Infinite Egress

I have to admit it: if David Foster Wallace hadn't killed himself I most likely would not have picked Infinite Jest back up.  I had read the first hundred or so pages and expired -- I think I had just tried reading a footnote to a footnote on the dim A train while standing in rush hour traffic-- I returned it to my bookshelf and snorted not in this life pal (I eventually had to set the rule that I would only read the book at home to keep myself from getting too angry at it).

I can give myself at least enough credit to say that I was not re-attracted to the tome because of some swirling romantic myth about suicidal geniuses.  I wrote my senior thesis on Yukio Mishima and had enough of psychosis laden fiction to carry me into my senescence.  No I can say as callous as this sounds that what drew me back to Infinite Jest was the idea that there would never ever be another overly self-conscious 1000+ footnoted novel based entirely in the brain of very clever person.  The idea that David Foster Wallace was alive and well and producing more high-grade monstrosities comprised of authorial ego made me balk.  Having read Infinite Jest I can now say that my fear was unfounded. 

Infinite Jest is a terminal novel, a book built to exhaust its own conception so completely that anyone who dared to pick up any of its radioactively in-lit tropes would most likely be burned.  

Written in crystalline prose of exceeding vividness, the book proposes itself as both cancer and cure.  Contrived as an entertainment that requires the physical activity of flipping between the front and back of the book (as well as hefting its generous weight) it is meant to counteract the passivity in-built into our entertainment addicted society.  The irony of the conceit is that so much of Wallace's content is focused on addiction/recovery and behavioral control while he himself is wielding an almost unprecedented amount of authorial control over the reader.  The previously mentioned crystalline prose is no accident.  The novel is written in the Tolstoyan model: complete the image, deliver the picture, leave no letter unturned for the reader to fill in on his or her own. It would be near dastardly if  Wallace wasn't so ridiculously (and near-pathologically) self-aware.

Wallace is exceedingly contemporary.  No other writer I have read, including Don DeLillo, seems to have imbibed the present-day (of then 1996) quite so deeply as him.  Alloys, brand names, chemical compounds, ingredients, fabrics, polyresins, etc.  Wallace's writing is exact. His true passion is for precision.  He seems to pick up where Gaddis's use of the specialized language of the professional class leaves off (see G's A Frolic of His Own). The relentless contemporariness, self reflection and content elect this books as perhaps the first and last book of the Ultra-PostModern movement. Wallace's project was to convert the novel into a contemporary object, in the materialist sense of the word object.  A utensil.  

The list of ironies associated with this book is long.  Its uselessness is perhaps one of its most significant ironies. All of this vividness is used simply to light the benighted lives of its many characters, each physiologically, habitually or psychological predestined for addictive behavior. Completist and yes Maximalist, everything seems to transpire within this book while very little actually happens in situ-- this is where Wallace avoids the dastardliness of his control, the reader is invited to extend the amply quadrupled logic presented page after page to complete the far ends of the story and fill in gaps based on their reading. 

Wallace was without a doubt an architect.  My ambivalence for the book never fully lifted. I read dutifully, flipping ahead to remind myself that the end was in sight. And then it came, the end (which is no end-- this should not be a spoiler for anyone paying attention to anything happening in the book) and the book falls off the shelf and floats freely in my brain tying out its own little ends and keeping some of its own little mysteries, going about the business of completing itself and then I felt free-- free in a way of a giant weight being lifted  (pun intended?).  How can you rate a book that makes you feel so good to be done with it?  It is entirely Wallace's object and now that I am on the other side of I do feel the tragedy of Wallace's death.  

Weight Bearing Elements

The city stands on its trees. In early spring when the stick straight bareness begins to pubesce and bulb the buildings lose their winter prominence.  The bricks still stack all the way up to the sky, but their middles are missing, replaced by freshly minted leaves.  Brown grey branches end in elegant pink and white tips. Old bikes cannibalized down to their naughty bits lay chained to iron skirted guards, like the last reminders of winter's inhuman appetite.  The skeletons of conquistadors lay wrapped in strangling vines, speared by tall grass a mere mile shy of the fountain of youth. 

How many people can pass the same tree and have different thoughts? Shel Silverstein aside, what are the trees of New York?  The New Jersey wetlands do more to scrub the air in New York City than all of Bloomberg's million trees ever will.  The trees are under control.  Frederick Law Olmsted planted Central Park with the idea of a romantic garden in mind.  The trees were planted purposefully askance.  The grid gone spaghetti soft.

 

The trees break the sidewalk. The trees count your steps. Your stride fits between trees. The trees seldom show ill-use, outside of the occasional restaurant permanently celebrating Christmas with a wending choke of white lights plugged in year-round or sycamore trunk bearing a purple graffitied initial. 

The trees give your dog directions.  The trees hold scarves, hats and pilates balls. They get shaggy with blossoms, perfume bloated to over-ripeness.  They mark the seasons and track the sun.  They bend around corners and flick you the bird.  They hold onto rain showers and continue to drip for hours after.   

Treehuggers and treefuckers (and bear fuckers) beware: New York City's trees bear the weight of the whole hag-ridden Western world.  

Tying My Shoes

Occasionally my shoes come untied.  I don't generally find this to be a desperate problem.  I've never taken to heart the admonitions of parental types and shoelace-gazers that I will be more apt to trip and chip a tooth if my shoelaces are undone.  I am perfectly apt to trip and chip all my teeth at any moment of the day, not the least of which is when my shoelaces are undone.  

But now I'm walking down a fairly busy street and I have to wonder if someone else might trip over my shoelaces and if this is liability.  I for one do not have insurance against such things.  So rather than going into the poorhouse (I wonder how many families have ended up in the poorhouse because of their shoelaces?) I try to find an appropriate place to stop to tie my shoe. 

The problem being that as far as I can tell every surface in New York City is in play and really why do human flies need to climb up the sides of buildings? There is no more vulnerable position on a busy sidewalk than the crouch.  In the crouch even toddlers can run head-first full blast into you and knock you down, take your wallet and giggle.  But if I decide to post a foot up on a near-by implement, say a hydrant, then I am also in this indefensible flamingo pose.  But there's really no other choice.  The shoelace must be tied and guard must be let down for the brief time it takes the rabbit to go into the hole and around the bend, etc.  

The funny thing is I can never recall seeing anyone else over the age of six stopping on the sidewalk to tie their shoe.  Is this the sort of he thing the mind just ignores and moves on or am I just the only adult who never learned to tie a proper square knot?  

Blocking the Box

The city's rules are all plotted out in paint and light.  The city wears its own rules like a series of fading tattoos.  Driving, biking and walking in the city one quickly finds that the rules are more or less guidelines for idealized transportation.  Driving down second avenue, the lanes disappear. Occasionally dots and thin rules appear solely for the sake of confusing the motorist.  Then suddenly a gorgeous Sunday drive appears to your right, a road leading to verdant sun drenched canyons.  In New York?  Why not? Never mind that it's raining.  Cross two lanes without signaling and make that sharp right into paradise. When the subsidized firefighters arrive in a truck bearing a full-length video ad for Shrek The Musical you wake up just long enough to see that those hills were just a painted scene on the side of a green grocer (but how did those joggers and that guy on the recumbent bicycle get in there?).

The playground on the other hand has repurposed all of those lines and made hopscotch, and four square. Kids play red light green light imagining the unbridled thrill of stop and go traffic. The whole poisonous world dangles like a carbon monoxide piñata just out of reach and the collective thrill of imagining that it is indeed full of that strange secret energy that allows adults to take themselves seriously.  That juice that powers listening. A dozen red dodgeballs whiz across a single line drawn across the basketball court.

 

  

Panting Lines

There is a dog on every corner of the city.  Go out the front door and look.  One dog at least.  Rottweilers, Pitbulls, and Dobermen, alternating with Golden Retrievers, Yellow and Black Labs, Russian Wolfhounds, Greyhounds, Weimerauners, Burmese Mountain Dogs, Alsatians, Whippets, Scotties, St. Bernards, and Great Danes.  Bulldogs in rugby sweaters wearing derbies surrounded by defective pugs, long-haired schnauzers humping Pomeranians humping miniature pinschers.  A thousand poodles, spaniels, maltese, and terriers vanishing into chihuahua.       

They are there by dint of populist aggregate, by misplaced urges (parental or partner), by snowballing conformist compulsions.  They are there by desire-- people have chosen to bring dogs to the city at double or triple the human population  (or to match a quarter the purported rat population).  There is a brief period in the morning where central park belongs to dogs.  They are allowed off-leash between 6 and 9 on weekdays and humanity is proven secondary to caninity.  But now by dint of populist aggregate you can walk to your corner and grapple with a stranger's dog.  You can walk up to your corner dog, wrestle it to the ground and rub its belly until the legs kick with instinct.  Slake that brief flash of affection that would otherwise be spent hugging the pin oaks that grow from every sidewalk. You will notice that once you are satisfied and walk away feeling somewhat refreshed the dog will walk back to its designated spot: a perfectly painted outline of the dog where he or she will stand, sit or lay for the length of its shift waiting for the next person to walk by.

Arena Rock Death Cults of the 1980's Reprised

The age of arena rock irrevocably passed with the closing of the Cold War. It's a strange phenomenon, the culling of massive crowds into packed, over-heated and acoustically poor environments for the benefit of hearing a four or five piece band normally accompanied by some kind of pyrotechnic display and array of inflatable set pieces.  Whether or not this was the Me generation squandering the inheritance of Woodstock is beside the point.  The music was what it was and the people came by the boatload to experience it-- lit, high, twisted, garbage-fucked and skinned;looking for a lay or to fend off another dipshit hour riding the douche donkey to nowhere.  

It wasn't until I watched Live Aid 1985 in all of its un-glorious time-capsule-dom that I really saw what these spectacles were about.  The 80's mega-shows were all about megatons. Nuclear payloads.  The camera pans back and shows George Thorogood of all people playing for a swarming crowd of millions.  The concert itself, pulled together to bring aid to Africa gave people a reason to pay the entrance fee, but the concept itself is a pure symptom of the Cold War germ.  Crowds should gather.  People of like taste should stand side by side and lose their identity in the overwhelming superabundance of human flesh.  A dot entertained by the dots up there on the stage, trusting the face on the Jumbo-tron corresponds to the face on the stage. 

It was the last time that the population felt truly and horribly that entire swaths of civilization could be wiped out at a moment's notice.  Aids was also beginning to show its fangs around that time too.  It's difficult not to see a metaphor in Freddy Mercury's performance at Live Aid. Queens performance was hands down the greatest of the day.  It looked as if Freddy Mercury was the only person not entirely cowed by the unbridled multitude at his feet, that he was actually tapping into all of that strange feeling and ripping through his set.  But the multitude, the faceless crowd.  Freddy Mercury with his white duds, trim moustache, slicked back hair and stage hand in short shorts is the only one even marginally aware of the other side of the evening.  Having read Sontag's essay on AIDS and its metaphors, I do tread here lightly (though she wrote her book in a different climate as a form of political proscription, it is a bar set at an height for good taste).   If not as a metaphor then as a moment of imminent tension, of heightened unawareness: a man with a plague singing before untold legions-- some infected, most not.

The difference being AIDS, unlike death by neutron bomb, is death from incredibly intimate conditions.  It is in fact the polar opposite of death by neutron bomb (y'know as long as we're still on the scale of death and not talking about life-- which is the true polar opposite).  It changes the scenario of the untold millions cheering at Freddy Mercury's feet.  Suddenly they are people. They are capable of knowing one another.  They are bigger than the performance.  The crowd is in fact the true spectacle and the performance is only the slimmest of justifications.  In every other performance on the whole 16-hour Live Aid dvd set it is utterly apparent.  A crowd was found to dilute the entertainer's power.  The claim of over 3 million albums sold suddenly seems just that ludicrous as Phil Collins takes the stage before a crowd 82,000 people. 

The population of the United States labored from the 50's-80's always carrying at least an iota of the notion of mutually assured destruction in the backs of their heads.  The massive concert was a singular way to allow people to be together, to be a little less anonymous and to blow off steam. That system lost its meaning in the 90's.  Take the example of Woodstock II: a corporate re-imagining of that first far-away festival with $3 water, mud, and industrial music. It's little wonder rioting broke out.  After the threat of nuclear annihilation has passed the idea of bringing together thousands of young people suddenly seems like less of a good idea.  The parenting practices of the generation raised under the bomb suddenly seem built on sand.  The idea of living everyday for yourself and yourself alone--once the romantic mantra of the lost generation-- is suddenly shown as corrupt.  The public yearning for YTK, the millenial cults and suicide pacts were all symptoms of the vanished germ.  Some people didn't want to get well. Some wanted to crawl back into the Cold War as the force that brings meaning. So we got the last administration...    

The Freedom Cocksmoke Ltd by Mike Lyon

Houses seen from a train window reveal their private nature.  An unfinished expansion stapled over with plastic.  A dismantled car, rusting, unidentifiable make, some long forgotten pet project.  Garish plastic playground furniture.  Birdbaths filled with mud.  Sequestered behind high fences, hidden from the neighbors; the train passenger is afforded a special glimpse into the quiet, pathetic moments in the existence of a house.

Graffiti changes from town to town.  Underpasses and corrugated metal retaining walls burst with beautiful color here, suffer beneath shitty monochromatic signatures there.  Some towns clearly house artists of a finer caliber: discreet shading, gorgeous goofy characters, clever koans in mock typeset.  All glimpsed in the fraction of a second.  Absorbed, forgotten.

The forests are never beautiful.  The train tracks act as a magnet for the limitless junk littering the edge of the wilderness.  Discarded folding chairs, suspect barrels of ...? plastic cups by the millions, a crushed laundry basket, a Connect Four game board.

There must be a whole race of weird itinerant trash haulers, bundled in limitless layers of mismatched clothing, wandering through the woods, weaving close to the tracks in a perpetual sine wave, arbitrarily depositing refuse that overburdens their gargantuan rucksacks.  They all wear goggles, invisible if they want to be, mostly nocturnal.  It's no wonder you've never seen them, but they exist--who else would abandon that big red beach ball in the middle of nowhere?  The Trash Nomads played with it.  They tossed it in the air, jogged comically to bump it up like a volleyball.  They laughed and clapped sarcastically when it got stuck in a tree.  It was a little too pretty for them.  It made them depressed about their lifestyle choices, so they left it on the edge of the woods by the train tracks, so you could look at it.