A Supposedly Posthumous Fun ...... by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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Horse painting; property of the author.

ED: Are you another to proclaim that we are literarily doomed, or less than that predictive of yet another prediction of the death of the novel?

DFW: Not at all. First, the definition of a novel varies by source. That alone makes a death diagnosis problematic. Second, any novel I know of is a book which has not yet acquired the attributes of Pinocchio. Since it has never “lived,” to speak of its death is tantamount to discussing the death of a rock.

Third, when the best writers go to Hollywood in search of a regular paycheck, it becomes more difficult for what remains to continue the non-tradition, perhaps thereby suggestive of some mathematical function which tends downward, but does not and cannot ever reach zero, Bret Easton Ellis be damned by drowning

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in money. In an attempt to avoid the obvious banalities previously stated, the best metaphor I know of for being a fiction-writer in the middle of writing a long book is Don DeLillo's "Mao II," where he describes the book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer. It is dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer's trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it'll get; the writer's complete attention. The inherent system often works. The damaged infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he's working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it; a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception. Yes, understand; grotesque because imperfect. And yet it's yours, the infant is, it's part of you, and you love it and fondle it and wipe the cerebro-spinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left. You have only one clean shirt left because you haven't done laundry in like three weeks because finally this

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one chapter or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of coming together and working and you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it; but also you hate it; hate it because it's deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in your own imperfect parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity, since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of those babies in catalogue-ads for Infantwear, perfect and pink and cerebro-spinally continent, and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of you on all levels; and so you want it dead or out of your sight, even as you dote and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether. The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender and moving and noble and cool. It's a genuine relationship of a sort; and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you; maternal parts and dark parts. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and

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try to face the world. But wanting other people to love it, now, means hoping that others somehow won't see the hideous infant as you see it; as a grotesque, malformed betrayal of the very possibilities that spawned it. You hope very much they'll look at it and pick it up and dandle and coo and fall in love with something they see as pink and whole, as the sort of transcendent miracle that only whole babies and unwritten books are. So you're in a bit of a dicey position. You love the infant and you want others to love it, but that means that you hope others don't see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people.

You want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection. Or else you don't want to fool these people. What you want is them to see and love a lovely, miraculous, perfect, ad-ready infant and to be right, correct, in what they see and feel. You want to be terribly wrong. You want the damaged infant's hideousness to turn out to have been nothing but your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that'd mean you were crazy; that you have been stalked by and recoiled from hideous deformities that in fact, others so persuade you, aren’t there at all; surely meaning you're at least a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal. But worse; it'd also mean you see and despise hideousness in a thing you made and love. And this last, best hope is that all this would represent something way worse than just very bad parenting. It would be a terrible kind

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of self-assault, almost self-torture. But that's still what you most want; to be completely, insanely, suicidally wrong. .......

But it's still all a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong.

ED: I almost invariably get my best ideas while in the bathroom.

So now I keep a pen and paper towels in there, in order to make the difficult transition from inspired conception to perfect book actualization. I stress book, as I have not yet been pregnant with child.

The view of the audience chosen by the editors, in an apparent display of their television acumen, reflected the largest section of it. Invariably, the big-city-vacationers from the outskirts of places like Lubbock were hooting uncontrollably upon having heard a toilet-based joke. The editors missed the soon to be MFA’s doing precisely the same thing in a more high-brow applicable, post-modern manner; that, of course, being enhanced by the derisive aspect in the irony of their Gassian guffaws allegedly residing in their collective heads.

DFW: I might have suspected that you may be at your best while in the defecatory position. If I ever write “Infinite Jest II,”

be assured and congratulated that you will be a character who further depresses Hal.

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ED: Thank you. You shouldn’t take it too personally. You just happened to be there. That’s all. To again change pace; while your “Infinite Jest” explored the upper registers of amusement; and concerned a film so entertaining that it literally enthralls audiences to death; your later “The Pale King” was less exuberant; exploring the depths of boredom and stupor. It's set in what is considered one of the dullest places on earth, the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois. “The Pale

King's” narrator seemed to be a version of yourself. He whispered that he witnessed a sinister takeover in Peoria; towards the end of the Reagan '80s; a shadowy contingent of bureaucrats took control. But in order to understand the massive political, financial, and philosophical implications of this coup we must wade through vast amounts of extremely user-unfriendly information. One might interpret this as you having entered the “Conspiracy Non-Entertainment” industry.

DFW: Yes, one might, if one ignores the widely recognized factoid of the well-paper-protected right wing shadow government exceedingly expanded under Reagan. But, that one might also have chosen to ignore that the book was totally under the control of Michael Pietsch. I mostly enjoyed working with Michael; but one has to recognize that his primary thrust toward the maximization

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of book sales is not entirely mine. If you were able to get copies of the first two hundred pages I left, you would have to conclude that my thrust was more personal and artful than that of Alex Jones. Pietsch was quoted as saying; “Wallace had not indicated a plan for the book's overall structure. The author wanted the book to be non-linear and challenging. There was no obvious or straightforward way to order the manuscript.” From that, it is obvious that the structure and order was not provided by me. Again this is no criticism of Michael. He was stuck with a task and he is not me. That was the requisite extent of his executive responsibility.

ED: Indeed, Michael Pietsch did say; “When I first saw it in November of 2008, it was literally thousands of pages, of many types; typewritten pages; handwritten pages, and pages in workbooks. They'd been assembled in wire baskets and in plastic tubs. His wife and agent had gone through his office and pulled everything they could find in any sort of file with the name Pale King on it, and anything else that seemed to be part of the book he'd been working on for all these many, many years.

This was what I tried to work with.”

DFW: Kudos to Michael again. And again it is as much his book as mine.

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ED: Can you identify the parts which are yours?

DFW: Outside of having said that I considered it a more personal statement rather than a public one; no. I might be able to fatigue you and everyone by going through it line by line, indicating which part was me. But, besides the rude tedium induced, my faulty memory will no doubt produce inaccuracies.

ED: You introduced yourself as a character for the first time in

“The Pale King.” Why?

DFW: No good reason. I could have named the character Barney Google and it would have had the same effect. It may have been a momentary need to call the character something coupled with a complete breakdown in creativity intended to be later changed, or a commercial deference to the po-mo guys, or a goof on them.

Probably all of the above and whatever other motivations you might imagine.

ED: Maybe it's a sign that people miss Wallace's consciousness so much that I often hear people ask what he would have written about WikiLeaks or Twitter. More than so many writers, your work embodies the Internet age with its stylistic variance, its

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nonlinear structure, its obsession with pop culture; and yet tragically you have missed out on so much of what has developed.

So what does it mean that we're moving forward into unknown cultural territory without one of our wisest and most generous interpreters? How would you describe what we've lost by losing your voice?

DFW: Oh, come on. If you get me crying I’ll melt all my mummy bandages. You've posited that question so carefully, I feel like you've answered it for yourself. I think I'm not going to add anything to it. I'm sorry. I don't have the words.

ED: I’ll dare be persistent. If you were 25 years old today, what would you be doing on the literary scene?”

DFW: Much of what I previously wrote could be characterized as collegial with a mock professorial tone. This technique effectively handcuffs most of those not having attended college and jeopardizes the possibly positive views of collegians. Were I to start again, which is as likely as Leif Eriksson being credited with having discovered the new world, I’d probably try to ingratiate myself into Arthur Graham’s burgeoning Goodreads based cartel, and try to write like a funny, more accessible addlepate. Arthur Graham and his minions are doing some

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interesting eclectic things. He has gotten a head start; but I’ve been able to learn some things quickly.

Please allow me to read a ribald manifestation of puerile sentiment I did recently.

Kenny’s Dance

In the course of entertaining my youthful recollections I must mention another illustrious group of people from my home town of early and thereby fundamental twenty-one years; the Vanilla Fudge. No, sorry. This is not about Lydia; my thirteen year old half black-half Latino love; the significant segment of the reference to me as she was sixteen going on forty at the time; and I am still quite uncomfortable in openly conveying matters of the heart or crotch to strangers. If you have some sort of problem with that, I invite you to take it to my place of partricianism where you will swiftly learn to mind your own business; or else chop-chop, pre-Asian considerations of the term or terms.

The Diana-Ross-updating Fudgies were all from my interrial peninsular paradise or claimed to have had that status. They supposedly lived uptown somewhere, but I didn’t know of them.

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Somebody who lived up there told me that they were a bunch of glue-heads. That makes sense as their music sounded that way to me.

Some sources sufficiently credentialed to write liner notes on those decades prior pop musical compilations hawked by Time or Bazookan Psychedelic Groovy Celebrations credit the Vanilla Fudge with having been the inventor or a pioneer of psychedelic music. There’s no home town boy worth his adjacent jelly water gonna knock a good scam; but the statute of limitations set in a long time ago. See, it’s simple. Psychedelia is out there and glue is bogged down.

According to the Wiki I recently researched, Vanilla Fudge was managed by Phillip Basile of the Lucchese crime family. That’s not entirely surprising. They used to be so close mouthed about this stuff, as I knew his daughter Marcy for a while, and she never told me shit about the Fudge connections.

Anyway, back on the glue aspect, Vanilla Fudge took prior hit songs; the most memorable perhaps the Supremes “You Keep Me Hanging On,” and slowed them down like a 78RPM record playing at 33RPM, and added some slurring voice and heavy, decelerated guitar. At one point they were so big that Led Zeppelin, even

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fortified by their Yardbirds theft, opened for them and probably picked up on a lot of their shit, as was one of their talents.

In my calculated wariness, I’ll confess that I never personally did glue, and am therefore suspect in my assertions regarding the connection between it, the Fudgies, Basile, psychedelia, and the Led Yardbirds; but I’ll tell you what. My pal, Kenny-down-the-block was fucked up on it more often than the old bats in babushkas went to church.

One time the whole crew of us were hanging on the fire escape in the schoolyard in the dark, bullshitting about all the good lovin’ we didn’t get and said we did, not to be a downer. This time somebody brought a forerunner to a boom box called a tape player. He must have been bored with all the shit stories, as he drowned them all out, by blasting the fuck out of “You Keep Me Hanging On.” Unowumsayin? Like the vibrations were producing a distortion that seemed sufficiently physical to produce a redundantly visible air wave assault on your head. Far fuckin’

out and far fuckin’ in.

You should have seen fucking Kenny-down-the-block. He was back in Eden. He took off his shoes and socks, said he was a hippy, and just started doing a slow sort of dance all over the asphalt

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and the un-swept broken glass. Fucked up his feet like two weeks-worth, but in the barefoot dancing moment did not give the slightest bit of a deference to the soon-to-be-removed broken glass and the unseen foul raspberries in anyone’s ass.

Big John was trying to make him stop, but Kenny just said; “Fuck off, man. Mind your own fucking business.” Since “Mind your own fucking business” is commandment numero uno where I come from, Big John fucked off and Kenny’s feet got fucked up for a while.

That’s fucking poetry.

ED: Fucking poetry indeed. This Arthur Graham you mentioned? I’m not familiar with the name.

DFW: You will be if he doesn’t first tell everyone to go fuck themselves.

ED: Our time is almost up. Are you the real David Foster Wallace?

DFW: No. Can’t you see? I’m just another mummy, this one hawking for the DFW Brand. Don’t fall for the hype. I’m free now. You’re much too old to continue making the same mistake.

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The mummy stood up and staggered off stage as the scrap-iron, bottom-weighted, gelatinously burgundy curtain started the descent destined to culminate in its inevitable dull thud. Evan remained in his seat. He sat there in the freshly supplied, novel darkness with his silent mouth wide open and suffered the same letdown that the audience felt. They shuffled out, un-necessarily squinting through the freshly supplied, novel, caliginous light provided by the flickering overheads, grumbling a bit more than when they had come in.