Kyros

Jackie The Jokeman: King of Inappropriate Laughter

I'm On Fire

Now for something funny.

The Howard Stern show call by Dominic Barbara:

Requiem For A Dream

Sara Goldfarb: I'm somebody now, Harry. Everybody likes me. Soon, millions of people will see me and they'll all like me. I'll tell them about you, and your father, how good he was to us. Remember? It's a reason to get up in the morning. It's a reason to lose weight, to fit in the red dress. It's a reason to smile. It makes tomorrow all right. What have I got Harry, hm? Why should I even make the bed, or wash the dishes? I do them, but why should I? I'm alone. Your father's gone, you're gone. I got no one to care for. What have I got, Harry? I'm lonely. I'm old.

Harry Goldfarb: You got friends, Ma.


Sara Goldfarb: Ah, it's not the same. They don't need me. I like the way I feel. I like thinking about the red dress and the television and you and your father. Now when I get the sun, I smile.


I remember seeing this film when it came out several years ago. It was in a cinema and I must say that it was probably one of the most powerful and disturbing films I'd ever seen. The reason for this reaction was due to Selby's relentless morality that runs through his work.

The scene above is probably one of the most powerful in the film due to its emotional/existential crisis that it delivers to the viewer.

Crash---J.G. Ballard

All the while I stared at those parts of Gabrielle's body
Reflected in this nightmare technology of cripple controls.
I watched her thighs shifting against each other
The jut of her left breast under the strap of her spinal harness
The angular bowl of her pelvis
The hard pressure of her hand on my arm
She gazed back at me through the windshield
Playing with the chromium clutch treadle
As if hoping that something obscene might happen

It was I who first made love to her
In the rear seat of her small car
Surrounded by the bizarre geometry of the invalid controls
As I explored her body
Feeling my way among the braces and straps of her underwear
The unfamiliar planes of her legs and hips
Steered me into unique cul de sacs
Strange declensions of skin and musculature

Each of her deformities became a potent metaphor
For the excitements of a new violence
Her body with its angular contours
Its unexpected junctions of mucus membrane and hairline
Detrusor muscle and erectile tissue
Was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilies

As I sat with her by the airport fence in her darkened car
Her white breast in my hand lit by the ascending airliners
The shape and tenderness of her nipple seemed to rape my fingers
Her sexual acts were exploratory ordeals

As she drove towards the airport I watched her handle the unfamiliar controls
The complex of inverted treadles and clutch levers of the car
had been designed for her -- implicitly, I guessed, for her first sexual act
Twenty minutes later, as I embraced her
The scent of her body mingled with the showroom odor of mustard leatherette

We had turned off near the reservoirs to watch the aircraft landing
As I pressed her left shoulder against my chest I could see
The contoured seat which had been molded around her body
Hemispheres of padded leather that matched the depressions of her
brace and backstraps
I slipped my hand around her right breast
Already colliding with the strange geometry of the car's interior
Unexpected controls jutted from beneath the steering wheel
The cluster of chromium treadles was fastened to the steel pivot
Clamped to the steering column
An extension on the floor-mounted gear lever rose laterally
Giving way to a vertical wing of chromium metal molded into the reverse
of a driver's palm
Aware of these new parameters
The embrace of this dutiful technology
Gabrielle lay back
Her intelligent eyes followed her hand as it felt my face and chin
As if searching for my own missing armatures of bright chromium

She lifted her left foot so that the leg brace rested against my knee
In the inner surface of her thigh
The straps formed a marked depression
Troughs of reddened skin
Hollowed out in the forms of buckles and clasps
As I unshackled the left leg brace
And ran my fingers along the deep buckle groove
The corrugated skin felt hot and tender
More exciting than the membrane of a vagina

This depraved orifice
The invagination of the sexual organs still in the embryonic stages
of evolution
Reminded me of the small wounds on my own body
Which still carried the contours of the instrument panel and the
controls
I felt this depression on her thigh
The groove worn below her breast
Under her right armpit
By the spinal brace
The red marking on the inside of her right
upper arm
These were the templates for new genital organs
The molds of sexual possibilities
Yet to be created in a hundred experimental car crashes

Leo Gay?

Nun

Heavy Metal City

Retro Pussy

Cunt

Simpsons I

What I Am Doing Tonight III

What I Am Doing Tonight II

What I Am Doing Tonight

Sucking Stones----Beckett

Molloy

by Samuel Beckett


The Sucking Stones Sequence



I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of
sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on
this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them
equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn
about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following
way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these
being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my
greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and
putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my
greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I
replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had
finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my
four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to
suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my
greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time.
And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I
have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me
fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the
four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which
case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was
really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But
I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and
again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of
obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to
pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a
man like me. So I began to look for something else ...


I might do better to transfer the stones four by four, instead of one
by one, that is to say, during the sucking, to take the three stones remaining
in the right pocket of my greatcoat and replace them by the four in the
right pocket of my trousers , and these by the four in the left pocket
of my trousers, and these by the four in the left pocket of my greatcoat,
and finally these by the three from the right pocket of my greatcoat,
plus the one, as soon as I had finished sucking it, which was in my mouth.
Yes, it seemed to me at first that by so doing I would arrive at a better
result. But onfurther reflection I had to change my mind and confess that
the circulation of the stones four by four came to exactly the same thing
as their circulation one by one. For if I was certain of finding each
time, in the right pocket of my greatcoat, four stones totally different
from their immediate predecessors, the possibility nevertheless remained
of my always chancing on the same stone, within each group of four, and
consequently of my sucking, not the sixteen turn and turn about as I wished,
but in fact four only, always the same, turn and turn about. So I had
to seek elswhere than in the mode of circulation. For no matter how I
caused the stones to circulate, I always ran the same risk. It was obvious
that by increasing the number of my pockets I was bound to increase my
chances of enjoying my stones in the way I planned, that is to say one
after the other until their number was exhausted. Had I had eight pockets,
for example, instead of the four I did have, then even the most diabolical
hazard could not have prevented me from sucking at least eight of my sixteen
stones, turn and turn about. The truth is I should have needed sixteen
pockets in order to be quite easy in my mind. And for a long time I could
see no other conclusion than this, that short of having sixteen pockets,
each with its stone, I could never reach the goal I had set myself, short
of an extraordinary hazard. And if at a pinch I could double the number
of my pockets, were it only by dividing each pocket in two, with the help
of a few safety-pins let us say, to quadruple them seemed to be more than
I could manage. And I did not feel inclined to take all that trouble for
a half-measure. For I was beginning to lose all sense of measure, after
all this wrestling and wrangling, and to say, All or nothing. And if I
was tempted for an instant to establish a more equitable proportion between
my stones and my pockets , by reducing the former to the number of the
latter, it was only for an instant. For it would have been an admission
of defeat. And sitting on the shore, before the sea, the sixteen stones
spread out before my eyes, I gazed at them in anger and perplexity ...


One day suddenly it dawned on me, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve
my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the
number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim.
The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within
me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once,
and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense,
long remained obscure. Finally I seemed to grasp that this word trim could
not here mean anything else, anything better, than the distribution of
the sixteen stones in four groups of four, one group in each pocket, and
that it was my refusal to consider any distribution other than this that
had vitiated my calculations until then and rendered the problem literally
insoluble. And it was on the basis of this interpretation, whether right
or wrong, that I finally reached a solution, inelegant assuredly, but
sound, sound. Now I am willing to believe, indeed I firmly believe, that
other solutions to this problem might have been found and indeed may still
be found, no less sound, but much more elegant than the one I shall now
describe, if I can ...


Good. Now I can begin to suck. Watch me closely. I take a stone from
the right pocket of my greatcoat , suck it, stop sucking it, put it
in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take
a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it put it
in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket
of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents)
and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are
all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and
concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the
right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the
five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by
the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by
the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage
then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while
the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the
vright way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just
sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other,
vand to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat,
being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this
kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but
others. And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of
stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception
in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same
redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution,
that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now
again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers,
which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers,
which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my
greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on?

There was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I
abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck
the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with
method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two
incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen. But
deep down I didn't give a tinker's curse about being off my
balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and
forewards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked
a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end
of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had
collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and
such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little
store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn't give a
fiddler's curse about being without, when they were all gone they
would be all gone, I wouldn't be any the worse off, or hardly any.
And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all
the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another,
and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or
swallowed ...

Seven Deadly Sins---Gluttony

In the same way as below, the steps leading up from the sixth terrace lie to the right of those which lead up to it.

As one goes around the sixth terrace, in the middle of it an apple tree becomes visible. It branches hold ripe, sweet-smelling applies. In shape it brings to mind an inverted fir tree, growing broader the higher one goes, making it impossible to climb. A stream falls from the mountain above onto the tree, drenching all of its leaves.

Approaching the tree, a voice from out of the branches warns one not to eat of the fruit of the tree, as if one does, ones food will lack as if it were no food at all. There is no sign of the source of the voice. The voice will then continue on, giving examples of the virtue of Temperance. "More did it in her thoughts to Mary seem that all the wedding should be fitly set and furnished forth than that rich wines should wet the lips which answer now for you. And they, the Roman matrons of old time, would stay their thirst with water. Daniel counted naught the price of food, if wisdom might be bought with the same coin. The earliest age of men had golden beauty of simplicity: acorns were sweet, and brooks were nectar then. And so John Baptist in the wilderness ate honey and locusts only - wherefore he, the greatness of abstention to express, is glorious in the gospel's imagery."

Those on this terrace are expiating the sin of gluttony. As such, they are starved skeletons, with chalk-white cavernous faces, hollow eyes, skin tight to their bones and all the other signs of prolonged hunger. To those on this terrace, and indeed most likely to anyone who is at all hungry, the scent of the apples and the water falling on the tree is irresistible, and they cannot help but eat and drink of them. Unfortunately, that is part of their punishment, as in doing so they are left hungrier and thirstier than before.

A number of those on this ledge are former highly-placed members of the Church, now paying the price for their indulgences in life. At first reluctant to speak, as soon as one talks to a traveller, many those here will flock around visitors to speak to them, and tell their tale.

Continuing on around the terrace, one comes upon a second apple tree, with broad-spread fruit-laden branches bending low. This tree is concealed by the curve of the mountain so that one is close to it when it is first seen. Its fruit, although appearing to hang low, are in fact held up just too high to reach. There is a crowd of sinners around the tree, raising appealing hands towards its fruit, until they become disillusioned and depart.

A voice from the branches of this tree warns passers-by not to come too close, as the tree is one grown from a seed of the apple tree from which Eve plucked that fateful apple. "Pass warily, nor come too nigh; a tree there is beyond from which Eve plucked the knowledge of sad years, and this one from that fatal seed is bred." Having spoken its warning, the voice from the tree will continue on, speaking of the dangers of gluttony and the punishments awaiting those who succumb to it.

A thousand paces or so beyond this second tree a voice hails travellers. It comes from an angel, glowing with a fierce, bright clear red light. He points out the way up to next terrace.

When Dante passed, a wind smelling of sweet graces and a million flowers brushed his forehead, as the angel's wings, shedding an ambrosial fragrance, erased the penultimate 'P' from his forehead.

The staircase up to the seventh terrace is narrow, so that travellers must go in single file. As Dante ascended he was lectured by Statius on generation, the infusion of the Soul into the body, and the corporeal semblance of Souls after death.

Seven Deadly Sins---Greed

The way up to the fifth terrace brings one out onto a place not unlike the other terraces. This terrace differs from the others in that the ground here is covered with people lying face-down, sobbing tears and lamentations. In between their tears they sigh, and speak words such as 'Adhaesit pavimento' and 'Anima mea.'

Those expiating their sins here are both those who were too avaricious in life, and those who were not avaricious enough. They are those who turned their eyes to Earth and its goods, separating themselves from God by their own will, by either desire for earthly things, or too great a rejection of them. Now where, in life, they did not lift their eyes to Heaven, their avarice holding them from high pursuits, now they must lie with faces and bodies presses to the Earth until their sin is cleansed. Those doing so claim that there is no worse punishment in all of Purgatory.

There are so many people lying on the ground here that one must pick one's way carefully to avoid treading on them; the easiest way is along the very edge of the terrace.

When Dante was here, he felt Mount Purgatory shake as if in a mighty earthquake. When this happened, a cry of 'To God be Glory in Excelsis' rose up from all those in Purgatory. The mountain quakes in this way when someone at last ends the expiation of their sins and is freed to ascend, and all of those in Purgatory hail their release. Dante and Virgil learned this from Statius, the former sinner whose release caused the shaking of the mountain in the first place.

The way up from the fifth terrace lies to the right of the place where one climbs up onto the terrace. Another angel stands watch at the entrance of the way up, and when Dante passed erased another of the 'P's from his forehead. The way up to the sixth terrace is a steep one

Seven Deadly Sins---Sloth

On this terrace, those who were slothful in life, who loved the Good but who did not act to promote it as well as they might have expiate their sins. Their love is strengthened on this terrace - "the loitering oar resumes its regular stroke."

This terrace is of plain undecorated flinty rock. As one goes along it in search of the way up to the fifth terrace, a clamourous outcry arises from in the distance. This comes from a crowd of people running at speed along the terrace, weeping and crying aloud as they go. "Swiftly they came, and voices cried aloud amid their weeping. Two in front proclaimed: 'How quickly Mary to the mountain ran!' and: 'Caesar once, Ilerda to subdue, struck at Marseilles, and ere his foemen knew had entered Spain.' And other of the crowd, jostling behind, cried: 'Hasten! Hasten all! From insufficient love let love's pursuit not slacken, and the power of grace recruit from strain to reach it.' ... In the rear they ran, and shouted: 'Those who saw the seas divide to give them passage, in their sloth they died before the chosen heirs to Canaan came.' And: 'They who would not, with Anchises' son, toil to the end, they bought a life of shame with that reluctance.'"

The members of the crowd are quite spread out, but still move quite fast, as a mass, passing anyone who is merely walking and racing off into the distance. There are many such crowds, each one racing around the terrace. They are not allowed to pause in their running through night and day.

Dante was assailed by a dream of a Siren on this terrace, from which he was only rescued by the intervention of Virgil. "A woman crooked in deformity, squint-eyed, and stammering in her speech, with hands Ill-shaped to make caresses, and her hair it seemed disease had whitened. Such to see was little bliss, but as the light expands with morn, and the chilled limbs their strength renew which night hath stiffened, so my gaze on her had power for her transforming. Straight and tall she rose, and soft swift speech, and eyes of love, she gave, and in her face the warm blood beat, even as desire would have it. I could not stir mine eyes from that regard. Her speech was sweet as song, and song became. 'I am,' she sang, 'I am that siren who the seaman charms in distant ocean. Not to heed would wrong the fountains of delight. To find my arms I turned Ulysses once. Who once belong to what I gave them will but seldom go. Such peace I give.' She had not ceased her song when came another of a different hue, alert to foil her, holy and austere, 'Virgil,' who cried, 'behold, what meet we here?' And he came forward in my dream, as though he saw this last one only, on the first, rude hands who laid, and tore her garments through, Opening her before, and showed her belly bare. Whereat there issued from that womb accursed such stench as waked me."

Progressing further around the terrace, one arrives at the way upwards, at which is stationed an angel, who invites travellers to 'Come hither' with a voice far beyond those of mortals in its sweetness and benignity. He has white, swan-like wings, with which he fans those who ascend the stairway past him. For Dante, he removed one of the 'P's which had been inscribed on his forehead.

Seven Deadly Sins---Wrath

Through the smoke, one begins to hear the 'Agnus Dei', "Oh, lamb of God, who takes all sins away" coming from all sides. These are the voices of the penitent who are being purged of their Wrath on the third terrace and who are hidden in the smoke. They ask travellers to be mentioned in the prayers of those who pass.

The way up out of the third terrace lies opposite that up onto the third terrace.

Going onward through the smoke the sun eventually becomes visible again.

Dante sees visions of examples of anger in the clearing smoke. "Born of Light, by Heavenly Will, Its power descends upon us. She who sings, Impious, in likeness of the bird which most For sorrow in its song finds ecstasy, First my imagination held: so still My mind was mirrored on itself that naught Intruded inward to divert its thought. Next after Philomela came a sight Of one who hung in torment crucified, Yet haughty and dispiteous while he died, While round him grouped Ahasuerus stood, Esther, and Mordicai called the Good, Who was of speech unbending. As will burst A bubble, failing of its watery frame, So passed this vision. In its place there came A maiden, weeping anguished tears, who said: 'O Queen, why hast thou made this choice accurst, Wrath-blinded? Not to lose Lavinia, Thy own life hast thou lost; so losing me. Mine is the grief, the bitter grief for thee. Oh, Mother, for thy ruin must I weep Much more than for another's.'"

Some of the light which seems to come from the sun in fact comes from an angel, who guards the stair upward, and who will point it out to travellers. His glory makes it impossible for mortals to look at him. The angel removed a third 'P' from Dante's forehead, sweeping his wings over Dante's face to do so, saying "Beati Pacifici who from evil wrath are free."

The stair upwards from the third terrace is wide enough for two to walk abreast.

Seven Deadly Sins---Envy

The envious are purged in hell by having their eyes sewn shut...

(Punishment ref. Dante Alighieri Purgatory)



This terrace is very similar to that below, but lacks the carvings, being very bare and empty, with no apparent penitent.

However, as one walks along the second terrace, one begins to hear the wings of invisible entities sweeping past, and among other things they call the traveller to join them "in their courtesy to join the Table of Love" as they fly invisibly past.

On this terrace the sin of Envy is purged. The penitents here sit, dressed in hair-cloth, along the inner edge of the terrace, so still and so coloured that they are, at first, very hard to notice. Their eyelids have been sewn closed with threads of iron, and they resemble blind beggars who constantly sigh and pray to the saints to be prayed for. They can and will talk to passing travellers, and warns of the dangers of Envy, though some do not like to relive the memories this stirs...

At this point, Dante is assailed by thunderous flying voices that are a warning to him to stay on the correct path, in the same way as a bit keeps a horse on the correct path. It seems that Dante is, at this point, paying to little attention to Heaven, which he can see above him, and too much to Hell and the Earth below.

As one carries on around the terrace, one comes to face the Sun, which seems very bright, too bright to be shaded even with ones hands, and which seems to advance on one.

In fact, and angel is standing in the sunlight at the foot of the way up to the third terrace. He tells travellers to enter the less steep steps which lead up to the next terrace. He erases a second 'P' from Dante's forehead.

'Beati Misericordes' accompany one up these stairs.

On the way up, Dante is lectured by Virgil regarding the way in which, the more people who are accepted into Heaven, the more God likes it, as the larger the numbers there, the more they reinforce one another's praise and worship, to the greater glory of God. "The Eternal Good Is both ineffable and infinite. The more there are who in its rays unite, The more its conflagration heats. The more Of folk in Heaven whose souls have understood Each other, in the light of Love Divine, The more of love doth midst and round them shine, As mirrors, each to each, reflected light Cast to their own advantage."

For half a league or so, Dante has ecstatic visions of forebearance on the stair. "Here a temple showed, with moving groups about its doors, and one who with a mother's gesture called: 'My son, why hast thou disregarded? While that we have sought thee grieving?' ... Then a crowd I saw fired with fierce hate, and voices shouted: 'Slay!' And in their midst a youth was bound, and they hurled stones on him from every side, that he sank deathward, but his eyes were gates of prayer raised to an opening heaven, and from his lips, un-stilled by scourging pains or life's eclipse, petitions for their pardon came, that so stirred pity to see it."

These are sent to him to aid him by opening his heart to the peace of God.

Higher up the stair, smoke begins to drift across the sun, darkening it more and more until sight is completely lost and there is no clear air. One stumbles on blindly.

Seven Deadly Sins---Pride

But eventually one emerges on the first terrace of Purgatory proper. This is a flat are about six metres wide, with sheer rock rising before and falling away behind. The bare, flat rock of the first terrace stretches away to left and right.

The rock face ahead has no visible way up to the next terrace, but is of clear white marble, carved with many wonderful life-like sculptures giving examples of humility - angels, the Ark of the Covenant on a car drawn by oxen with seven choirs the carvings of whom seem almost to sing going before it, and many others. Even the speech of the subjects seems to have been sculpted:

"Upon the fronting rock I gazed. It seemed, our further course to block, it rose uncleft by fissure, gate or stair. But its own marvel filled mine eyes. Its white clear marble was with sculptured wealth so well, so richly furnished, Polycletus' art not only, but the actuality of Nature, might accept the inferior's scorn. I saw an angel who, I might have sworn, spoke Hail! to her to whom he came to tell the gracious verdict that reversed our woe, when the long-wept-for peace, by Heaven's decree, to men was granted; held no more apart by God's refusal of our guilt. For she to whom he bent, who turned the holy key of Love's high gates, this speech imprinted showed: Ecce ancilla Dei! Apt as seal on the soft wax. ... Here the marble live seemed motion, as their car the oxen drew, bearing the sacred ark, which taught the bane of those who more than seemly service do. Before them moved seven choirs. My senses warred: 'They sing.' 'They sing not.' With no more accord sight knew the incense real that scent denied. The humble Psalmist, more and less than king, danced on before, with garments girded high; While Michal, from a palace window nigh, looked sombre scorn upon him. I moved to bring before mine eyes the next bright history that gleamed beyond that leaning queen's contempt. Here rode the prince for whom Saint Gregory by prayer won Heaven: the saint's high victory according to the Emperor's worth. Was he, Trajan, outriding seen. Beneath his rein a woman wept. Around him horsemen rode with stir of trampling hooves beneath. Above, the golden eagles that his standards showed swayed in the wind, so live the scene. It seemed, the woman holding to his bridle said: 'Lord, wilt thou venge me for my dearest dead, My son, for whom I mourn uncomforted?' And he to her: 'My soon return await.' And she, as one by urgent grief possessed: 'But, Lord, if thou return not?' 'Then will he True justice deal who takes my vacant state.' 'But will another's deed be praise for thee, Who hast thyself ignored it?' He thereat: 'Take comfort, for thy prayers prevail. The plea of justice rules, and pity's call must be as potent to delay me.' Visible speech so sculptured we beheld, beyond the reach of earthly art: nor can I clearly tell a thing so different."

Around this terrace slowly move those purging their sins here, each weighed down and bent over by a heavy burden, praying as they go, for themselves and those on Earth who are still in danger of Hell.

On the pavement itself, placed where the penitents here cannot help but see them, bent under their loads as they are, are carvings as wondrous as those on the cliff-face, giving examples of the sin of Pride, which is the sin being purged on this terrace.

"There saw I Lucifer as lightning fall, Heaven's noblest cast from Heaven. The further side showed where Briareus, raised by equal pride, smitten by celestial lightning, sprawled supine, by chill death weighted to the earth he spurned. Thymbraeus I saw. Pallas and Mars I saw yet armed around their father, gazing down upon the giant's dismembered limbs. I saw Nimrod beneath his toil bewildered stand, the nations ranged around on either hand who shared his pride in Shinar. Tears were mine thy seven and seven children, Niobe, slain in their youth around thy feet to see. And here was Saul, face-fallen, pierced and dead by his own conquered weapon: rain nor dew Gilboa from that fated moment knew. And foolish here I saw Arachne too, half-spider now, and mournful to survey the tatters of the work her hurt had wrought. And Rehoboam, his high threats forgot, now terrored in his clanging chariot fled the hard pursuit behind him. Forward lay Vision succeeding vision. Alcmaeon within the lucid pavement made appear his mother's bright adorning bought too dear. Further, Sennacherib on the temple stone stretched lifeless, while his murdering sons withdrew. And next Tomyris, who to Cyrus said: 'With blood that was thy thirst I feed thee full.' And all the pitiless ruin she caused was shown. Headless beyond, the bold Assyrian bull. Great Holofernes, sprawled, whom Judith slew, while on its flying rear his army bled. Troy saw I also there, how piteous low! Blackened and hollowed by its eating fire, and all its pride degraded."

Around the curve of the first terrace from when one ascends to it one eventually nears the way up to the second terrace. An angel is stationed there, white-winged and white-robed, with an unthreatening visage, full of light.

For Dante, he beats his wings across Dante's forehead, erasing one of the 'P's the gatekeeper placed there and making the others fainter. Dante quickly discovers that the fewer and fainter the 'P's on his forehead, the easier his ascent.

Upwards, a neatly-cut but steep and narrow stair is carved into the rock, so narrow that ones elbows easily touch both sides at once as one ascends to the second terrace.

Seven Deadly Sins---Lust

The lustful are purged by burning in an immense wall of flames...

(Reference Dante Alighieri's Purgatory)



One emerges onto the seventh terrace to face a field of tall, clear, flames, held back from a narrow path along the edge of the terrace by a strong wind rising from below.

There is a sound of voices from out of the fire, singing hymns, 'Summae' and 'Deus Clementiae', and those expiating their sins here can be seen moving in the fire, burning as they chant. They also cry of the virtues of husbands and wives, the obligations of marriage, and repeat their hymns again. Those on this terrace are expiating the sin of lust, having their excessive passion burned away in fire.

There are, in fact, two groups of sinners in the fire, one stationary, one moving around the terrace. When the two groups meet, their members kiss shortly and move on without pausing, as they turn away crying "Sodom and Gomorrah!" and "Pasiphae in a cow incarnate lay that she might draw the bull her lust to sate!" The moving group are those who committed unnatural acts of lust (those who cry 'Sodom and Gomorrah!') while the stationary are those who sinned no less, but by simply lusting too much, rather than wrongly.

Around the terrace, one comes upon the angel who guards the way up to the Earthly Paradise, as glorious as all the others. He sings "Beati mundi corde" in a voice with such an intensity of life that no human voice can compete with it. The angel tells travellers that they may not ascend unless they submit themselves to the fire - the way up lies on the inner edge of the terrace, through the flames, towards the chanting which comes from the other side. "O ye spirits purified, you may not enter by this stair except the fire hath licked you. Through its flames ascend, heeding the chant beyond." This angel removed the last 'P' from Dante's forehead.

Dante was very dubious about this, but was assured by Virgil that the fire was of a spiritual nature, and would not harm him physically. And indeed, this is the case. The fire does not burn the body, but it is nonetheless very painful. "After them I went, but when I felt that cleansing heat's intensity, I would have flung myself in boiling glass to quench the burning."

A chant is heard from the other side as one makes one's way through the flames. "Venite, benedicti Patris," it says. It from a blinding white glow which is present at the bottom of the steep ascent to the Earthly Paradise, where one emerges from the flames. It encourages those who emerge to carry on upwards while there is light to do so.

The ascent, though steep, runs straight between the rock faces to either side, and lies so that the light of the setting sun illuminates it along its whole length until the sun is entirely set.

Dante, Virgil and Statius slept on the stairs rather than ascend all the way to the Earthly Paradise after emerging from the flames. While he slept, Dante dreamed. "I dreamed a dame I saw youthful and fair. Amid a field of flowers she pluckt, and wandered singing. This she sang: 'Tell him who asks my name that Leah am I. With my fair hands a garland wreath I weave, my mirror and myself to satisfy. But Rachel at her glass from morn to eve sits ever. Fain her own sweet eyes is she to worship: better with my hands to me it seems to twist my crown; for diversely my pleasure is to do, and hers to see.'"

And carrying on up the stairs, one emerges in the Earthly Paradise...

Existential Friday Part IV

It's Friday and I'm at work.

BBBBLLLLAAAHH!!!!!!!!!

Well, it looks like the weekend is full of Happy Days and Drunk And Horny Nights.

Existential Friday Part III

Dinosauria, We

Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.

Existential Friday Part II

Consider the Lobster

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER
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Existential Friday

"The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately, sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's a philosophy of despair. But I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. But one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance of feeling on top of it. It's like your life is yours to create. I've read the postmodernists with some interest, even admiration. But when I read them, I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It's something very concrete. It's you and me talking. Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are."

What I Am Doing Tonight

Come and Go

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
----T.S. Eliot "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"


"Human beings came and went" an epitaph of thanksgiving to my mentor the late David Foster Wallace


In my late teens and early twenties Infinite Jest was my best friend. I lugged the glossy tome of erudition and narrative bravura with me everywhere I went. I ploughed through the continents of paragraphs, brandishing my pen like a scalpel as I chiseled annotations into each page. I loved how each individual sentence revved up and sputtered before driving the reader deeper into a neon Golgotha of an overtly subsidized, spiritually vacuous future. I loved the acronyms and the irony and the lack of punctuation—how everything fractl'd out of control with the subtle velocity of a mouse click and the startled sunrise of a new web page. I loved how from page one, Wallace allowed the reader to stumble and wade into a sea of characters in the book-- creatures who are seeking and yearning. Creatures who are fucked up yet fighting. The scene where Tiny Ewell is confessing his pubescent chicanery to a comatose Don Gately still to this day reverberates inside my chest with the resonance and flap of angel wings. Or the scene where beloved maladroit Mario asks the Moms how she can tell if someone is sad. Open to around page 200 in nearly any version of Infinite Jest and you will witness a miracle in print, the epistemic of a heart that wildly observes and blinks as well as pulsates with the aesthetic drive of all mankind as it lurks and scopes out a simple halfway house while detailing the errant souls that dwell within.

I annotated and re-read and pondered and dreamed. I talked about Wallace to anyone who would listen. I started carrying around a vial of Visine. I told them that Wallace was to a generation of writers what Cobain had been to a generation of lyricists. I told them that the linguistic mortar binding the jacket of this book together contained the ever-elusive "it" in which we as a collective human species were all somehow seeking. The book was marketed like the purported failed entertainment itself—glossy and gargantuan. Epic and exhausting. The blurbs of Moody and Vollmann and Franzen sprouted off the back cover with the intensity of fireworks blossoming above the tinted window showcasing the pensive author himself, looking as if he had just inhaled something green and potent while mulling over the outcome of a game of frisbee golf. He looked like what I thought a literary savior should look like: a wizened Spartan wordsmith. A feral wildman boasting about the glory of his fresh inky kill. He looked like someone who had been there, a washed up itinerant emotional Ishmael, who had not only survived the to tell the tale but one who wished to convey it in a fashion that had simply never before been conceived. That he wished to push the (porous) borders of the page as far as they would allow. Wish to amp up the volume of the contemporary state of American letters. That he wished simply to stretch out the possibility of the human experience and immortalize it in the tattooed hieroglyphics of language.

But more than anything what inspired me about David Foster Wallace was that he lived forty-five minutes away from the aching bluffs of the river town where I was born. For a formative teenage writer lodged in the genital wart of the Midwest nothing is more needed, more revered, more sacred then finding superman occupying the corner phone booth in the sometimes empty avenues of your artistic ambitions—and when that superhero looks like David Foster Wallace and writes like a wild-haired caged mad man howling at the harvest moon, you know you have found a true mentor of the soul indeed.

The summer of '97 I would drive down the cement arteries of I-74, lost in the emerald husks of corn, thinking to myself aloud that "This is David Foster Wallace, country" as I chained smoked Camel Turkish Golds thinking about Don Gately or Hal Incandenza or Himself pressing microwave integers or thinking about the ravishing, unforgettable Lenore Beadsman from Broom of the System (my favorite DFW protagonist of all time) wondering if I would spot him at the Denny's he was rumored to write at. Apparently he would put his television in his front lawn when he wished to log in some serious writing hours. My friends who had met him said that he always referred to writing as "work." That he smoked like a chimney at a nuclear facility. That he was apish in stature, hairy and uncouth and dipped even when he was in class. That he was brilliant. That he smelled. That he couldn't play tennis anymore because he had a sore knee. That he didn’t know how to shave. That all the girls loved him. That he would often enroll his creative writing students through two weeks of remedial grammar at the onset of every semester because they didn't know how to punctuate worth shit. That he would chew up your individualized slain over manuscripts and spit out the romantic residue of your tears. That he was going through writers block. That he had his own private study in Milner library. That he could sometimes be a real asshole. That he had gotten it on with fellow writer Mary Karr at Syracuse and had her initials tattooed somewhere on the hirsute boundaries of his flesh. That he looked like a hybrid between a court Jester or a samurai warrior in that ubiquitous bandanna he donned with the cagey assurance that he could either easily amuse you to death or simply fuck with everything you have ever believed in.



I never had a class with David Foster Wallace. After I discovered the blinding shield of linguistic light that is Infinite Jest I began to consume every writer and book David Foster Wallace recommended. For me personally, this was where David Foster Wallace, the image of a jaded hip insomnia-addled novelist chain smoking cigarettes at a local coffee bar comes to life--that image made me simply want to read and write books and sent younger writers a message that if you openly indulged in your literary fetishes you might also influence others in the process.

Everything David Foster Wallace recommended I devoured with the appetite of hunger strike riddled martyrs. When I first discovered Wallace I was lost in the mire of serpentine sentences brought on by an unyielding "beat and James Joyce phase" that compels so many young (esp. males) writers to forgo the piecemeal rudiments of punctuation, sandblasting a ditzy clang of syllables into the drywall of the page in hopes that a metaphor encapsulating the human condition might somehow be revealed in a dash of brilliance. While my education at that time was (to plagiarize Wallace again) "A few french fries short of an academic happy meal," I never received anything close to the edification and encouragement and the joy inside the classroom that Wallace offered me via his prose and his enthusiasm for contemporary state of letters. There were the writers on the back of the book cover, Sven Birketts urging us to "THINK" William Gaddis and William Gass and John Barth and (oh yes) Thomas Pynchon. I read William James' "Varieties of a religious Experience," I fell head over knee caps enamored with Wittgenstein's Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus based solely that Wallace's first novel Broom of the System had incubated inside the epistemological rungs of this philosophical ladder.

A sentence referencing eternity in respect to the vicissitudes of time culled from that positivism bulletin provides the title of this particular blog.

But then I also began to read his contemporaries. If Wallace was vaulted into the coveted dome of the literati spotlight, he was sharing his champagne and confetti with writers who struggled and wrote long side him. Younger writers. I read the writers whom he was compared to yet seemed to vehemently despise (McInerney and Leyner). I read the writers he adored. I read Susan Daitch and AM Homes. I read and re-read Galatea 2.2 and fucking wailed til their were tear drops on my testicles ("Richard Powers," Wallace applauded in an interview "Who lives all of 45 minutes away from me and whom I have met all of once.") I fell in madly love with the spritely wit and windex clear prose of Lorrie Moore. I slipped into the frigid late-70's ambiance of Rick Moody's icicle prose parading over the upholstery of Updike. I lauded the beautiful carnivalesque clan and narrative tomfooleries of Don Antrim's "100 brothers." I ordered a copy of 27th City and even submitted my name to Oprah's book club in hopes that I would be a guest panelist during the one week that Jonathan Franzen itchingly anticipated CORRECTIONS was chosen to be in the aborted media spotlight.


After all, I knew all about Franzen. David Foster Wallace had introduced me to his work years before.

I read more William T. Vollmann then could possibly be salubrious for my spiritual longevity. More than once I got laid plagiarizing the quote "Gave my heart an erection," a metaphor he quoted in an interview while talking about Carole Maso's ravishing novel "AVA."

Some of the books Wallace introduced me to have become my best friends. I can't imagine where I would go for emotional solace if I didn't have Delillo's WHITE NOISE or GREAT JONES STREET. During the IJ tour Wallace was quoted to having said something like, "The writer I'm most into right now is George Saunders Civil War Land in Bad Decline."--Saunders becoming a second literary avatar who I was honored to introduce in Chicago during his book tour for Pastoralia.

I read every DFW interview I could land my postmodern inflicted paws on. To this day I feel the Larry McCarffery Interview featured in the 1993 Summer issue of THE REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION has served as my emotional rod and staff--it is the one piece of exposition I have been going to like a confidant for over a decade to confirm my devotion to this craft.

In the interview (published when Jest was still in its second trimester)Wallace said things like "Fiction is what its like to be a fucking human being." He talked about Wittgenstein and about chasing what Yeats called "the click of a well made box " How he talked about the craft and loyalty to composing stories being an act of love. "And I've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you are smart or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn't have enough motivational calories to carry you in the long haul. You've got to discipline yourself that talk out the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you're working on. Maybe that just plain loves."

The interview with Larry McMurphy stewarded to my life what the New Testament proclaims to give to tithing Born again arms flailing Christians. It gave me orientation and encouragement and still to this day part of me feels set on fire every time I read it.


The first creative writing seminar I attended at Bradley University I wore glasses and a bandanna to class. After the class period I chatted with my instructor, the great Thomas Palakeel, about post modernism and Wallace’s place in it. A year later I transferred to Illinois State to save money. Wallace was on sabbatical that semester but I remember jipping class and spending all day burrowed 400 meters from his office writing in the basement of Manchester. I had a crush on the scarlet-haired professor with the tight ass whose office was adjacent to Wallace's academic den. I would hang outside his office, my manuscript folded beneath my arms like an American flag configured after taps, waiting to be discovered. There was nothing remarkable about his office. I remember that he had a New Yorker cartoon posted on his office door (something about rogain, middle age and chest hair). He also had a quote stating how he would be on sabbatical followed by the phrase” FARETHEWELL FELLOW TRAVELER.

When I called his office just to hear the voice of my avatar on his office answering machine, hoping to introduce myself as an eager student and enthusiastic fan of contemporary fiction I was dismayed when the semi- nasal tone of his voice offered out a bitter caveat stating, "This number is for student and academic inquiries only."

I met a cool cafeteria worker at Illinois state who was a late-middle aged writer paying his dues like every other aspiring chronicler I know and who walked out of Wallace's classroom after a heated discussion where Wallace ripped his story apart.

"The one word to describe Dave Wallace is "intense." He said, after telling me about a recent rejection letter he had just received from Esquire.

We had a mutual friend named Nick who worked at Brewster Beans and who looked just like Tiny Ewell from Infinite Jest. Nick had met DFW in hallways of Stevenson one afternoon and knew him solely as a professor. Nick was also an English major and I remember feeling appalled when he confessed to me that he had no clue of DFW’s literary renown. Nick had never heard of Infinite Jest, was oblivious that his friend Dave Wallace was named to the New Yorkers "Top twenty writers for the New Millennium."

Nick was working on an adaption of Hamlet for class.

"He has a really cool set up for writing." Nick said. "When I was inside his house last week he told me that he was working on something very serious and that he trusted me not to look around too much."


Nick told me a story how DFW's home answering machine apaprently kept weekly updates of the Bears 2000-2001 sloven season.

"By the way," It would end, "The Bears are still oh and five."


I edited a copy of Nick's Hamlet manuscript. Later Nick work shopped the manuscript. Next to my scribbled comments were those of DFW's. His handwriting was a lot neater than mine.The closest to Dave Foster Wallace I would get that semester was having my handwriting on his writing desk, wondering if his lips offered a snicker of delight when he saw my request of "Needs to have more Alas Poor Yorricks."

I transferred back to Bradley to wade ad infinitum in a haunting quagmire of debt but still somehow determined as fuck to scribe out my heart on to the unblemished pasture of snow that is the beckoning freshness of a blank page. I fell in love with girl who was the most beautiful (visually stunning) and ebullient gifted writer I have ever met (for all you jest-heads out there, her smile alone would make Joellen PGOAT look like she belonged in a barnyard bargain book bin). When John Updike came to speak at Bradley University that fall, I inquired about the future of fiction. Updike mentioned the name of David Foster Wallace and the whole room visually turned in my direction. I made friends with Kris, a James Joyce scholar whose IQ may be soaring somewhere next to the hubble telescope. Together with the PGOAT we maxed out autumnal afternoons driving around Bloomington, leaving Babbit books with a pagoda of postmodern texts busheled in the basket of our arms. We visited Dalkey Archive press and Fiction Collective 2 in Fairchild Hall requesting back issues of The review of Contemporary Fiction. We tramped through Stevenson Hall in search of simply spotting the author. We made Wallace out to be an elusive sasquatch and even coined the term "Wallace droppings" whenever we came across a twinkie wrapper. We bought more books. We read more interviews. We listened to folk music (Dar Williams, Ani Difranco, Greg Brown) and smoked weed. Thanks to the mind blowing Hyperbolean philosophical orations of Dr. Greene we spent that autumn immersed in the incendiary soul poetry of Husserl, Levinas, Battaile and Blanchot. We loved life. We howled and screamed. We fucked and accused. We continued to pelt out the confusion of love and the love of confusion into the keyboard every night in forlorn hopes that a metaphor might somehow be conceived.

We dreamed.


Still Wallace had been the most influential writer in the last half-decade of my life--his prose and literary recommendations alone served as the impetus to my every creative craving and try as hard as I fucking may, I never saw him once.


I finally met David Foster Wallace at Borders Books store in downtown Chicago on Bloomsday 1999. He had just appeared in the New Yorker top 20 writers for the new millennium issue, standing next to George Saunders, doing what looks like a fist pump of joy.

He was large. With his bulk he looked like an offensive center hunched over on all fours about ready to hike a football shaped exactly, somehow, like the book which I felt was the greatest text in the English language. He wore a pink bandanna, shorts and purple socks. He looked nothing like the saint I had drooled over the past three years. I remember telling my girlfriend that I thought he looked like the energizer bunny clad in that pink bandanna lumbering across aisled of reduced bestsellers brandishing an empty Evian bottle like a scepter, using it solely for a tobacco spittoon, the jester taking court, center stage, waiting to tell us a story.


He looked like a poured hybrid of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately.

He gave a kick ass reading, his voice soft, a late spring breath rustling over the Midwestern prairie reeds. When the plenary Q and A section of the book signing convened and one gentlemen asked him what he was currently reading he answered, "Hannibal" followed by a pause followed by a, "like the rest of the nation" rejoinder. When a middle-aged lady asked him where his inspirations come from, he scratched his head in an apish fashion and confessed that he really didn't know.


After the Q. and A the audience configured into an exclamatory mark of anxious bodies standing in the direction where the author was seated. David Duchovnyof X-files renown cut my girlfriend ( the PGOAT) in line and stepped on my foot in the process in order to be the first to offer Wallace a congratulatory shake. Wallace seemed completely unphased by Duchovy's presence.

I had one copy signed for me and another addressed to Doc. Palakeel, my first creative writing prof at Bradley university. I began to get tense. I tittered. I tried to convey to him the gratitude I felt for everything he had given me. He brushed it off like he could care less about what his work had meant to the general populace at large. When the person behind me in line made a reference to the date of June sixteenth being Bloomsday I almost on cue broke out into a fulsome rendition of Joyce's "Ineluctable modality of the visible," warranting a scowl from my Waterhouse visgaed PGOAT girlfriend which strongly insinuated to quit being so pedantic in public, honey. DFW continued looking down as he autographed his, "with best possible wishes" bromide in the interior of each Hardcover book. When I asked him if I could shake his hand, he said I could but then commented in a very James Joyce May-I-kiss-the-hand-that-wrote-Ulysses-germane-to-Bloomsday-kind-0f-way that if he were me, then I should still wash it, preferably with soap. I kept on wanting to talk to him. I wanted to ask him the perfunctory interrogation of "What advice would he give young writers? Who do we need to sleep with to get published?" As he scribbled the rehearsed sentence into the collar of my book I tried to thank him again for every thing he has given me. Stuttering I mentioned how I had read his five, "Direly underappreciated American novels" appearing in a recent on-line issue of Salon and how I had read each of them and how this constituted my overall affection for himself as the author, that not only did he make me want to give up everything I was doing and write books he simultaneously made me want to give up everything I was doing and read books as well.


When I told him we were from Peoria and attended Bradley University he paused for a moment and said "You guys have a really good basketball team, though, right? That one white guy."

"That one white guy," I thought to myself as I held the porcelain handle of the PGOATs palm in mine and two autographed copies of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men between us like a newborn as we left the bookstore on Michigan Avenue, the late-afternoon tint of over head lego-stacked buildings adorning downtown Chicago like a spiking utilitarian nest of beauty falling all around us in fragments of shadows and in spangles of fresh light.

I don't think the author ever looked up at me once.


You could see it after Infinite Jest. You could see Wallace trying to change. You could see Wallace trying to stretch the perimeters of the page. You could see it in Adult World (II) and other more abstract selections of BIWHM. It was as if he wanted to perform electroshock therapy on his readers psyches. It was if he wanted to push the envelope of language past the shoreline of the page into the ocean of reality , the feeling of wading in a pond of consciousness, a feeling of what it means to be a pulsating, sentient human being alert at all times versus, as he quotes, “a very sophisticated mammal” or as Wallace elegantly espoused in his 2005 Kenyon graduation speech: “It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

This is the world we are all blessed to somehow an astonishing part of.


Wallace demanded that you look at a piece of fiction (or reality for that matter) with this sort of 24-7 metaphysical cognizance---to scrutinize the vessels and shapes of the alphabet in a new way, which in doing so, coerces the individualized reader to look at his world from a wider self-expanded periphery. You could see this in Tense Present Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage. You could see it most vividly in HOST with its cryptic interpolated urine stained continents of prose. It looked like witnessing a crop circle from an overhead bush plane. Linguistic alkaloids and metaphorical algorithms and a lot of avant-gardish where the fuck am I going with this—but mostly, I thought to myself as I leered into the foam of sentences ornamented into the page was that this looked like a lot of cryptic slop and I longed for a novel, an adopted Chinese sibling for Infinite Jest to cuddle up with for an eternity all for my own.

Still, in the last half decade of his life, Wallace wrote some astounding shit.

Less than a month after 9-11 A View from Mrs. Thompsons was published in Rolling Stone. Wallace recounts witnessing the tragedy and shock of that day on a neighbors couch. He was writing about 9-11, but he was writing what was transpiring on that day in my back yard. I felt every resident in central Illinois should buy five copies of the article and memorize it. Again I was seminally pissed that no one I knew in the community seemed to care that DFW was writing about the lens of global loss from the vantage point of our own backyard.

Wallace even published two nature poems in Triquarterly "Peoria," named after the city and the lush prairie environs where I have lived for the bulk of my life.




“ Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and sky line of canted rust and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to a place beyond the windbreak, where unfulfilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat…. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and wholrs of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite, Very old land. Look around you. The horizon, trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”


Reading that poem, thinking about all the late nights I spent driving in the country, smoking cigarettes in David Foster Wallace’s zip code, chasing the peach blink of the sunset as it gradually dissipated in the autumnal vapors of the west, thinking about how I too, wanted just to be like this man who had inspired me, it seemed that Dave Wallace had composed these two poems somehow just for me. But I wanted novels. I wanted another 1000 page emotional lifeboat with labyrinthine plots and random minutia. I wanted another Lenore Beadsman and another Great Ohio Desert and a pub where all the bartenders dressed up like Gilligan and a sumo-shaped proprietor who simply wants to eat everything in sight. I wanted the scenes, banal and beautiful, Don Gately trying to rouse fellow residents at 2 am to prevent their vehicles from being towed or precocious Hal Incandenza trying to feel that he is more than just a corporeal version of the OED with a killer backhand—trying to feel that he is somehow a human being in a world where even the calendar days are corporate cavities of the heart.

I wanted another novel.


Candidly I began to give two shits about Wallace’s essays. I checked amazon dot com and the Howling Fantods religiously with the anticipation of seeing an upcoming Work in Progress. When the 2002 O.Henry awards came out I paid more attention Anthony Doeer's resplendent THE HUNTERS WIFE then I did to Wallace's GOOD OLD NEON, a story it seemed to me that was a run off sentence blistered from a previous bildungsroman. Not to bash G.O.N, a story which has meant much to many readers, it just seemed to me that it was nothing more than an extracted B-side raked from the galleys of Brief Encounter (read B.I. #20 12-96 and re-read it and re-read it and re-read it again).


All I could do was bitch that he didn’t write fiction the way he used to anymore.

By this time I was working at Bradley University library as a third shift access coordinator, still writing my ass off every opportunity I got. I turned in a single spaced very heavily David Foster Wallace induced 700 page novel to my creative writing professor at Bradley for my senior project (my other senior project was about the efficacy or lack thereof of MFA programs entitled, “Jack Kerouac never got an MFA.” ) I would periodically find myself back in Normal visiting my artist friend, going to Folk concerts at Illinois Wesleyan still finding gems inside Babbbits used books bin.

I would even traipse around the cigarette stained contours of Stevenson Hall wishing to talk with my mentor, wanting to share with him my nest of rejection letters or convey to him the jolt of electricity I felt every time I massaged the tips of my fingers on the welcome mat of the keyboard. I wanted to tell Foster Wallace how much inspiration his work and artist's purview continued to add joy to my life.

I again wanted to tell Wallace all this only I couldn’t-- Wallace had abandon his longest teaching gig at ISU, leaving the trigonometric back road plains of central Illinois for Pomona California where rich corporate demagogue awarded him 0ne million dollars to teach two classes a year.




****


In the apocryphal Book of Enoch a story is relayed about the fallen angel Penemue, exiled from the presence of God, jettisoned from eternity in heaven for being the first ever teacher of the craft of writing. Even an amateur etymologist could surmise that from name comes the origin for the writing instrument.

“And pointed out to them every secret of their wisdom. He taught men to understand writing, and the use of ink and paper. Therefore numerous have been those who have gone astray from every period of the world, even to this day. For men were not born for this, thus with pen and with ink to confirm their faith; Since they were not created, except that, like the angels, they might remain righteous and pure. Nor would death, which destroys everything, have effected them; But by this their knowledge they perish, and by this also its power consumes them. "


The pen is not only mightier than the sword, it is also the lance in which the damned author will slit his wrist .....


***



This is how I heard about the suicide of my mentor: I monopolized that entire September weekend blanketed in the late night din and fracas of a local bar, blatantly cursing at flat screen digitalized rectangle to see if my beloved White Sox would inch into the playoffs (note: they did). Sunday afternoon when I awoke I was pensive and inexplicably felt broken glass shards coating the interior of my lower stomach lining. My girlfriend kept inquiring what is wrong and I could not give her a valid answer. Ironically my girlfriend of two months was reading Broom of the System. When I arrived at work there was an e-mail. Fittingly, the news of his suicide came from Dr. Palakeel, my first creative writing prof. The heading to the missive simply read "Sad news." Before the New York Times link Dr. Palakeel wrote the sentence, “ I know he has tried this before.”



*****




For the over last decade I’ve been telling everyone that David Foster Wallace was to a generation of writers what Cobain was to a generation of musicians and now Wallace has joined that cadre of elite souls too brilliant and too misunderstood to cope with the book jacket binding that serevs as their own flesh. Wallace joins the extolled likes of Hemingway and Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath. Dying young cements that there will be a mystique around the narrative of your life—that scholars will probe into every facet of your tortured genius, that teenagers will attire themselves in black while locking themselves in the bedrooms of their parents suburban casa numerating ways that there life is sad and lonely just like that of their mentor. Dying young grants you the cool aura Fitzgerald and Jack London and Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas. Dying young grants you a romantic aura of Byron or Keats or Shelly. Wikipedia writers who have committed suicide. Vachel Lindsey drinking Lysol. Virginia Woolf’s grave being marked in an effervescent tombstone of expired bubbles. Jesrzy Kosinski leaving a suicide note that reads simply:


“I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity".

An essay from Denise Levertov published three decades ago discusses the suicide and death of so many young writers with fervor germane for today's literary community:


“My own sadness at the death of a fellow poet is compounded by the sense of how likely it is that Anne’s Sexton’s tragedy will not be without the influence of tragedy in others lives. She herself was obviously, too intensely troubled to be fully aware of her influence or to take on its responsibility. Therefore it seems to me that we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction. The tendency to confuse the two has claimed too many victims. Anne Sexton herself seems to have suffered deeply from this confusion, and I surmise that her friendship with Sylvia Plath had in it an element of identification which added powerfully to her malaise. Across the country at different colleges I have heard many stories of attempted—and sometimes successful suicides by young students who love the poetry of Plath and who suppose that somehow, in order to become poets themselves, they had to act out in there own lives the vent of hers. Innumerable young poets have drunk themselves into stupidity and cirrhosis because they admired John Berryman or Dylan Thomas and came to think they must think like them to write like them.”

One doesn't much like to ponder the bleak possibility come a decade or two from now of a young writer in his late teens with so much potential hanging himself in the manner of his mentor, a bandanna clad around his limp neck like a fallen halo.

David Wallace becoming the Kurt Cobain for a generation of those who decided to read.

***


Part of me is pissed off and wounded. Part of me wants to buy him a beer and say funny anecdotes so that he can laugh. Part of me wants to give him the finger, tell him he's an overrated fuck up, tell him there are so many young writers, good writers working piss-ant jobs, struggling, impecunious, lonely, fucked-up who harbor knee-deep suicidal proclivities every time they try to explain the jaded nature of their vocation to their parents, to their girlfriends, to their peers-- see the deflated expression etched into the face of a writer who has scribed over a million words in the last decade and still can't find a publisher or make rent but refuses to yield to the chorus of his calling at all costs.

Part of me is learning (on the recommendation of a feathered spiritual friend) to seriously, like Don Gately in IJ get down on my knees and pray for his soul and in hushed reverence thank him for everything he has simply given. That his soul needs help. That it is in a confused state and that it needs fellow wayfarers and dreamers to assist him in his journey between the oscillating spectrum of light casting shadows and prisms between this realm of being and the inscrutable wonder of the world to come.

Part of me doesn't like to think about the method in which he died. Part of me can't imagine killing yourself in such a manner in which your surrogate soul mate or spouse walks in on you hung from the neck, swaying like the stem to some unknown pendulum, an octagon thatch of urine staining the infield of his crotch, his keen eye prodded free from his socket, duck tape manacled around his wrist like an identification bracelet from some Podunk country hospital, the smiley sick clowned faced emblem of Infinite Jest unable to find any more amusement by the simultaneous recurring wonder that is the failed entertainment cartridge of ones own shot at existence.

Part of what gives me the Howling Fantods is that someday, in the not so distant subsidized future that is subsidized academia, some grad student whose published academic drivel on writers include more footnotes than Wallace ever employed will one day quote the death of David Foster Wallace as being the death of postmodernism.


What gives me Howling fantods even more is that he may have had this whole shit planned for some time. When you think of stories such as "The Depressed person," or "Suicide as a sort of present." Or when you look at the time line linearity of Infinite Jest and begin to randomly ponder if Wallace had choreographed this shit: As a fellow Jest head notes:

Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Y.D.A.U., which is probably Gregorian 2009. Critic Stephen Burn, in his book on Infinite Jest, argues that Y.D.A.U. corresponds to 2009: the MIT Language Riots took place in 1997 (n. 24) and those riots occurred 12 years prior to Y.D.A.U. (n. 60). It is also possible that Y.D.A.U. is 2008---

YDAU equals autumn 2008.

That “Himself” was Foster Wallace himself. That he gave his readers an sos cryptogram of help and that, throughout the adulation and the praise and the grants and bandana wielding and the dip, there was a tortured soul veiled only as the letter Q. to the astute reader seemingly blinded by his brilliance--a soul who direly needed someone to see him and to hold him and just to pull a Marley and tell him that every little thing is gonnna be alright.

Later in that afternoon I would call Dr. Palakeel, only to hear his voice on the other end of the phone, saying that he knew it was me on the other end of the line the minute the phone rang.

***


Poets and writers drink more intensely. Smoke more intensely. Worship God more intensely. Poets and writers fuck more intensely. Poets and writers give more willingly-- spilling the alphabetical marrow of their souls out into the albino sonogram of hope that is the page, hoping some stranger whom he or she has never before met turns to his crafted syllables in time of dire need and somehow finds solace, finds laughter finds a friend. The best writers will gladly serve as damaged dantes to the romantic whims of their readers Beatrice-like longings. The best writers will be butchered by academics--the same academicians who use footnotes of another mans failed genius as stilts to publish anything at all. The best writers have their hearts turned into a maxi-pads day in and day out. The best writers will understand poverty. The best writers will be self-published. The best writers will watch as rich spoiled North shore brats who have been wiping their asses with two dollars bills their entire lives publish simply because they were able to spend two years on their fathers' yacht writing full time.

The best writers never make it during their lifetime.

The best writers fail.

Again and again and again.

The writer sees. He feels. He loves. And more than anything, he gives, even with the heartbeat and breath of everything that is lodged inside of him.

***

When Foster Wallace died I thought about a lot of things. I thought about his closing comments in the aforementioned Review of Contemporary Fiction interview, in which, when asked about the future of fiction he replies:

"For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back—I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back—which means we’re going to have to be the parents."

I thought about how so many writers fall pray to this maxim of Shakespeare , "On the ashes of his youth doth lie/ As the death-bed whereon it must expire/ Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by..."

I thought about how the ashes of too many writers fertilize their corpse buried deep in the soil of the page. I thought about good ol' Penume and how the writer is seemingly damned from the outset, perhaps even by a Deity for endeavoring to tell the truth.

Writing is the most lethal vocation I know. No one knows what indeed was concealed behind the bandana Wallace shielded around his skull like a turban or a helmet.

No one truly knows what emotional shit he was goin' through.

I also thought about this quote, by former poet Laureate Donald Hall, written shortly after the death of Dylan Thomas.


“The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate. The human who confronts darkness and defeats it is the most admirable human.”

**


Two weeks after his death I did the only thing I knew I could do-- I phoned up his office in Pomona and left a message for him. I had been trying to contact him for years. I wanted to convey to him everything he had meant to the discourse of my life. I wanted to tell him how he made me want to devote my life to the craft of fiction.

His voice on the answering machine identified himself as "Dave" Wallace followed simply by a high pitched electronic purr. In that moment, as I wallowed in the pause that followed the sound of his deceased monotone. I then told him what I had been waiting to tell him for nearly a decade. I thanked him for everything he had given me.

I quoted his Kenyon commencement address, parts of it verbatim. I told him how he said in his address speech that the "Capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death," and how his life, his prose, his astute observation about the world around him, his incessant curiosity towards the habits and vices of the human race impelled me to want to write books, made me want to read books, and made me want to convey his joy and beauty found in this beautiful pond of reality we all find ourselves skinny dipping through.

Thank you David Foster Wallace.

Bravo!!!!