I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s book of stories, Oblivion. Amazing, wonderful stuff. He's one of my favorite writers, although I didn’t like his non-fiction book about infinity. (I'm referring to the book “Everything and More” about Georg Cantor, not to the novel Infinite Jest, which I really liked.) Thinking back, “Everything and More” could have been saved if only he'd had better editing and more help with the math. Also the fact that I myself wrote a book on infinity means that I might not be the most objective judge of Wallace's success in this niche. I know well that I'm subject to professional envy and resentments.

[Agitated cow resembling Rudy in a bad mood.]

Nobody can match Wallace for use of different language registers: the vernacular, the clinical, the scientific, the business-speak. As a writer, I can usually see how another writer is achieving their effects, but with Wallace, it's like “How did he do that?” It takes close study to figure it out, but it's hard to stop and do that as you're so swept along by the hypnotic jabber. The page-long sentences. The deep insights.

Wallace does seem to have a problem with ending his stories or novels. He builds up to a frenzy about 3/4 of the way through, and then the piece may just fizzle out. Sometimes this works, the fizzle serves as an appropriate artistic effect, a reminder that life is all of the piece and this piece is just an excavated chunk of the human tundra. Like it worked at the end of his transormative novel Infinite Jest, but sometimes, like in his non-fiction book on infinity, a reader thinks, “Instead of getting so worked up in the middle of the story you should have saved some energy for writing an ending.”

Some critics complain that Wallace is too intelligent. Like that's a pervasive problem to worry about. “Hey, I found this glittery rock and, damn, it's not a rhinestone, it's a diamond!”

Under Wallace's influence that I am today, the rest of this entry will be gnomic.

Wallace doesn’t seem to have an official website, but this Wallace site has a lot of good stuff, including a link to a really interesting essay ‘explaining’ the title story, “Oblivion,” which ends in a very odd and unexpected way (Spoiler warning: don't read the essay before the story. Note also that the 'explanation' could be mistaken, maybe the two people talking at the very end are, say, Hope as a teenager and her father, or even Wallace and his wife, it's all very dream-like and bewildering, and this is a time when the weird ending achieves just the right disorienting and troubling effect.)

[View of Montery Peninsula from Wilder Ranch Park north of Santa Cruz. Objective correlative for “Fata Morgana” image of a vanishing island (or wave) that symbolizes the soul merging into the One.]

One story, “Good Old Neon” is narrated by a guy who killed himself, and has some great philosophizing in it.

“the whole my whole life flashed before me phenomenon at the end is more like being a whitecap on the surface of the ocean, meaning that it’s only at the moment you subside and start sliding back in that you’re really even aware there’s an ocean at all” (p. 152)

[View into baseball stadium in SF. Objective correlative to the “infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life.” p. 178.]

Wallace has some intriguing notions about how the dead souls “talk” with each other, the idea being, more or less, that they can communicate a near-endless amount of info at once, like direct telepathic link, or a parallel extremely high-bandwith link (as opposed to the serial bottleneck of spoken or written language) not that he puts it so SFictionally:

“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anywone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze ou through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we were all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open … you can as they say open the door and be in anyone elses’ room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets…” p. 178.

[Seen on a railing behind the baseball stadium in SF. Objective correlative to the experience of death as described by Wallace or to, alternately, a tunnel to La Hampa used to flee the crushing machineries of the Law.]

I'm planning a scene for Mathematicians in Love where Bela's band Washer Drop is playing at this stadium, now named Heritiagist Park after the ruling Heritagist party, and Bela is slated for assassination by the Heritagists, for handing out long-lasting bubbles in which you can see the future, giving away the latest high-tech of the PIG. You can't pop these bubbles at all, they just break into two smaller ones, so the stadim steps after the concert are littered with little bubbles showing the scenes that people wanted predictions of. Bela's gonna hampajump off a skateboard ramp to get away, you understand, and jellyfish God will speak to him, and it'll be like … opening a door.

Ffwwwwwwup! Come back and the hitmen are gone. Back to Wallace's Oblivion, if you only read one story, don't miss the last one, “The Suffering Channel,” about a People-magazine-type reporter working on a story about a hick in Indiana who makes sculptures on the order of “The Winged Victory” out of his own poo — without touching it. The sculpting happens within the guy's bowels. All the interns at the magazine are NYC hipster women from elite East Coast colleges. It's devastating and hilarious.

S. is getting into digital photography, too. She found an interesting PhotoShop trick, Filters:Stylize:Glowing Edges. So I ran my new painting through it.

Actually I remember making an undersea picture like this in art class in Germany in the eighth grade. We painted random colors onto a page, then put black wax over it, and then scraped lines into the black wax to revealing colors. Just a click away now. Even so, there's no substitute for using a physical brush and paint, it's so much more pleasant for the mind and body.

I’ve always thought it would be nice to have glasses that do these kinds of things in real time. I call them “stunglasses” in Freeware. My character Tre invents a stunglasses philtre that turns everything into mosaics of three-dimensional non-repeating tiles inspired by the Penrose tiles called Perplexing Poultry.

Okay, back to revising the novel so I can write the last two chapters. I just got through going over the page proofs of the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, which was pretty intricate, as the book has so many illustrations plus some math in the appendix. On this last pass-through I made the ending more strongly in favor of universal automatism.

So I joined Netflix and so far it seems pretty cool. I never have enjoyed physically visiting the video store, with the monitors playing it’s always hard to remember what I wanted to see. With Netflix you can compose your Want Queue at leisure. And at least on paper, it looks like the one-disk-at-a-time plan isn’t going to cost more than renting, say, three disks a month.

The first movie came yesterday: Fellini’s great early (1953) film I Vitelloni. The word means veal-calf, and was used in F’s time to mean — slacker. Fellini left his home town of Rimini on the right-hand coast of Italy in about 1941 when he was 19, but as a boy he’d been interested in the vitelloni, who were late-twenties or even thirtyish guys who still lived with their families, didn’t have jobs, spent all their time just kickin’ it, like in caffes or pool-halls.

Really worth seeing, even better than I'd hoped.

When the movie came out it was a hit, Fellini’s first (the earlier Variety Lights and The White Shiek didn’t do well). And Fellini came up with a philosophy-of-life he called Vitellonismo. What a great word. Even though he himself had never actually gotten to be a vitelloni, he had the philosophy figured out. To play and screw around and be light-hearted and perhaps to perceive a small truth in your activities. Vealness = Slackerdom. What is Veality?

I was in Rimini in 2001 to get an award honoring my novels, of all things, from the Pio Manzu think-tank. Not the reception I’m accustomed to. That’s Richard Dawkins and John Searle there next to me. High-class. We stayed at the Grand Hotel, which also features in Fellini’s Amarcord. Here’s some journal notes I made about Rimini then.

I walked down to the beach with its colorfully painted concrete cabanas, all closed for the winter. There were a fair number of people strolling it. To the left I found a canal leading into town, lined with fishing-boats at anchor. A good sign, gastronomically. Great to see the classic Italian fisherman doing things along the stone wharf edging the canal. Pescatores. Since we’re in Italy, they’re not even “Italian,” they’re the standard, they’re the fish of the water. Like in China, the word for “Chinese” is “person,” is what I’m getting at.

It was good to finally be out seeing stuff. The Mars Rover’s excitement to finally be shooting pictures, sniffing soil, tasting the air — after all those long hours in the shuttle rocket.

A billboard for what might be a store like a Wal-Mart, it’s name listed in “all” the languages, that is, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish. Ipermarket and Ipermarkt were two of the names. I guess they mean hypermarket. Superman/Hyperman. Superspace/Hyperspace. Supermarket/Hypermarket.

I turn at the bridge and walk into the old-town district of Rimini, a pedestrian zone, it’s a little past noon. I sit down on a bench in Piazza Ferrari, keep hearing someone playing a trumpet, at first I assume it’s, like, a school-boy band member grab-assing on his lunch hour. But then it’s playing “Taps,” and I see that it’s a real ceremony, a line of boy soldiers with semi-automatic rifles, a man with a banner, another man with a wreath saying, like, “For Our Fallen Brother Soldiers,” setting the wreath on a Futurist-style or, like, Fascist-style war memorial dated 1911. It’s great to see a real, local thing happening here, the town like a living cell I’ve insinuated myself into, and here’s a mitochondrion busying itself, the pulse of civic life. Two different ladies come up to me and ask me what’s going on, I’m dressed Italian style in black pants, dress shirt, vest and suit-jacket.

Fellini’s Rimini, I think, and think about him being dead, and how my remembering his Amarcord is a nostalgia for a nostalgia.

And now, resurrecting this old journal entry, we can be nostalgic at third hand. “The tears of things,” as Vergil says.

I finished painting “Jellyfish Lake” today. You can click here to see a bigger version. And you can see a preliminary version in my previous post. The painting is based on a photo of me in Jellyfish Lake in Micronesia.

Now I’ll go back to writing Mathematicians in Love. Not so coincidentally, I’m at the scene where Bela and Alma meet the divine jellyfish and get to make some wishes about which version of Earth they’ll return to. Here’s an excerpt, although it may later be revised.

****

Just then we felt a cold flow of water against our feet, an upwelling as something large moved towards the surface.

“Here she comes,” I said.

Without even slowing down, the big jellyfish moved into our space, engulfing us. And now Alma and I were inside a damp, echoing body cavity. I felt a force touching my mind, and the little space loomed as large as a cathedral. Its floor was as a glassy sea, and in the center stood an alabaster throne ringed by an emerald rainbow. A figure stepped from the throne and walked slowly towards us, a form like a four-armed Shiva with a woman's face. Each of her gestures was ideally formed and filled with meaning, each motion a great novel, a profound theorem, a cosmic work of art.

“Welcome Bela and Alma,” came her voice, sounding within my head. “You are as one flesh, one seeker. I bid you bow before me. I am your God.”

Gladly I knelt. Peace filled my heart. I thought to glance over at Alma; her face was suffused with joy. The jellyfish telepathy was hitting both of us. For an instant I flipped back to a not-so-pleasant vision of us squeezed into a sac in the body of a giant unearthly coelenterate, but then a tingle ran through my brain and I was again seeing the sacred figure, the holy dancer, the end of every quest.

She danced on, her limbs tracing slow, exquisite paths. Alma and I sat cross-legged, holding hands. Veils streamed from the goddess’s arms, the motion-trails weaving into a glowing cable that led away from the throne, across the sea, dwindling into the distance where a tiny planet Earth floated at the long cord’s end. I could see the ice-caps, the continents, the clouds.

“What do you seek, Bela?” asked the goddess. “I see many desires. Utter your heartfelt wish.”

I found myself unable to speak anything but the truth. “I wish I’d made love with Cammy at my mother’s house after the Washer Drop concert in San Jose,” I said. Alma dropped my hand like it had turned into a loathsome crab…