f0rrest | Entries tagged with books

A few days ago, I finished Don DeLillo’s Underworld. It took me over a month to finish, and now, looking back, that entire month is like a gaping hole in my memory, a void, one of those paranormal loss-of-time events almost, because I barely remember a thing.

I don’t blame Underworld. I blame myself.

I've got more than a few bad habits, like smoking almost a pack a day, eating whole bags of candy in one sitting, biting my nails to the quick, chewing at the tips of my fingers, drinking coffee after midnight, staying up way too late, being an absolute terror in the mornings, compulsively watching YouTube videos that I don’t even like just to post snarky comments, picking scabs to the point that they take months to heal, picking my nose, eating boogers, drinking straight out of the carton, throwing recyclables in the garbage because I’m too lazy to go through the whole can-crushing process, a seriously unhealthy relationship with digital entertainment of all kinds, sudden-onset procrastination when some mandatory task presents itself, eating only like three types of food because I refuse to try new things, and all sorts of other stuff. But the bad habit that’s most applicable here, which is sort of a blessing and a curse in some ways, is my tendency to finish every book that I start regardless of quality, because that’s exactly what happened with Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a book that, in hindsight, was a colossal waste of my time, like I could have read three other books in the time it took to read all 900 or so pages of Underworld, and the worst thing about it is, I barely remember what happened in the book. In fact, I’m pretty sure nothing happened at all.

I don't know why I do this to myself, the whole force-myself-to-finish-things thing, because it's a catch-22 really, a situation that ends up making me feel like shit whether I finish the thing or not. There's also a sunk-time thing going on, too. But mostly, when I tell myself I'm going to do something, it becomes like a matter of personal responsibility for me, a self-inflicted obligation almost. So when I don't finish something, it feels like I’ve broken some sort of oath, which makes me feel like a failure on some level, as if I can't keep my word, which makes me feel like a dishonest, lazy person. Yet, when I do force myself to complete things, I’m always doing it begrudgingly, and there’s never a feeling of satisfaction afterward, because I’m very aware that I only have a limited amount of time on this planet and not everything is actually worth completing, and so every minute spent doing one thing sacrifices time for another thing, so when I force myself to complete things I don't want to complete I end up feeling like I've wasted a bunch of time. And even though I know the outcome of the whole finishing-things-I-don’t-really-want-to-finish thing, I still persist with finishing the thing because of the whole aforementioned personal-responsibility thing, and this, combined with feeling that I’m effectively wasting my time, creates a sort of dissonance in my mind, a dissonance that's present not only when completing the thing but also upon completion of the thing, so I can’t win. This is one of the many types of psychic torture I inflict upon myself daily. Underworld being just one of many such cases.

Underworld itself is one of those works of literary fiction that functions as a sort of commentary on twenty-first-century, first-world society. It takes place mostly in New York City between the 1950s and 90s, chronicling the life of a man named Nick Shay, who killed someone in his delinquent youth, then went through the justice system and came out reformed as an executive for a waste management company, which is supposed to be some profound comment about something, but what that something is is elusive to me, as the novel attempts to wrestle with multiple themes but is so overwrought that it only ends up wrestling with itself and the reader.

The themes, from what I gathered, are garbage, literal garbage, like waste, refuse, trash, but also spiritual garbage, like dealing with life-altering mistakes and bad habits and harmful obsessions and aversions to change. Another major theme is human interconnectedness, like how everyone is connected, how every human action has an equal and opposite reaction, even though you might not be aware of it, and also how six degrees of Kevin Bacon applies not only to Kevin Bacon but to everyone you meet, like how you could probably connect yourself by association to someone on the other side of the planet when considering that the people you interact with also interact with other people and so on down the chain. “There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password—world without end, amen.” And the novel’s theme of garbage supports this theme of interconnectedness as well, as DeLillo is keen to point out that one person’s garbage is often recycled into another person’s cardboard box or plastic bottle or whatever, highlighting that we are even connected by our own waste. Also baseball. Baseball is a big theme. In fact, you could probably make the argument that the main character of the novel is not Nick Shay but actually a baseball, a literal baseball, the baseball hit by New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson at the Polo Grounds in New York City on October 3, 1951, dubbed the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” because the novel sort of follows this baseball chronologically from owner to owner, starting from when a young boy named Cotter Martin obtains the ball at the ball game itself, which is told in a beautifully written novella-length chapter at the start of the book, to when Cotter’s father steals the ball from his son and sells it for rent money, after which the ball exchanges hands multiple times, each of those hands belonging to a different character in the book, so there are a lot of interconnected characters associated with this specific baseball. There’s Nick Shay, Cotter Martin, his father Manx Martin, Nick’s wife, who’s like a heroin addict or something, Nick’s wife’s secret lover Brian, Nick Shay’s secret lover Klara, who’s a “reclamation artist” that turns trash into art which obviously ties into the themes of garbage and interconnectedness, then there’s this gay graffiti artist who might have AIDS, then there’s Sister Edgar, a nun whose consciousness gets uploaded into the World Wide Web after death or something, then there are like twelve other characters who are so underdeveloped that I could barely tell them apart. Oh, and also fictional versions of J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, and Lenny Bruce, the latter of whom functions as a sort of comic-relief sage who does subversive stand-up comedy highlighting the existential dread and paranoia of living through the Cold War, ending most of his raunchy routines with “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE.” And all of these characters are connected in some way through the Bobby Thomson baseball, which all serves to reinforce the novel’s Zen-like central theme of human interconnectedness, which is basically the only thing I like about the book. And, considering that Underworld was written late in Don DeLillo’s career, when he was like 60 or something, this Zen-like theme of interconnectedness kind of reinforces my suspicion that most philosophically minded writers, given enough time, tend to lean toward Buddhism. And if you don’t believe me, see the late work of J.D. Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Jack Kerouac, and now Don DeLillo, because, despite the fact that Buddhism isn’t mentioned even once in the novel, Underworld is essentially a Buddhist text.

But that alone does not save Underworld from being a boring, overwrought waste of my time, unfortunately.

And despite the novel’s name, the Mafia is not involved here. The book is not about crime, although crime does happen. The name Underworld is more like a symbol for what’s going on underneath the surface of society, how underneath everyone is connected, both spiritually and metaphysically, and maybe the name is also a reference to the World Wide Web, which is also used as a symbol for human interconnectedness, a point DeLillo clumsily shoehorns into the epilogue, which is one of the few highlights of the book, alongside the opening baseball chapter, and this one late chapter that reveals the circumstances around how Nick Shay killed a guy, a scene that did indeed make me put the book down and be like, “damn.” The rest of the book is a series of short vignettes that jump from one time period to another in random order, which only serves to make the novel more confusing than it needs to be. These vignettes follow one of the many dull characters as they just go about their normal lives talking to each other about stuff, which results in a reading experience that goes something like, “nothing is happening but surely something must happen soon because, according to literary critics, Underworld is a masterpiece, so I’m going to keep reading because surely there must be a big payout coming up here soon,” but, spoilers, there’s no payout. There’s no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Nothing fucking happens. All the excitement is frontloaded into the beginning of the book, when Cotter Martin, who only appears in the first chapter despite being the novel's only likable and compelling character, obtains the baseball. That’s pretty much it. There’s your excitement. The rest is so dull that I can’t even recount it here, because, frankly, I do not remember. The majority of Underworld is just dialogue exchanges between characters who talk past each other about literal garbage and other topics loosely related to the overarching themes of the book. And, due to the nature of this quote-unquote “story” being told in a disjointed, out-of-sync manner, there’s no real build-up or climax or whatever, just lots of pretty words with supposedly deep subtext.

As I read through Underworld, I was struck by just how much it resembles David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in its length, its number of characters, its fragmented storytelling, its critique of modern society, and its story that loosely gravitates around a central object. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Infinite Jest was inspired by Underworld, given that, if you check the Underworld Wikipedia page, one of the only cited pieces of praise is actually a quote from David Foster Wallace himself. “This novel is (1) a great and significant piece of art fiction; (1a) not like any novel I've read; (2) your best work ever, so far; (3) a huge reward for someone who's read all your previous stuff because it seems to be at once a synthesis and a transfiguration—a transcendence—of your previous stuff; (4) a book in which nothing is skimped or shirked or tossed off or played for the easy laugh, and where (it seems to me) you've taken some truly ballsy personal risks and exposed parts of yourself and hit a level of emotion you've never even tried for elsewhere (at least as I've read your work).” But the difference between Underworld and Infinite Jest, frankly, is that Infinite Jest is actually good, whereas Underworld is just not. Infinite Jest is sprinkled with exciting moments, occasionally beautiful prose, outrageous situations that capture your attention, short stories within stories that cause you to put the book down and stare off into space thinking about shit, spot-on future-sight prescience, well-developed characters that you actually grow attached to, and comedic moments that break up all the existential dread, all written by an author who could speak in multiple subcultural languages. Whereas Underworld is just like, “here’s a baseball game for 100 pages, here’s people making supposedly profound observations for 700 pages, here’s a nuke going off and a nun getting trapped in a computer or something for 30 pages, the end,” written in dreary prose by a 60-year-old boomer who lost touch with modern culture decades ago and is now interested solely in baseball and writing, desperately trying to marry these two loves to produce some sort of grand meaning-of-life type statement that vaguely hits on conclusions Buddhism already uncovered centuries ago, all of which basically amounts to a 900-page ramble, likely because DeLillo’s editor probably wasn’t ballsy enough to be like, “OK, grandpa, time to put the pen down.” And this is obviously true when reading the epilogue, which feels tacked on as an afterthought because, one, it’s written in an altogether different tone from the rest of the book, and two, it reads more like a thesis paper than an actual part of the novel, almost as if it were written solely because, after finishing the main bulk of the novel, DeLillo realized that he had failed to sufficiently make any sort of cohesive point whatsoever, so instead he just decided to tell us the point point-blank, meaning the bulk of Underworld functions as literary masturbation while the epilogue functions as a sort of post-nut clarity.

To me, a long novel is like a rainbow, a beautiful, awe-inspiring, mysterious thing, and you kind of expect there to be a pot of gold at the end, but there’s no pot of gold at the end of Underworld, only a wastebin full of garbage, in keeping with the major theme of the book. And, in comparison with other long novels I’ve read, notably Moby Dick and Infinite Jest, two books I enjoyed overall but also have grievances with, at least there were nuggets of gold sprinkled along the arcs of those rainbows, whereas in Underworld there are just a few gold flakes here and there, but not enough to justify the journey.

I want to caveat all this with the following disclaimer. I have a deep respect for all writers. It takes serious dedication and love-of-the-craft to write anything, especially a novel, especially one that’s almost 900 pages long. Underworld is an incredibly impressive book, from this standpoint. I also want to caveat by saying that, despite throwing around claims like “Underworld is just not good” and other criticisms, the qualitative measures of “good” and “bad” are basically stupid and almost entirely subjective. As such, my opinion of Underworld is just that, an opinion, a stupid, subjective opinion. I am not trying to make any objective claims about the quality of Underworld here. I am probably not even qualified to critique a work of this caliber to begin with, as I have not written a novel myself, and I’m also not that great of a writer. I’m also not that smart. I just have a high-school-level grasp of English vocabulary and grammar, opinions, and a tendency to ramble using far more words than necessary, as evidenced by this poor excuse for a book review. What I’m trying to say is, there’s a good chance that Underworld just went over my head. I probably just didn’t get it. And since I begrudgingly forced myself to read it, I was probably not in the best mindset to fairly judge the material when I was reading it. But, if I’m being fair, Underworld’s themes are interesting, and the way it ties those themes into baseball and trash is clever. But the whole thing just kind of fell flat for me, likely because these are things I’ve already thought about on some level, so there was nothing new for me here, at least nothing new that I picked up on, keeping in mind that I’m not that smart and that this book probably just went over my head.

To be honest, I didn’t even want to write about Underworld. I was just going to move on. But then, after considering that I had spent over a month with the book, living in its world, breathing its air, getting to know what little there is to know about its incredibly dull characters, the sunk-time fallacy sunk in, and I felt obligated to write something about it, otherwise, I would feel like I’ve wasted a bunch of time.

So here I am, making up for lost time, inflicting that old psychic torture on myself again, finishing something I don’t want to finish, effectively wasting my time, writing the last sentence of a highly subjective review of Underworld.

“Our usual understanding of life is dualistic: you and I, this and that, good and bad. But actually these discriminations are themselves the awareness of the universal existence. ‘You’ means to be aware of the universe in the form of you, and ‘I’ means to be aware of it in the form of I. You and I are just swinging doors.”
—Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Driving north on Interstate 675, around the Dekalb County area, past the JESUS SAVES and BEEN HURT IN AN ACCIDENT? and WENDY’S SPICY CHICKEN NEXT EXIT, you'll pass a break in the thick wall of billboards and trees, and there you’ll notice a temple on a hill. This temple is fashioned in the old Laotian style, bright reds, sea greens, a brick staircase flanked by wavy three-headed dragons, big ornate double doors, a line of great golden Buddhas out front. This is the Wat Lao Buddha Phothisaram. And just a few yards before this, towering right in front of the temple itself, there's this massive billboard that reads ARE YOU COVERED? 1-800-GET-LIFE.

This is the kind of dualism we are so accustomed to seeing here in the United States of America. On one side, we have a calm place of quiet meditation, on the other, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE SOON BE AFRAID BUY NOW. It’s a striking, ironic juxtaposition, almost uniquely American, because only corporatism run amok could produce such a thing by accident. It takes a certain lack of awareness and fucks given to erect a massive life insurance billboard right in front of a Buddhist monastery. I mean, think about it, they’re trying to sell something that Buddhism is just giving away for free. And they’re trying to sell it in a flash, in a small break in the wall of trees, while we’re driving like 90 mph down busy Interstate 675, when the atoms are all blurry and smeared together. This ironic image is there, then it’s not there, but it’s still there, because it was always there. It’s there and not there at the same time, because, as the Buddhists would say, these things are the same, or something like that.

Within the last year, after reading some of Salinger’s lesser-talked-about short stories, I have developed a sort of tourist interest in Buddhism, specifically the Zen school of Buddhism, specifically the one that says “Kill the Buddha,” which sounds cool as shit and is essentially a comment on hero worship, and talks about doing things “with no gaining idea,” which means to practice something without a goal, without the intent to achieve something, as this desire to achieve something is itself a taint, as Buddhism seeks to eliminate desire as a path to Enlightenment. This “no-gain” idea is itself paradoxical because, first, it’s sort of an idea itself, and second, because why would anyone practice anything if not to achieve some sort of outcome? Doesn’t one need to desire a thing to even seek it out in the first place? Doesn’t motivation sort of hinge on the very idea of wanting the thing you are motivated for? Wouldn’t you be, like, not motivated to pursue the thing if you didn’t want the thing? Why would anyone do something if they didn't want to do it on some level? This is what drew me to Zen, the no-gain idea. I wanted to understand no-gain because it was so opposed to my first-world understanding of human psychology and ego. It made no sense to me, but in some ways, it also made perfect sense because my own desire to achieve something, be someone, has always felt a little gross to me, like a thin film of slime over my psyche. On the one hand, no-gain is a paradox, it doesn't make any logical sense, but on the other hand, it’s obvious to me that the desire to achieve something is, at its core, a selfish, egotistical desire, and selfish desires lead to angst and discontent, be it through comparison, envy, self-pity, doubt, or whatever. So it makes sense to me that stripping away desire, even stripping away the desire to strip away the desire, would lead to something like contentment, like washing away the slime, so to speak. Because when we desire something, we look at things through the lens of “have” and “have not,” and this is a destructive, dualistic path. Take, for example, in my case, “I have written a novel” and “I have not written a novel.” This is a dualistic perspective. “Have written a novel” and “Have not written a novel.” This perspective is harmful because, naturally, I start to look at writers as “those who have written a novel” and “those who have not written a novel,” and by doing this, I am bucketing people into a hierarchy of value, where writers who have written a novel are seen as more accomplished than those who have not written a novel, myself included somewhere in this value hierarchy, when really everyone is of equal value because we’re all just humans living together on this here planet in this here galaxy in this here universe, and who cares if a writer has actually written a novel or not, right? You could say, “Well, why does it have to be a value hierarchy, can't it just be a descriptive observation about the writer?” And that's fair, but if there is no value, that also means there is no value in calling it out. It is meaningless. Why even mention it? When we engage in dualistic thinking, even if our intentions are good, we are inadvertently assigning some sort of value, some sort of “have” and “have not,” some sort of “this” and “that,” some sort of “good” and “bad,” some sort of thing to achieve, and this leads down a destructive path. I don’t think I’m explaining this well, so let me just drop a rhetorical nuke bomb to make my point, that being, when we engage in dualistic thinking, we get “us” and “them,” we get “boy” and “girl,” we get “black” and “white,” we get “Aryan” and “Jew,” we get the fucking Holocaust.

So, when I first saw the Buddhist Temple Life Insurance Landmark, it sort of put me in a weird, dualistic funk. I was driving to my dad’s up Interstate 675, and I passed the break in the trees, and in that brief flash, I saw the temple and the billboard, and so I turned to my wife, who was sitting in the passenger seat reading a book, and I said, in a kind of flabbergasted tone, “Did you just see that?” And, looking up from her book, she said, “No, sorry, I missed it, what was it?” So I said, “Never mind, don’t worry about it,” and kept driving. At first, I didn’t think much of the temple and billboard, just that it was sort of darkly humorous, but over time, it started to taunt me, mock me almost, that grayscale close-up face of the solemn-looking old woman with the ARE YOU COVERED? juxtaposed against that magnificent Buddhist temple, it kept popping into my head like an intrusive thought, and I kept thinking to myself, how could a Buddhist temple exist in a place so antithetical to Buddhism? How could someone even practice Buddhism in a culture that places so much value on materialism, greed, and self-advancement? In this corporate world, isn’t Buddhism just kind of doomed to fail? Isn’t it pointless to even try? Is Buddhism even compatible with our society?

We are indoctrinated with dualism from birth. Some doctor looks at our junk and checks some sort of box. We are male or female. We are Caucasian or Hispanic or something else. Right when we pop out of the womb, some health insurance company sees us as rich or poor, and our coverage options warp around this nexus of poverty. As we grow older, our parents buy us all sorts of cool or cute toys, depending on which box was checked. Our rooms fill up with colorful plastic. We hold Daddy’s hand down the aisle at Walmart, and we pitch fits when he tells us that we can only pick one thing. He makes lists of all the other things so that he can buy them, wrap them, and place them under a big glowing tree once a year, and in this way, the whole family celebrates avarice and greed. Then we go to school the next week and brag to all our friends about all the cool or cute shit we got for Christmas, depending on which box was checked. We stare into the glow of our television sets and fantasize about being those people. Our parents tell us that we need to do well in school so that we can make a lot of money one day. We see money as a source of comfort from a young age. We look at big houses and think, “Wow, that’s a nice house,” so we grow up thinking that success is a big house. We start seeing people as big-house people and small-house people. Our teachers and parents tell us we are unique and special, so we grow up thinking we are different from everyone else. We believe our choice of clothing says something deep about who we are on the inside. Nike or Adidas. Old Navy or American Eagle. Mario or Sonic. Pepsi or Coke. Sony or Nintendo. Apple or Android. Pokemon or Digimon. Visa or Mastercard. Google or Bing. Star Wars or Star Trek. Buddhism or Corporate America. We feel strongly about these preferences. We collect things related to these preferences. Our identities become an accumulation of stuff and things. And eventually, we have kids of our own and impart these values onto them, and thus the cycle of materialism continues.

Surely, Buddhism has no place in this society. How could it? If Buddhism were like a flower, it wouldn’t even grow in this dark place.

But this wasn't all that bothered me about the temple and the billboard. What really bothered me was the fact that I myself had a problem with the juxtaposition of these things at all, because it revealed something about myself that, while I was aware of it to some extent, I hadn't really dived too deeply into. It revealed that I myself am deeply entrenched in dualism. The very fact that I notice irony stems from the fact that I am dualistic. I see things in terms of “good” and “bad,” and when a good thing is coupled with a bad thing, I see this as ironic in some way, whereas if I had no dualistic thoughts, I probably wouldn’t see the irony at all, because there wouldn’t be any. The temple and the billboard revealed that there is a darkness inside me that is conjuring all sorts of deeply ironic, sardonic observations, and I started questioning the usefulness of this. Like, would I be happier or something if I didn’t think this way? What is scoffing at the temple and the billboard actually accomplishing? Is it all some sort of weird flex, like “look how smart I am, I can point out the dark irony in situations,” and this somehow makes me feel superior or morally righteous in some way, while I myself don’t actually do anything to correct the perceived “good” and “bad” things that make up this irony I am observing? The temple and the billboard made me realize that I’m just as caught up in the same dualistic thinking as everyone else, the same dualistic thinking that drives people to put corporate billboards in front of Buddhist temples to begin with, and this realization did not sit well with me. It disturbed me, frankly. So I decided to read up on Zen Buddhism, thinking that maybe that would alleviate some of the dualistic angst I was feeling.

A couple of months ago, I ordered this book from eBay, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and it never arrived. It was marked delivered, but it never got here. I contacted the seller, and they said that that was their only copy, so they gave me a refund, even though I didn't ask for one, and I didn't actually check if it got refunded. It was like ten bucks. It wasn't that important to me. I figured it was just not the right time. The universe said no, this book is not for you, please wait a little while longer. I started reading something else and forgot. That is, until a few weeks ago, on Interstate 675, when I passed the break in the trees, saw the temple and the billboard, and the questions kept piling up. Is Buddhism doomed to fail? Is Enlightenment even possible in this corporate hellscape? If I practiced Buddhist teachings, like conditioning myself not to care about materialistic things, living frugally, ditching the rat race, so to speak, wouldn’t I be harming my family, who depend on me for food and shelter and all these other things, and wouldn’t that be selfish in some way? Wouldn’t that ultimately produce bad outcomes not only for me but also for the people around me? Is Buddhism even realistic in this society, or is it just some pretentious philosophy that dudes with man-buns pretend to practice after they drink their Starbucks Mocha Choca Frapes or whatever? Should I just move on, look into some other philosophy that might be more compatible with the modern world? I wanted answers. I desired them, needed them. So I downloaded the book, put it on my Amazon-branded corporate eReader, and started reading it electronically and with great vigor.

The book was written by Shunryū Suzuki, a Buddhist monk who helped spread Zen Buddhism to the United States in the 60s, and it was published in 1970, right before Suzuki’s death in 1971. The text, as you might imagine, is full of confusing, paradoxical stuff. Stuff like, “Zen is not important. Thinking things are important is dualistic thinking. But actually, Zen is very important.” And, “Kill the Buddha. Thinking someone or something is the Buddha is not the Zen way. But actually, you are the Buddha.” And, “Thinking things are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is not so good. These are dualistic misconceptions. You will have a bad time if you think of things as ‘good’ and ‘bad.’” Of course, I’m sort of paraphrasing these quotes from large walls of text which expand on these ideas in way more depth, but that’s sort of the gist of the entire book. It’s a paradoxical adventure of the mind in which nearly every other sentence contradicts itself in some uniquely Buddhist way. But, out of all this paradoxical, confusing stuff, one quote stood out to me in particular and helped me grapple with the dualistic angst I had been feeling ever since bearing witness to the temple and the billboard on Interstate 675.

“Tozan, a famous Zen master, said, ‘The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud. The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain. All day long they depend on each other, without being dependent on each. The white cloud is always the white cloud. The blue mountain is always the blue mountain.’ This is a pure, clear interpretation of life. There may be many things like the white cloud and blue mountain: man and woman, teacher and disciple. They depend on each other. But the white cloud should not be bothered by the blue mountain. The blue mountain should not be bothered by the white cloud. They are quite independent, but yet dependent. This is how we live, and how we practice zazen.”
—Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

And now I think that maybe corporate America needs Buddhism just as much as Buddhism needs corporate America. These things are different but the same. They depend on each other but are also entirely independent. If there were no desire and materialism, there would be no Buddhism, and if there were no Buddhism, there would be no desire and materialism. This is just the way things are. These things are in perfect harmony with each other because all things are in perfect harmony with each other.

This is what I have come to learn, with my beginner’s mind, and it all started on Interstate 675, which, fun fact, is actually connected to every other road in mainland America, so it’s not really Interstate 675, it’s actually just one long, winding road that connects everyone to everyone else. Literally every road in mainland America is connected, isn’t that interesting?

This is what I have come to learn, with my beginner’s mind.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: "Ants To You, Gods To Who?" by Andre 3000

“All plots tend to move Deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer Death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.”
―Don DeLillo, White Noise

Death, perhaps life’s greatest mystery. What is Death? Where does it come from? Why is it a thing? Neither the what, nor the where, nor the when, nor even the why is known to mortals. Why, why do we die? What's the purpose? Where does consciousness go? Are our souls recycled, inserted into new life upon Death? Do we end up in some sort of Mysterious Otherside? Heaven? Hell? Valhalla? The great recycling plant in the sky? Perhaps we are consumed by Earth herself, fated to be nothing more than nutrients for the soil? Worm food, is that it? No one knows the answer. There are all sorts of theories, some scientific, some mystical, but no one really knows, and those who claim otherwise are almost certainly deluding themselves.

The most I know about Death is from the beginning of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, when Alucard, in all his bishonen glory, equipped with his most powerful artifacts, comes sprinting into Dracula’s castle, super cool afterimages trailing in his wake, only to be met by the floating specter of Death himself in all his cloaked skeletal grimness. “I’ve come to put an end to this,” Alucard says, to which Death responds, “You shall regret those words,” before stripping Alucard of all his artifacts, laughing a chilling laugh, and vanishing with an ominous warning, “We shall meet again.” This leaves Alucard effectively newborn and defenseless at the very start of the game until he powers himself up by collecting his stolen artifacts strewn all over the castle, around which point he crosses paths with Death again and stomps him good. But Death is never truly defeated. He returns again and again with each subsequent game, all while some valiant new hero goes dashing Deathward, which I'm sure symbolizes some profound thing that I haven't quite figured out just yet, but maybe I will stumble across it by writing this journal entry? Don't count on it.

This journal entry is not actually about Castlevania, however, it’s mostly about Death, and also White Noise by Don DeLillo, which is a novel that has been marinating in my mind ever since I finished reading it about two weeks ago. The book was first published in 1985 and is considered one of DeLillo’s best works, although this is the first novel I've read by him, so I don't really have much to compare it to. I got interested in DeLillo after seeing his name come up time and time again in reference to authors similar to David Foster Wallace, and I figured the best place to start was with DeLillo’s most popular novel, White Noise. I quickly found that the only similarity between DeLillo and Wallace is the fact that they write about similar subject matter, that being the subtle perils of modern life, ruminations on mindless entertainment and vacuous celebrity worship and the numerous distractions we all willingly engage in, both authors trying to tease out why it all feels so empty and gross. DeLillo, however, is a much more mature writer than Wallace. Reading DeLillo, one gets the impression that he has nothing to prove to anyone, even himself. He uses short, simple sentences. He doesn’t mess around with complex runaway paragraphs. He doesn’t overuse semicolons or em dashes or footnotes or whatever to make some kind of literary point. He has things to say and thoughts to express, and he does these things in a very to-the-point manner. There’s no fluff, no pointless wordplay. Every sentence, every word, every punctuation mark feels like it has a purpose. You never get the impression that DeLillo is doing the whole literary “Look Dad, no hands” thing, and because of this, his writing is very easy to digest, and not in a vacuous, unmemorable way either, because despite all his stylistic simplicity, the writing is still somehow multi-layered, full of double meanings and triple meanings that, considering how simple some of the stuff he writes is, kind of makes your head spin in a sort of “How the fuck is he doing this?” sort of way. Basically, if you can’t tell, I really like Don DeLillo’s style. I think he’s a brilliant writer.

And White Noise is a brilliant book that I would recommend to anyone. It’s a fast read, like 300 pages, and I read it in a few days on account of how engrossing it is. The dialogue in particular is fascinating in this darkly humorous way, and it’s written in the first-person perspective, which is my favorite perspective, so make of that what you will. The story is told from the point of view of a university professor specializing in “Hitler Studies” who is so afraid of Death that he comes up with all sorts of absurd plots and intellectualizations to hand-wave it away, all while being constantly thrown into situations that exacerbate his fear of Death, which results in a constant stream of humorous situations, like in the second act when this toxic-chemical tanker crashes, resulting in a billowing cloud of poisonous gas ominously hanging over the main character’s town, which, if I were to analyze, is a potent metaphor for Death’s looming influence over our lives. The novel also covers themes like rampant consumerism, family dynamics, and academic pretentiousness, all filtered through a sort of dark-comedy lens, which has resulted in many critics hailing the book as a quote-unquote “postmodern masterpiece of our age,” and I use the tag “postmodern” here kind of flippantly because I don't actually know what the fuck that means, and I don’t think Don DeLillo knows what it means either because he basically said something like “Postmodern? I don’t know what the fuck that means” in an old interview from 2010, which he later clarified by saying, “I think of postmodernism in terms of literature as part of a self-referring kind of art, people attach a label to writers or filmmakers or painters to be able some years in the future to declare that the movement is dead,” which illustrates that maybe Don DeLillo himself also has a preoccupation with Death, so perhaps there’s something autobiographical going on here too.

So, basically, White Noise is about Death, among other things. I had originally planned to write about the novel immediately after finishing it, but I kept putting it off because, well, surprise surprise, I guess I don't really like thinking about Death too much. In fact, I rarely ever think about Death, but the same cannot be said for the two main characters of White Noise, Jack and Babette, who are deathly afraid of Death and literally think about it all the time, and they have pretty logically convincing fears, too, considering Death is literally all around us just waiting to swoop in and take us away to the Mysterious Otherside, like you could step on a pebble the wrong way causing you to fall and bonk your head and that’s it you’re dead, or you could be watching your favorite television program while eating grapes and then all of a sudden a grape goes down the wrong tube and cough cough you’re dead, or you could be sleeping and your heater starts malfunctioning thus putting out some sort of invisible odorless gas and you never wake up because you're fucking dead, or you could be on a walk on a nature trail or something and you somehow touch some innocuous-looking plant and you have some ultra-rare allergic reaction to it and suddenly you’re throwing up and then bye bye dead, or you could be walking downtown and some random thing just falls on your head and bam dead, or a plane could just crash into your home for example, or you could be crossing the road and some drunk dude just doesn’t stop at the light and all of a sudden your guts are all over the windshield and just like that you’re dead, or your body could just say NO and trigger a brain aneurysm and that's it see ya you’re dead, and so on. Neither the what, nor where, nor when, nor even the why is known to mortals. No one knows. It's almost so absurd that it's not even worth worrying about, at least that's how I view it, like if I could die at any time, in ways often outside of my own conscious control, why expend time and effort worrying about it? Why get worked up? Why ruin my day? And that’s why I don’t fear Death, because like what’s the point?

But after reading White Noise and upon reflection, it turns out I was wrong, I do fear Death. Maybe I don't consciously fear Death, but I certainly subconsciously fear Death, at least on some sort of deep biological level. After reading White Noise, I started analyzing my habits, my daily routines, things like that, and came to the realization that maybe everything I do is actually motivated by some latent fear of Death, like Death is this terrifying primordial silence just lingering there in the background of things, always influencing literally everything I do, and I hadn’t even realized it until just recently. I started thinking that maybe even the stuff I do that seems so far removed from fear-of-Death, like reading and writing and playing video games, is actually just a subconscious distraction from the ever-present biological fear of Death. Maybe all the bullshit I do to keep myself occupied actually functions as a sort of white noise to drown out the silence of Death. This idea was new to me, and it spooked me a little bit. I didn’t understand it, but I wanted to. So I went on a quest to understand it, which involved the writing of this journal entry, and this quest led me to the soft conclusion that it’s likely very possible that everything we do is actually some sort of Death Avoidance Behavior.

There's obvious Death Avoidance Behaviors, like eating so that we don't starve, drinking so that we don't dehydrate, finding shelter so that we don't die of exposure, avoiding vicious animals so that we don't get mauled, forming communities so that we can help each other survive, establishing rules so that we don't take advantage of or kill each other, and so on, which, in the modern world, manifests as things like working shitty jobs so that we can buy food and afford a place to live, buying cars so that we can travel to all the places that supply various life-sustaining things, wearing clothes or whatever, obeying laws so that we don't end up getting murdered in jail or whatever, brushing our teeth and taking showers and whatnot, getting married and having children so that we can form our own close-knit communities so that we can have life-sustaining support systems, and so on, which is all very obvious stuff. But then there’s the less obvious stuff, like watching television or reading a book or playing a video game or writing a journal entry or painting a sunset or performing in a play or dancing on Saturdays or playing tennis or whatever, all so that we don’t quite literally bore ourselves to Death because, I suspect, if we just sit on our asses all day doing literally nothing, we’ll start thinking a little too much about our own mortality and thus the fear of Death will start creeping in. Maybe boredom is actually a latent fear of Death, our bodies telling us that we better getting moving because one day we will just up and die. Death is always there, in the background. So we distract ourselves. We turn on the white noise. Otherwise, we become depressed, despondent, miserable, all those dark adjectives that only serve to bring us Deathward, be it through suicide or self-neglect or whatever. What I’m trying to say is, it seems like everything we do is some sort of Death Avoidance Behavior, even the stupid behavior that seems counterintuitive to staying alive, like overeating food packed with high-fructose corn syrup or binge drinking alcohol or vegging out in front of a screen for hours or injecting heroin into our veins, these things serve as sort of Misguided Death Avoidance Behaviors, because even though this behavior is harmful, potentially bringing us closer to Death, they make us feel good in the short term by doing a really good job of drowning out the silence of Death, even if only temporarily, which becomes extra complicated when addiction comes into play, creating a sort of paradoxical Death trap wherein by trying to avoid the fear of Death you are actually hastening your own Death, or something like that, which only serves to show how cruel biology can be sometimes, tricking us Deathward. And we do these good and bad things, obviously, because Death just keeps showing up in each subsequent Castlevania game, he just doesn't go away, he is an ever-present force. Death is a hard-coded fact of life, and coming face to face with this is just downright unpleasant.

At first, this all struck me as very grim and depressing, but after finishing White Noise and ruminating on it a little bit, my perspective changed.

In White Noise, there’s this drug that basically eliminates the fear of Death. The main character becomes obsessed with this drug and comes up with all sorts of plots and schemes to get their hands on it, eventually leading them to the creator of the no-fear-of-Death drug. The creator of the drug turns out to be a man living in a cheap motel room. And from the very first scene with this man, we can tell that he’s obviously addicted to the no-fear-of-Death drug. He has eliminated the fear, drowned out the silence, conquered Death. He’s sitting in an uncomfortable metal chair in the middle of the room, no lights on, surrounded by broken bottles and candy bar wrappers and flies and stuff, just staring up into this little television set mounted in the corner of the room, mumbling to himself. He has clearly not bathed or groomed himself in months. He’s just wasting away, dying pretty much. He is no longer living life. He is just there, existing, doing pretty much nothing. The text makes it clear that this man is a sad, pathetic excuse for a man, a hollow shell, a ghost almost, someone who is both alive and dead simultaneously.

But he doesn’t care, why would he? He has no fear of Death.

Current Mood: optimistic
Current Music: "The Finest Joke Upon Us," by Guided By Voices

I recently read some pretty harsh criticism of Infinite Jest on a random blog, and I wanted to talk about it. The person, whom I'll call Bob for the sake of anonymity, claims he didn't hate the book, but I would say, from my reading, that he did in fact hate the book. And that's fine. Infinite Jest is easy to hate. The question is, does he hate the book for the right reasons?

The art of evaluating criticism is a tricky slippery slope because criticism is often a highly subjective thing. One person's criticism might be another person’s praise. It often comes down to stylistic, aesthetic preferences. Etc. But some criticism is just flat-out stupid. For example, some people dislike The Catcher in the Rye because Holden Caulfield is “insufferable” or “immature” or whatever, but that's kind of the whole fucking point of the book, right? So, in that case, I would say that that is not valid criticism. If anything, that criticism highlights that the critic themselves did not actually understand the book, which kind of ironically calls into question the critic’s capacity for comprehension. In poorly criticizing a novel, the critic, in a roundabout way, reveals a criticism of themselves because although they think they're making smart criticisms, they're actually revealing themselves to be not as bright as they're pretending to be. This makes criticism a very tricky business indeed and is one of the reasons I tend to veer away from it in general, but I'm making an exception here because, although not my favorite book by any means, Infinite Jest is a book I enjoy quite a lot, and it also irks me when people misunderstand things, which I guess is a personal problem that I'm working through. Now, with all that being said, you may be asking something like, “Well, what is good criticism then?” And the answer to that is, well, I don’t know. It turns out that identifying bad criticism is much easier than identifying good criticism. Bad criticism usually misidentifies personal opinion as gospel, whereas good criticism is often packaged with a disclaimer that subjective opinion is not objective fact.

So, considering all that, the rest of this entry should be taken with a grain of salt. That's my disclaimer.

Bob’s first point of criticism with Infinite Jest is that, despite review blurbs on the back of the novel calling the work "genius" and "laying it on thick," he would not personally use the word "genius" to describe the book. To his credit, I will say that I hate the publishing industry’s obsession with putting quotes of praise all over books. “A virtuoso display of styles and themes.” “The next step in fiction.” “It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy!” Whatever the fuck that means. I’m the type of person who is immediately put off by preemptive praise, as it stirs the old contrarian within me. I hate being sold stuff, so when I get a whiff of a sales pitch, which is what packing books full of quoted praise is, I immediately go on the defensive. My question to Bob, however, is, isn’t “genius” a relatively subjective noun or adjective, depending on the context? Why are we getting hung up over this? People are always calling stuff genius nowadays, it’s basically vacuous praise at this point. Instead of debating which adjectives best describe the book, perhaps we should instead just analyze the contents of the book. Bob clarifies his anti-genius stance with the following criticism, “No, I don’t find a page-long sentence genius.” And, as an opinion, that’s fine. But you have to admit that it takes some level of literary talent to write a sentence that’s a page long while also still having it be intelligible and easy to follow, which Infinite Jest’s page-long sentences often are, which says something about David Foster Wallace’s “genius” here, if we’re choosing to use that word. It’s also important to note that page-long sentences are not just used as literary flourishes in Infinite Jest, they're used as a form of pacing to both control reading speed and add urgency to the text. If a scene is intended to be frantic, with fast-paced action and dialogue, a long sentence sort of simulates this urgency and freneticism in the reader’s mind, forcing the reader to follow along at a whirlwind pace, which mirrors the urgent speed at which the scenes unfold. Wallace has always been loose with grammar, using punctuation not in a strict Oxford sense but more like traffic signals, slow down, go fast, yield, full stop, and so forth. And I personally like this grammatical philosophy. I will admit, however, that it does occasionally feel like Wallace is writing these page-long sentences just to flex, as if he’s taking his hands off the handlebars of the figurative bike of writing, turning to Dad, and going, “Look Dad, no hands.” But I’ll forgive Wallace’s pretentious flourishes here because, in most cases, the run-on sentences and huge paragraphs work really well for the high-speed craziness that is Infinite Jest.

Bob goes on to say that all the reviews gloss over the fact that Infinite Jest is jam-packed with pain, trauma, death, and addiction, as if this is somehow a bad thing. My question is, is life not full of pain, trauma, death, and addiction? Are we forbidden from covering these topics? If so, why? Is it so that we don’t potentially hurt someone’s feelings, make them feel uncomfortable? He goes on to clarify that Infinite Jest uses trauma and suffering to “shock” and “entertain,” as if one of the themes of Infinite Jest is not a criticism of that very thing. It could be argued that David Foster Wallace is walking a fine line here, as using shock-and-trauma entertainment to criticize shock-and-trauma entertainment perhaps puts Infinite Jest uncomfortably close to becoming what it is criticizing. I would not disagree with this more nuanced argument, but that is not the argument Bob is making. However, I do think some of the scenes in Infinite Jest are excessive, and I also think that Wallace was perhaps having a little too much fun writing them. The scene with the addicted mother carrying her dead baby around as if it were alive and the lengthy descriptions of all the associated smells come to mind, also that one scene where Hal and Orin accidentally leave a dog leashed to the back of a car before driving to the store, turning the dog into a bloody “nubbin,” and that one guy who gets impaled with a broom through his ass, and that scene where the homeless drug addict’s head explodes because he shot up Drano or whatever and the alleyway air blower they use for warmth at night blows all his head chunks around, but each of these awful stories led into their own lessons and commentaries on the human condition, which, personally, I found valuable. I never got the impression that David Foster Wallace was adding awful tragedies into Infinite Jest just for shock value. There was always a point. And, again, life is full of pain, trauma, death, and addiction. We shouldn’t veer away from covering these topics, even if they make us uncomfortable. And yes, Infinite Jest did often make me feel uncomfortable, but I leaned into that discomfort, and I like to think that I learned something from it. We can learn a lot about our own humanity by studying these uncomfortable topics in depth, it might even be necessary to truly understand the human condition, and by ignoring the uncomfortable stuff or applying some hyper-PC literary policy that forbids it, we are doing ourselves a disservice, both emotionally and philosophically. After all, life is not all sunshine and rainbows, and sometimes you have to come face to face with that, and if you don't want a novel to force you to come face to face with that, then don't read the novel. Infinite Jest makes it very clear very early on that it's filled with unsettling imagery, so if you choose to continue reading the novel despite all the obvious warnings and then you choose to complain about it, then maybe that says something more about you than the novel? Perhaps it is you who derives entertainment from trauma and suffering, not Infinite Jest. Just a thought.

Bob’s next point of criticism is, “I didn’t think DFW did a great job of capturing different verbal styles of groups of characters nor did I find the novel especially deep.” This is a two-pronged criticism, so I’ll address both separately.

The first point of criticism, about capturing different verbal styles, is one I actually happen to agree with. Ever since I started reading David Foster Wallace, which was about three years ago, I have often found myself thinking, “Do people actually talk like this?” Wallace excels at building characters descriptively, both by their physical descriptions and psychological descriptions, but he seems to have trouble making a character’s dialogue fit their described personality. Strung-out drug addicts are too insightful, too self-aware. Everyday Joe Schmoes are too profound, too intelligent. Teenaged high schoolers are too mature, too philosophical. Every character seems to have an excellent grasp of the English language, often going off on long-winded, very smart tangents, much like the third-person omniscient narrator does, which highlights that Wallace, who is pretty much the narrator in most chapters, has trouble separating himself from his characters. This is especially obvious if you take the time to listen to some of Wallace’s recorded interviews. Every character seems like some version of David Foster Wallace. This is Wallace’s biggest literary shortcoming, in my opinion. He is great with descriptive prose, can write well in almost any style, has an excellent grasp of philosophical concepts and can weave them effortlessly into almost any situation, and he's incredible at evoking emotion, but he’s not very good at writing dialogue, at least believable dialogue. I mean, who actually talks like this? “I'm sitting here with the leg in a whirlpool in the bathroom of a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist's ranch-style house 1100 meters up in the Superstition Mountains. Mesa-Scottsdale in flames far below. The bathroom's redwood-paneled and overlooks a precipice. The sunlight's the color of bronze.” The answer is, no one, no one talks like this.

The second point, about not finding the novel especially deep, Bob clarifies by adding the following statement, “It reminds me of stoners getting high and thinking they are saying the deepest shit in the world when really it’s drivel.” And, I mean, that’s one way of putting it, I guess. I’m reluctant to use the word “deep” to describe anything, as I believe that a thing’s depth is influenced by the quote-unquote “depth” of the reader, meaning it is yet another highly subjective thing amongst the infinitely long list of subjective things. But I would both agree and disagree with Bob's take here, as Infinite Jest treads the line between superficial depth and real depth, sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. I do think that, considering the almost nonsensical structure of the novel, it’s unnecessarily hard to follow and, considering that nearly every character is an unreliable narrator of sorts, the novel can come off as being purposely confusing, almost like a David Lynch movie, which was one of Wallace’s favorite directors if I remember correctly. For example, the story of Joelle Van Dyne and why she wears a veil all the time. In one section, Joelle herself says that she wears the veil because she's so beautiful that men become obsessed with her and can't stop staring at her or whatever, and that she views this as a disfigurement, which, OK, that's interesting. But in a different chapter, it's explained that Joelle’s father actually threw acid into her face when she was younger, which permanently warped her face, leaving her disfigured, which is also interesting. And then, in a few later chapters, the so-beautiful-it’s-a-disfigurement thing is reinforced again, so there's no way of really knowing what happened to Joelle. Now, it could be argued that Wallace uses this ambiguity around Joelle’s disfigurement to raise the question of like, could both extreme ugliness and extreme beauty be considered a disfigurement? What is ugliness? What is beauty? Does it even matter, considering Joelle believes herself to be disfigured regardless? And so on. But the fact remains, the book is full of contradictions. People are still arguing on the internet about what actually happens to Hal at the end of the book because Wallace’s prose is so vague and confusing on this detail that it's almost impossible to tell. Did he accidentally ingest the super-powerful drug DMZ, turning him into an incomprehensible mess? If so, how did he ingest it? Some people think that his father’s ghost laced his toothbrush with the drug, which is only vaguely supported by a few throwaway lines in the book. And there's some question as to whether Hal’s father’s ghost was even real to begin with. And if Hal didn't ingest DMZ, why couldn't anyone understand what he was saying? Did he slip into some inward psychosis spurred on by his extreme intellect, making it truly impossible for him to communicate with other people? I guess we will never know. Again, Wallace could have written it this way on purpose, leaving it open-ended to encourage the reader to either come to their own conclusions or to force the reader to put in some extra mental effort to figure it all out. It’s possible. But sometimes it reeks of the same intentional ambiguity that you might get a whiff of off a David Lynch film. Sometimes it feels like Wallace wasn’t sure of the details of his own plot or the points he was trying to make, so he intentionally left things open-ended and vague to sort of trick the reader into thinking something profound was going on when really there just might be nothing profound going on at all. But of course, this sort of intentional ambiguity is almost impossible to prove one way or the other. This is the tricky line this sort of weird fiction walks. But at times it certainly feels like some high-level literary mystification is going on. But while this might be true occasionally, it does not mean that Infinite Jest is completely devoid of quote-unquote “depth.”

There is tremendous prescient depth throughout Infinite Jest. Wallace predicted the sociopolitical entertainment landscape of the modern day in terms of its impacts on human behavior and society at large, and this is especially impressive considering that, since the novel was published in 1996, Wallace only had cable television, VHS, and Compact Discs to base his predictions on. He foresaw the rise of instant at-home entertainment through his idea of the InterLace Entertainment network, and he accurately foresaw its addictive, destructive effects on people and society as a whole, and then he paralleled that theme of entertainment addiction with hardcore drug addiction, and the MacGuffin of the book, the titular film Infinite Jest, which sucks you in and kills you if you watch it, is a potent metaphor for all this stuff, which I think qualifies as “deep.” And the numerous character vignettes about reaching your goals only to find out that you’re still unhappy and unfulfilled and starving for more, like the Clipperton saga and Hal’s father killing himself despite having achieved goal after goal, all provide valuable insight into the nature of personal achievement, making you, the reader, ask yourself, “What’s really important in life? If I publish my dream novel, will that finally make me happy? What is happiness? What am I really striving for here?” Bob later goes on to clarify, “If Wallace had been trying to come up with solutions rather than just shocking with exposition, perhaps I’d find his work more on the brilliant side.” But the questions Infinite Jest poses, like the nature of humanity and the path to contentedness, are deeply philosophical questions without easy answers, and the answers will vary from person to person, so expecting a book to lay out an easy-to-digest solution to these complicated philosophical problems that people have been wrestling with for centuries is frankly naive. And Infinite Jest does in fact provide some hints as to the solutions to the problems of addiction, instant gratification, and existential loneliness that pervade the text. I would encourage Bob to reexamine Mario and Don Gately’s sections more closely, for example, as they pose potential solutions to all of the aforementioned problems, like ditching intellectual irony in favor of unbridled sincerity and, in Don Gately’s case, devoting yourself to something larger than you, even if you don’t fully understand the thing you’re devoting yourself to. So, yes, there are proposed solutions to the hard questions and philosophical problems scattered throughout the novel, David Foster Wallace isn't just going to hold your hand and guide you to them, however. You have to put in some effort.

In my view, if a book makes you ask questions and examine philosophical problems, then that book is doing it's job, and Infinite Jest does that in spades, and it does it quite well, but it’s a work of fiction, not a self-help novel, so you have to put some existential work in. And if you’re not willing to do the work, then maybe you shouldn’t be criticizing the novel to begin with because, frankly, you just don’t get it.

And that's fine. Not every novel is going to click with every person. I get that. But don't pretend like your criticism is anything more than your own subjective opinion, especially when you're not willing to put in the work to understand what you're criticizing, otherwise it's just bad criticism.

Current Mood: critical
Current Music: "Loro," by Pinback

Intelligence. People value intelligence, especially high intelligence. Intelligence enables us to solve complex problems, invent great things, write incredible novels and essays, and even go to the moon. But what if intelligence, instead of being this like great amazing thing, is actually a kind of curse? A curse that causes us to overanalyze things, get stuck in our own heads, become detached and despondent and cold?

That's the thesis statement.

About a week ago I finished reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It's a big book. It took me like two months to finish, although to my credit I only read like a dozen pages per day, but I always looked forward to reading those dozen pages, which must mean I enjoyed the book a good bit, especially since sections of the novel intrusively invade my thoughts multiple times a day. The novel did leave me feeling somewhat confused and frustrated and sad though, but I've found that the best things in life often do that, leave you somewhat confused and frustrated and sad, maybe because those things are often the most rewarding.

Some people say that Infinite Jest has no comprehensible plot, that it's just a thousand-page ramble tied loosely together by a core set of themes, that it’s impenetrable and overwrought on purpose, that it's just a pretentious exercise in literary masturbation, and those people probably haven't read the actual book, but they're also not entirely wrong, because Infinite Jest is all of those things, but it’s also so much more.

Infinite Jest is a post-postmodern encyclopedic work of fiction set in a near-future version of North America where the United States, now called the Organization of North American Nations, led by former B-list movie actor slash Las Vegas crooner President Johnny Gently, who ran on a populist platform centered around “cleaning up America’s garbage” and bears a shockingly prescient resemblance to Donald J. Trump, has subsumed both Canada and Mexico and has “subsidized” time, meaning calendar years have been sold to the highest-paying corporation, for like advertising or whatever, so instead of numbered years you get stuff like “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad” and “Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster” and so on, and O.N.A.N. uses giant catapults to launch the nation’s chemical waste and radioactive garbage into a region near New England now dubbed “the Great Concavity,” which has turned the whole area effectively into a no-man’s land where unspeakable mutant horrors like giant babies and feral man-eating hamsters roam in packs, which is a detail almost inconsequential to the overall plot, because the story is mostly a rumination on addiction, sincerity, the dangers of irony, human connection, the importance of family, existential dread, and the fallacious belief that attaining all your goals will somehow make you feel happy and fulfilled, centering around the teenage students at a prestigious Boston tennis academy and the recovering drug addicts living in a nearby halfway house, and these characters’ stories are told through a collage of scenes presented in no sensible chronological order whatsoever, like if Infinite Jest were a photograph then David Foster Wallace took that photograph and cut it up into a million pieces and then asked you to put it back together with nothing but a magnifying glass and some Scotch tape, which is exactly what it feels like trying to piece together what the hell is actually going on in this book.

And I’m not going to try to explain what the hell is actually going on in the book, but I will give you just enough context to support my thesis statement up there. Needless to say but the rest of this entry contains significant spoilers.

The plot ultimately centers around the drama of this one particular family, surname Incandenza. The father of this family, James O. Incandenza, was this super-intelligent guy who invented some super high-tech fusion technology but got bored with that so founded a tennis academy but got bored with that too so decided to make indie films, pretty much. James was addicted to his interests and would play them out until he got bored, and although mastering each interest, they still left him feeling bored and unfulfilled. At some point before the events of the novel, James creates this film called Infinite Jest, and this film is so entertaining that, if you watch it, you cannot stop watching it, so you just waste away and die watching it. This film has been copied and sent to people all over North America, resulting in many deaths. Questions abound around the contents of the film, a detail that can't be confirmed because there’s no one alive who’s watched it, and why the film was even created in the first place, which the novel does address, although in a sort of lynchian fashion. The whole plot of the book sort of swirls around this titular film, as all the central characters have some connection to it, even if it's like six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon levels of connection. The symbolic significance of Infinite Jest, the film, and how it relates to our modern entertainment landscape, particularly streaming culture, phones, and having all this media at our fingertips at all times, is especially prescient and interesting, although none of that ultimately matters for my thesis, so I won't be covering that here. Anyway, shortly after creating Infinite Jest, the film, James Incandenza kills himself by cooking his own head in a microwave oven, which sounds like an impossible feat but is actually fully explained in both technical and gory detail. He leaves behind a wife and three kids. Hal, Orin, and Mario, who I will refer to as the brothers Incandenza hence forth.

Hal is sort of like the main character of the novel. He’s the youngest of the brothers Incandenza. He's seventeen years old and enrolled at his late father’s prestigious tennis academy, Enfield Tennis Academy. He’s a super genius just like his father, able to recite dictionary definitions of pretty much any word on command. He’s also cold, detached, downright condescending sometimes, super ironic, unable to express his thoughts and feelings properly, and also super addicted to marijuana. It turns out that Hal is very much like his father in this respect, although his father’s substance of choice was alcohol. Hal was never very close with his father, they couldn’t connect emotionally, mostly because of their vast almost self-defeating intellects, and this haunts Hal both mentally and physically, like the wraith of his late father actually haunts him, like James’s ghost, literally, haunts Hal, in the book, in some weird lynchian attempt to bring Hal out of his detached intellectual shell. So when Hal’s not rigorously training for tennis or playing tournaments, he’s spiraling mentally into a depression by overanalyzing everything in his life, particularly his relationship with his late father, and when he’s not spiraling in some sort of over-analytical depression, he’s smoking weed in secret in the Enfield basement and blowing the smoke into a ceiling vent to hide the smell, to drown it all out, bury his emotional baggage, pretty much.

Orin, who is also incredibly intelligent, is the oldest of the brothers Incandenza. He's a professional football player and a sex addict. Orin spends a lot of time mentally torturing himself and getting anxious and harping on the old times and getting into all sorts of sexual trouble due to his sex addiction which all stems from some sort of unresolved childhood thing with his mom and dad or whatever that he's constantly thinking about and overanalyzing to death. He's also superficial, selfish, and incredibly manipulative, especially with women.

And then there’s Mario, the middle child of the brothers Incandenza. Mario loves his dad. He wants to be just like his dad. Mario makes films like his dad. Mario even wears a helmet with a tripod camera thing attached to it on his head, so he can film everything that's going on in his life, so he can use the footage for future films. He almost never leaves his room at the Academy without the helmet on, which makes for some very comical scenes. But Mario was born premature, and he has pretty much every physical deformity ever medically documented, so he’s hunched over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and he has claws instead of hands, and his head is humongous, and he has these big bulging eyes, and he’s just like, for all intents and purposes, monstrous, for lack of a better term, and he’s also not very bright, like stuck-forever-at-a-third-grade-reading-level levels of brightness. It would be unfair to say that Mario is “stupid,” because he can comprehend things just fine, but he has a lot of trouble communicating and sometimes can’t follow along in complex conversations. He’s more like incredibly simple. But the thing about Mario is that, although he gets sad sometimes about the death of his father, as anyone would, he never gets stuck in his head like his brothers do, he never questions if his father really loved him or whatever like his brothers do, he never waxes himself existentially into a spiraling depression like his brothers do, he never develops some sort of crippling addiction because of unresolved childhood stuff like his brothers do, he’s never sarcastic or ironic, and he never once says anything bad about anyone, like ever, because Mario is the nicest, most sincere, most loving brother Incandenza. Mario is like the beating cardiac muscle of the book.

And that’s why Mario Incandenza is my favorite character in Infinite Jest.

Mario is a stark contrast to almost every other character in Infinite Jest, especially Hal and Orin and James, who are all too smart for their own good. Due to Mario’s stunted intellectual growth, he seems to lack the faculties to overanalyze people and situations, taking everything at face value, and because of this deficiency he approaches everything with the naive innocence of a young child, harboring no preconceived notions or negative stereotypes about anyone, which leads to him treating everyone he meets with a level of respect that Hal, Orin, and James just are not capable of. I mean, Hal and Orin and James are often cordial and respectful to people, but behind the mask they are brooding, distrusting, and critical, whereas Mario just does not have the capacity to be like that. Mario is guileless, innocent, pure of heart almost. And Mario, despite being frankly hideously-deformed and a little slow in the head, is treated with respect by others because Mario himself treats everyone with respect, because he’s simply incapable of doing otherwise, because he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity and all the psychic baggage that comes along with that. And because Mario is like this, he’s viewed by many as a pleasant, guru-like person to talk to, so people often go to him for advice, especially his own brother Hal, who often calls Mario “Boo,” and who, in one scene, goes to Mario for advice on what to do about some extreme anxiety he, Hal, is feeling about not having smoked weed in a long time yet still perhaps failing an academy drug test and other stressful existential tennis-life things, this scene is also the only time Hal opens up to anyone about anything in the entirety of the novel, which is important, and Mario, in this scene, delivers the best advice delivered by anyone in the entire book, and this advice is not just the best advice in the book, it’s also like the thesis statement, the point, of the entire book, which sort of makes Mario like the most important character in the book, in my opinion. The scene hit me so hard that I had to put the book down and text one of my friends about it, so I’m going to just copy-paste the tail end of the scene here, for reference.

( Hal & Mario excerpt, Infinite Jest, pg.785 )

Mario is beyond intellectual obfuscation of any sort. He’s simple. He does not have the capacity to lie, either to himself or to others. He does not hide things. He is guileless, innocent, pure of heart. And because of this, he naturally just sees through the bullshit. He sees through intellectual rationalizations and mental decision-tree-like anxieties that stem from intellectualism. And because of this, when Hal opens up to Mario for the first time pretty much ever, expressing his emotions, fears, and doubts, and then asking Mario for advice on what he, Hal, should do, Mario correctly and simply points out the obvious, that Hal is already doing what he should be doing, opening up, expressing his emotions, admitting that he has a problem, coming out of his intellectually detached shell, which are things Hal literally never thought to do before because he’s just too damn intellectual about everything. Hal’s vast intellect, while enabling him to accomplish great mental feats, has also led him into a black hole of irony and insincerity that ultimately undermines his own happiness.

By the end of the novel, Hal has become so wrapped in his head that he can no longer communicate with other people, James has microwaved his own skull, Orin gets abducted by Wheelchair Assassins and tortured by being placed in a tumbler full of cockroaches, and Mario, well, Mario is fine. He’s just wearing his ridiculous tripod headgear, filming stuff, being nice to people, doing what he likes to do, not overanalyzing any of it, because what’s the point in that?

Some people might say Mario is stupid, since he does have a number of learning disabilities, but “stupid” is ultimately a subjective societal construct. I would say instead of “stupid,” Mario is simple. But regardless of whichever semantics you subscribe to, the point is, we should all try to be a bit more like Mario, be that more simple or more “stupid” or more whatever you want to call it.

Because if ignorance is bliss, perhaps “stupidity” is transcendence.

Current Mood: stupid
Current Music: "Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party," by Hayley Williams

“Suddenly now and then someone comes awake, comes undone, as it were, from the meaningless glue in which we are stuck—the rigmarole which we call the everyday life and which is not life but a trancelike suspension above the great stream of life—and this person who, because he no longer subscribes to the general pattern, seems to us quite mad finds himself invested with strange and almost terrifying powers…”
—Henry Miller, Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1)

There I was, sitting in my faux-leather office chair, playing Final Fantasy VIII via DuckStation emulator on an old transparent SecureView CRT via an HDMI to Coax Modulator set to CH3 running from an Ubuntu Linux desktop PC to said CRT so that I could play the game How It Was Meant To Be Played in the year 2025 of our lord, because I'm insufferable like that. My good and perhaps only true friend, Robert, visiting from Florida, sitting next to me in the slightly less comfortable office chair, reading orange-highlighted passages out of Henry Miller’s Sexus between taking sips of Red Bull and waxing pontifical on all his various interpretations of said passages, because he's also insufferable like that. It's like three in the afternoon, and we had planned to take my napping two-year-old son to the mall after he woke up. And of course I’m barely paying attention to what Robert is saying because I’m hyperfocused on fighting monsters to grind materials to make Doomtrain, a Guardian Force that looks like a train made of stretched human muscle and bone and teeth with a ghastly scream stuck on its face as if it had just seen itself in the mirror, when all of a sudden there's a VOOM and the word ZANTETSUKEN appears at the top of the screen and I start bouncing up and down in my faux-leather office chair like I’m ten years old again shouting LOOK LOOK LOOK right over one of Robert’s long-winded-but-I’m-sure-very-interesting Miller rambles.

Our heroes fade. The phosphor goes dark. The screen pans to a 320x240 sky cloaked in black and gray clouds. Rain falls in thin pixely white lines. A low-res puddle forms on the virtual ground. There’s a clomp, a splash. The polygonal hoof of a white mare is shown. The clomps continue, slow, foreboding, off-time. The beast has six legs. The screen pans to reveal the rider, an entity only vaguely human, full of strange and terrifying powers, clad in black armor. His face is yellow and his eyes are red and his scowl is permanent. It is Odin, the god of death. The camera pauses on his indignant mug. He looks severely displeased and ready to fuck shit up. Lightning splits the sky. Thunder booms. The screen goes white, turning the wrathful God silhouette, but only for a moment, because suddenly, with massive blue-steel blade in hand, Odin tugs the reins. The nightmare beast neighs a wicked neigh, rears up on hind legs, plumes smoke from its flared nostrils, and then violently leaps toward the enemy. Odin swings his massive blade, big kanji flashes, not once 斬, not twice 鉄, but thrice 剣, then he is motionless, posed with sword crossed by his face, blood-red 斬鉄剣 splattered on the screen, enemy in view behind him, and then, in the silent blink of an eye, that same enemy is split in two, destroyed.

“That’s gotta be the coolest summon animation in all of Final Fantasy,” I say so matter-of-factly that Robert really has no choice but to nod his head and agree before turning his attention once again to Sexus and saying something like, “The thing about Miller is that, like, he can go from these raunchy-as-fuck sex scenes, which are like ‘I touched her only once and it made her cum like six times,’ which makes me wonder if he ever actually had sexual intercourse with a woman, to these vast philosophical musings on what it means to be an artist and how to navigate the soul-suckingly fake modern world, in a way that really no other author, at least that I’ve read, could. I mean, you really should read Tropic of Capricorn at least, I think you’d like it.” And of course, at this point, I’m zoned out on my grind shit again, but Robert keeps going. “I mean, Miller himself, whose middle name is Valentine which is kinda cool, was kind of an awful person, I think he had a daughter that he pretty much abandoned for a life of debauchery in France or something, all while bumming money off people because he was broke as fuck or whatever, but his writing is incredibly good, so it’s kind of like an art-before-the-artist thing, if you know what I mean.” And I’m nodding along, doing the whole absent-minded mhm-yeah-I-know-what-you-mean thing, repeatedly pushing X on my DualShock, watching Squall gunblade monsters to death, when all of a sudden there’s a knock on my office door and in walks my son, Arthur, at the absolute height of his terrible twos, so of course he immediately starts going through my bookshelf, grabbing at all sorts of paperbacks that, if given enough time, will surely be ripped to shreds, so now I’m scrambling to grab the books out of his hands all while he’s repeating “Daddy, daddy, mall, mall, wanna go to the mall, wanna go to the mall with The Robert,” which is what he calls Robert, “The Robert.”

So The Robert and I get our stuff together, pack up my son’s bag, and head off to the mall.

The mall sucks. It’s dying. There's not one store in there worth going to, and there's hardly anyone ever there, so it's kind of like this vast liminal space left over from a pre-terminally-online age. I only take my son to the mall to ride the motorcycles. Arthur loves riding the motorcycles. They're not real motorcycles, they're like these motorized electric three-wheelers dressed up as unicorns and Paw Patrol characters and shit, but they're pretty fast for indoor children’s vehicles, like 10mph at least, and they can technically support up to 200lbs, so I sometimes ride them too, often the same one my son rides, because frankly he's not a very good driver, having run into many benches, walls, and glass display windows in his time, which is easy for him to do because the employees at this little motorcycle kiosk let the kids ride these little disaster machines all over the place with basically zero supervision as long as you pay the going rate of like two dollars a minute, which is actually pretty expensive considering you're really only paying for electricity and experiences, but the motorcycles are just sitting there untethered outside the kiosk, so anyone could potentially just climb up on them whenever, but the motorcycles won't actually rev up unless the kiosk employee inserts a little card into the motorcycle’s backside which, considering these things are dressed as colorful beasts, ends up looking a little sodomitic, to tell you the truth, but I guess that's beside the point.

Anyway. When we get to the motorcycle kiosk inside the mall, it’s like four in the afternoon, and not a soul is there, besides us, and there’s no OUT FOR LUNCH or BE RIGHT BACK sign or nothing. So I’m scanning the area, checking if maybe the kiosk employee is nearby somewhere, maybe actually supervising one of the little cyclists for once, but no, nothing, not a single person that looks even remotely close to an underpaid mall kiosk employee that hates their life, and all the motorcycles are there, right in front of the kiosk, and my son is now climbing up on the unicorn one, which, from previous rides, we have discovered is actually the fastest one of the bunch, so little Arthur always wants to ride that one, so he’s now repeating, “go go go go go,” but little does he know, there is no way to make it go, for the underpaid mall kiosk employee is not there to stick the little card up the thing’s butt, so I walk to my son, lift him off the unicorn, and try to explain the situation, “no one’s here, buddy, we’ll come back in 10 minutes,” but of course he doesn’t understand and, at the absolute height of his terrible twos, while I’m holding him skyward, he starts kicking and screaming like a madman, so I put him down, at which point he climbs up on the unicorn again, so I say something like “what the hell why not” then The Robert helps me push the unicorn out of its little spot in front of the kiosk, and then I get behind the thing and start pushing it, Arthur going “weeeeeeeeeeee” while holding the handlebars and revving it like it’s actually working, which it’s not. I push him around for a few minutes, figuring maybe the kiosk employee will show up at some point, but no one ever does, so eventually I get kind of exhausted pushing this unicorn around, especially since there’s like a thirty-pound toddler on top of it, so I push the thing back into its spot right by all the other motorcycles, and Arthur hates that, so he starts moaning and groaning, doing his terrible-twos shit, at which point I’m like, “OK, what the hell, where is this person?” and The Robert is like, “how am I supposed to know? Maybe they skipped out on work.” So, not taking that for an answer, I tell The Robert to push Arthur around for a minute, and, once he starts doing that, I walk off to the nearby shoe store, which is called something generic like Shoe Emporium or something, and I walk right up to the front desk and say, “Where’s the Motorcycle person?” And the woman at the front desk, who has brown hair and is quite round and whose face just sort of sinks into her neck because she’s quite round, not trying to be mean, those are just the facts, the woman says, “They do whatever they want, just leaving all the time, taking breaks whenever, last I saw them was an hour ago.” So I nod, say thanks, then, figuring surely the kiosk employee will be back soon, considering they’ve already been gone for an hour and it’s still like four hours until mall-closing time, I go back to the motorcycle kiosk, where The Robert is still pushing the unicorn around, and Arthur, who now looks quite bored sitting atop the unicorn, is saying, “I wanna do it, I wanna go fast, go fast,” so I trade off with The Robert and start pushing Arthur around again for another minute or so, but Arthur keeps repeating, “wanna go fast, wanna go fast,” and of course, as his father, I too want him to go fast, I want him to have a great time, I want him to be happy always, forever, and that’s when something strikes me, psychically, so I stop and think to myself, “you know what, fuck it,” and then, with a glint in my eye and a confident smile on my face, I tell The Robert, “Push him around for just another minute, I got an idea,” and The Robert, who is now looking at me with an eyebrow raised and a stern look on his face, as if he’s seen this side of me before and knows something’s up, says, “What are you planning to do?” But I do not respond, I say nothing. I simply walk up to the kiosk and start circling it, looking for an opening, an entrance, but the entrance I find, a wooden gate, is locked, so that’s when I get creative.

The kiosk itself is pretty much just a rectangular wall enclosure that goes up to about my chest, and it's got a raised desk in the middle where the little electronic credit card reader is, and there's also a small bench back there, for employee sitting, and there’s also a long broom, and, upon examining the desk closely, I also see the little card that the kiosk employees use to power up the motorcycles, which is exactly what I was hoping to find, and upon seeing that little sodomitic card, I'm overcome by this tingly heady feeling as if I’ve been endowed with strange and terrifying powers, as if I have become unstuck from the fabric of reality, free of all the frankly fucking pointless rules of the world, and of course I want my son to have some fun here at the mall, and these damn motorcycles are pretty much the only way for him to do that, so without a second thought I decide to use this newfound strange, terrifying power to reach my long arm over the kiosk wall, grab the broom, pull it toward me, examine it as if it were my blade, all while big kanji flashes in my mind, 斬鉄剣, which frankly I don’t know the meaning of, then I move the attached detachable dustpan to the end of the broom, near the bristles, and then I start using the broom as like an extension of my arm, holding it out far over the kiosk wall, maneuvering it onto the desk in the middle, all to reach the little power-up card, and then I start nudging the card off the desk, and after a few seconds of this, the card falls right into the little dustpan, at which point I pull the broom back toward me, to like retrieve the card, but while doing this the card slips from the dustpan, falling onto the floor below, so I quickly pull back the broom, lean it upright on the kiosk, and, thinking to myself, “fuck it, I’m going all in,” I start lifting my leg, totally intent on just climbing over the fucking kiosk wall, to get in there and pick up the damn card, but that’s when I hear a loud, “HEY, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?”

So I turn around, and I see the woman from the shoe store, standing about ten feet away, staring at me with this harsh look on her face, then I look back and see both The Robert and Arthur just standing there staring at me too, although they’re staring at me with these big eyes, as if they’re in awe of the strange and terrifying power radiating from my person, but it’s at this point that I think to myself that perhaps I am setting a poor example for my son, so I turn back to the woman from the shoe store and, acting totally oblivious, say, “What?” And she says, “What do you mean ‘what?’ You can’t do that.” So I say, “Do what?” And she says, “Mess with their stuff.” And I’m just sort of blinking at her at this point. And then she repeats, “You can’t mess with their stuff when they’re not there.” So I say, “Well, when are they coming back?” And she says, “How should I know? You just can’t mess with their stuff.” And I’m like thinking to myself like, “What are they going to do, throw me in mall jail? For trying to climb over a kiosk to get a card that powers a child-sized motorcycle so that my son can have a little fun in this run-down dump of a fucking mall? What is this woman trying to prove? Is she like lonely and miserable, so she gets off on ruining kids’ fun? On a Saturday for fuck’s sake? What’s her fucking problem?” And then she says something like, “You have to wait for them to come back or you have to leave, sir.” And now, feeling the strange and terrifying power dissipating from my body and soul, like I’m slowly becoming stuck in the pointless fucking rules again, I blink and say, “OK, but when are they coming back?” And she says, “I told you, sir, I don’t know, please leave.” And now I feel totally stuck, like I’m fully back in reality again, so I say, “Sorry, I just wanted my son to have some fun, is all.” At which point the woman’s expression softens a little bit and she says, “I get it, but you can’t do that.” So I sigh dejectedly and say, “I know.”

And I did know, but, for a moment there, I didn’t, for a moment there, I was unstuck.

So I turn to my son and The Robert and say, “C’mon, let’s go downtown or something.” But my son shakes his head, “No, no, wanna ride the motorcycles, please daddy, please.” So I crouch down eye-level with my boy and say, “I know, son, but we can’t today, I’m sorry, but we can go to the playground, you’ll have fun there.” And, upon hearing the p-word, his rosy little cherubic face lights up, and off we go, leaving the motorcycles and dead mall in our wake.

Later that night, Arthur is asleep, and The Robert and I are back in my office, doing our literary-nerd shit. I’m repeatedly encountering these Blitz monsters to steal a bunch of Betrayal Swords to turn them into Confuse magic so that I can junction that magic onto Quistis so that I can survive Malboro Bad Breath attacks so that I can kill Malboros so that I can get some Malboro Tentacles so that I can create Doomtrain, which is a fucking pain in the ass and gives you an idea of just how grindy and repetitive Final Fantasy VIII can be, when The Robert, index finger on an orange-highlighted passage of Sexus, says, “You know, at the mall today, for a moment there, you were unglued.” And I’m like, “What?” And he’s like, “Unglued, like, here, let me read this passage here,” and then he starts reading the passage, but I wave my hands and interrupt him because, at that moment, ZANTETSUKEN appears on the screen again, and now, instead of being excited and ten years old again, I’m very annoyed, so I say, “You see, this is the problem with Odin sometimes, it’s like, he just does whatever the fuck he wants. I’m trying to steal Betrayal Swords here, which means I have to actually fight the monster, so that I can use steal on them, but I can’t fight the monsters when Odin just on a whim decides to fucking show up and slice them in half. He slows the whole stealing process down. And he’s done this like five times now, as if he knows I’m trying to steal from these monsters specifically. And since he randomly shows up, there’s nothing I can fucking do about it. It’s ridiculous. It’s like he’s outside of the normal rules of the game, almost.” But The Robert, blinking at me a little bit, just says, “Can I read the passage now?” So I pause the game, turn to him, and say, “Whatever, sure, read the passage.” And that’s when he starts reading the passage, “Suddenly now and then someone comes awake, comes undone, as it were, from the meaningless glue in which we are stuck,” and so on, and this passage actually captures me, I am sitting there, rapt, as he keeps going and going, reading the whole page, and then, after a long pause, he goes, “You know, I’ve known you for a while, and sometimes you really can be one unglued motherfucker. I wish I could be like that, sometimes.” And I sort of shrug and say something like, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, the whole mall thing was kind of embarrassing, in hindsight.” But he shakes his head, “No, it was cool as fuck.” And I sort of smile before turning back to my game, unpausing, then running Squall around in circles in the woods again, to encounter more Blitz monsters, which, after a few seconds, I do, but, lo and behold, there’s a VOOM and the word ZANTETSUKEN appears at the top of the screen again, so I swivel my faux-leather office chair to face The Robert again, incredulous look on my face, and say,

“You know who’s unglued?”

“Who?”

I point at the screen. “This asshole.”

The Robert laughs. “Yeah, well, at least he’s still cool as fuck.”

斬鉄剣

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short stories & essays

January 2026

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Page Summary

a highly subjective review of Underworld
beginner's mind 675
all plots move toward white noise
in defense & criticism of Infinite Jest
intelligence as a kind of curse
ZANTETSUKEN or, on becoming unglued at the local mall

just words

"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words."

Entries tagged with books

a highly subjective review of Underworld

beginner's mind 675

all plots move toward white noise

in defense & criticism of Infinite Jest

intelligence as a kind of curse

ZANTETSUKEN or, on becoming unglued at the local mall

Profile

January 2026

Page Summary