• In the process of writing the novel he came to call The Pale King, he laid out its central tenet in one of his notebooks: "Bliss -- a second-by-second joy & gratitude at the gift at being alive, conscious -- lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you & just about kill you. Ride these out, & it's like stepping from black & white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom."
• "I do not know why the comparative ease & pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I'm Supposed to Do... but it does, & now I'm back here flogging away (in all sense of the word) & feeding my own wastebasket, & taking half-hours off to write letters like this & still calling it Writing Time."
• ...Kurt Godel, who authored the incompleteness theorems, which state that no matter how much one knows about a system there is yet more to know. That knowledge has limits that are themselves the product of our knowledge was the sort of thing that Wallace never stopped thinking about.
• The morning of September 11 found Wallace at his usual activities, going to his meeting, running errands, planning to write. At the actual moment of the attacks, he was showering, "trying to listen to a Bears post-mortem on WSCR Sports Radio in Chicago," as he remembered.
• He made amends wherever he could, sometimes to excess. He wrote to his Arizona sponsor that "I struggle a great deal, & am 99.8% real," then crossed that out & wrote "98.8%," noting in a parenthesis in the margin, "Got a bit carried away here."
• "I'm not that into condiments."
• Expecting that they were going to begin a relationship & determined to start on an honest footing this time, he wrote her a series of letters -- Grim Letter I, Grim Letter II, he called them -- where he laid out his psychiatric history & his history w/ women.
• He told her the depressed person was really him."
• In Hawaii, they watched movies & walked on the beach & talked constantly. Green swam, while Wallace avoided the water. He found the islands, he wrote Morrow afterward, "much less touristy or vulgar than I'd thought, & haunted & sad in a good way." He also liked that there were no bugs.
• His earnestness, part midwestern childhood, part defense mechanism, was unusual on a campus where the tone was muted cool, sun-drenched Ivy.
• ...he came back with something decidedly more delicate than the state fair or the cruise piece. He had always been interested in what animals feel -- their inability to protect themselves touched him as human pain didn't -- and over the years he had begun to wonder what right we had to be cruel to them. In Maine he found a scene worthy of Hogarth: thousands of lobsters being boiled alive at the "enormous, pungent, & extremely well-marketed Maine Lobster Festival," where "friend & stranger alike sit cheek by jowl, cracking & chewing & dribbling. It's hot, & the sagged roof traps the steam & the smells." Who, he wanted to know, gave us such dominion? But Wallace was & had always been adverse to hectoring -- it seemed rude to him -- & in the piece he took pains to distance himself, physically & rhetorically, from the PETA representative... Instead, Wallace posed the problem w/ lobster eating as a series of ethical questions, writing in the faux-naive voice of the curious midwestern boy he still in some ways was: "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?" He went on slyly...
• The stories in Brief Interviews are afraid of expansion, so unattractive or unstable are the interiors of their subjects; the stories in Oblivion seem afraid of compression, as if the title were a threat that could only be defended against by the relentlessly engaged consciousness. Words cover the stories, coating them in thick layers of verbiage, perspectives shift, & there are disorienting chronological jumps. "It's interesting if you really think about it, how clumsy & laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing," the narrator of "Good Old Neon" writes. There is only one way to halt the onrush of data, to slow it down so you can find its meaning: "Think for a second what if all the infinitely dense & shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open & expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died...?"
• Neal is a familiar type in the Wallace world, a young man whose personality is built on the need to impress others. And the more he succeeds in impressing them, the more of a fraud he feels. Like Wallace, he feels frozen by the need to control how others see him, "condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue." Suicide appears to him the only escape from this recursive nightmare. "Self-loathing isn't the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death. If I was going to do it, I wanted it instant," he reassures us.
• ...many (stories) in the collection have a tamped-down sense of doom, of thoughts distorted by words & words constrained by personality & personality deformed by culture.
• ..."not a body that occupied space but rather just a bodyshaped area of space itself."
• He boasted to Costello that in writing it he had "looked straight into the camera." He meant that he had finally surmounted the need to have readers love him. The mania was gone; only a studied & mature sadness remained.
• Wallace: "Maybe dullness is associated w/ psychic pain b/c something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, & which most of us spend nearly all our time & energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or w/ our full attention."
• Wallace: "I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic."
• Wallace had a strikeout drawn through the fading word "Mary" on his tattoo & placed an asterisk & "Karen," turning his arm into a living footnote. He knew he could not sustain the emotional availability of a parent & he was worried about passing on his mental instability, so he did not want to have children anymore, but he enjoyed being w/ Stirling...
• ...& from their street they could see the mountains.
• After lunch, the newlyweds walked down a path & Wallace gave a hop & clicked his heels together. Amy photographed the moment, & this became their wedding announcement. They spent the evening watching a Law & Order marathon in their "shitty motel," as Wallace reported to DeLillo, assuring him that "my ass is not as big as it looks in the photo."
• (Wallace) had developed a personality for social interactions that he had never had before. Whenever anyone came over & complimented the decor, Wallace would quickly say it was Green's doing. Green would see another side at night, when he would beg her not to get sick & die.
• _allace often got mail from aspiring authors, many modeling their prose after his, & one day Weston Cutter, a young writer, wrote to ask Wallace, why bother writing? "It's just this: how do you keep hope?" Cutter asked. "How do you know just get tired of all this shit, all the time from every vector, public & private & governmental? And more pressing, how do you not wear yourself out & feel as if you're just another supplier of said stuff?" "This is like listening to a transcript of my own mind," Wallace jotted at the bottom of his letter in response, adding, "Basically--I empathize. I have no answers. I do know I'm easiest when I accept how small I am & how paltry my contribution is as a % of total. But >60% of the time I don't/can't accept it. Go figure."
• But of course being ready to write was not the same as writing. (284)
• There was always the teaching & the counseling & the sponsoring. He wanted to help those most in need, offering informal advice & complete availability, paying it forward. He wrote in his introduction to English 67 - Literary Interpretation: "Clinically shy students, or those whose best, most pressing questions & comments occur to them only in private, should do their discussing w/ me solo, outside class. If my scheduled office hours don't work for you, please call me so that we can make an appointment for a different meeting time." (284)
• "...but by the time learn your name I'm going to remember your name for the rest of my life. You're going to forget who I am before I forget who you are." (284)
• ...the real Wallace differed at this point almost 180 degrees from the Wallace of popular imagination; a slacker exterior hid an intense moralist, someone whose long experience in recovery had made him into an apostle of careful living & hard work. Success had to be earned; do your homework; make your bed. (284)
• At Kenyon, Wallace saw a chance to set out the things he cared about w/o the frustrating contrivance of the noel. He could just tell the audience to be mindful instead of trying to orchestrate it through his characters. He had a chance to remind that most self-centered of cohorts, college students, to get over themselves -- or, better, outside themselves. (...) "You're special -- it's O.K. -- but so's the guy across the table who's raising 2 kids sober & rebuilding a '73 Mustang. It's a magical thing w/ 4,000,000,000 forms. It kind of takes your breath away." (285)
• So for the Kenyon College address, he wrote a speech against egoism & egotism, about openness & humility, of apostles who behold but cannot see. He inserted a favorite joke from recovery. Two young fish are swimming along & they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish goes by & calls out to them, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" The younger fish continue side by side for a while & then one stops & says, "What the hell is water?" In other words, it was not hard to be successful in conventional terms; what was hard was to be aware of life as you had lived it. "The trick," he underscored, "is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." He continued: "Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about the mind being "an excellent servant but a terrible master." He explained to the students that they could stand in a supermarket line & experience nothing but the anxiety & irritation their college-augmented sense of superiority would entitle them or they could, in the midst of that same experience, open themselves to a moment of the most supernal beauty -- "on fire w/ the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things." It was up to them, of course; they could do as they chose: "But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will have other options." (285-86)
• The truth behind banalities always excited & embarrassed Wallace, filling him w/ the wonder that, as he wrote in IJ, "cliched directives are a lot more deep & hard to actually _do._" Over the past 25 years his mental life had run a huge circuit through the most astonishing complexities to arrive at what many 6-year-olds & nearly all churchgoers already understood. He wasn't sure whether what he had written was deep or unimportant. (286)
• Wallace delivered his (Kenyon) words in his academic robe, bent slightly forward, a lock of hair covering his face, sweat dripping down his neck, in his intense, slightly quavering voice, speaking modestly & hesitantly. It was as if there was nothing more uncomfortable for him than being there, at this podium, but what he had to say was too important to keep it to himself. There was a sense that day that the man speaking these ordinary phrases had earned that right. It was one thing if your aunt told you you weren't the center of the universe just b/c you thought you were; it was another if the author of Infinite Jest did. Wallace was someone whom younger people felt a link to, someone who had defied the corruptions of the adult world. (286)
• ...the world had changed drastically in the decade since Wallace had written IJ. The current danger was not from total immersion but from relentless fragmentation, not from watching one video to death but from skipping among hundreds. Americans were now not passively but frenetically entertained, & the warning shot turned out to be not Wallace as a child, glued to the 4 stations of 1960s Urbana, but Wallace in Bloomington, clicking among 75 channels of satellite TV, unable to decide which show to watch lest he miss a better one. Instinctively, Wallace was wary of the emerging technology. (286)
• But changes in technology did not really affect whether one responded to IJ. Video cartridges were the vector of the plot, but they were not responsible for the sadness at its core. What the novel was about was how to feel connected in your own life, & that was still the great struggle. The Web might offer a different hope of escape from the self, but actually escaping was no less futile, as those who spent their time trying discovered. (It was nicknamed the "Web" for good reason.) (287)
• Wallace's distinctive prose w/ its rapid ascents & descents in diction & its seemingly endless appetite for expansion, at once erudite & ungainly, yearning for home w/o ever finding it, turned out to be perfect for a new medium. The Web seemed made for multiple conjunctions at the opening of sentences. (287)
• Scholars began examining his works' dense allusions. They focused on narcissism, irony, & recursion. The influence of Derrida, De Man, Heidegger, &, of course, Wittgenstein were looked at. (288)
• (Wallace on his writing): "I have lots of stuff that's been jostling in line inside for years for a book. What's missing is some...thing. It may be a connection between the problem of writing it & of being alive. That doesn't feel quite true ofr me, though. Mine is more like the whole thing is a tornado that won't hold still long enough for me to see what's useful & what isn't, which tends to lead to the idea that I'll have to write a 5,000 page manuscript & then winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither & get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light outside. I've brooded & brooded about all this till my brooder is sore. Maybe the answer is simply that to do what I want to do would take more effort than I am willing to put it. Which would be a bleak reality indeed, if that's all it is?" (289)
• (Wallace): "DeLillo's thing," he added to Franzen, "about the unwritten book following Gray around like a malformed fetus dribbling cerebrospinal fluid from its mouth gets apter all the time. I am dead becalmed -- stuff literally goes right into the wastebasket after being torn from the top of the legal pad." (289)
• Yet the specter of his unfinished work was never far from his thoughts. The Pale King was wildly overdue now, though the only deadline was in his own mind, since there was no contract. (290)
• The value of meditation & emptying the mind continued to play a key role in The Pale King. (291)
• ...but he could not get out from under the shadow of the statue. To the inside cover of a notebook, he taped an anecdote about T.S. Eliot, who had also suffered from crushingly high standards: "One of (Conrad) Aiken's friends was a patient of the famous analyst Homer Lane, & Aiken told his friend about Eliot's problem. Lane said to his patient, "Tell your friend Aiken to tell his friend Eliot that all that's stopping him is his fear of putting anything down that is short of perfection. He thinks he's God.'" (The underlining was Wallace's). (294)
• When his sister, Amy, would call, he would tell her, "I'm not all right. I'm trying to be, but I'm not all right. (298)
• "The Pale King" had once referred to the IRS, & possibly to the state of contentment & focus the book advocated; but now it was a synonym for the depression that tormented him, or death. (298)
• Sedaris was surprised at how funny & gentle Wallace was, how full of praise for his students. At the end Pietsch asked Wallace how he was doing. "You don't wanna know," his writer replied. When they hugged, Pietsch looked into Wallace's eyes & thought they looked "haunted." (299)
• (after Wallace's new 12 ECT sessions): Franzen came for a visit while the treatments were in progress in July. (...) He was astonished at the changes in his friend's body & mind. They would play w/ the dogs or go outside so Wallace could smoke. Franzen asked what he had been thinking when he tried to kill himself & Wallace winced & said he didn't remember. He was barely able to read, not even the thrillers he ordinarily devoured. Instead he mostly watched TV. After dinner, Werner licked out his mouth. (300)
• "It's like they're throwing darts at a dartboard," he complained to them about his psychiatrists. (300)
• He was a shut-in now, worried he'd run into his students if he went into town. (His mother) Sally Wallace cooked him the meals he had loved as a child -- casseroles & pot pies; they watched The Wire. It was obvious to his family that he was in unendurable pain. Before she left, he thanked her for being his mother. (300)
• In early September, Nadell spoke w/ him & thought that he sounded a bit better. He was writing notes to himself, making gratitude lists & lists of symptoms & fears & keeping a journal. In his last entry he wrote that he would stay awake so that when Green got home he could help her w/ the groceries. (300-01)
• Green felt comforted by the fact that he'd seen the chiropractor on Monday. "You don't go to the chiropractor if you're going to commit suicide," she says. (301)
• After Green left, Wallace went into the garage & turned on the lights. He wrote her a two-page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair & hanged himself. When one character dies in IJ, he is "catapulted home over... glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear & nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world's well-known tongues." Green returned home at 9:30 & found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly 200 pages. He had made some changes in the months since he considered sending them to Pietsch. The story of "David Wallace" was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his 2 computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages -- drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel over the past decade. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be "a fucking human being." He had never completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen.

footnotes:

• This story was mythologized at Amherst in later years such that Wallace so flummoxed a professor w/ his superior intelligence that the professor snapped shut his briefcase & left the class in the middle of a lesson.
• Wallace made a try at explaining the dynamic of his surprising public success: "I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed."
• Wallace was well aware that suffering could help a writer produce his best work. In Somerville he had read Paul de Man's essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality" & wrote "brilliant" when he came upon the following disquisition on authorship: "The mere falling of others does not suffice; he has to go down himself. The ironic, twofold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification."
• "Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink" was a standard warning against self-pity in recovery, one that Wallace would cite in IJ. (317)
• Hints of effeminacy always brought out a bit Wallace's anxiety. When he moved to Illinois he placed a special order from a Bloomington store for T-shirts with dark squares on the front meant to hide what he saw as a flabby chest. (317)
• ...(Wallace) found writing directly onto a computer to be like "thinking out loud onto the screen," adding, "Writing by hand & typewriter not only brings out the best in me -- it brings out stuff I never would have dreamed was there... It is this -- not improvement, but transfiguration of the contents of my head that I am addicted to. It is astonishing when it happens -- magical -- & it simply doesn't happen on a computer." (317)
• Blue is a dominant color in IJ. One character is killed drinking Drano, "blue like glittershit"; another reveals "a blue string" behind an eyeball; Joelle vomits "blue smoke" into "the cool blue tub" when she hits bottom; the Charles is transformed to "robin-egg's blue" by the Clean US Party; the skies of the novel range from "Dilaudid-colored" to "pilot-light blue"; one section begins simply: "The following things in the room were blue." (318)
• ...he explained that his goal was "to preserve an orallish, out-loud feel" to his writing. That piece began as a talk, but it is also true of IJ. You are meant to think of it as a story being spoken rather than written -- or even better, thought. (319)
• Younger readers had an easier time with IJ's structure. It was in fact an undergraduate student who captured Wallace's strategy best. (...) In "On Speculation: Infinite Jest & American Fiction after Postmodernism," his undergraduate thesis, Hager captured the novel's "incomplete" ending w/ delicacy: "The resolution that reviewers complain the novel lacks isn't in the text, but sits chronologically & spatially in front of the novel proper, which, as a satellite dish, serves to focus myriad rays of light, or voices, or information, on that central resolution w/o actually touching it." Wallace was thrilled; battered by critics who said the novel just sort of stopped, he was waiting for just this type of reading. He offered a similar thought about the book in an online chat room for the e-zine WORD in May, saying that __"there is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an 'end' can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book's failed for you."__(219)
• Wallace was an extraordinary listener, with "a way of attending that is at once intense & assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed & sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment." (The description is of Lyle, the weight room guru in _IJ._) (320)
• An alternate reading of "The Depressed Person" is that the author sympathizes with her. The space he gives to narrating her experiences confers a validity to them, a gift that mimics at the same time the gift of therapy. (320)
• When from Las Vegas (Wallace) called Francis B. to complain the mirror on the ceiling was keeping him from sleeping, his friend told him to roll over. (320)
• The problem w/ the relationship might be captured on either side by the comment the outraged male narrator of "Here & There" makes about his girlfriend: "She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the 'me' she seemed so jealously to covet." (320)
• "He spent his entire life apologizing to me," Amy Wallace remembers. "Almost every time I saw him he'd apologize." (321)
• But, as Wallace himself would have asked, was he writing these letters to be open & honest or merely to make Green believe he was open & honest -- which would actually make him the opposite? (321)
• What drew Wallace to office life were its codes of conduct, the implicit restraints on the individual that were so lacking in his own life. For him office life bore the same relation to real life that literature did. It was a beguiling simulacrum, a cleaned-up imitation, a playful variation w/ rules. (322)

references to look into:

• film: Being There (starring Peter Sellers) - "...which he saw over and over and which fascinated him with its portrait of a man who learns everything he knows from television" (6)
• music: High, they listened to the stoner bands of the time: "I remember KISS, REO Speedwagan, Cheap Trick, Styx, Jethro Tull, Rush, Deep Purple, and, of course, good old Pink Floyd." (10)
• short story: David Barthelme's "The Balloon" - "It peeled back the skin of literature just as logic peeled back the skin of language. Wallace told an interviewer years later that Barthelme was the first time he heard the "click" in literature." (29-30)
• While they tripped, Wallace & McLagan would listen over & over to "The Big Ship" by Brian Eno on McLagan's expensive stereo. McLagan heard birth in it; Wallace thought it captured the earth in the time of the dinosaurs. (31)
• novel: Frank Norris - McTeague : "...finding himself particularly drawn to Frank Norris's ungainly naturalist novel McTeague - Norris's novel showed how much room there was for the bizarre in fiction, even in supposedly realist works. (38)
• novel: Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight - "...whose precise, almost analytic evocations of childhood felt like something (Wallace) might like to try." (56)
• Paul DeMan & Jacques Derrida (French-thinker duo)
• Malamud
• Hegel & Wittgenstein
• novel: William Gass - Omensetter's Luck - He had long wanted to write a variation on (the novel). The laconic hillbilly voice of the story appealed to him. (74)
• film: Blue Velvet by David Lynch: "It was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn't exempt you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it obligated, it upped them... That whatever the project of surrealism is works way better if 99.9% of it is absolutely real... I mean, most of the word surrealism is realism, you know? It's extra-realism, it's something on top of realism. It's that one thing in a Lynch frame that's off, that, if everything else weren't picture-perfect & totally structured, wouldn't it." (85)
• long story: John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse: "a touchstone of postmodern fiction written in 1967 that Wallace had long loved. (...) Barth consistently breaks through the narrative wall to remind the reader what he or she is experiencing as real is an artifact, words on paper. (...) He interferes with the seductions of fiction by unmasking them. (89-90)
• novel: The 27th City by Jonathan Franzen: "Set in St. Louis, it mixed postmodernism & traditional storytelling & showed a familiarity w/ its chosen city that Wallace could only marvel at. It decanted a Pynchonesquee conspiracy in media-mediated language; it was about the word and the world, realism for an era when there was no real. (Wallace:) '(this novel) seems so much more sophisticated than anything I could do plot-wise, so precocious in its marriage of theme & character & versimilitude & phantasm, so simultaneously wild & controlled, that I found myself hugging criticisms of it to myself in unabashed self-defense (a subspecies of envy).'" (115)
• novel: Rick Moody's Purple America - "a novel that deploys shifting consciousness to define a damaged & polluted America" (213)
• novel: William Vollman's The Rainbow Stories - "pursues the reportial inquiry into the darker side of American life" (213)
• novel: Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son
• novels: "They exchanged books -- he gave her The Screwtape Letters, she gave him the J.D. Salinger collection Nine Stories -- "She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing" was a line he loved. (252)
• film: "...insisting he had the maturity now to withstand fallow times: 'When there's sufficient humility & non-seriousness-about-self, it's not all that bad, more like when the 2 guys are laughing existentially... at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'" (263)
• novels: Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook & Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated, both debut novels that seemed to owe their exuberance -- their commitment to "vitality at all costs" -- to IJ. (265)
• philosophers, etc.: Derrida, De Man, Heidegger, Wittgenstein (288)
• novel: Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov : links with IJ - "The parallels are multiple, both being novels about a father & his 3 sons. Orin Incandenza corresponds to Dmitry Karamazov, the nihilistic oldest brother; Hal is Ivan; & Mario is the stand-in for Alyosha Karamazov, the simple, almost holy youngest son, w/ his "foolish grin" & refusal to lie. Like "the good old Brothers K," as Wallace called Dostoevsky's novel, IJ counterposes sincerity & faith against moral lassitude. Both eschew irony to make a single point: faith matters. (288)
• Rick Moody's The Diviners - "a maximalist novel set in Hollywood; (Wallace) thought it good in part but tired in style" - scene becoming crowded w/ "single-entendre principles, hijacks sentences, prose at once formal & street-smart" - no longer his alone (289)
• "...various writers he admired: Saint Paul, Rousseau, & always, Dostoevsky, among them -- & added, "What are envied & coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings - capacities of spirit -- rather than technical abilities or special talents." (296)
• writer: "He added that he had been reading Camus lately: 'He's very clear, as a thinker, & tough -- completely intolerant of bullshit. It makes my soul feel clean to read him.'" (298-99)
• philosophy: "Another philosophical book of the era, Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter, impressed Wallace a great deal. Subtitled "an eternal golden braid," the book investigates consciousness, logic, language, & the structures of meaning. Wallace borrowed his father's copy & "actually shoved this book excitedly at people in the 80s," as he remembered in an interview in The Believer. Godel is a predecessor to IJ, at least structurally. Mark Costello remembers Wallace when he was working on his novel "going on about the 'braid' or 'fugue' shape -- disparate elements making a whole." (310)
• writer-James Joyce: "'Order & Flux in Northampton' is an homage/parody of James Joyce. Wallace shared Joyce's fascination w/ wordplay though they approached literature from very different perspectives. But he took what he wanted from other writers. He told Mark Costello that he had gotten the idea of the discontinuous interview numbers in Brief Interviews after reading in a biography that Joyce loved putting puzzles in his work. (314)
• film: "When Boogie Nights came out in 1997, Wallace called Costello & told him the movie was exactly the story that he had been trying to write when they lived together in Somerville. (314)
• writer: "Wallace admired Raymond Carver, whom he distinguished from his minimalist acolytes (Wallace dismissed them as "crank turners"). He was a man who had outrun alcohol in moving from a deflected style to a more sincere one, & Wallace doubtless saw the relevance to his own story. (317)
• writer/novel: "Typically, Wallace met DeLillo through worries about plagiarism. He was concerns that DeLillo's work was a too obvious source for the Eschaton scene in IJ, in which Ennet Academy students pretend to wage a nuclear war w/ computers & tennis balls. DeLillo, who admired Wallace's writing, responded that it was not, a generous gesture given the scene's overlap w/ his novel Endzone. (317)
• book: "Wallace had first come upon the story of a man who specialized in finding such women in Cracking Up, a psychoanalytic casebook published in 1996." (320)
• St. Francis prayer: "Lord, make me a channel of thy peace."
• novel: William Gladdis - The Recognitions
• story: Eudora Welty - "Why I Live at the PO" (unreliable narrator)
• story: Lee K. Abbott - "Living Alone in Iota" (voice)
• music: James Brown & rap
• film: Fool for Love (based on Shepherd's play)
• novel: Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange (re-read)
• author: Manuel Puig
• author: John Irving - The World According to Garp
• film: The Matrix
• locations: NY, LA, Breadloaf, AZ, Chicago
• author: Dean Koontz
• location: Little Lisbon, Cambridge/Somerville
  • 35 Houghton St, Apt 2
• author: David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress
• novel: Prozac Nation
• The Velveteen Rabbit
• music: Alanis Morisette, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Fiona Apple