I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THURSTON MOORE-in studio at KEXP, March 11, 2008 (2008).

This interview was headlined ‘Thurston Moore: Not a “Real Guitar Player”?’ which is pretty funny.  The Sonic Youth guys have been defying conventional guitar playing for years.  And then in 2008 Thurston put out a solo album called Trees Outside the Academy, a beautiful delicate album of acoustic guitar songs.

The interview covers this very subject and concludes that maybe back when they started he wasn’t a guitar player, but now, 25 years later, he certainly is.  Moore is charming and funny and relates a very amusing story about being on the cover of Guitar Player and then embarrassing himself in front of one of his idols.

But this download is all about the songs.  Thurston (and violinist Samara Lubelski–who plays great accompaniment, but doesn’t really get any on air time to speak) play four songs from Trees: “Sliver>Blue,” “The Shape is in a Trance,” “Frozen Gtr” and “Fri/End.”  He sounds great in this setting, especially under close scrutiny.  I’d always assumed that there was a lot of improv in the SY guitar world, so to hear him play these (admittedly not difficult) songs flawlessly is pretty cool.  I actually wondered if he’d be hesitant (he admits the acoustic guitar is a fairly new thing for him), but not at all (although he says he screwed up on a chorus, but I never heard it.

It’s a great set and its fun to hear Thurston so casual.

[READ: April 14, 2011] “Farther Away”

The subtitle of this essay is “‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude.”  As with Franzen’s other recent essays, this one is also about birding.

Franzen explains that he is hot off the work of a book tour (for Freedom) and is looking for some solitude.  He decides to travel by himself to the island of Alejandro Selkirk, a volcanic mass off the coast of Chile.  The island is named after Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish explorer who is considered the basis for Robinson Crusoe.  As such, Franzen decides to travel to the remote island, decompress and read Robinson Crusoe while he’s at it.  The locals call the island Masafuera.

I haven’t read Robinson Crusoe as an adult, so I don’t know the ins and outs of the story.  Franzen has a personal resonance with the story because it was the only novel that meant anything to his father (which must say something about Franzen’s father, no?).  The upshot of what it meant to Franzen’s father was that his father took him and his brother camping a lot as a way to get away from everything.

However, for Franzen, on his first experience of being away from home for a few days (at 16 with a camping group), he had terrible homesickness.  He was only able to deal with the homesickness by writing letters.

When he arrives on Masafuera, Franzen’s writing really takes off.  He has some wonderful prose about this treacherous space.  Although he comes off as something of a yutz for relying on a Google map to learn about the terrain and for bringing an old GPS which has more or less run out of battery.

He also seems pretty foolish for wanting to sleep out on the mountainside in a tent rather than in the shelter on the island (his manliness is pretty well depleted when his whole assembly almost gets washed away by the rain).  He does prove his mettle by searching for the rare native bird, the Masafuera rayadito. However, in trying to prove to himself that he hike the absurd trail, in the fog and the wind, he nearly gets killed by falling off of the side of a cliff.

It is this brush with death that leads Franzen to talk about David Foster Wallace.   Well, actually it is his trip to Masafuera that initially brings DFW’s name into the article.  Franzen and Wallace were very close friends.  When Wallace’s widow heard that Franzen was going to this island, she asked him to bring a matchbook full of DFW’s ashes with him, to spread around on this remote location.

It is Franzen’s close friendship with Wallace that leads to the hardest portion of the article for any fan of Wallace’s.  I’ve been reading a lot of reactions to this piece and many Wallace fans are offended that Franzen would say the things he does about Wallace.  But the thing that lovers of Wallace’s words have to realize is that Franzen was Wallace’s close friend.  He knew the man. And unless the average reader knew him as well, all we know about him is what he wrote.

I love Wallace’s work, and I want to think that he would like me as much as I like the person I have created from reading his work.  I met him for all of maybe 90 seconds once.  He seemed nice.  By the same token, I met Sarah Vowell for about 90 seconds once, she seemed (surprisingly) not so nice.  Both of these fleeting meetings at book signings have left lasting impressions about the writers, but I’d be a fool to think it was a meaningful insight into either of them.

Franzen says wonderful things about Wallace.  He gives us a few small insights into his sense of humor (I loved the joke about “paragon,” and DFW signed a copy of his book to Franzen by drawing a giant erection on it–I hope that makes it into Wallace’s archives), but more importantly, he talks about him as a friend would.  A friend who is hurt and sad, but who also knew the man.  He tells us that DFW’s actual character was

more lovable–funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies–than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him (90).

And after reading this you settle in for what you assume is going to be Franzen’s remembrance of his friend as a great author.

So, when Franzen says things like “the David I knew less well, but still well enough to have always disliked and distrusted, was methodically plotting his own destruction and his revenge on those who loved him” (92), we recoil.  Is he saying something negative about the man?  And Franzen continues with “The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms” (90).

And as much as I don’t want this person whom I respected (is there a word for such a person?  Wallace would certainly have known) to be brought down off his pedestal, at the same time, I didn’t know him at all.  He could have been a class-A douche.  Indeed, my first thought upon hearing that he killed himself was that he was an asshole for doing that to his wife.  As Franzen says, “The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed” (90).  So who am I to be mad at Franzen for revealing a truth I would have no way of knowing.

My father’s spent the last years of his life in a haze of alcoholism.  He didn’t bathe, he didn’t shave, he embarrassed me so much I had to move out of the house.  He was as far from the man who raised me and whom I loved with all my heart as a man could be.  And I felt betrayed that he gave into this addiction and let himself go, even if I wasn’t around as much as I could have been, even if I was just as guilty of abandoning him as he was of abandoning himself.  Before he died, I imagined the eulogy I would say.  I planned to tell the truth to everyone and feelings be damned.  That this man before us was no more your friend or my father than any stranger on the street.

But what I found was  that most people knew that.  He had alienated so many people with his behavior, that people didn’t think of him as highly as they used to.  He pushed away friends and family.  I wasn’t the only one who felt betrayed.  But I also didn’t have the courage to say it out loud.

With distance and age, I have come to forgive my father (and heap more guilt on myself).  But the truth is the truth.  And it hurts.  I didn’t know Wallace at all.  Franzen did.  He knew far more than I ever will about the man.  And whatever I may think of Franzen is irrelevant.  I have to trust his word as a friend of Wallace.

As for what I think of Franzen, he has written (and I have read) far more of these personal memoir/essay things than any writer that I was willing to read.  I recently learned not to trust that DFW’s essays spoke the truth (the first article he wrote for Harper’s, which is ostensibly about is childhood was full of fictions).  So, perhaps I am foolish for thinking that that’s the real Franzen in his essays.  If that really is him in the essays, then Franzen seems like a decent yet flawed man.  I’m not sure I’d want to be friends with him (it seems like being friends with any famous person sucks), but he seems self-deprecating enough to make me think he’s not an asshole.  (Of course, I missed all of the Oprah hoopla from years ago so that doesn’t play into my picture of him).

So, whether or not Franzen is a trustworthy narrator, whether or not he is a decent person, I’ll likely never know.  But again, he is writing as a friend who is in pain.  And the key word is friend, a friend who also clearly read and cherished DFW as a writer.

So Franzen says one thing about Wallace’s writing which really struck home.

The curious thing about David’s fiction though, is how recognized and comforted, how LOVED, his most devoted readers feel when reading it…. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love.  Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning , have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe.  What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing an abstract or spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent [like] the psychopath in the last of the interviews with hideous men (90-91).

Franzen goes on to say that Wallace feared love or more to the point, feared that he was unlovable.  This is something I’ll never know about him, so I’ll trust Franzen’s word.  It seems ridiculous to think of someone as talented as DFW, with so many fans who “love” him thinking he was unlovable.  But as Franzen argues “How easy and natural love is if you are well!  And how gruesomely difficult–what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be–if you are not!” (91).

It’s powerful and painful to think that someone you like (or love or respect) could be so stupid about love, especially someone who seemed so insightful about the human condition.  And it even makes me a little angry that I “fell for” something that DFW was selling if he didn’t believe it.  And then I remember, that even if he couldn’t feel love, he let me see love both in his fiction and in his descriptions about others.  Well then so what if he couldn’t see it for himself.  I don’t hate Ender’s Game because I found out that Orson Scott Card is a raging homophobe.

Admittedly, Wallace was different than Card.  And they are very different authors even for me, since I have read only one of Card’s books.  Wallace was a kind of beacon for contemporary writers and readers.  And his work is profound.  And, hell, he was so damned smart.  So, yes, even as I acknowledge that I never knew the man, it still hurts a bit to think of him as less than perfect.

And I have to thank Franzen for showing me the truth, whether I choose to believe it or not.

This essay was one of the more impactful essays I have read.  And this is one of the most personal posts I have written.  Good writing will do that to you.

And maybe this essay will get me to read Robinson Crusoe again.  And I hope that Franzen can eventually forgive his friend.  And that someday he sees the Masafuera rayadito.