Summer Reading-Infinite Jest

So I’ve set out on a summer reading journey, tackling David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, all 981 pages, an additional 388 endnotes, which tacks on 96 more pages. Not the kind of reading assignment one tackles frivolously. Staying power is required.

Infinite Jest is a “claustrophobic” read, commented one person at Infinite Summer, the focal point of a community read highlighting Wallace’s most famous, and talked about work. Maybe “famous” is the wrong way to describe Wallace and his work.

Unlike the books that get passed off for today’s best selling novels—books that are a cinch to read on your lunch break, the subway, standing in line at the supermarket, or between innings during commercial breaks, watching Red Sox games; Infinite Jest requires heavy lifting—mentally, physically, and metaphorically. Strong arms and a healthy back are also helpful, with this chock-a-block of a novel.

Infinite Summer provides readers, who might be tempted to veer aside, and toss the book down with a loud “thud,” a guide and the company of fellow travelers in reading, which for me, has willed me forward, and actually found me ahead of schedule. Woe to those who got a late start, or haven’t been as religious in their daily reading. Falling behind adds additional pressure to an already tough read, and might be the primary reason many pull up short. Infinite Jest, as presented via Indian Summer, is not a reading plan for procrastinators.

One of the reasons I’m ahead of the reading schedule (as of this morning, I’m at page 227) is illustrated by one of my evenings after work, last week.

Tuesday night, Mary was out for her monthly book club meeting (their group had tackled Khalid Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns), and I had hours of time after work to do what I wanted, as well as an empty house, filled with quiet.

Rather than frittering the time away with the empty calories of sitcoms in rerun, or even pissing away an hour online, with the all-too-often lauded social media tools of Facebook, or Twitter, I arrived home, cracked open a Diet Pepsi (in lieu of a couple of frost-brewed Coors Lights), and set about knocking out some pages over the next hour, or two. Maybe if the sun had been out and it wasn’t raining once again (June has visited rain upon us, 21 out of 30 calendar days), I’d have decided to jump on my bike for an invigorating ride to leech the work day’s stress from my system. The occasional downpours and soaked pavement made my decision to sit under artificial lighting an easier one (that and the stories of how so many have abandoned IJ further on than I’m currently sitting at).

Now that I’m ten days into my assignment, I’m viewing it less as a chore and recognizing now that reading IJ is a subversive act. Understand that for me that’s a real motivator.

When DFW committed suicide last year, no one outside of my wife and son knew anything about him, or his writing. My few failed attempts to explain his significance to co-workers just drew empty looks.

Back in the mid-90s, during my indie rock heyday, I hosted a couple of Saturday night music shows on Bowdoin College’s radio station, WBOR. I was one of a handful of community members that knew enough about college radio, and the CMJ-type formats most programmed at the time, to land a slot, not once, not twice, but for three semesters (and it would have gone longer, if I had decided to continue).

I always gave my shows some kind of “outsider” moniker, like “Swimming Upstream,” or “Against the Grain,” which allowed me to use Bad Religion’s title track from their 1989 album as one of my show’s intro music each week. Subversive college rock radio, I suppose.

During that time, I thought my actions ran counter to the mainstream. I hated much that passed for popular culture, particularly mainstream rock music. I went to great pains to strike a pose running contrary to it.

Looking back a decade, I’m not so sure I was as rad, or counter-cultural as I once fancied myself to be. My musical tastes did run to the fringes of indie rockdom, however.

Given that IJ is my book of choice for the next six to eight weeks (possibly less, given my current reading pace), I’m fueling my page turning forward by thinking of it as an act with seditious tendencies. Accomplishing completion is something that disconnects me from the mainstream of popular culture and its technological mores of watching bad television, mindless trolling of the interwebs, and the current trendy magnetism of social media.

Call the reading “claustrophobic,” difficult, or even impossible to do (as so many are moaning about on the various Infinite Summer blogs) if you want; bail on it after 200 pages if you dare. I’m choosing, however, to move forward as part of a greater reading community of people struggling by various degrees to do something unique in our time—read and think.

I’ve been asking myself (and ruminating on other reader’s comments) the past ten days, why is this book causing us all so much consternation, and even stress? What makes poring through a difficult tome run so counter to our everyday experiences in the 21st century?

I think that most of us, even those that still regularly read books, have been co-opted by our digital world of blog posts, where 300 to 400 word posts are deemed too “wordy.” Even worse, now our written communication must conform to a tool that tries to box us into 140 characters. In that context, David Foster Wallace, and Infinite Jest might just be too goddamn difficult, or “claustrophobic.”

As a writer, I appreciate DFW’s legacy with words. I admit that IJ isn’t an easy read and that his usage has been taxing the two dictionaries I have utilized regularly—both my Pocket Oxford English Dictionary, and the other, more unwieldy New Lexicon Webster’s Dicitonary of the English Language, with its 170,000 definitions and entries (30,000 more than the POED)—neither are sufficient tools for IJ. What current writer strings mixes nouns like “phonemes” and “fricatives,” and an adjective such as “trochaically?”

While it’s convenient for some to accuse Wallace of leaning towards pedantry, crafting prose fat with unfamiliar words to most of the rest of us mere mortals, on the contrary, I think Wallace’s appreciation for words and language is one of the endearing characteristics that I’ve pulled from my reading to date.

Even better, reading Wallace makes me want to write better, and pushes me harder at my own craft.

Jesting infinitely (all summer)

I've accepted the challenge--I've begun reading Infinite Jest (finally) because of two occurrances: 1) my son sent me a belated Father's Day package including DFW's novel, a hefty tome that one writer described as "a doorstop novel." 2) I discovered (ironically, the day my package arrived containing IJ) that an entire group of people that still consider reading important have decided to do so.

I'm joining in and I'm going along for the ride.

More to come on this summer reading project.

Back to my use of "finally."

When DFW committed suicide, like many others, I was shocked, horrified, and ultimately deeply troubled and saddened. I wrote about it.

At that point, I determined to read IJ, "finally," but to my dismay, I couldn't score a copy for an upcoming long weekend (every store and online resource was "out of stock"). When I returned, I made several more attempts and forgot about reading it.

I'm 63 pages in and I'm as confused, exhilarated, awed, and frustrated as many others who've taken the plunge.

Noir, Los Angeles style

There is a great deal of conjecture about books and “the future of publishing.” What that basically means is that major publishing’s empire has been forced to contract and consolidate.

Amidst all of this hand wringing about books and their demise, small press publishing continues to experience healthy growth. There are a wealth of innovative small press publishers, particularly those publishing new fiction.

One of the things I enjoyed when I was in Los Angeles, and attended the LA Times Festival of Books, was meeting some of these small press aficionados and seeing the diversity of titles they were bringing out. All of the publishers I talked to were optimistic and saw opportunities in the particular niches they occupied.

One of my favorites of these various presses has to be Akashic Books, a Brooklyn-based small press, founded by former Girls Against Boys bassist, Johnny Temple. With a focus on urban literary fiction, Akashic has developed an expansive catalog of quality titles over the past decade.

Their noir series is pure genius. Launched back in 2004 with the first title, Brooklyn Noir, this innovative concept has expanded into double digits, including noir books highlighting Baltimore, Chicago, Manhattan, Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles.

After tooling around Los Angeles for a week, I knew I had to read Los Angeles Noir when I returned to the sedate environs of my home state.

What I really like about the two noir books I’ve read, the one set in Los Angeles (and also, Baltimore) was how each story is centered in a particular neighborhood, or section of the city.

Each one of the books is edited by a writer hailing from the featured city. The Los Angeles book’s editing duties were handled by Denise Hamilton. Hamilton is a native Angeleno and former reporter for The Times. She now regularly shows up on best seller lists for her crime novels.

Hamilton clearly knows about noir and the city’s penchant for that writing genre. Interestingly, Hamilton shares with readers in the introduction to the book that she was surprised given LA’s noir tradition that a similar book hadn’t already been done.

With each subsequent story being set in a neighborhood/section of Los Angeles, the book mirrored my own take on the city, which Hamilton echoes when she describes the city as a “grab bag of ethnic clusters, neighborhoods, communities, subcultures.”

LA Noir captures the best of the genre, with a 21st century take on it. With each story’s twists, turns, double-crosses, characters drawn to Hollywood’s former myths, and deals gone awry, given to readers by some of the city’s best writers, it shouldn’t be a surprise when they find themselves eagerly turning pages, disappointed once they reach the book’s final one.

[Johnny Temple of Akashic Books/(LA Times photo)]

Eula Biss: Essayist extraordinaire

Essays and short stories have been my reading domain of late. The essay has also been where I've been focusing my own writing energies.

While the essay is not uncommon, and many writers utilize the essay as a writing platform, an entire book of essays in the wrong hands can often go flat.

Several weeks ago, I happened upon Eula Biss reading her essay, "Time and Distance Overcome" on C-SPAN's BookTV. She was in the midst of the essay, which uses telephone poles to convey several themes about America, including the inherent racism represented by our history.

The telephone pole allowed wires to be strung, linking communities and eventually the entire country. We now view this and Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone as wondrous things. Biss points out in her essay that Americans at that time opposed telephone poles vociferously.

She writes about the New York Times in 1889 reporting a "War on Telephone Poles." Biss tells us that as soon as the telephone company erected a new pole, home owners and business owners would saw it down, even resorting to defending their properties from telephone poles with rifles.

According to Biss, newspaper editorials at the time considered telephone poles as contributors to urban blight.

Despite America's initial disdain for telephone poles, Biss writes that "it would only take four years after Bell's first public demonstration of the telephone for every town of more than ten thousand to be wired, although many towns were only wired to themselves. By the turn of the century, there were more telephone poles than bathtubs in America."

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying that "telephone poles annihilated time and space and brought the human family in closer touch."

Telephone poles also made convenient stations upon which to lynch blacks, something I never learned in history class, and wouldn't have known, if this essay by Biss, contained in her collection of essays, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press, 2009).

Biss doesn't blame telephone poles. They were merely an instrument, a practical one at that given that they were tall and straight, had a cross bar, and they stood in public places, making them great for humiliation and degradation, key elements of lynchings.

Writing about telephone poles and lynchings might seem perverse, and evoke discomfort from readers, Biss conveys something about America in this essay, about racism from our nation's past that is not common knowledge, even though telephone poles are ubiquitous.

Her essays are like that. She looks at things, like race in America, and the prevalence of fear in our country, through a lens somewhat altered from the norm.

We also learn from Biss that her father told her that her grandfather was a telephone lineman and "broke his back when a telephone pole smashed him against the road."

The 13 essays in the book are placed in sections, three of which are geographic divisions where each essay is rooted--New York, California, and the Midwest.

In "Black News," Biss breaks down illusions outsiders have about San Diego, with its beaches and white sand, just like advertisements she had seen, promoting the city.

Biss writes that "most of the people on Pacific Beach were young and white and tanned and muscular." Biss assessed from the beaches that San Diego was "almost entirely white." She would learn later that this wasn't the case.

She didn't live near the beach--she couldn't afford to. She lived in a section of San Diego that was predominantly African-American, where there were "four liquor stores within two blocks two blocks of my apartment." She points out that the nearest bus stop was 10 blocks away.

Biss landed a part-time job as a reporter and photographer for the Voice and Viewpoint, the African-American community paper in the city.

She learned from this that news is different, depending on who hold s editorial control. The beat she covered yielded news that wouldn't be found in the cities white-owned and white-controlled newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune. For instance, the Voice and Viewpoint didn't carry a beach report. The Union-Tribune didn't report on Child and Protective Service's (CPS) systematic assault on black families.The CPS beat was one that Biss was assigned to. Biss learned that not all news was the same, and who reported on it really mattered, and who read the paper mattered more.

What holds these 13 disparate essays together is Biss's obvious chops as a writer. Not one of the essays is a "clunker." Her skill allows her to tie together lynchings on telephone poles, governmental malfeasance towards African-American families in San Diego, and in her essay, "Is This Kansas," the intellectual and ideological poverty of college students, and college administrators in the Midwest.

While all of the essays have a thematic center, which is race in America, a subject fraught with peril for any writer, Biss never comes across as heavy-handed, or haranguing readers, and the essays aren't about ideological axe-grinding.

Throughout Notes from No Man's Land, Biss regularly showed her adeptness and skill as a writer, tackling tough subjects in each essay, but always with a twist or turn that took you somewhere different than you originally thought you were going. In the process, you admired the journey, and how Biss made you think about her points.

This is Biss's first full-length work, made possible when she won Graywolf's Nonfiction Prize for 2008.

I'm sure this will be the first of many books from Biss, as this first book of essays is a winner.

Billy Graham: Friend of Republicans

Ross Douthat weighs in on Stephen P. Miller's new book, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

Douthat, whose political leanings generally tilt differently than my own (read, conservative), nonetheless, was a regular stop during the last presidential election to take the Republican pulse, and also to witness some rare, nuanced conservative views on Obama, McCain, and the daily machinations of presidential politics. He was one of several bloggers at The Atlantic (like Megan McArdle) that I respected as writers, even if I didn't always march in lockstep with. Sadly, Douthat stopped blogging for The Atlantic in April (he now is a regular op-ed contributor to the NY Times).

His review is solid, like most of what he writes. Douthat, btw, also has a book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, which came out in 2008.

Looks like I'll need to add Miller's book to my growing list of summer reading material.

Aimee Semple McPherson-Fundamentalist Queen

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America, by Matthew Avery Sutton (Harvard University Press, 2007)

Long before megachurches and names like Rick Warren and Joel Osteen became commingled with American Christianity, Aimee Semple McPherson was America’s key religious figure, representing fundamentalism and old-time religion in America between the two World Wars. She was America’s most famous and certainly flamboyant minister, during the 1920s, 1930s, and even into the early 1940s. Given the scope of her influence, and thorough remaking of the country’s religious landscape, it is unfortunate that so few within, and without the confines of American Christendom know about “Sister Aimee” today.

While there have been books detailing McPherson’s life before (both Edith Blumhofer and Daniel Epstein produced solid works about McPherson) Matthew Avery Sutton’s Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America is the first book that places her firmly within the cultural, political, and religious milieu of her era.

The book, which came out in 2007, avoids some the traps of previous treatments of McPherson’s life—the stereotypes and caricature so often attendant with this early 20th century religious icon.

Avery does an excellent job of highlighting the context of the period when McPherson’s star began to rise. From simple beginnings on a farm in Ontario, McPherson would utilize the new media of her day, particularly radio, to draw upon the burgeoning appeal of popular entertainment, and the development of modern day Hollywood.

Raised by a strict mother, McPherson’s religious underpinnings were forged by the conservative theology of the Salvation Army. Later, she would meet an itinerant Pentecostal evangelist and fiery preacher, Robert Semple, when he came to Ingersoll, her hometown, for a revival. Later, the two married and after a brief time in Chicago, the newlyweds were off to the mission field in China. Semple later contracted malaria, and died, leaving Aimee stranded with her young daughter. She would return to the States, enter into another relationship leading to marriage to Harold McPherson, a successful businessman. This one would fail mainly due to McPherson’s inability to forego preaching, for domestic chores and duties.

It was as an evangelist that McPherson began to find her true religious calling. After a transcontinental journey in her “Gospel Car,” which was painted with the slogan, “Where will you spend eternity?” and holding meetings from the farflung reaches of the northeast in Maine, down the eastern seaboard into Florida, and across America’s heartland, in the Midwest. From there, McPherson headed west, arriving in Los Angeles in December, 1918, with mother and children in tow.

While there is no doubt that McPherson would have attained a measure of fame and notoriety regardless of where she put down roots, the city of Los Angeles during the 1920s was the perfect place for someone with McPherson’s gifts, charisma, and sexual aura to be living. It is Avery’s ability to place McPherson within this context, and his understanding of its importance that makes his book the standout that it is.

Los Angeles in the 1920s had been transformed from a sleepy agricultural town, to the place where 500,000 Americans descended over the next decade, lured by train to an Edenic paradise with its fabulous climate, marketed by legions of real estate developers and other civic opportunists. Score of Midwesterners—retired farmers, grocers, Ford agents and others—would sell out their farms and businesses to settle in California, and in particular, the “City of Angels.” It was from the bulk of these folks that McPherson would build her following from.

Civic leaders were thrilled that McPherson chose to build her magnificent Angelus Temple in sunny Los Angeles. They saw her choice as vindication of their city, and would serve as a magnet for tourists, and it wasn’t long before these leaders saw the economic bump that McPherson provided.

The Temple was located a few miles from downtown, at the corner of Sunset and Glendale Boulevards. I visited the church a few weeks ago, when in Los Angeles, and it is a magnificent building even today. It had to have been a spectacular attraction nearly 90 years ago, when first built. Avery points out that famed California journalist and historian Carey McWilliams believed that McPherson’s timing for establishing her church, and its location “were perfect.”

McWilliams wrote, “The postwar period, so full of restlessness, with its craze for entertainment and passion for frivolity, had already given birth to the Jazz Age. The flapper had arrived, a little tipsy, with short skirts and bobbed hair. It was time for petting and necking; for flasks and roadside taverns; for move ‘palaces’ and automobiles…and Aimee was determined to lead the parade on a grand detour to Heaven.”

Attendees would parade to the Angelus Temple en masse during McPherson’s heyday, with church officials counting weekly attendance at between thirty and fifty thousand people, as the church was packed almost nightly and on weekends. They came to hear McPherson’s sermons, and theatrical delivery of her biblical message.

Avery clearly makes the case that it was McPherson who deserves credit for the megachurch movement, and the political strength exhibited by the religious right, and figures such as James Dobson.

Eighty years ago, fundamentalism was floundering. It was on the ropes, after taking an uppercut to the jaw from the Scopes Trial, and repeated attacks from liberal theologians like Fosdick, making claims that modern science invalidated the fundamentalist theology. McPherson and her allies reshaped the “old-time religion” and found new ways to promote it and connect it to changes happening in mainstream American culture.

Avery’s book is well-researched, without being overly pedantic, or unnecessarily scholarly. This isn’t to say that it doesn’t hold up well as a strong source of historical documentation.

He takes a very even-handed approach to an important 20th century figure, one that is sadly underrepresented in the 21st century, and should be, given the importance of who she was, and what she represented, particularly her role model for women, as a religious and cultural pioneer.

The book should appeal to anyone wanting to broaden their understanding of America and early 20th century history. It also is a very strong work on the phenomenon of urban growth in the last century, particularly Los Angeles, and its ascendancy to becoming one of the nation’s great cities.

Writing about dogs

Mark Doty is a fine writer. Equally at home writing poetry, as well as prose, my first contact with his work was via his wonderful memoir, Dog Years.

The book was one of many that I jammed into my backpack while readying for our summer vacation, in August 2007. Mary had found what looked like a delightful, rustic cottage along Maine's rocky coast, in Steuben, about an hour east (or Down East, if you prefer) of Mount Desert Island, and removed from the tourist Mecca of Bar Harbor. Granted, we were working from a picture and description from a guide to Maine camps and cottages (put out by the Maine's Office of Tourism , I think), but we decided to take and chance. I'm glad we did.

Bernie, then 12-years-old, was beginning to show the first signs of aging. Occasionally, after he would run chasing balls in the yard, or aggressively exert himself running, his rear haunches would shake and quiver. I wondered if he was showing the first signs of a possible genetic hip condition that Shelties are prone to have.

Steuben became a magical week away from television, cell phones, and computers. It was a week filled with early morning walks in the fog, exploring the shoreline at low tide. We met a local clammer, 82-year-old Reny, who kept us supplied with the freshest clams for the rest of the week, for a pittance of what we'd have paid in Portland. Mark, our son, and his girlfriend, Gabi, would arrive midweek, and share the cottage for the remainder of the week.

One night, we had Sandy Phippen, Maine writer extraordinaire, over for dinner. Phippen and I had struck up a relationship over the phone over the past few years, and I thought it would be great to have him by, since he lived nearby in Hancock. His homespun Maine humor and stories kept us all in stitches throughout dinner and afterwards.

I read Doty's book in a day and a half. Without giving away too many details of the book, the ending, where Doty eloquently conveys the passing of one of his two beloved 70-pound labs, Beau, touched an emotional resevoir, as if my own canine friend, Bernie, had passed away. Little did I know that less than two years later, I would personally experience the loss of my own friend.

Doty's book has a much greater depth than the popular Marley & Me. That's not to say that the latter isn't fine for some tastes, but for me, Doty's writing is much more grounded in the harsh complexities of life's realities, with their joy, pain, heartbreak, and the inevitable death of loved ones, both animal and human that all of us must come to terms with.

This is only the second day without Bernie, but his departure has left an almost palpable emptiness in our home. This void has much less to do with the absence of Bernie's 35-pound physical frame, and much more to do with his larger than life spirit and personality that filled rooms, and always elicited a smile. He was a dog that truly loved everyone he was ever with, as long as it was human, and not a fellow dog (an association that I don't think Bernie ever was comfortable with).

I know that both Mary, Mark, and I will ultimately come to terms with the loss of our dog, but in the short-term, it's just really hard to cope with, just as Doty was able to convey in his wonderful memoir.