2 posts tagged “david foster wallace”

The other day when I wrote that post about books, I was trying to find an actual quote from that David Foster Wallace book online because I already took it back to the library.  I couldn't find any from that book (I don't think that's one of his more quotable) but I found some other great quotes from books I haven't read yet.  Is that posery, quoting from books you haven't read yet?  Well some of them were from interviews and stuff too.  I loved this one.

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."

Sounds kind of familiar, I'm pretty sure lots of people have said it before, from like C.S. Lewis to Bob Dylan ("you gotta serve somebody") but I like how it's put here. 

Another one made me think of a lot of entertainment review blogs and other blogs I read where (and this kills me) they seriously cannot actually like anything without being called big naive sentimentalists.  Their raving reviews sound a lot like this: "this movie was not quite as horrible as I thought it would be" or "So I didn't hate this one, even though I should have because of X and Y higher education that I have" (because more education means less excuses to ever like anything, ever), or whatever.  People are getting ridiculous about having to be above every single thing out there or they risk looking like a sucker or a chump or a mindless herd animal.  Voltaire has that whole part about how does that make your life richer, never being impressed by anything, or are you cheating yourself out of happiness?  Anyway, he says it better than me:

"Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? 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. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years."

Ok next time I'll try not to make a whole post out of borrowed words, but whatever.  Better than nothing, right?

I just finished this YA book I borrowed from Anna Claire called Birdwing by Rafe Martin, which is like a continuation or sequel to a Grimm's fairy tale.  It was kind of weird and clunky but somehow also super engaging, which I don't know how that works.  I guess they just created some characters that I really liked and wanted to know more about, even if it was all woven in kind of a weird way.  So overall I'd totally recommend it, especially because it's quick and easy, even if it had a few hiccups in the telling of it.

For Christmas I got two copies of the complete novels of Jane Austen, so I took one of them back and exchanged it for On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I've sort of dipped my toes into both so far and I really love both of them, but for totally different reasons.  Ian McEwan is like full entire pages of absolute poetry, and it's so romantic and beautiful yet posh and English.  JSF is more like if you were in a car with a 9-yr-old in the back seat who is both unendingly chatty and incredibly bright.  He's hilarious and kind of ADD, but also has moments of this totally childlike sadness and wisdom that can break your heart. 

I don't know what it is lately, but I've been reading so many books that can literally have me like fighting back tears one paragraph and laughing out loud the next.  Seems like they're usually in the perspective of a kid though too, so I guess that's the key.  But done well.  A couple of other ones I read like that recently were Eggs by Jerry Spinelli and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.  I'd also recommend both of those.  Just go read them in one of the chairs at B&N with a latte or whatever, they're pretty quick reads.  Ok but disclaimer for the Alexie book -- it's kind of... I don't know, PG-13 sometimes?  Or not, I don't know.  It's probably a pretty accurate depiction of a 13-yr-old boy.  Maybe.  I never was one. 

Another one I recently read was called Everything and More: a Brief History of <infinity> but it had the little symbol, by David Foster Wallace.  It was kind of math/philosophy/logic/history, not exactly like a summer beach read but totally fascinating and oddly hilarious.  I'm sure it was a practically impossible book to write, because I do feel like it was probably pretty accessible to newbies (well, you'd probably need at least a little college math) and brainiacs.  I can't really speak for the brainiacs though.  He'd have these little footnotes (DFW?  Footnotes?  No way!) that could either be filling in gaps for the less knowledgeable or adding even more depth for the more knowledgeable so you could kind of customize.  Made me excited to read one of his novels once I get it back from Susanna, he's just so readable and challenging at the same time.  My favorites were how he constantly refers to particular aspects of math or theorems in terms of their "sexiness," or how he'll say something about the relative futility of a certain mathematical paradigm and how that's why he's just not going to go into it, and then round it off with an uber-professional "Deal."  This one might not be for everybody but it's probably for more people than you'd think.  And it's a nice review of the ole higher-level calc.

So from YA to infinity...  I guess I'll wrap this up.