the meaning you make

I started reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace in October. I finished it last night. I am not a slow reader. I read it almost every single day. It is a challenging book, is what I am getting at. And long. 981 pages; 1079 with footnotes. And the font isn’t that large and the margins aren’t that big and DFW isn’t much into paragraphs, but really likes abbreviations (without which we’ve speculated it could have doubled in length). I got a new dictionary because of (for) this book. Entire meetings of English Club were devoted to IJ. We were all reading it. It has been nice going through it with others, to share in the confusion and awe of DFW and IJ.

I don’t really know what else to say about it or where I would even begin. When I finished it, I just sat there and stared at the blank space on the lower half of page 981. I had known the end was coming. I’d read the last footnote with eager regret. I had often thumbed to 981 with a twinge of doubt that I would ever reach it (I had started IJ at least 3 times before). I texted Abdul who had finished it the previous week and while waiting for his response, I realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

I closed the book. I reopened it to the first page and started reading it again.

When Abdul responded he suggested I do exactly what I had done and then said the most perfect thing: “I feel like the story is just starting and I’m starving for more of that world.”

In the short non-fiction piece “Blue”, Mary B. Valencia subtly draws parallels between the alcoholic behavior of her lover that lands him in rehab and the home renovation phenomenon she finds herself entrenched in. The dismantling of two lives, their love and their home and the subsequent attempts at rebuilding (not all successful) is made only more powerful by the fact that it is not fiction.

Valencia has a seemingly effortless way of bringing the reader straight into the story: “I peeled away green painter’s tape from around the light socket and flicked the switch,” (45). Her tactile imagery alongside this everyday action makes me feel the tape under my own fingers. And later on my toes curl at this: “I dried off and walked downstairs without any clothes on. I never did that. I didn’t care that the back window had no curtain, that there were nails and sawdust on the floor, that a snake’s den of cable hugged the walls,” (47). I feel as though I am walking with her on that bare floor,welcoming the idea of physical pain to subside the emotional.

The story flashes between home renovations shows she becomes addicted to, fond and not so fond memories of the boyfriend (though even the fond ones give us glimpses of what is to come: while the two are racing another couple in canoes, “You steered sloppily, holding us back, but I kept counting”), not wanting to rid the house of him and then desperately trying to rid the house of him (46).

In the midst of finding hidden bottles and recalling fights, Valencia details a gentler moment: “I wished you had always been with me. That’s why I hung onto you us for so long, because of that moment when you loved me so perfectly,” (47).

Valencia weaves an undercurrent of change and possibility into each aspect of the story, you can choose not to get sober, you can add more storage space to accommodate the accumulation of your life, or you can start over, clean up. Even then, so concerned with what could be, you forget what is. She reminds us this can be a matter of our perspective: “You hated the chain link fence until I pointed out the visual depth. We weren’t constricted by the six-foot high wooden fences,” (48). We get to choose to see things the way they were or maybe, in a way, still are: “If you stood at the base of our pear tree, you could see an entire row of fruit trees – cherry, peach, apple – a stretched outline, a secret orchard in the city,” (48).

The final passage brings us into the garden, into the melting snow revealing items thought lost, and Valencia considers what she had found, what she could turn it into, and what it truly had been: “What was the yard like before these brick houses, garages and alleys? On the edge of this great lake, was there still a forest of tree roots under my feet?” (50).

And I didn’t even touch on the blue part… read it for yourself: “Blue” appears in the Fall issue of the Canadian journal PRISM international.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

~ Ernest Hemingway to a friend, 1950

I haven’t been able to get through a single book in months; since Factotum actually. I’ve started two Augusten Burroughs books, Life of Pi (a reread), Infinite Jest (for the millionth unsuccessful try), An Imaginary Life, and countless short story collections and journals. On a recent trip my father bestowed upon me several books to breakthrough my reader’s block. Hemingway finally did it.

Outside of school, I had never read Hemingway. I think I was too bedazzled by the likes of Thomas Pynchon, Wallace Stevens, and Kate Chopin in my American Lit class to delve into Hemingway. But the intrigue of a memoir set in 1920’s Paris starring Hemingway with appearances by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was great and the book delivers.

Hemingway’s voice is an easy one to fall into and images of him writing in Parisian cafés and meeting his literary contemporaries are incredibly romantic ones inspiring a great desire in me to quit my job(s) and devote myself to writing entirely. The food, drink, and book recommendations alone are worth the read. Plus you could plan an entire tour of Paris based on his comings and goings. While reading, I did a lot of putting the book down between chapters and staring off into space (one of my favorite pastimes), and part of that was wanting to savor Hemingway’s world. I didn’t want the book to end because I wanted to hang out with Hemingway longer and I knew, as anyone would know, that things would eventually turn dark.

After finishing A Moveable Feast, I Googled and Wikipedia-ed Hemingway and everyone else in the book. I was profoundly saddened, mourning his suicide as if it had just happened, and completely fascinated by the rampant alcoholism and mental illness that plagued him and his circle of friends. The power and limitlessness of self-destruction never ceases to amaze me.  I wonder if Hemingway thought of his father’s suicide as he pulled the trigger. I wonder if it made it easier or more difficult.

On that note, here are some not so dark parts (sometimes a little dark, I suppose) I liked:

On page 45, a bit about a false spring:

“This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”

Closely following that at the beginning of the chapter titled “False Spring” on page 49:

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

On page 62 about giving up betting at the races:

“When I stopped working on the races I was glad but it left an emptiness. By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

On writing, page 156:

“Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.”

So, find out where A Moveable Feast takes you, or maybe where you take it.

In Charles Bukowski’s Factotum we follow Henry Chinaski across the country from job to job (Chinaski makes an art form of getting fired), city to city, and woman to woman. Simultaneously, I am repulsed by and drawn to Bukowski. I am revolted by his characters, their habits, their alcoholism, and the way they treat each other.

Why he interests me is more complex. There is a definite loveliness in his writing, his word choice, his syntax, his subtlety. But ultimately, the very reasons I am disgusted by him are what make his writing appealing. His characters and the things they do are embarrassingly honest. They are human beings living in this world and he shows us the things they must do to get by, and it isn’t always pretty. And it shouldn’t be. Poverty isn’t pretty, alcoholism isn’t pretty, and in a shocking departure from the norm, he does not try to glamorize any of it:

I went and sat on the edge of the bed and rolled a cigarette. I hadn’t wiped myself very well. When I got up to look for a beer there was a wet brown stain. I went into the bathroom and wiped myself again. Then I sat on the bed with my beer and waited for Jan to awaken (118-9).

And then in the space of a few lines Bukowski can so quickly and quietly create a connection between Chinaski and one of his many co-workers:

“My brother is rich,” said Maurice. “He has disowned me. He doesn’t like my drinking. He doesn’t like my painting.”
“But your brother never met Picasso.”
Maurice stood up and smiled.
“No, he never met Picasso.”
Maurice walked back down the aisle toward the front of the store, cigar smoke curling back over his shoulder. He had kept my book of matches (175).

An empathetic Chinaski actually consoles Maurice, shows him how though he may not have the things his brother has, he does have things his brother doesn’t. The two men may be drunks working menial jobs, but with that comes what enables them to be an artist, a writer. But Bukwoski keeps us rooted in reality by reminding us they are still who we think they are: Maurice steals the matches, a small action that tells us Maurice is that guy who never has a light unless he has just jacked one from someone else.
Bukowski forces the reader to judge his characters; he does, Chinaski does. Consequently, this forces us to think about them and leaves us wondering how different these people really are from us, from the people around us.

There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren’t writers, or even cab drivers, and some men – many men – unfortunately aren’t anything (166-7).

I read Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut for the first time five years ago. I remember thoroughly enjoying it, but after rereading it I realize I apparently remember nothing about the story aside from a few vague images I could not find a place for again. I’d like to think that my reading and interpretive skills have improved (otherwise I’m not sure what I was doing while in school), but I fear that my memory is simply just as poor as I’ve suspected it is. Regardless, I have enjoyed SH5 again, as I always enjoy Kurt Vonnegut (even Galápagos).

SH5 is a book about Dresden. More specifically, the bombing of Dresden during WWII. Vonnegut was there. It’s not really his story though, as it is told through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim (who incidentally travels through time and is abducted by aliens). It’s about Dresden, and war, and people, and time. Time, according to the Tralfamadorians (the aliens), does not occur as we experience it:

“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.”

And when a person dies, they are not really dead, because they are “still alive somewhere and always will be.”

I couldn’t help but be reminded of “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges. In “Forking Paths” Borges explores the idea that everything that could happen, does happen, so there is a fork from each moment into each result that could occur, e.g.,

Gina meets Roger and falls in love and lives happily ever after.
Gina meets Roger and falls in love and murders him in a fit of insanity.
Gina meets Roger and falls in love and then falls in love with Sam.
Gina meets Roger and never see him again and on and on and on…

So, in “Forking Paths” all these things could happen, and would happen, simultaneously in another reality, or in dreams, or … somewhere. Not quite what Vonnegut does in SH5, but I think it is the suggestion that the “reality” we appear to feel, see, etc., isn’t the only thing we’ve got going on is what appeals to me so much.

So… read SH5, or reread it and find out if your memory is as bad as mine. AND read “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges. It is a short story that is definitely in a collection called Ficciones and may be included in others as well.