I want an erection of the heart

I was surprised by how taken aback I was at learning of the death of David Foster Wallace some two weeks ago now. I have not been one of those who tackled his massive Infinite Jest, that 1000+ page tome to postmodern angst and ennui caught in the language of addiction and compulsive action. Rather, I am more familiar with his (more minimalist?) work in such bits as his collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and the nonfiction pieces of "journalism" that appeared in myriad places and publications. In fact, it was just these sorts of essays, ruminations on a (post)modern morality often, that punctuated my months and reminded me of the significance of the man himself - most recently in a near perfect 2004 essay on the Maine Lobster Festival that appeared in Gourmet Magazine; a piece that I took and read (and reread) in the days after learning of his suicide. It was thanks to the thoughtful work of my good friend Jon that I was reminded of an interview that DFW gave to Salon.com after the initial buzz surrounding the publication of IJ. Though it is a decade or so old, it remains a succinct reminder of not only Wallace's concerns, what most motivated his work and life, but also why he was so important an author. Whether it be the valuation and estimation of the work of other authors (and in that a reminder that good writing, though fundamentally a charade, can, as a friend of his had said, give you an erection of the heart), or simply the place of the author and literature in a postmodern world that is seemingly stuck in a cycle of hyper-entertainment and distraction, he spoke out loud the words that many of us who (and lets face up to this) came of age in the late 1980s and the 1990s, who are white and male and found ourselves in a position unfamiliar and unlike that of our fathers. It is too simple to say that our world was decentered and that "power" (in the Foucauldian sense) in the public sphere was slipping (had slipped) out of our grasp, rather the dissolution of the modernist metanarrative that had guided us for fifty or so years - that of the Cold War and righteous warriors - had necessarily faded with the collapse of the Soviet Union and was replaced (whether we realized it or not in the moment) by a narrative of plastic postmodernism. No doubt, the era of image politics had come of age in the US with the ascendency of Ronald Regan to the presidency (as has been noted elsewhere, George Bush actually was all the things that Regan simply pretended to be in the movies and as he aged the boundary between his "actual" memories and his "hollywood" memories became more and more transparent) but it was with the ending of the Cold War that we entered fully into the era that Lyotard had suggested in his short 1979 work, The Postmodern Condition, an era when information and its monopolization in non-governmental organizations pressed the levers of influence and power. Language changed with the ending of the Cold War and other technologies of exchange and transfers of information entered into the (Bourdieu-ian) field muscling onto the ground that had been the privlege of the narrative of the nation previously: "nobody speaks all of those languages, they have no universal meta-language, the project of the system-subject is a failure," wrote Lyotard - the day of a unitary and exclusionary identity has slipped well into the past. This was the tide of things that Wallace did not fight against but wanted to explicate and reveal the source of the alienation that seems to strike so many in today's America.

I can go back and read the work that he left behind at any time, but for now I have another proposition for myself. Recently, a former student in one of DFW's creative writing/literature courses at Pomona College posted a copy of his 2005 syllabus. Sophia, apparently now a graduate student in the hard sciences, nonetheless made reference in comments to her blog that her course with Wallace was her "favorite academic experience" despite the fact that she was a bio major. What I am now proposing for myself is to "take" DFW's course using Sophia's syllabus. I will read the texts listed and write the papers as detailed, and I will attempt to avoid the "rough-draftish" quality of much "semiliterate college writing" that apparently drove him crazy. With pencil, highlighter and a refresher primer on how to do a "close reading" of a text, I'm moving from behind the college lectern and putting myself back in class. I will have to wing some of it, in an attempt to follow as closely as I can his intent for the course, I will have to additionally assign myself at least a dozen smaller readings and produce 11 short writing assignments. Obviously, the elephant in the room here is that DFW is not here to provide his piquant and potentially withering but always spot-on comments on my interpretations and analysis of the assigned works and short assignments so I will be posting them here and leaving them available to anyone who happens across them and wishes to offer their own thoughts or comments. I am going to give myself a year to complete this project and as next week marks Rosh Hashanah, I will mark that as the start date for my class. That said, I will give this one caveat, I have other work, a manuscript, that must - must - be completed and with some luck (lo, how often in the past months have I uttered that simple and ugly phrase?) it will be completed in the next two weeks. It is then that I will actually begin this plan. After all, when another author who was sharing time and space with Wallace at the Lannan Foundation suggested that he was going to blow off the morning's writing to head 50 miles out of town in search of some fresh fish, DFW "looked intrigued, but advised, 'You'd better give that the old sniff test.'" It is time that I start giving much that I decide to do the old sniff test. Thanks Professor Wallace, see you in class - after I finish what I am supposed to finish.
-fp