Rudimentary Sentences

A special section of my library contains twelve books from twelve authors. I refer to these works as my Zodiac of Literature. Three of these books are dealt with below. Part of my Zodiac project is to find meaningful links among the novels. For each book, I have chosen a rudimentary sentence from which I derive meaning that pertains to the entire work. The three sentences are:

It wasn't the driver's fault he was only going thirty. -- Monsieur Levert, Robert Pinget

'It seems a very difficult sort of easiness,' I answered. -- The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien

I had been ready for anything, but not for a teapot.-- Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz

i.

I had been reading Monsieur Levert when I arrived in Paris.  One evening I returned to my hotel on the Boulevarde St. Germaine carrying my Grove Press copy.  Previously, I had vainly sought in a Larousse dictionary a translation for the novel's actual title, Le Fiston.  The clerk spoke English and had been friendly, and I took this occasion to show him the book.  He had never heard of Robert Pinget, one of the nouveau roman contingent.  It didn't matter.  Could he tell me what fiston meant?

            No, he replied, but perhaps the hotel's owner would know.  Before I could stop him, he took the book to an adjacent parlor and returned a few minutes later.  He was smiling as he handed back the book.  Fiston, he was told, was an affectionate name a father would call his son. The word derived from fils.

            This made perfect sense, I told the clerk. He did not ask how.

            Monsieur Levert has been writing a letter to his missing son everyday for ten years. He never posts the letter. He can't be satisfied with what he has written but is compelled to write (the novel's last line: "Except for what is written there is death" solidifies the book's Beckettian lineage). The narrative is divided into two parts -- each part or letter may have been written years apart -- describing life in Levert 's village.  Part II contains similar information but with many additions, contradictions, and distortions. Indeed, the novel literally seems to start over.

            The quoted sentence above embodies the equivocal relationship between Monsieur Levert's two parts.  Initially, there's the claim for the driver's innocence and an apparently acceptable reason (he wasn't speeding), that is, within the flow of the narrative the explanation appears logical.

            I don't know why I returned to the sentence.  Perhaps I was pulled back to it before I could turn the page.  I wondered how the fact that he was going thirty miles an hour absolved him of responsibility.  Was speed a negligible factor for the accident?  Could we trust Levert's judgment?  The sentence's meaning, my initial understanding of its implications, detonated before my eyes.  The two parts of the sentence separated and drifted apart.  Looked at another way, their being together grew more absurd.  Especially so with the absence of a comma.  That's why I had to go back to it.  Read it again.  Two complete thoughts together uninterrupted.  Only I have discovered that they've little to do with the other.  Levert's word isn't good enough.  At this juncture of the novel, Levert's narrative is breaking down.  The breach of meaning in the sentence parallels the discontinuity between the novel's two parts.  The sentence has effected the novel's detonation!  Which is Levert's.  It will mean death.

            The way the sentence works, likening it to a patch of skin taken from the toe and placed under the microscope, as a cellular sentence, we see Monsieur Levert's DNA.  It resembles patches from other Pinget books.  In fact, the tremulous feeling one gets reading his novels is best exhibited in the first sentence of his first work, Mahu or The Material: "This is the story I can't make head nor tail of it, somebody said: 'You ought to write it down,' I can't remember who, perhaps it was me, I get everything mixed up, it's true sometimes when I'm being introduced to someone I concentrate so much I take on the same face as the person and the friend who is introducing us doesn't know if it's me or the other one, he just leaves me to sort it out for myself."  We have entered a detonated fictional zone and must try to put together a few of the pieces. The notion of reliable narrator doesn't enter our head.  In a more radical stroke than in Levert, Pinget abandons Mahu's narrative halfway through.  If we can make head or tail of the book, then we're slightly better off than Mahu.  As for Levert, we feel melancholic toward his paralyzed relationship with son.  The act of writing his son might not be worth the effort, but it's all he has. Like Beckett's narrators, he can't help going on.

ii.

The rudimentary sentence from The Third Policeman might seem less consequential, being spoken by the narrator as opposed to something from his narration.  It responds directly to something said by Sergeant Pluck at a police station where the narrator is being detained. However, the nature of the response lessens the immediate importance of Pluck's remark. In these few words, we get a tiny (abstract) picture of the whole novel.

            The oxymoron as a turn of phrase has been in the foreground of literary criticism very seldom.  Used familiarly as the pun but garnering fewer groans and appearing less often (especially in news broadcasts), the oxymoron embodies contradiction and paradox, two things most people want to avoid.  Perhaps this partly accounted for the wholesale rejection of the novel by publishers for twenty-seven years.  Few could make head or tail of it.  The sentence, the narrator's remark about a difficult sort of easiness, refracts the entire novel through an oxymoronic prism.  By definition, also, we view the oxymoronic statement as being fundamentally incorrect.  Just as we know in The Third Policeman's narrative, from the first sentence, and especially after the narrator puts his hands under the floor looking for the black box of money, something is very wrong.  More, when the Sergeant interrogates him about bicycles and then expostulates a strange atomic theory.  Not to mention the narrator's devotion to the philosophy of DeSelby.  When all is said and done, we apprehend the narrator's fate just as we realize that a crustacean, called a shrimp, could come in a variety of sizes, the largest being the Jumbo size and, hence, only seeming to be a contradiction.

            Seeming contradictions proliferate in O'Brien's book, none more germane to the action than DeSelby's belief that death is the greatest hallucination within the hallucination of life.  In a sense, its truth is undeniable.  While we know death's inevitability, we would be paralyzed should we concentrate on it and nothing else.  Our ability to act and respond loses force when thoughts of death cloud our minds.  The narrator's application of this philosophy seems a model for all philosophies to aspire.  Marxists could only wish the workers of the world united as well as this man seemingly avoided death.

            Only, the elusive third policeman is finally met and the narrator must find out he himself has in fact died and gone to a quite improbable hell.  While we might not fully understand the rationale behind the fascination with bicycles, it seems an easy sort of hell.  Reading the novel again and again, we are disabused of this notion.

            The odd feeling we carry through this novel may just be another form, an absurd form, of the melancholy and helplessness we suffer along with Monsieur Levert.  The fictional world comes apart the more we think about them.  How does the speed of the car relate to the driver's responsibility?  And what's really going on in O'Brien's nether world?

iii.

In any case, these mid-twentieth century novels suggest the chaos near us, whereas Witold Gombrowicz, in his last novel, Cosmos, doesn't disguise or hide from the world's cornucopia of meaninglessness.  His narrator wants to create order and understanding within his absurd universe.  Yet, as the sentence culled from the narrative suggests, he can never prepare himself for the unexpected, for the next object, for it will change the pattern of meaning he had derived from previous objects, a pattern meant to anticipate the odd, unexpected object.  Some things, apparently, are too odd, too great to handle, even simple teapots.

            Levert barely exists; O'Brien's narrator fools himself to believe he exists. Cosmos's narrator, beset by people and objects, can only live by finding meaning for those people and objects.  In fact, he discovers that he must fully participate in the mysteries surrounding him and others even if that means perpetuating the mystery.  Just as he had not counted upon a teapot having any significance, so we didn't count on him killing a cat and hanging the body from a hook on a door in order to finalize a symmetry started earlier in the novel when he had found a sparrow hung from a piece of wire on a branch.  We resist believing that our relationships to people and things are determined by randomness and coincidence.  Put another way, and seemingly more oppressively, everything connects.  Later in the novel, the narrator sees a bird hovering in the sky: "Was it a vulture, an eagle, a hawk?  At any rate it was not a sparrow, but it's not being a sparrow made it a non-sparrow, and it was connected with the sparrow by virtue of this." (99)  On the same page, an incongruous development, seeing a priest sitting on a rock on a roadside in the mountain, reminds him of the teapot because the priest was a superfluity.

            The novel's title refers to the order and meaning the Greeks applied to existence. At any moment, the order can breakdown, either when meaning can't be found or when too much meaning, too many relationships occur.  Cosmos is about excess, the "here comes everything" aspect of existence.  Or, better, about a narrator lured to the mysteries of objects and determined to craft associations. Monsieur Levert initiates an opposite process whereby the more we attempt to associate the two parts of the book (or the cellular sentence), the less meaning or greater the dissociation will strike us.  But by being the opposite of Cosmos, Monsieur Levert becomes connected to it.  Something DeSelby might agree with.  For The Third Policeman's oxymoronic stance grants us the illusion of certain associations. We endure the uneasiness, possibly because we sense O'Brien's narrator deserves everything he gets, including a repeat of the experience (just as we gladly read the novel). Perhaps we even sense that these three novels connect at a fundamental level and, somehow, this unity was discovered by the happenstance of putting these three sentences together. 

The Kindle

Besides the overflowing library with many unread books in upstairs study, I have an invisible library, my Kindle, which also contains books that I haven’t gotten to or have stopped reading. I use the Kindle because there’s no more room for hard copy books in my house. I have gotten rid of a hundred or more but this seems to be the limit. I can’t part with them.

Many people eschew the Kindle because it doesn’t feel like they are reading a book. This rationalizes a predilection for the printed page and suggests resistance to the insidious advance of the Digital Age. I’m not sure if these people are consistent, not knowing their magazine and newspaper reading habits. I have no problem reading Harpers, New Yorker, and Atlantic articles online. A great international writer, Mirorad Pavic, author of The Dictionary of the Khazars, before he died a few years ago had several books and plays available online and dependent on the choices an internet book permits.

Reluctant as I was to use the Kindle at first, I accepted its necessity and soon was publishing my own work on Kindle. I have six books on the Amazon Kindle, one is novel that is also in paperback and another originally was published as an e-book. Sales have been sparse, even when I reduced the prices more than 60%. One might expect friends (real and Facebook) and relatives to purchase them, but it seems not as many own a Kindle as I thought would (or they have Nooks).

To facilitate reading on Kindle, I try to buy books less than 250 pages. Longer works seem to take forever, especially as the percentage of the book one has read is at the bottom of the page. Doing ten pages or even fifteen, and remain on the same percent number is, frankly, depressing. There are exceptions to this, usually non-fiction works that I can put down (as if I’m  reading a hardcopy):

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson (author of Men Who Stare at Goats) – one of the interesting pieces from this book is called “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes”, which he also made into a film.

A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

One Hundred Names for Love by Diane Ackerman – My writing mentor, Paul West, suffered a severe stroke in 2005 and suffered aphasia. Ackerman took it upon herself to retrieve her husband’s ability to speak and grow his vocabulary. West recovered enough to compose a memoir and novels before he died in 2015.

Ninety Percent of Everything by Rose George – this work opened me to a level of reality in the world I had barely thought of.

I have used Kindle to pick up four works by one of my favorite authors, Flann O’Brien. Myles Away from Dublin is a collection of his newspaper pieces not found in the Dublin Times, where his most famous column, Cruiskeein Lawn, ran for thirty years. Myles before Myles includes O’Brien’s work before 1940. Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green: The Insect Play, a comedy, was produced in Dublin in 1943. The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien collects five stories from the Irish, nine stories in English, and an unfinished novel. O'Brien was a pen name for Brian O'Nolan. His newspaper pieces were under another pen name: Myles na gCopaleen (Myles of the ponies). His column was my inspiration for a feature column, A Sardine on Vacation, published by the internet magazine, Unlikely Stories, which eventually became my first published book (2006).

Kindle books can be inexpensive and I found one by my uncle, Trevor Nevitt Dupuy, a military historian, The Battle of Austerlitz, and another by his father, Col. Ernest Dupuy, St Vith: The Lion in the Way (the 106^th Infintry Division in World War II). Then there are several that were free:

Bertha Garlan – a novel by Arthur Schnitzler, who also wrote Dream Story (the source for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut) -- unread

Memoirs of Aaron Burr – over 600 pages, unread; I have strong feelings that Burr is one of the most underestimated of the Founding Fathers. Two other books on my Kindle are Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study on Character by Roger E. Kennedy and Jefferson’s Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary by Joseph Wheelen.

Shakespeare’s Othello

On Liberty – John Stuart Mill

Sophocles’ Oedipus Trilogy

Homer and Classical Philology – Friedrich Nietzsche

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – David Hume -- unread

We Philologists – from the Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 8)

On the Future of Our Educational Institutions – Friedrich Nietzsche

Eureka: A Prose Poem – Edgar Allen Poe – unread

My concern for Nietzsche I’ll address in a future blog. I will enumerate and write about the many film books on my Kindle as well.

Women and Men

Joseph McElroy is not well known among general readers. His Wikipedia entry calls him “a difficult writer”. There are many difficult writers but the entry is an understatement.

His fiction is often impenetrable, by which I mean that you can’t get very far very quickly, and it’s difficult to comprehend and remember. His one book, Plus, took four efforts before I finished it. It was worth reading. A friend, who also read it, said that reading it was the equivalent of raising a retarded child. Extremely difficult. Demanding impatience and fortitude.

As for his other novels, I had first bought Lookout Cartridge and got nowhere fast. It became my whipping post for unreadable novels. Then I found an inexpensive hardback copy of the 1192-page Women and Men. I read twenty, maybe thirty pages. Like Infinite Jest, the idea of devoting so much time to one book dampened my interest.

Always hopeful, I found on Amazon Ancient History and A Smuggler’s Bible. They seemed approachable and of reasonable length (less than 400 pages). It didn’t matter. I couldn’t read them.

For a while I have toyed with the idea of the connection between a writer’s style and our reception to his or her writing. While it is difficult to pin down a style in so many words, we can approach it in a general way.

1. Schopenhauer wrote the aphorism: “Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is a more reliable key to character than the physiognomy of the body.” Transfer the mind to an author’s writing, then consider the content of the writing as ‘the body’.

2. What is physiognomy? Judging a person’s character via the facial features.

3. A writer’s work gives us the features of a mind. Just as we may not like a person’s features (extreme example for me: Ted Cruz), a writer’s style may put us off.

4. My example of a writer I have less enthusiasm for than other writers whose entire work (save the obvious one) I’ve read is James Joyce. I didn’t get anywhere with Finnegan’s Wake, but style is the least of my problems with it. I have read and moderately enjoyed Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. But rarely have I studied Joyce closely. And I have been encouraged by professors and friends who are Joyce scholars to take a closer look. There’s a payoff. I resisted.

5. I have greater enthusiasm for one of Joyce’s proteges: Samuel Beckett. I have read all of Beckett’s books four times over. Even the most demanding, How It Is and The Unnamable still interest me. And these are books with virtually no breaks. How It Is is one sentence! A book similar to this, Conducting Bodies by Claude Simon, is one of my favorites. Thus, the outright difficulty reading the text does not constitute the ultimate reason for pushing away an author’s work.

6. Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his short autobiography, The Words, that we only read what agrees with our viewpoint. Think about it. It would take a great effort to read works that contradicted our view of the world. Equally difficult would be to navigate a writer whose style alienates us.

7. I can’t watch the films of Paul Mazurski. A sampling: Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; Alex in Wonderland; Blume in Love; Harry and Tonto; and Down and Out in Beverly Hills. A decent sampling. A few of these movies are well regarded. I couldn’t get very far into them. I didn’t think they were awful or lacked artistry, although Blume in Love was hard to digest.

8. The same could be true for actors. I have heard people declaim the deficiencies of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Richard Dreyfus, etc. I cannot watch Tom Cruise or Barbra Streisand, and I try to avoid Meryl Streep and Robin Williams. I can’t give you a solid reason. They bug me.

The difference between Women and Men and Infinite Jest lies in this style issue. David Foster Wallace's writing I find more than agreeable. Subjectively speaking, he's one the greatest I've come across. He still gives me difficulty but it's a difficulty that potentially can be overcome. Style doesn't enter into it.

Thus, my failed efforts to take on the oeuvre of Joseph McElroy I don’t blame on McElroy. It wasn’t meant to be. And I am pretty sure I won’t buy any more of his books. However, he has a short work, Night Soul and other stories, Can I be tempted to take a look? Give him one last try? Forget all the other books of his I couldn’t read?

Rare Books

Between September, 1983, and October, 1987, I purchased 21 books through Rare and Out-of-Print Book agencies.  The books cost between $35 and $80.  The process allowed me to send the agencies on a hunt for the book, then they mailed me a price quotation once the book was found, and I chose whether to buy it or not.  It appears cumbersome today compared to the near instantaneous quotations one can get from Amazon.com.  I stopped purchasing books this way ten years before I bought a computer, partly for lack of money, not that I had very much when I was buying them. 

I found an inventory of the books in an old personal journal. These were books I had seriously wanted and had sought them after having exhausted my closest resources: several bookstores in New York City and Philadelphia and many bookstores on or near several college campuses I visited.

My first purchase was Reasons of the Heart by Edward Dahlberg. Dahlberg interested me, among other reasons, because I collected books of aphorisms: E.M. Cioren, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Nicolas Chamfort, etc.  My passion for this form of writing had previously led me to try to complete an MFA at Columbia by writing a book of aphorisms.  The project never got beyond one class where we discussed fifty or sixty of them (I had written five hundred), but the teacher, Frank MacShane, received them coldly, despite his having written on Dahlberg’s aphorisms.  

As described in Jonathan Lethem’s Harper’s article in 2003, Dahlberg adopted a severe persona inside and outside of his books.  His writing style is one of the most demanding in American letters.  No less intensely does he judge the work of his contemporaries and classics. For instance, Henry James was plainly unreadable (I read this at the time I was trying to get through The Ambassadors and couldn’t have agreed with Dahlberg more).  Apparently, Dahlberg damned student writing in classes at Columbia University just as severely, advising the fragile egos in writing classes to give up trying to write.  His aphorisms continue the assault on those who expect life to relax for a moment and allow the horse’s ass to pass by.

A writer whose path crossed mine in one such writing class at Columbia, was William Bronk, a friend of my teacher, Richard Elman. Bronk read passages from The New World, a book rhapsodizing Mayan and Incan civilizations (a topic Dahlberg touches in The Gold of Ophir).  I was so impressed that ten years later I ordered The World, The Worldless by Bronk, a book of poetry.  I seldom bought books of poetry, but these poems lived up to my anticipation.  Several years later I joined a group which met weekly where one of us brought a poem into to discuss for thirty to forty-five minutes.  I chose Bronk’s “A Postcard To Send To Sumer”:

        Something you said--I found it written down--
        and your picture yesterday, brought back old times.
        We are here in another country now.  It’s hard.
        (When was it ever different?) The language is odd;
        we have to grope for words for what we mean.
        And we hardly ever really feel at home
        as though we might be happier somewhere else.
        Companion, brother, (this funny) I look
        for you among the faces as if I might find
        you here, or find you somewhere, and problems would then
        be solved. What problems are ever solved?
        Brother, the stars are almost the same
        and in good weathers--here it is summer now--
        when the airs are kind, it seems the world and we
        might last unchanged forever. Brother, I think
        you would like it here in spite of everything.
        I don’t know where to send this to you. Perhaps
        I’ll be able to find it before the mails have closed.

I was impressed by the poem’s melancholy stemming from the sense of fatal brotherhood with a past civilization and, simultaneously, our mutually expecting to never find final comfort with what we have become.  It is why we read, breathe, and write.  

I also purchased six works of fiction:

The Blue Flowers -- Raymond Queneau       Mahu, or the Material -- Robert Pinget
The Axe -- Ludvik Vaculik                           To the End of the World -- Blaise Cendrars
Sutter’s Gold -- Blaise Cendrars                  Brave African Huntress -- Amos Tutuola 

These books were written by authors I had read intensively the previous decade, most of them first encountered in several Comparative Literature classes taught by Paul West. I had wanted to read all of their novels, especially Pinget’s, whose nuances and narrative devices I had tried often in my own work. The title of my first novel was taken from Mahu’s first line: “This is a story I can’t make head nor tail of it....”  Overall, Queneau may have influenced me more greatly.  I have described my novel, Berthcut & Sons (formerly known as Head Nor Tail, in queries to editors, as being “Ameriqueneau.”  

The other thirteen books comprised various works of nonfiction – philosophy, history, memoir – from influential authors.  A Cendrars memoir of World War I, Lice, complemented another work about the French soldiers in the trenches, Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory.  T. Harry Williams’ P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray I acquired because of my interest Southern Civil War Generals, especially Beauregard, who participated in many battles and campaigns: Fort Sumter, First Mannasas, Shiloh and the southern retreat into Mississippi, and the defense against Sherman’s drive through South Carolina at the end of the war.  After reading it I was more amazed by the organized chaos of battles in the Civil War (and probably all wars), especially the apparently arbitrary factors which allowed one side to carry the day (Battles of Bull Run and Shiloh) and how generals could make or break battles with decisions made in an instant with little or scattered bits of information with which to work.

Invertebrate Spain and Meditations on Hunting by José Ortega y Gasset added to my already large collection of the Spanish philosopher’s book, as Ortega was and remains the single strongest influence on my ideas and direction in life.  My aforesaid novel began with an epigraph from Ortega.  Invertebrate Spain proved to be a necessary prelude to his most famous work, The Revolt of the Masses.

The remaining purchases:

The Outlook for Intelligence – Paul Valery         The Greek Tyrants – A. Andrews          

Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin – Otto Jespersen 

Terrorism – Walter Lacqueur             The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes – Arthur Waley

War and Human Progress – John Nef                      History of Rome – Thomas Mommsen

Idols of the Tribe – Harold R. Isaacs                  The End of Our Time – Nicolas Berdyaev

             

Only one or two of the twenty-one books I didn’t finish: The Greek Tyrants and War and Human Progress.

Infinite Jest

I explained to a friend what I considered the supreme quality of the greatest authors.

The author makes you want to give up writing.

There are a million better writers than me. Some of these writers I could give some fair competition to. But among the million are a few who would make these good and great writers pause and consider a new vocation. My two earliest encounters of the most intimidating fiction came from Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov. Their writing is to everyone’s else’s what Plato’s philosophy is to the rest of philosophical endeavor.

To add David Foster Wallace to a category including Proust and Nabokov is apt given my Plato analogy. Philosophy since the fourth century B.C.E. has been called a footnote to Plato. A distinctive feature of Wallace’s work is the footnote (or endnote). Infinite Jest has 388 endnotes covering 96 pages. I first encountered footnotes in a work of literature reading T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. They elucidate some elements of the poem but, in toto, they could be considered an elaborate joke. Look at this erudition, Eliot seems to say, but you won’t find the meaning of the poem here. The next time I saw footnotes, in Samuel Beckett’s Watt, clearly were satirizing Eliot’s use of them. The bulk of Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a commentary to a 999-line poem.  Indeed, Wallace’s footnotes in any of his works have Watt and Pale Fire as literary ancestors.

I read approximately 80 pages of Infinite Jest but circumstances forestalled any chance for sustained reading. So dense a novel needs long sustained readings, especially at the start, maybe 60 to a 100 pages. Take big chunks out of the book, as I had for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. However, I could barely read ten pages an hour and had little time available when I was teaching. Nothing kills a difficult reading venture than staying away from the book for two or three days. When I retired from teaching and had infinite time, I couldn’t make a commitment of a month or more to it. Nor did I want to reread the first 80 pages, although I had forgotten most of the content.

Not finishing Infinite Jest should have prevented me from buying his first novel, The Broom of the System. I started it but gave up quickly. It wasn’t as interesting as the former book, and I genuinely desire to finish it someday. But I rarely read books over three hundred pages and have completed a slew under one hundred pages. I like filling up my list of books read for the year. My fiercest reading binge occurred during the summer I had read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Fifty-three books. Since high school, I doubt that I have read fifty in one year.

Perhaps because I couldn’t finish Infinite Jest, I read as much of his other works as I could. His story collections:
The Girl with Curious Hair

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

And essay collections:

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Consider the Lobster

A great commencement speech:

This is Water

The commencement speech is exactly the opposite of the kind I got from Joe Paterno at Penn State’s Beaver Stadium. Joe was chosen because he had turned down an offer to leave Penn State and coach the New York Jets or New England Patriots. Here was an example of a man of principles. Now it appears that he should have taken the pro football coaching job and get as far away from Sandusky as he could.

The heart of David Foster Wallace’s speech comes from two successive passages:

1. “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

2. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

His speech is paean to a liberal arts education.

His two books of essays inform the reader superlatively about the sport of tennis, the American political campaign, sea cruises, talk-radio, state fairs, and literature. The title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again has made the greatest practical impact. I have been reluctant to take ocean liner cruise for years. Now, Wallace cemented the everyday horror of the experience. Primarily, one is with too many other people. Eating and recreating with them, perhaps a small group, but amidst thousands of others. It seemed the ships on the Celebrity and Disney Cruises are too big, as if you wouldn’t recognize you’re on a boat (and you only would when circumstances went horribly wrong). The first section of the essay includes the cultural vulgarity once shouldn’t have to pay to be around: a 13-year old with a toupee; fluorescent luggage, sunglasses, and pince nez; a woman in silver lame projectile vomit inside a glass elevator; and elevator reggae music.

Wallace’s style may be the most intense I’ve encountered. Proust can tie you into a mental bow with a two-page sentence; Nabokov pins you to the ground with his impeccable style and mastery of language. Yet, the scope of Wallace’s imaginatively innovative universe is daunting. Can any human being take in as much as he did? Critic David Lipsky said that Wallace’s “was the one voice I absolutely trusted to make sense of the outside world to me.” Another quality of the greatest writers.

Eventually, I want to return to Infinite Jest. Put aside the hundreds of books I own and haven’t read and spend two or three months with it. (I plan the same for two Nabokov novels: Ada and The Gift.) And eventually I will feel compelled to obtain Wallace’s incomplete third novel, The Pale King. It’s only 500 pages, although it appears the book, if finished, could have been 1500 pages. Then, again, it wouldn’t be the worst thing to collect a dozen or so books from the greatest of the great authors and strictly read, and reread, only them for the rest of my life. 

Book Overload

Maybe blogging more than any would want to read, best defines what I want to do:

1. A blog about books

2. In a medium whose users are indifferent to books

3. In a world where books have become increasingly irrelevant

4. By a writer who is unknown to the world of blog readers

5. A writer who senses no one cares about his tastes, fancies, insights, humor, but who simply can’t stop himself

Am I making a case for no one to read this?

But if someone is reading it, he or she must either care a bit or are curious. Perhaps I’ll blindly wander into a world of book readers who can share and appreciate my obsessive reading experience.

How to define this obsession? That’s one of the threads of this blogging venture. I will examine the many symptoms of a drive or appetite to read as many books as I can, starting around age ten. Could I have been naïve enough to have thought I could read everything? Did I know or anticipate the enormous amount of literature out there? I was satisfied, if not confident, that my tastes were wide enough to include many genres in fiction and large quantity of nonfiction, especially historical books.  

A character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea, Ogier P., an autodidact, is reading all the books in the local library alphabetically. The project seems both admirable and pathetic. No, I don’t think I could be so systematic, as my reading habits will prove, but the scale of my reading mirrors Ogier’s project.

Evidence of my progressive desire to read everything is the increasing number of books that I own and have not read (or only partially read). This inclination started early, in my teens, as I found great pleasure on buying books. I belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild during my sophomore year in high school. In my thirties, as I started a career as a History teacher, I joined the History Book Club. These started my book surplus, as initial enthusiasms for many works (the Eastern Roman Empire, the Goths, archaeology) often died before I even started them. Because I found other books more interesting and promised myself I would eventually get to the increasing number of dust-gathering hardbacks.

The book overpopulation took off exponentially once I accessed second-hand book stores. Starting in college, most of the books I bought cost a fraction of the retail price. Forty-years of second hand books made worse with the creation of Amazon. I had access virtually to any book ever written. And, like the search for books in New York City and Philadelphia, I reveled in tracking down many remote books.

But the ultimate testament to my obsession is the presence in my bookcases of several thousand-page books or books that are almost or feel like a thousand pages. All the books have been started but, due to age and distractions, I gave up after reading, at most, ten to fifteen present of them.

Not that I don’t have a successful history of reading very long books. In high school, at age fifteen, I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It took two weeks, reading eighty to ninety pages a day.  Then there was Irving Wallace’s The Plot. I remember a blurb on the nine hundred-page paperback: “Only a shortage of paper will prevent this book from being a bestseller.” In my thirties, I read the nearly thousand pages of Don Quixote.

Trouble began with the eight hundred-page Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I had read V. and The Crying of Lot 49. And I motored through the early pages of his magnum opus. But around page four hundred I bogged down, I told myself I would get back to it. I did but didn’t get much further. But this didn’t prevent me from buying Mason & Dixon. Nearly eight hundred pages. I haven’t even started it after ten years.

The latter book reminded of two John Barth novels I couldn’t finish: The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy (I couldn’t get very far in his very long Letters). The first Barth book anticipated Mason & Dixon; the second intrigued me for its alleged satire of campus life at Penn State University, where I earned a Bachelor of Arts in English, the same department where Barth worked a few years prior to my matriculation.

Mason & Dixon’s length pales beside the impossibly long narratives (and supremely small print) of'

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Women and Men by Joseph McElroy

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

I will discuss these books and my trouble reading them in the next few blogs.