I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SANDRO PERRI-Impossible Spaces [CST085] (2011).

This album has become one of my favorite releases of the year.  I simply can’t stop listening to it.  And the funny thing is that on first listen I thought it was too treacly, too “sweet,” especially for Constellation Records (home to the over-the-top Godspeed You Black Emperor amongst other wonderful bands).  But after a listen or two, I heard all of the genius that is present in this record–so many different layers of music, and so many interesting instrumental choices. Indeed, it does come off as sweet, but there’s really nothing wrong with that.

This album gives me a happy pick me up without being cloying in any way.  That’s a great accomplishment.

“Changes” opens kind of all over the place, with some noisey guitars and really high bass notes.  But once the shk shk of the shakers comes in, the sing settles into a great groove (and there’s a cool bassline that really holds the song together).  After about 3 minutes, it turns into a cool light funk jam, with retro keyboards, buzzed out guitar solos and some funky drums.  It’s unlike anything you’ll hear anywhere else.  “Love & Light” is one of the shorter pieces at just under 4 minutes.  It’s different from the other tracks, in that Perri’s vocals seem to be the dominant motif, rather than the cool music.  I like the song, but it’s probably my least favorite here.  “How Will I?” uses a similar multi-tracked vocal style but it has some wonderful flute moments (yes flute) that make the song bubbly and happy.  The song kind of drifts around the ether in a kind of jazzy world until about 5 minutes in, when the bassier notes anchor the song with great contrasting notes.  And the electronic ending is as cool as it is disconcerting.

“Futureactive Kid (Part 1)” is a shuffling minor key number that’s just over 3 minutes, it features a cool bass clarinet and backwards guitars to propel the song.  The backwards guitar solo segues into the uplifting (literally, the keyboards just go higher and higher into space. “Futureactive Kid (Part 2)” features fretless bass, a flute solo and My Bloody Valentine-esque sound effects (although radically simplified from MBV’s standards).  It fades out only to introduce my favorite song in forever–“Wolfman.”  I can’t get enough of this song.  It’s a simple structure, but at ten minutes long, it deviates in amazingly complex ways.  It has so many cool aspects that I love–I love the chord changes at the end of each verse.  I totally love the guitar solo that goes up and down the scale for an impossibly long run–well over 100 notes by my count.  I also love that the end of each section features a different guitar style playing the simple chord progression–from acoustic to loud solo to full band playing those same notes–so by the end of the ten minutes you ‘re not sure what to expect.   By the time the flute solo comes in at nearly 7 minutes, I’m totally committed to the song and wherever it’s going to take me.  So when it gets a bit of an electronic ending, I’m ready to go there with it.  Oh and lyrically the song is just as curious as the music.

The final song “Impossible Spaces” is a beautiful, quiet guitar song which is actually easy to sing along to.  It quiet a departure from the rest of the record, but it ties things together very nicely.  I have listened to this record so much lately, I just can’t get enough of it.

You can stream the whole thing here.

[READ: May 10, 2012] Conversations with David Foster Wallace

This is a book that collects interviews with David Foster Wallace.  Although DFW was reticent about d0ing interviews (as the introduction states), he did do quite a lot of them–often at the same haunts.  This book contains 22 interviews that span from 1987-2008.

The conversations are in chronological order, which is really a treat because you get to see DFW’s opinion (and his addiction to nicotine) evolve over the years.  You also get to see the topics that he was really focused on at one time and whether or not they stayed with him until the final interview.  DFW was outspoken about certain things, especially entertainment, which is unsurprising.  But he was also a big advocate of truth, honesty, realness.  It’s amazing seeing him when he lets his guard down. Although his honesty is there for all to see in his work, he is better known for his difficulty with language or his humor.  So seeing him without the multiple revision is quite enlightening.

The first pieces, “David Foster Wallace: A Profile” published after his first novel The Broom of the System launched Viking’s paperback imprint actually looks into his classroom a little bit and shows him interacting with a student (I wonder if she knows she is in this book?).  It seems sweet and almost naive compared to what is to come next.  And, for anyone who is familiar with him from later in, it’s a wonderful look behind the scenes.  There’s also a number of pieces from The Wall Street Journal.  Like the second piece in the book, the worryingly named, “A Whiz Kid and His Wacky First Novel.”  It’s not a bad piece at all, but man, headlines can be delicate matters.

After these two short pieces, the conversations jumps forward to 1993.   The oddly titled “Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant” is actually appropriately titled given that it focuses on The Broom of the System.  And while it is certainly interesting, it pales compared to the tour de force interview of the book, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace” by Larry McCaffery.  The shorter version of this interview is oft-cited in DFW scholarship.  I don’t know what is new and what is old, but you can absolutely see the scholarly value of this article (for students of DFW).  This version is over 30 pages long and McCaffrey covers so much. The introduction explains that the interview was used as an introduction to DFW’s essay “E Unibus Plurum” in the same journal.  That article was all about television.  So in this interview they talk about media, about the current (circa the early 90s) state of fiction and the state of meta-fiction and how most of it is crap: “When you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction.  But after the pioneers always come the crankturners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end” (30).

This interview also introduces Wallace idea of the “click” when something just feels right that you are working on (you can feel it in others’ work too).  He says that in Don DeLillo’s stuff almost line by line he can hear the click.  In addition to DFW’s theorizes about things, McCaffrey gets him to talk about his work.  He reveals that The Broom of the System was “a coded autobio that’s also a funny little postructural gag: so you get Lenore, a character in a story who’s terribly afraid that she’s really nothing more than a character in a story.  And sufficiently hidden under the sex-change and the gags and the theoretical allusions, I got to write my sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman” (41).  We also learn that “Forever Overhead” is autobiographical.  The incident happened to him a he has felt strange guilt about it all these years.  They also talk a lot about Signifying Rappers (and how it was the first book about rap, which i did not know).  I think it’s also one of the first interviews where he talks bout pop culture as an unavoidable part of his life and how his older professors simply couldn’t see that.

Then we move on to 1996 and the Infinite Jest-era interviews.  I had read or heard most of these.  The ones that were previously only available on audio are fun to see them in print.  We have Marc Caro’s article in The Chicago Tribune, the Salon interview with Laura Miller, David Steitfeld’s article in Details (that should show you how big this book was in terms of media).  There’s also the article that got me excited to read Infinite Jest in the first place (Anne Marie Donahue’s article in The Boston Phoenix (which I cut out and saved in my hard cover copy and still have.))

Hot on the heels of the Infinite Jest articles (almost exactly a year later) come the A Supposedly Fun Thing…articles.  These seem to try to reconcile the wordsmith of Infinite Jest with the humorous and enjoyable young man in the essays.  We see articles from The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix (this one I didn’t remember, although I was in Boston when I got my copy of Supposedly autographed so I’m sure I read it).  This is a nice one because it talks about his return to Boston for the reading, and about how he feels badly for the way he described Trudi on the cruise ship (Jackie Gleason in drag).

Then the articles move to Brief Interviews (1999).  Lorin Stein’ article in Publishers Weekly is very good (not to put the other publications down or anything, but in terms of significance, PW is one of the only journals that most librarians read when it comes  to selecting books, so this is a pretty big get, although by then he didn’t need it).  In this one he admits that he had no idea how upsetting BIwHM was going to be and that his friends saw it “as reflecting things that were going on with me–which, if that’s true, then I’m the literary equivalent of the person who writes ‘Help me’ on the mirror without knowing it” (90).  He also says that he was dissatisfied with the character of Orin in IJ, which is an interesting insight.  “David Foster Wallace Warms Up” from Book is amusing because he takes the interviewers to a Cracker Barrel.  He’s reticent to talk about BIwHM because he thinks it’s just a  book of formal exercises that people don’t want to hear about.  He also eats a shrimp from one of the interviewer’s plates.  Boston Phoenix is back again (they did love him) this time in Chris Wright’s “Mischief; A Brief Interview with David Foster Wallace.”  Cleverly (if you like this sort of thing) the Q’s are left blank like in the book.

Moving into 2000, Marck Schechner interviews DFW for The Buffalo News. (I didn’t know so many newspaper wrote about authors).  The discuss BIwHM and IJ.  And then he asks DFW about Cynthia Ozick.  The response, “We’re both politically active Jewish females.  I don’t see the problem” is hilarious.  Also in 2000 is the interview for The Lannan Foundation with John O’Brien and Richard Powers.  It’s always fun to see him interact with other authors, as they tend to feed off each other.  (Audio for this and more is available here).

Back to Boston (the city that has adopted him, apparently) for a 2003 interview about Everything and More.  The most revealing information–he made up the Greek epigram in the beginning of the book!

2004 sees the release of Oblivion and an interview on To the Best of Our Knowledge.  This interview is also available in audio format.  Then there’s more NPR and more Boston with Michael Goldfarb on The Connection.  There’s a lot of talk about “Mister Squishy” and the length of one particular sentence.  This one is also interesting because they take listener calls.  It’s not often that you get to hear him engaging with his fans.

In 2005 Didier Jacob interviewed DFW (although I’m not sure for what publication).  For the first time in an interview, DFW seems somewhat antagonistic to Jacob.  He rephrases one question; he answers another one with, “Taken literally this question is impossible to answer”; he answers another with, “I don’t understand how the two clauses in your question fit together”.  Although he does eventually try to answer everything, it’s a sad kind of interview.

In 2008, we have one more Wall Street Journal interview.  The editor of the book, Stephen J. Burn believes that this was his last formal interview  This one is about his Rolling Stone article about John McCain (which was reissued for the 2008 campaign even though it was written about the 2000 campaign and Wallace is quick to point out that he was a very different John McCain then.  The final question is about the smiley face that DFW puts on his autographs (I’ve got one).  It’s a sad final question to have to read.

But nowhere near as sad as David Lipsky’s  “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace” from Rolling Stone.  It’s really an obituary, but it’s a lengthy one, filled with comments from friends and relatives.  We get the entire story of his years of taking depression medicine (when I first read this back in 2008, it was the first I knew of all of his history with depression and the meds he t0ok and everything else).  The essay talks about his meeting his wife, of going off the meds and not being able to sustain himself and finally of his suicide.  If you don’t cry at the final paragraph, a quote from David’s sister, you have no humanity.

It’s a fitting but all to sad ending to this collection, which is full of insights and intelligence, humor and emotion and, yes ultimately sadness. If you have any interest in David Foster Wallace as a person, this book is essential.  Even though he did not like giving interviews, it’s clear that he is such a decent person who is willing to work through his discomfort to give what he can to his interlocutor.  He’s also funny and charming, self-deprecating and serious and very passionate.  It’s a really enjoyable read (although the McCaffrey one is long–it’s well worth it but it’s not as “enjoyable” as the others, and the Lipsky piece is devastating).

Half of the pieces are actual interview (with the interviewer and DFW getting their own paragraphs).  These pieces that are: Kennedy and Polk; McCaffery; Miller; Socca; Wright; Shechner; O’Brien; Crain; Paulson; Goldfarb; Jacob and Farley.  And these are the most revelatory because they actually engage DFW.  No doubt they have been edited down, but presumably they reflect what DFW actually said and meant.   The other articles, Katovsky; Dudar; Caro; Streitfeld; Donahue; Fry; Gilbert; Stein; Arden and Lipsky are more…casual.  Some may put words in his mouth, but everything feels truthful.  And these articles actually construct a narrative around what DFW had said to them.  In these you can learn a  bit more about things that he didn’t necessarily want known–or didn’t care to state, anyhow.

Together they provide excellent insights and create a surprisingly enjoyable read.  For although some of the interviews get pretty cerebral, which DFW was never afraid to shy away from, he was also a person who enjoyed all kind of things.  The extended McCaffrey interview also leaves in all of DFW’s cursing and casual asides, really letting you see what he was like off his guard (or as much off his guard as he could be).  I don’t know if this is a suitable read for the causal DFW fan, but really, it may spark a greater interest into other things that he has written.

Thanks, Stephen J. Burn for compiling all of this material in one place.  It’s very much appreciated.