetted to a certain degree, and people writing web sites don’t have to be honest or realistic!

With the Kiss Me’s, I had good success last year by putting them in an aluminum cake pan with seed starting medium and wetting it down really well. I covered it with plastic wrap and set it on a shelf in the garage. The seeds I’m planting this year are saved from last year’s flowers, but because I saved my seed packet and stapled it into my garden book, I have all the planting information from the company plus my own notes about how long it actually took for the seeds to grow. They need to be kept out in the cold for at least 21 days. By that time, it will be mid to late March, and I will be starting my earliest seeds in flats and pots in the house. It’s all very exciting!

Late winter is also the time for making sure that the fish in the pond have a good year, too. There is a lot of snow coming down, and the pond has been frozen over a few different times this year. Each time, it has thawed almost completely after a week or two. This is the longest sustained period of time it has been frozen, and the snow is piling up. This is a problem, because the snow is deep enough to block any light. In the winter, the fish and plants are largely dormant, but not entirely. Even under ice, the plants in the water are carrying out some photosynthesis. When there is no light, the plants start to die, and decaying plant matter will consume the oxygen that the fish need to survive.

The solution for preventing a plant die-off and a potential fish kill is pretty simple: shovel the pond! You don’t need to do the whole pond. More like, just create bare “lanes” over the surface. Of course, this is not practical if the ice is not safe. If the ice is safe. it is kind of fun to scoot around on top of the ice. Remember, never go on ice that is less than four inches thick! The best ice is “thick and blue”. Don’t go on ice alone. Don’t go on any ice over moving water, and don’t go on at all if you’re not sure!