Capital T Truth, David Foster Wallace

I came to read David Foster Wallace after his death - actually because of his death. My introduction to him was through the April 18,2011 New Yorker article by Jonathan Franzen about DFW's suicide. They were great friends. The suicide broke Franzen's heart. I was moved by the article, and found a couple of short stories by DFW on the Internet which moved me further to read Infinite Jest. Can you believe it? I read the entire 1000 page book in the three weeks allotted by my local library. (I have since purchase a copy of it.) What a writer, what a thinker. And as I discovered tonight, what a speaker.

Here are a few memorable quotations from the phenomenal 2005 commencement address he gave at Kenyon College. This version was transcribed and published by The Economist.

 I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

In this address, he has been slowly, logically making his points, and by the time the above conclusion is reached, it hits with a force rather than as a cliche. This next paragraph follows in sequence - there's a jaw dropper in it.

 This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

 The address ends with the following:

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.  

He called this "The capital-T Truth: life BEFORE death". The address is not long and contains many profound ideas. It's worth a read.

A side note: Franzen claims that with his suicide, DFW was shooting not the "master", but those who loved him (family and friends) because he was incapable of accepting their gifts of love. He had capacity to give infinite love, but not to accept it. Franzen's article is long, but also is worth a read.

Dog Soldiers

How does a mild-mannered, middle-aged woman (me) get through a journey into hell like Dog Soldiers? It was a struggle. The saving grace was the meaty, philosphical reflections of its main characters on topics like death, the meaning of life, marriage and drugs.

This is a book about drugs, drug smuggling, drug users, drug addicts - not the sort of book I have any interest in. But what a story teller Robert Stone is - and what a story to tell.

This thriller takes place in the drug-crazy, late-Viet Nam days of the 70's. John Converse is a journalist in Viet Nam trying to find the creativity for a novel or a play by covering the war. As he is getting ready to return to Oakland, CA, and to his wife, Marge, and their young daughter, he is talked into buying and smuggling into the US, 4 kilo of very pure heroin. To him, it sounds easy. It sounds harmless. Little does he know. The heroin gets there before he does with the help of a psychotic friend, Hicks, who is making passage to the US on a mostly-empty military cargo ship. Before Hicks leaves Converse's house where he has not only dropped off the heroin, but seduced/raped Converse's wife, things are already out of control. Two federal agents acting on the wrong side of the law bust in the door and try to steal the heroin. The monstrous strength and psyche of Hicks fends them off. He steals the stash, Marge and Converse's money. Drops off the daughter in a safe location and runs for the LA area desert. The chase is on.

Stone does a terrific job of painting the characters. Marge takes tickets at a porn movie and injects a large part of her salary into her arm. Hicks is part zen adeapt, part monster, presumably the result of having lost his entire troup during a one-sided battle in the jungle. Converse is mostly just a loser with an adict for a wife, a career gone wrong and little heart remaining. Stone manages to pull empathy for this trio from the reader by creating bad guys that are ever-so more evil than them in the two agents who take up the chase, kidnapping and torturing as part of the game.

But as I said, I'm not a fan of action books. It was the philosphic musings I enjoyed. Here is an early sample. Converse has just arrived in the US and discovered that his house is trashed and his wife and daughter are gone. Hicks is nowhere to be found. Converse heads out of his house and sees a tan car following him. He meditates on the death he sees in his near, short future.

If he had just been a bit less timid in Viet Nam, he thought, he might be honorably dead -- like those heroes who went everywhere on motorbikes and died of their own young energy and joie de vivre. Now it would be necessary to face death here -- where things were funnier and death would be as peculiar and stupid as everything else.

 Dog Soldiers is by no means on my favorites list, but I'm glad I read it. I would not recommend it to folks not going through the list. It's a hard, hard tale to read.

The Power and the Glory

I found Graham Green's, The Power and the Glory to be a bit tedious. But it was a book that I was glad to have read, even though I did not enjoy reading it. The story tells of a Catholic priest who is being  hunted during the anti-clerical purge in a southern state of Mexico. To get a sense of it, the American TV series, The Fugitive, was loosely based on the novel.

Why was I glad to have read it? The character of the priest was brilliant. What was tedious about the book? The chase. Not-for-me, the story that enthralled millions of people over a several-year period. So goes taste. But I recommend the book to you.

The priest is an interesting character. He's a coward, whiskey-priest, sire to a 10 year-old child. He could marry and go free. He could cross the border into another state and find safe-haven. Instead, he shows up in towns and villages offering confessions, baptisms, marriages and masses to the local residents.

This pattern goes on for several years until an edict comes from on-high to track him down and execute him. A man simply called, The Lieutenant, takes charge of the hunt and begins to take hostages from the Catholic towns he searches as a way of putting pressure on the priest. Some of the hostages are executed. The priest searches his soul and attempts to do the right thing, but his need for whiskey continues to betray him until he finally realizes that he must leave the state or die.

It is his fear of death that he must come to terms with. He fears both the pain of death and the prospect of hell if he dies before confessing his sins to another priest. The plot has some interesting twists toward the end of the book that allow the priest to look deeply into psychological self and grow from that sight.

In the end, the priest is an honorable character worthy of a great book of his tale.

The Sot-Weed Factor

There are only a few books on the Time 100 list that I do not plan to read. I opted out of A Clockwork Orange (although I saw the film) and The Blood Meridian due to excessive violence. I found two other books alarming in various ways (Lolita and Naked Lunch), but managed to complete them (or nearly so) anyway. Such was not the case with The Sot-Weed Factor.

I came to The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth, without any prejudice. I missed the not-so-soft-porn illustration on the back cover of my used-British version of the book showing half-nude women being tied up and raped. I also missed the quote next to it from Norman Shrapnel of The Guardian:

"Here be rapes pursuits, swivings, walking of the plank, epic poems, fantastical changes of identity, deep philosophical discussions, more pursuits, more rape."

Had I seen the back cover and blurb, I would have hesitated before opening the book. As it was, I didn't get much further than the first 30-40 pages before becoming thoroughly disgusted with it. I browsed the remainder of the book and decided to give it up. I can see that some will like it -- love it, as a matter of fact. I am sure that Barth has excellent social commentary buried in those sordid pages. I wasn't interested in dumpster diving to find those pearls buried amidst the garbage. It's a matter of taste.

Barth tells the tale of an innocent named Ebenezer Cooke who is a man of high morals, high aspirations but a weak spirit. Cooke spends his free time either gambling or working on an epic poem and both interfere with his earning his keep. He is an easy mark for the miscreants of the world who continuously show up on his doorstep. Although he tries to keep his affairs from his father, an uptight American tobacco farmer who now lives in England, a series of misfortunes befall Cooke and his woes reach his father's ear. In spite of his pleas for forgiveness, he is forced to move to Maryland to manage the family tobacco business.

There is an eventful journey to Maryland and an eventful life in the sot-weed (tobacco) factory. Barth does not treat this hero any better than he did Giles, in The Giles Goat Boy. Cooke is subjected to countless indignities everywhere he turns. He tries to keep to morally high ground, but in the end, the experiences change him deeply. This is a coming-of-age story (parody) that moves in the wrong direction. The book, true to Shrapnel's review, is bawdy: filled with rapes and atrocities.  But it's a parody and all is forgiven in a parody, isn't it? Well, that may not be true, but then one doesn't have to read it, do they. In the end, I chose not to.

I am glad to be rid of the book. On to something more suitable....