I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NEGATIVLAND-“Nesbitt’s Lime Soda Song” (1987).

There are multiple references to Nesbitt’s soda in this book.  I am unfamiliar with Nesbitt’s except in this funny little song from Negativland (on their album Escape from Noise).  I have always liked this song, perhaps because it is so simple (and is an actual song) amidst the chaos of the album.

A simple strummed guitar introduces this quaint song about everyday frustrations:

We spent a lovely summer, my wife Elaine and me,
We bought us a great big motor home, with a shower and TV,
We was camping and having a great time, watching Brokaw on Today,
Till a bee flew into the Nesbitt’s Lime Soda, and we had to throw it away.

Now most of the time I’m a peaceful man, but I lost my temper that day,
Just one last bottle of Nesbitt’s Lime Soda, and we had to throw it away.

I’m including the second verse not only because of the sodas listed, which I find endearing, but also because of the phrase “good old Mountain Dew” which reminds me of something DFW would say:

I brought a case of Nehi, and Double Cola, too,
A half a dozen Upper 10’s, and good old Mountain Dew,
I bought a quart of cola-a, to get me through the day,
But just one bottle of Nesbitt’s Lime Soda, and we had to throw it away.

I think most of the Nesbitt’s in the story is orange (that was their big seller) but Nesbitt’s did actually did have a Lime (or I guess Lemon-Lime) soda as well

[READ: August 4, 2014] Pale Summer Week 4 (§23-§26)

After last week’s massive 100 page section inside of one person’s head, it’s nice to get back to some of these smaller sections.  I’m particularly pleased to have another David Wallace section, as I find his the most entertaining.

§23

This is a brief First person section that begins: “Dream:”  Rows of foreshortened faces, many blank doing endless small tasks. It was his psyche teaching him about boredom.  He was often bored as a child, but that boredom was not actual boredom.  Back then he worried and fretted a lot, feeling the “sort of soaring, ceilingless tedium that transcends tedium and becomes worry” (253).  It was anxiety with no object.

He was the nervous delicate son, as opposed to his brother, the gifted driven son whose nightly piano practice coincided with their father’s return from work.  I section that says “after the incident with my own son” (254) reminded me that someone suggested that “Incarnations of Burned Children” may actually fit into this book and it seems like that could be applicable here, although I shudder to think it.  In psychotherapy he realized that his family was Achilles.  His brother was the shield and he was the heel. His father was a warrior, but his mother’s role was unclear.

He had trouble in grammar school because of the rows of windows and the regimentation. The teachers were sexless females, cold and severe, but the young men were the worst. They were depressed and bitter because their idealism has been destroyed by the bureaucracy of the Columbus School System.

I’m not entirely sure who this is or even if it matters all that much.  So many of the people come from similar backgrounds, and this feels like one of those sections that may not have a connecting later person.

§24

David Wallace the author is back here.  This is the saga of his arrival and processing at Lake James, IL’s IRS Post 047 in mid-May of 1985.  He thinks it was May 15 (in the FN he says that he’s not going to be one of those memoirists who pretends to remember every detail.  He’s not going to waste your time like “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle in §22 (so now we know who that was, and I love the nickname). A brief aside that Fogle may have been self-indulgent, but he was accurate about a lot, particularity that the mind remembers tiny details rather than grand moments or feelings).  One of the funnier moments is that Wallace says that §22 was “actually heavily edited and excerpted” (257).   He says that the interviews like §22 were engineered by Tate (which we knew) but they were a huge clusterfuck.  He should have “simply let Stecyk do all the work of the Personnel office as usual” (257).  Later there’s a very funny bit about Tate removing reserved parking because it sapped morale “The syndrome of DP [Director of Personnel] Richard Tate instituting a policy that resulted in far more problems than it resolved was so familiar that wigglers referred to it as dicktation” (279).

Back to Wallace: He arrived at the office with all of his gear, but instead of waiting on the crazy long line to get his ID badge, he was whisked though past everyone.  He was still concerned that he was in trouble–that his “juiced” note might have actually gotten him in trouble with the higher ups…although he also thought it was possible that the letter was so powerful that it actually worked and that’s why he was brought past all the other poor suckers.  (He would not learn the truth (a case of mistaken identity) until much later).

Wallace dishes on his family, saying their attitude was one of “What have you done for me lately, or more likely what have you achieved, earned, attained lately.”  And eventually reveals the horrific skin on his face which causes extreme reactions from just about everyone: “in the dermatological category ‘severe/disfiguring'” (286).

He continues with the theory that the IRS as of the Nixon administration was becoming “pro-business and -bottom-line.”  He discusses the several regional centers (Philadelphia PA, Peoria IL, Rotting Flesh LA (!), St. George UT, La Junta CA and Federal Way WA) and that the Midwest’s employees (approx 3,000) examined some 4.5 million returns.

But overall this is very funny section full of Wallace’s observations about his first day at the station.  Riding on a four-hour long bus ride (complete with two nuns) and its horrific graffiti and the gross lavatory.  There was a round-faced boy with impetigo on his knees (he was empathetic of the boy’s skin but also repulsed by him).  When he arrives at the center, he is not permitted to go home first so he must carry his luggage with him everywhere (and eventually leaves one bag behind).

He gets into specific details about the Midwest Regional Examination center, a roughly L shaped physical structure which is located off Self Storage Parkway.  The two buildings are perpendicular but not continuous.  The building was once owned by Mid West Mirror Works.  The staggering facade (which faced away from the Parkway) was created because of a typo in the construction and technology budget that “regional Service and Examination Centers’ facade’s ‘form specifications’ rather than ‘formal specifications’ …matches as closely as possible to the specific services the centers perform” (281) resulting in an expensive and elaborate facade that was a tile or mosaic representation of a 1040 Form.  He had included a plate with a picture of the building but it has been deleted for “legal reasons that (I opine) make no sense whatsoever. Hiatus valde deflendus (283). [A gap or deficiency greatly to be deplored].

There is a wonderfully long and awkwardly painful discussion of the ride into the facility on that first day.  As he sat next to an incredibly sweaty individual, who by the end of the ride had soaked Wallace’s clothes (and who is revealed in §27 to be David Cusk) [highlight to read].  The heat was so bad the bank’s Time & Temp simply said YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW.  He also talks about all of the details about the traffic snarl ups (so many different aspects of it!) including the jerk with the Jesus fish who cuts everyone off and makes the traffic even worse.   There’s also lengthy section (from Fogle) about the construction delays.  Not to mention the mandated signs in the tiny vehicles (acquired by jeopardy assessment, the Service’s fleet of vehicles came from seizures against an auto dealership in downstate Effingham), which blocked most of the view of the driver.

When he arrives at the facility he is escorted by Ms. Neti Neti the Personnel representative–a Persian woman whom “2K Bob McKenzie and some of the others in Hindle’s Rotes group had christened ‘the Iranian Crisis” (285).  She stated “on behalf of Mr Glendenning and Mr Tate we’re just so extremely pleased to have you on board.”  On the tour, at one point she gets lost and opens an Immersives room which affords Wallace a glimpse of the people working (rows of people with their heads down), although no one looked up at all.

Mr Glendeddning’s official title is DREC–Director Regional Examination Center and ARCE Asst Regioanl Commissioner for Examinations) but is refereed to by almost everyone as Dwitt.  He also references the progressive tax (that Fogle talked about) to show hostilities between the IRS and the state of Illinois.

There’s a mention of Chris Acquitispace, Chalk Leader and the only person in his building who was at all friendly (even after the administrative foul up).  It was either him of Ed Shackleford who came up with the idea that test anxiety was really about timed tests–where there is no way to do the endless fidgeting that people need to do to concentrate.  Some other people in his apartment complex (Angler’s Cove) are Redgate and Atkins.

By page 295 we learn that the Personnel office had mistaken him for a completely different David Wallace (“an elite and experienced Immersives examiner from Philadelphia’s Northeast REC who had been lured to 047 through a complex system of shell-transfers and bureaucratic finagling.”  The computer system that created this error is detailed later in §38.  This leads to an amusing aside of how Wallace uses his full middle name in his writing so as to avoid any kind of confusion”no matter how alien or pretentious it sounds to you in our everyday life.”  [This whole section made me chuckle, since he is so deadpan about it being real].

While he’s in the building waiting for Ms Neti Neti to return, he listens to a lengthy conversation about fluorescent lights and how Lehrl got them replaced which made his team’s productivity go up–but, the other guy argues, there is no real causation there.  Wallace tries to join in the conversation but is rebuffed.  These two are support staff known as “turdnagels.”

He talks about Mr Stecyk [Deputy Director of Personnel (DDP)] and his accepting responsibility for all of the signs that were incorrect now that they had created a subterranean addition–some of the signs still referred to the wrong floor number, making the building all the more confusing.   Stecyck says he should have had them corrected, even though it was Mr Lynn Hornbaker and the Physical Plant who should have fixed it years ago.  Stecyck’s “right arm” was Mrs Marge van Hool, a creepy reptilian woman who was actually the salt of the earth.  While his secretary/receptionist was the horrible Mrs Sloper (who gave him nothing but looks of distaste). “The more compassionate and effective the high-level official, the more unpleasant and Cereberusian the secretary who barred one’s access to hm” (304).  As the section draws to an end, Wallace sees Stecyk comforting an unseen man and their eyes meet in an “involuntary expression of compassion and sympathy, an expression that seemed almost moving in its spontaneity and unselfish-conscious candor” (309).  Quite a touching moment.

Oh, and one of the “courtesies” that the Iranian Crisis extended to Mr Wallace as part of his welcome (which she misinterpreted because of her upbringing in Iran) was to give Wallace a very quick and “woodpeckerish” blow job in the closet.

Quite a first day young Wallace had.

§25

This text is in two columns and is a detailed description of a Rotes Group Room 2: there are six wigglers per chalk, four Chalk per team, six Teams per Group.  Despite the nicely setup structure of the numbers in this pattern: 6 x 4 = 24;  24 x 6 = 144, there are (by my count) 28 wigglers listed in this section.  Many of them are repeated twice or three times.  Most of them simply “turn a page,” although some do more than just turn a page: someone attaches a file to a page, someone detaches a 402-C(1) from a file, someone looks up briefly while turning a page and Robert Atkins seems to be working on two files at the same time.  Nearly every person does something while turning pages–looking at a muscle in his wrist, opening a drawer, sniffing the green rubber sock on his pinkie, selecting just the right paperclip, etc.

The people named (many of them we have seen already but quite a few we have not) are:

1. ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle
2. Howard Cardwell
3. Ken Wax
4. Matt Redgate
5. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing
6. Ann Williams
7. Anand Singh
8. David Cusk
9. Sandra Punder
10. Robert Atkins
11. Lane Dean Jr.
12. Olive Borden
13. Chris ‘The Maestro’ Acquitispace
14. Rosellen Brown
15. R. Jarvis Brown
16. Meredith Rand
17. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle
18. ‘Second-Knuckle’ Bob McKenzie
19. Ryne Hobratschk
20. Latrice Threakson
21. Ed Shackleford
22. Elpidia Carter
23. Jay Landauer
24. Boriz Kratz
25. Harriet Candelaria
26. Ellis Ross
27. Joe ‘The Bastard’ Biron-Maint
28. Paul Howe

It’s an intense look at the monotony of the job.  It’s also fascinating how Wallace clearly has a ton of fun making up names, and yet is so consistent in not using them in so many sections.

§26

This short section (3 pages) is a word or two about the ‘phantom’ phenomenon that’s part of Exams lore.  Examiner’s phantoms are not the same as real ghosts.  A phantom is a particular kind of hallucination that can afflict examiners at a threshold of boredom. Sometimes they get a “visit.”  Not everyone gets visited, only certain psychological types.  Every phantom is different but typically they are diametrically opposed to the person who is visited (masculine wigglers get visits from simpering queens, etc).

Ghosts are different, few know or believe in actual ghosts.  Many think that the ghosts are just phantoms, but there are two actual non-hallucinatory ghosts haunting Post 047’s wiggle room.  The Ghosts’s names are Garrity and Blumquist.  Blumquist is a very bland, dull efficient examiner who died at his desk unnoticed in 1980 (see §4).  Garrity had worked for Mid West Mirror Works in the mid-twentieth century.  He examined mirrors for flaws–he had 20 seconds to check each mirror–1,440 times a day for 18 years.  he apparently hanged himself in 1964 or 1965.

Only Claude Sylvanshine knows anything detailed about Garrity (Random Fact Inference, no doubt).  He is chatty and distracting and many mistake him for a phantom.  While Blumquist basically just sits with you silently.  He seems to just like to be there.  The wigglers find him companionable.

§ § § § § § § § § § § §

There are several plots in the book that are coming together at this point.  The Wallace personnel debacle is definitely the biggest one that we can see so far.  There also seems to be talk of changing hierarchies at the Service, with one way of doing things possibly being replaced by another.

Mostly we are getting more and more details about boredom and monotony and the like, and I am so very impressed that he can write about boredom and give examples of boredom and boring people and still have the book be interesting.  There is also a lot of talk of suicide in the book (which is alarming for the obvious reasons, but may actually just be a real factor of bordeom).

Whereas in Infinite Jest, some story lines started to come together by this stage, aside from the obvious synchronicity between some of the characters’ early lives and current lives (although not all, that’s for sure), there’s not really a sense of anything “happening” (much like that play that was never finished which was mentioned earlier in the book).  Since it’s impossible to know what he intended with the book, idle speculation is all we have to what he meant us to “know” by this time.