Because this miss is on my list (ugh)

I have decided to give up on the book I've been reading. I seldom ever go this far into one (3/4) and not finish it, living by the belief that if the first few pages of a book doesn't appeal to me, the only recourse should be to put it down and move on to the next. One of the very few exceptions was Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which somehow proved my judgement on its beginning chapters wrong, and it was, perhaps, the memory of this experience that was one of the reasons why I stuck to Kundera's Life is Elsewhere; the other being that of reading his The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and liking both.

The book has its merits, but the current mood I'm in has been unable to find a juncture to settle in, so for now, I'm putting it back on the shelf. I could probably pull it out it at a later time, though judging from the list of books I still want to read (not counting the ones that are yet to be added), I'm predicting the chances to be very, very low.

Meanwhile, I'll be having this for breakfast, lunch and dinner:

David Foster Wallace, in the house:

"There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us---these are just the hazards of being free." 
— from Infinite Jest

"Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth." 
— from Infinite Jest

"Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" 

I give." 

You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog." 


— from Infinite Jest

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer." 


"Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still." 
— from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

"...morning is the soul's night." 
—  from Infinite Jest

"Mediocrity is contextual." 
—  from Infinite Jest

"But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?" 
— from Consider the Lobster: and other Essays


"Words and a book and a belief that the world is words..." 
— from The Broom of the System


"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home." 
— from Consider the Lobster: and other Essays


"To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type if death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end." 
— from The Pale King


"life's endless war against the self you cannot live without." 
— from Infinite Jest


"I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. "
— from Infinite Jest

“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. … We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.”

David Foster Wallace
-via
 Jonathan Carroll

I think, therefore, I squiggle

My friend, M--, is very anal about his books, which translates to his being finicky, as well, when it comes to my books. He used to scold me about dog-earing (I know, I'm bad, but I've changed my ways--I use book marks now) and barks at me when I leave them lying on the floor, or any other surface aside from a clean one. He thinks that the only proper place for a book--except, of course, when one is reading it--is a bookshelf.

He was shocked when I, so proudly, showed him my old poetry books, which had notes on the sides of the pages. "But it's a sign that it's been read, that it's being read. And that the person reading them actually cares about comprehending them, about studying them, right? And, besides, my analytical skills are heightened when I write things down."

If he weren't enough of a "guy" guy, I'm sure he would have rolled his eyes at the logic I was trying to present. "Write them some place else, then."

Heartless. Bigot. Purist.

Today, while I was blog-hopping, I came across these:



So, it turns out, the late, great David Foster Wallace wrote notes on his books. Now, I have someone on my side.

(images via We Love You So)

Lit Geek Update #14: Kafka, Funny?

I mean, the thought of Kafka as funny never, ever occurred to me, in all my readings of him. I pored through his stories with unabashed earnestness, approaching them with utmost thoughtfulness. Man's essential solitude and loneliness have been his central themes, all throughout, have they not?

I--and most of us, I'd presume--would turn out to be mistaken, apparently. In the initial paragraphs of "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness," the third essay from David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster And Other Essays:, he writes:

"...it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny. Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the power of his stories." -p. 61-

And I spent more than half an hour mulling over these lines:

"No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home." -p. 64-

I rearranged the ideas in several different ways, tried to twist the logic to see if it would give, caught a headache in the process, finally decided I'd had enough, then went back to it with a firm resolve not to give up until I could roll the words of the simplest paraphrase in my tongue as comfortably as I can. Eventually, and thankfully, I succeeded.

What a feat!

And then I read the passage to a friend, asked him to turn the lines around his head, then tell me what he thought about it.

I'm guessing he went through the same thing I did.
=)

Wallace ends the essay with these superb lines:

"You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward--we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch." -p.65-