I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THAO NGUYEN-Tiny Desk Concert #5 (September 4, 2008).

I had never heard of Thao Ngyuen (who admits that her last name is a phonetic disaster–it’s pronounced When) before this concert and man is she a lot of fun.

  She plays a great acoustic guitar—very percussive on the strings (and even some percussive noises from her mouth before the first song starts).  Her voice is a strange mix of a few singers, reminding me a bit of Björk (but with a kind of Southern sounding accent) and maybe Beth Orton, if Beth was a bit more excited.   Thao plays her guitar very loosely—a kind of sloppiness that is really fun—but not in a “she can’t really play” way.  It’s an I’m having a lot of fun style.

NPR dude Mike Katzif heard her band Get Down Stay Down opening for another band.  And he loved her off-kilter melodies (which are ample).  “Bag of Hammers” is played on the high strings and it has an almost Caribbean feel—boppy and fun and totally made for dancing. Her guitar playing is very fast strumming, especially on “Beat (Health, Life and Fire),” I love watching the chords she is playing up and down the neck of the guitar.

I really enjoyed the conceit of “Big Kid Table” and the Hawaiian vibe she gets from her guitar.  “Feet Asleep” brings out a bit more of a country vibe from her singing (she is from Virginia).  I love the diversity of her music and I’m looking forward to checking out both her band and her solo work. In addition to being a great singer and songwriter, she is also quite funny—the story about her grandma and her calves is very funny indeed.

This continues the greatness of the Tiny Desk concerts.

[READ: November 14, 2013]  “The Empty Plenum”

The reason I got involved with Wittgenstein’s Halloween was because David Foster Wallace had said Wittgenstein’s Mistress was one of the best books of the 1990s.

The whole list is on Salon, but here’s the quote about WM:

“Wittgenstein’s Mistress” by David Markson (1988)
“W’s M” is a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism. A monologue, formally very odd, mostly one-sentence ¶s. Tied with “Omensetter’s Luck” for the all-time best U.S. book about human loneliness. These wouldnt constitute ringing endorsements if they didnt happen all to be simultaneously true — i.e., that a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde that could also be so moving makes “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.

I had also read his review of the book before [I copy everything I said then below].  I admit I didn’t get that much out of it before because it was mostly about Wittgenstein and a book I hadn’t read.  Well, now that I’ve read the Markson book, it seemed like a good time to revisit the review.

Two things strike me immediately–this was written after Wallace had written Broom of the System and some other fiction and yet he speaks of himself as a “would-be writer,” not a writer.  And two, this review really belongs in a philosophy journal rather than a literary journal–DFW was making the jump from philosophy to literature, but his knowledge of philosophy is very strong, so he is focusing on that aspect of the story.

Indeed, many of the things that I found really fascinating in the story are things that he doesn’t even mention.  This is not to say that he does a bad job reviewing the book, just that he is focusing on a different aspect than what I noted.  Namely, he shows how well Markson has created a fictionalized version of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.  That might be obvious, although since I haven’t read Wittgenstein, I certainly didn’t notice it.  But what I found interesting about the story was the narrator’s mind’s deterioration–which may be a Wittgensteinian thing–but is not something that DFW focuses on.  It’s also interesting to me that he completely disregards so much of the name dropping and art/literary references. I know that DFW liked Gaddis, but it’s funny that the only time DFW mentions Gaddis is to show about her problem keeping his name straight.

He states that he’s not just making it seem like the book is designed to make abstract philosophy ‘accessible,” although he admits that the prose is hauntingly pedestrian.  And that aspect of the story I agree with–it seems much easier than it is.  In fact, the story isn’t hard at all.  But there’s a lot going on in it and as DFWs interpretation shows, the more you bring to the story, the more you will get out of it.

Since I know little of Wittgenstein, the title of the book was a bit of mystery to me, but DFW helpfully explains how indeed Kate is Wittgenstein’s mistress–she is a “ghostly curator of a world of history, artifact & memories–which memories, like TV images, one can access but never really own.”  Her spare style and “obsessive need to get control of the facts” is based on W’s Tractatus Logicio-Philosophicus.  Then he spends a lot of time talking about the Tractatus, which I am going to skip.

He also brings up Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow as a nice contrast to WM because it shows that a paranoid delusion of complete connections is preferable to the conviction that nothing is connection.

Some other issues DFW addresses are Markson as man writing a female character (he believes he succeeds).  Although he also says that many women have complained because of the emphasis on menstruation.  I noticed, how could I not, that it was mentioned a lot but I have serious doubts that he included it just to remind us that Kate is female–that would be unreasonably lame. I took it more as a fertility issue.  DFW say he’s neutral on the menstruation but does object to the other aspect in reducing Kate to feelings of guilt as an explanation of her “condition.”  He feared that it is just going to be another madwoman story.  And he worries about the dichotomy of Helen and Eve–Helen guilty as object and Eve guilty as subject, temptress. He likes the switch between the two expect when he stays on the Eve side of things–that’s when Markson writes too “male.”  I personally wish that  DFW had gone further with the idea of the feminization of skepticism, which is an interesting idea, especially w/r/t deterioration as a textual phenomenon.

Obviously DFW loves the book, but he does have some complaints.  His biggest is about Kate’s loneliness having a “motivation” via feminine trauma.  He thinks it’s an easy excuse, but it is far more upsetting because it is unnecessary.  The book works fine without it.

The article is pretty tough going I admit.  very philosophical and deep.  But there ae some fun moments.  I enjoyed in this essay that after a length explanation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, DFW includes an aphoristic paragraph (like Wittgenstein and WM)

The above summary is pretty crude.

If only he had added “I suspect” or “on my honor” or something at the end of the sentence.  It would have been perfect,

The one thing that DFW mentions that I actually am very curious about is this footnote:

“over half the reviewers of WM misnamed the narrator Helen.”

I am guilty of this as well because she is only referred to as Kate once in the book.

You will never know how much it has meant to me that you are an artist, Kate, she said, one evening (33)

But later in the book, the same sentence is repeated with the name changed

You will never know how much it has meant to me that you are an artist, Helen, my mother having said the very afternoon before. (228).

So why do we assume that her name is Kate and not Helen.  It is that true she has been comparing herself to Helen of Troy throughout the story, and she is getting more and more incorrect about her facts as the story goes on.  (Even the names of the people in her family have been changing).  But if she is only referred to as Kate once, who is to say that that is really her name?  (Aside from Markson).  I searched the book online found the name Kate appears only once (and several times in the commentary, so everyone assumes her name is Kate).  Anyhow, that footnote struck me, as it was one thing I was aware of from reading the book.

So I enjoyed the article more this time, but it still wasn’t terribly compelling without having read enough Wittgenstein.

This is the original post about the article:

“The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s ‘Wittgenstein’s Mistress'”. The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. 10, Iss. 2; Summer 1990; p. 217. [NOTES: A major work. I had this in the Book Reviews section for a long time but it really is far more than a review. Read it here.]

This is a very lengthy book review which goes beyond reviewing the book itself, into discussions of Wittgenstein, philosophy and contemporary fiction. I haven’t read the book, and I have only a passing familiarity with Wittgenstein, so it’s hard to say much about this review.  Plus, the review itself is very intellectual (as you might imagine) so this is not in any way a fun puff piece of a review.

In fact, I found it quite challenging.  And, like in “F/X Porn” below, he is very critical of some other writers and is not afraid to call them on it (sometimes making me feel a little uncomfortable).  DFW really likes this book and thinks it is an under-rated gem.  And yet, he is not afraid to be very harsh about certain aspects of the book that he doesn’t like.   He wants you to know that there are serious flaws with the book and yet you should still read it because overall it is fantastic.

As the review nears the end, it talks more specifically about the book and less about the philosophical implications of using Wittgenstein as its leaping off point, and I found that a bit more comprehensible.  Nevertheless, this is a difficult piece to read.  He throws in one or two of his signature fun comments, but for the most part it is all business.

And I have to say it doesn’t really make me want to read the book.