talking about "infinite jest" while reading it

is like giving a weather report from inside a storm. 

all you can say is that right now it's pretty wet and more rain is falling...

DFW

I have fallen hard, again, for David Foster Wallace. In high school I was intrigued by Brief Interviews and Girl with the Curious and liked both but was never tempted to dip into the novels. In college I exploded through A Supposedly Fun Thing and have never doubted that it's one of the all-time great and wonderful works of creative non-fiction. And I've stumbled across some of the scattered essays from Consider the Lobster and elsewhere over the years.

But this summer I picked up again A.S.F.T. and the jolt of familiarity, recognition, intimacy was almost troublingly vivid. And so now I have started Infinite Jest and I have no qualms and my hands do not shake when I hold it and I do not sigh when I fit all of its thousand or so pages into my bag and I do not think it strange that I might need two bookmarks to proceed through the whole of it. Which I will do. Even if it's all I do this fall.

Because reading David Foster Wallace especially now this summer after so many years of not reading him and never reading his novels, it's like that person in your life, I think everyone has one and I may have several, that person who is there is no other way to say it just really the most brilliant person you know, who seems not to ever walk across a room but to be always propelled forward by the gust of an idea swelling their mind like a sail, but you've never really been so close because in spite of this brilliant mind there is also a lot of pain and it is very close to the underneath of their skin and you can see it there when the sun hits in a certain way, illuminating their veins like rail lines on a city map, and so maybe you see them, i mean really see them, only a few times a year. And when you do, you sit at a table and talk. They talk, mostly. You are so involved in what they're saying, your mind responds so eagerly, that it may be hours before you realize that you haven't actually spoken in hours, and then you forget again, and but then you think they are talking maybe a little too fast or maybe it's a little too loud and you do a mental check for which of your neighbors might be home and which of the ones who might be home might mind, and maybe you get up to double-lock the door or put on some music. And maybe when you come back you lean away a little at this point. Maybe you duck your head or stop making such furious eye contact. The force of what's being said is enough to shave a layer of shine off the table. For a moment you've lost the thread but when you have it again, it is brighter than before.

And then the sun comes up and you go to sleep.

Full Circle

A few weeks ago I saw David M*tchell read from his new book at a bookstore in the West Village. The book, reviewed extensively in pretty much every major literary publication currently on my coffee table, is about Dutch traders on the Japanese island of Dejima in the 1800s, the closest that the closed nation would allow foreigners to approach.

At the reading, he said many beautiful things. This is one of them:

Over the course of the novel, the main character, Jacob, falls in love with a Japanese woman, Orito. Their courtship includes impromptu vocabulary lessons in one another's tongues. "What does Jacob mean in Dutch?" "What do you call this flower?" Etc. At one point, Jacob asks Orito the Japanese word for persimmon -- "kaki," she tells him. They share one, in a luscious passage of flesh-bright prose.

Here Mitchell paused from his reading. "You know," he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "I give readings in the Netherlands and people speak such good English there they can follow me without a problem. But when I got to that passage, I wanted to make sure it was clear, so I asked what the Dutch word for persimmon was. It's 'kaki.'"

Had his novel been written in the native language of its characters, Victorian-era Dutch, he would have known that already. But instead, this funny coincidence is in fact no coincidence at all: the word is a trace of the trade that he was writing about all along.

metaphor: from Gk. metaphora "a transfer," "a carrying over," from metapherein "transfer, carry over," from meta- "over, across" + pherein "to carry, bear"

translate: from L. translatus "carried over," serving as pp. of transfere "to bring over, carry over," from trans + latus "borne, carried"

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php

When we think about languages existing and persisting over time, we tend to focus on how they change -- new words being coined, others going stale, rules we no longer follow. The other day, a friend of a friend treated to me on a short disquisition on words that didn't make it into the new volume of the dictionary.

But this article by Frank Kermode in the New York Review of Books about a new translation of the Bible made me wonder about the opposite phenomenon. I think (and this is based on no actual information) that certain works of literature (the King James' Bible, Shakespeare plays, etc.) weigh like anchors, keeping English from drifting too far out to sea. The prevalence and currency of these texts maintains their legibility and their legibility maintains certain features of the English language.

Think of it as a cosmic struggle between Hamlet and Twitter over our souls.

And also...

How come an amnesiac is someone suffering from amnesia but an aphrodisiac is something inducing aphrodesia? 

What is with these suffixes??

Things I Am Wondering About

How come you can be heart-broken but not heart-warmed?