Streethop Beware: Digressions Ahead
I first heard the name David Foster Wallace in 2004, my freshman year of college. (It may be misleading for me to say that I heard of him in college; college had nothing to do with my learning anything, ever. It’s not as though some saintly undergrad approached me in the dorm room, cigarette-in-ear and beanie-on-head, exhorting me to the Ways of Wallace. No. I was just reading a lot and skipping class and refusing to meet people.) At the time, I was reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and I was reading them as too young a man. It both shames and liberates me to say that they were over my head. I've grown to like Fitzgerald, only because I've gotten old enough to appreciate the rare air he was flying in. (I understand Hemingway now, but I love only one of his books.)
I was embarrassingly, horribly pretentious then, all Shakespeare and Milton and knowing nothing. I thought literature was more about reading a thousand books than about understanding three. I don’t say this as a tribute to the Wonderfully Enlightened Person I Am Now, or as an attack on the Woefully Ignorant Person I Was Then, or as a conclusion that either characterization is accurate, but rather as background noise to my first encounter with the six syllables that changed my literary life and compelled me to throw pretension to the wind and just read: David Foster Wallace.
I don’t really remember what it was that first got me into him. I do remember that I read this blurb, somewhere: “Infinite Jest is a great novel. Scratch that, it’s too damn long.” Being 17 and irreparably naïve—felicitously so, it turned out—I wanted to read it immediately.
Among lesser male writers, there is a heavy undercurrent of masculinity, of bigness over density, of I Wrote The Biggest Book So I Have The Biggest Dick. I think every unserious reader, male and female, has the same problem. He or she wants to read the biggest book just to say that they have, and to keep it on their shelf. That way they can describe it as “good” when they are asked, which they know they will be. (That’s why they keep it out in the open. Real readers keep their books in a fucking closet.) But great artists and writers know that economy is the written word’s most precious gift. The Great Gatsby is, to me, the greatest novel ever written in English, and it is well short of two hundred pages. But my point is this: David Foster Wallace, in his 1000 page epic, was startlingly economical, and that’s what makes it special. Infinite Jest has everything you could ever want in a book.
Infinite Jest is the first book I defaced with highlighter and pen. I had never so viscerally wanted to remember what I was reading. I felt chastened by it, changed, forged in the fire of something great. I wanted to read everything before that; it made me want to understand everything. It made me want to become a writer. And perhaps it made me admit the great Socrates line into my mind’s library: “I neither know nor think that I know.” I realized how stupid I was/am, and that that was okay. It rather changed the way I went about my life.
Before I posted this, I’d been reading for two hours and had gotten through twenty hard-earned pages of Descartes. I could have sprinted through the pages, but I don't think I would have learned anything. I stopped to carefully highlight specific passages and scribble tiny notes on each and every margin. It's rather a wonder to behold, turning back the pages. It may look nice when the book is finished, like the work of someone who did a thesis on it or whatever work there might be in that foreign land of academia I so strangely once invaded. It makes me look all smart like. I'm not smart; I have rapid, ravenous, non-linear thoughts. As a young man, they ate me alive and made me extremely unhappy. I've learned to sort of tune them out. I've learned that it's much healthier for me to ignore the grating details of life and simply walk around. I would, though, like to have this exchange with anyone at all in the far future:
Q: Mike, how'd you get so dang smart?
A: I did the reading.
So the point of this post is that David Foster Wallace taught me how to read at 17. You should read him.
Or maybe just watch this interview:
I first heard the name David Foster Wallace in 2004, my freshman year of college. (It may be misleading for me to say that I heard of him in college; college had nothing to do with my learning anything, ever. It’s not as though some saintly undergrad approached me in the dorm room, cigarette-in-ear and beanie-on-head, exhorting me to the Ways of Wallace. No. I was just reading a lot and skipping class and refusing to meet people.) At the time, I was reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and I was reading them as too young a man. It both shames and liberates me to say that they were over my head. I've grown to like Fitzgerald, only because I've gotten old enough to appreciate the rare air he was flying in. (I understand Hemingway now, but I love only one of his books.)
I was embarrassingly, horribly pretentious then, all Shakespeare and Milton and knowing nothing. I thought literature was more about reading a thousand books than about understanding three. I don’t say this as a tribute to the Wonderfully Enlightened Person I Am Now, or as an attack on the Woefully Ignorant Person I Was Then, or as a conclusion that either characterization is accurate, but rather as background noise to my first encounter with the six syllables that changed my literary life and compelled me to throw pretension to the wind and just read: David Foster Wallace.
I don’t really remember what it was that first got me into him. I do remember that I read this blurb, somewhere: “Infinite Jest is a great novel. Scratch that, it’s too damn long.” Being 17 and irreparably naïve—felicitously so, it turned out—I wanted to read it immediately.
Among lesser male writers, there is a heavy undercurrent of masculinity, of bigness over density, of I Wrote The Biggest Book So I Have The Biggest Dick. I think every unserious reader, male and female, has the same problem. He or she wants to read the biggest book just to say that they have, and to keep it on their shelf. That way they can describe it as “good” when they are asked, which they know they will be. (That’s why they keep it out in the open. Real readers keep their books in a fucking closet.) But great artists and writers know that economy is the written word’s most precious gift. The Great Gatsby is, to me, the greatest novel ever written in English, and it is well short of two hundred pages. But my point is this: David Foster Wallace, in his 1000 page epic, was startlingly economical, and that’s what makes it special. Infinite Jest has everything you could ever want in a book.
Infinite Jest is the first book I defaced with highlighter and pen. I had never so viscerally wanted to remember what I was reading. I felt chastened by it, changed, forged in the fire of something great. I wanted to read everything before that; it made me want to understand everything. It made me want to become a writer. And perhaps it made me admit the great Socrates line into my mind’s library: “I neither know nor think that I know.” I realized how stupid I was/am, and that that was okay. It rather changed the way I went about my life.
Before I posted this, I’d been reading for two hours and had gotten through twenty hard-earned pages of Descartes. I could have sprinted through the pages, but I don't think I would have learned anything. I stopped to carefully highlight specific passages and scribble tiny notes on each and every margin. It's rather a wonder to behold, turning back the pages. It may look nice when the book is finished, like the work of someone who did a thesis on it or whatever work there might be in that foreign land of academia I so strangely once invaded. It makes me look all smart like. I'm not smart; I have rapid, ravenous, non-linear thoughts. As a young man, they ate me alive and made me extremely unhappy. I've learned to sort of tune them out. I've learned that it's much healthier for me to ignore the grating details of life and simply walk around. I would, though, like to have this exchange with anyone at all in the far future:
Q: Mike, how'd you get so dang smart?
A: I did the reading.
So the point of this post is that David Foster Wallace taught me how to read at 17. You should read him.
Or maybe just watch this interview:
