DFW

The David Foster Wallace story in the new issue of Tin House is an old one--his first published story, in fact, written while still an undergraduate at Amherst College. Perhaps the closest thing we have these days to the voice of a generation, Wallace committed suicide in September, at the age of 46. His death was a tragic development, but hardly a shocking one: he had tried to kill himself several times before. Suicide was also a recurring theme in his fiction.

This new old story, entitled "The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to The Bad Thing," is being republished, ostensibly--there is no editor's note*--to shed some light on his suicide. In the story, "the planet Trillaphon" refers to the condition of being on antidepressants, "the Bad Thing" to the protagonist's clinical depression. Wallace notably went off his meds--meds he had been swallowing regularly for two decades--just a few months before he died.

"I've been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I'm pretty qualified to tell what they're like," the story begins. "They're fine, really, but they're fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn't be good old Earth, obviously. I haven't been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn't doing very well on Earth. I've been doing somewhat better where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved."

Later, the character describes his depression--the Bad Thing--this way, "Everything in you is sick and grotesque. And since your only acquaintance with the whole world is through parts of you--like your sense organs and your mind, etc.--and since these parts are sick as hell, the whole world as you perceive it and know it and are in it comes at you through this filter of bad sickness and becomes bad. As everything bad becomes bad in you, all the good goes out of the world like air out of a big broken balloon. There's nothing in this world you know but horrible rotten smells, sad and grotesque and lurid pastel sights, raucous or deadly-sad sounds, intolerable open-ended situations lined on a continuum with just no end at all...

And then all of a sudden it sort of dawns on you...the Bad Thing is able to do this to you because you're the Bad Thing yourself! The Bad Thing is you. Nothing else: no bacteriological infection or having gotten conked on the head with a board or a mallet when you were little, or any other excuse; you are the sickness yourself. It is what "defines" you, especially after a little while has gone by. You realize all this, here. And that, I guess, is when if you're all glib you realize that there is no surface to the water, or then you bonk your nose on the jar's glass and realize you're trapped, or when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed," we say, "Holy Cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves." That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts...When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly. They're just giving external form to an event the substance of which already exists and has existed in them over time."

If you haven't read Wallace's Kenyon College commencement speech from 2005, you can find it here. It's hard to overstate the piece's brilliance. Wallace writes like someone trying to convince himself--and thus you--that living is ultimately worthwhile.

* UPDATE: Rob Spillman actually did write, in the Editor's Note for the entire issue: "Our premiere issue featured a story by David Foster Wallace, whom we miss. In the spirit of coming full circle, we present a story written in the budding stage of his brilliant career, previously seen only in his college literary magazine and published here with the blessing of Wallace's widow." Oops.

The Art of Noticing

From How Fiction Works, by James Wood:

"Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice...

This tutoring is dialectical. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better reader of details in literature; which in turn makes us better of readers of life. And so on and on."

Short Short: A Good Deed

By Charles Smyth

We were half-way through our third drink when the old guy at the end of the bar toppled off his stool onto the floor. He lay there for several minutes, his face turning gray. No one helped him. So we called nine one one. The ambulance arrived quickly, and two EMTs loaded the guy onto a stretcher and carted him off.

An hour and a half later, he walked back into the bar and said something to the bartender, who pointed at us. He nodded and headed our way.

"Probably wants to buy us a drink," I said to my friend.

"Next time," the old guy told us. "Mind your own fucking business."

Dehumanized

There is a really great article in the new issue (print only, unless you subscribe) of Harper's Magazine by Mark Slouka that elucidates how the education system in America has bowed to Big Business to such an extent that we are now producing a generation of future employees instead of citizens. Consider the language affected by such institutions: "Preparing America's Youth to Compete in the Global Marketplace," etc, etc. Private colleges, especially, seem to be first mechanisms for making money, second institutions for higher learning.

Or, as Slouka points out, institutions committed to a certain kind of higher learning--namely math and science at the expense of the humanities. After all, scientists and mathematicians are of great use to the capitalists, whereas people schooled in the humanities, in literature and history and art, are potential threats to such orthodoxy. As Slouka writes, "Real debate can be short-circuited through orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the result is the same." The unexamined assumption, of course, is that there is only one system of value that holds any merit, one that puts economic concerns ahead of all else.

Slouka continues, "In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, for accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked and revered by it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including--in the last, last analysis--our own. If humankind has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I am not aware of it."
d

Call Max Baucus, Senator Scumbag Extraordinaire!

d
If you aren't aware already, Max Baucus is a conservative Democrat from Montana who just happens to be the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee--which just happens to be the most important committee in Congress when it comes to passing health care reform. (Basically, he's the guy who has to sign off on the funds for the reform.) To date, Baucus has received almost $3 million in campaign contributions from the health insurance industry--more than any other member of Congress--and so it is unsurprising that of all the Democrats, it is he who has been the most obstructionist when it comes to the public option. One example is that he has brought more Republicans into the committee--the so-called Gang of Six--than are required, under the deceptive name of "bipartisanship." Apparently, that tests better with focus groups than "blatant corruption."

I normally don't get too outraged about this sort of thing--it just doesn't seem worth the energy--but in the case of Baucus, and in the case of healthcare, the outrage is plenty healthy. The idea that a man whose entire constituency equals about two percent of the number of people in this country currently without healthcare is holding up the most important piece of legislation in our lifetimes is enough to make one's stomach turn. Or one's blood boil. Mine certainly is.

I've been calling Senator Baucus' office to let them know what I think about what he's doing, and I suggest you do the same. The number is (202) 224-2651.

Norman Mailer on Craft

From The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

"By now, I'm a bit cynical about craft. I think there's a natural mystique in the novel that is more important. One is trying, after all, to capture reality, and that is extraordinarily and exceptionally difficult. Craft is merely a series of way stations. I think of it as being like a Saint Bernard with a little bottle of brandy under his neck. Whenever you get into trouble, craft can keep you warm long enough to be rescued. Of course, this is exactly what keeps good novelists from becoming great novelists...Craft protects one from facing endless expanding realities--the terror, let us say, of losing your novel in the depths of philosophical insights you are not ready to live with. I think this sort of terror so depresses us that we throw up evasions--such as craft. Indeed, I think this adoration of craft makes a church of literature for that vast number of writers who are somewhere on the bell-shaped curve between talent and mediocrity."

Poem: Chacala

by Alex Gallo-Brown

Where the sun setting
can still stop
a human cold

Where the waves
lap against the beach
like a cop making his rounds

Where the sky springs pink
like the cotton candy of childhood

and on the shore the people stand in silence
watching the sea and the sun

and the dogs at peace with their fleas

Where the blowfish wash up dying
or already dead

Where the vultures are greasy black
and hesitant

and the greasy, hesitant vultures
come to snack on the dead blowfish

Where the waves never quit

Where the mosquitoes come to visit at night
like old friends
leave with a little blood like
old friends

Where the geckos cackle high in the walls
the snakes keep to themselves
the rats drown in the toilets
and the wasps always wake
on the wrong side of the nest

Where the scorpions skitter along the rocks, scared
to be captured, turned into keychains

Where the Mexicans drain whales of beer

and the Americans tongue strings of cheese
dangling from their chips

Where things are always changing
the waves keep up their work
and the children are never alone