deep in my heart i am warrior.

(here is another bit i wrote elsewise, posted here just to give apsi a half-reviving half-breath. things are busy and don’t look to get less so for some time. (i got a job, a writing job, with an actual desk, and a laptop and a salary and responsibilities. also the job has artwork on my desk, 3 big pieces, placed there by the “senior vice president of non-value-added activities” which will remain there until someone else gets hired, probably a few months out. Among these pieces is an 18” x 24” full-color glossy tour book, entitled Bette Midler - Da Tour, and it is breathtaking---is proud and joyful and relentless in its celebration of mid-80s bette. even as i type she lurks, just beyond my monitor, primping her short perm, cooing at me, staring at me with those salacious eyes, equal parts manatee and sucubus. it's a good job.))

The first bits I really connected with in brief interviews with hideous men the title stories, of which there are several installments, and are structurally similar in that one (hideous) man talks and another party’s queries go unstated:

Q.

‘It wouldn’t be so embarrassing if it wasn’t so totally fucking weird. If I had any clue about what it was about. You know?’

Q….

‘God, now I’m embarrassed as hell.’

Q.

My initial fascination was so strong because it related to me: the opening pages of my story Dear Fat Kid, employ a similar device when Hal, the narrator, is on the phone with his father, who speaks only in em dashes. Most of the interviews are short, less than five pages, and the longer ones began to lose me. As a whole I felt the interviews came up short, not for their context-free nature but because any one interview was weighed down by the context of the interviews on either side of it—these are not happy or joyful dudes, and with the exception of the one guy who involuntarily shouts “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” every time he comes, they’re pretty hateable. But they’re interesting has hell.

This is because David Foster Wallace is a goddam virtuoso. In the end, that’s much of what I have to say about these pieces as a whole: he vamps with a mixture of ambition and clarity and ethic that brings to mind Charlie Parker or Miles Davis (both of whom I’ve been pretty newly introduced to, and whose structural expertise is so strongly if implicitly at the base of their improvisations that I’ve been playfully but recurringly taken with the idea of the framework that must underlie any significant creative work), and though almost every time I pick up Wallace’s writing I regret that he sets the bar for connecting with his work as high as he does, when the time comes to put the book down I don’t want to—the connection has formed (given his penchant for medical analogy, Wallace might say metastasized. Given my own penchant for picking up an analogy and wringing every last bit of life out of it, I’ll note that Miles Davis has become a staple accompaniment in my intellectual life—some of his work, that is. Kind of Blue and Live at the Plugged Nickel and Birth of the Cool have tirelessly sustained my attention, but I can’t listen to Bitches Brew while I’m writing, or reading, or riding on the rackety city bus—the sounds are unrelenting, fully harsh, and require not just focus but an acclimation period, a willingness to throw my hat in the ring and sit till I’m ready).

As taken as I was by the Brief Interviews stories, the mountaintop moment of the book came for me in Octet, a series of five bits of “belletristric fiction” each labeled as a Pop Quiz, in which a scenario is related to me, the reader, and at the end a question is asked (eg, “Q:(A) Is she a good mother. (B)(optional) Explain whether and how receipt of the information that the lady had herself grown up in an environment of unbelievably desperate poverty would affect your response to (A).) It’s in the final part of this piece, PQ9, that he does two alarming structural things: he goes off the deep end in terms of “S.O.P. metatext”—it has 17 footnotes; and he puts you in his shoes—the first line is “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer.” It’s a crazy and difficult piece, and it caused me to start taking notes before I’d read its (seemingly) modest 12 pages through for the first time. Not until after I’d digested it some did I see the neatest trick of the whole bit: Wallace actually succeeded not just in getting me to care about the central human theme of Octet, nor just to sympathize with his struggles in writing the piece, but too he successfully put me in his mind at the time of writing more than any writer has ever done—more than Lamott with boy and her birds, more than Dillard with her squirrels and trees and windowless rooms. I’m excited to dig in to his essays when I get the opportunity.