I first read Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men about ten years ago and hated it. But I was reintroduced to him, as many were, when I saw a video of his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. It, I believe, captures in example what Every Love Story captures in biography—a man who was brilliant, insightful, humorous, kind, caring, self deprecating, hyper-self-aware and generous.
Much has been written about David Foster Wallace’s significance as an author. He helped usher fiction out of the post-modern and into the post-post-modern, or whatever followed post-modern. This book provides insight into the stories and struggles behind Wallace’s work.
Max makes few judgments and neither sensationalizes Wallace’s life nor evangelizes for the church of Wallace. When it comes to the more tabloid-friendly topics, Max errs on the side of blandness, something Wallace would have appreciated. Wallace himself downplayed his drug and alcohol problems, reckless love life and bouts of severe depression—all the characteristics the media likes in their artists. He wasn’t embarrassed of his shortcomings as much as he was embarrassed by the triteness of them. As he said in his 1997 interview with Charlie Rose,* “It sounds like some kind of Hollywood thing to do. ‘Oh, he’s out of rehab and back in action.’”
Although he was a brilliant man, what I find most likable in Wallace’s character is how generous he was with his students, awarded several times for his dedication and loved for his sometimes childlike enthusiasm.
One day he put the words “pulchritudinous,” “miniscule,” “big,” and “misspelled” on the blackboard. He asked his students what the four words had in common, and, when no one knew, happily pointed out that the appearance of each was the opposite of its meaning: “pulchritudinous” was ugly, “miniscule” was big, “big” was small, and “misspelled” was spelled correctly. The students had rarely seen him so happy.
The biography also chronicles Wallace’s demons. He struggled to stay sober and drug-free, and his dependency on anti-depressants became a kind of clean-living moral dilemma. But beyond his depression, there was a deeper dissatisfaction with his public self image and his need to maintain it. It was an oppressive self-awareness that became pervasive in his writing and even more so in his life. In a letter to a friend, he wondered if he had become a “literary statue…that I want others to mistake for the real me.” He loved being loved by his fans, but he also felt “frozen by his own need to be the person others saw him as.”
Wallace ultimately lost his battle with depression, committing suicide in 2008. He was such a harsh critic and so hyper-self-aware that it’s not hard to imagine him complaining of the predictability of his own end. It is unsatisfying, unspectacular, and Max treats it as such. With a note of bitterness, the biography ends: “This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen.”
Every Love Story is better as a companion to Wallace’s work than a stand-alone biography. If you’re into Wallace (I’m going through a bit of a phase myself), it’s a good read, but probably not so much if you’re looking for pulp. There are plenty of artists who enjoyed their wild celebrity lifestyle. Wallace was not one of them.
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* Below is Wallace’s interview with Charlie Rose from 1997. My favorite part of that interview comes in the second part (at about 7:54) when Rose is asking Wallace about the footnotes in his book, and Wallace responds that he’s going to look pretentious.
ROSE: Stop worrying about how you’re going to look and just be.
WALLACE: I have got news for you…coming on a television show stimulates your “what am I gonna look like gland” like no other experience. You may now be such a veteran that you don’t notice it anymore. You confront your own vanity when you think about going on tv.
When my wife and I were doing our pre-marriage counseling, the priest told us that one of the most important things we could understand in our relationship was how the other person processes information. Introversion is conventionally understood as shyness, extroversion as gregariousness. But the more important aspect, we were told, was how these two different personality types like to think—quietly or out loud, thinking alone or talking through issues. This book takes that understanding quite a few steps further. Introverts not only process information by thinking alone, but they like to work alone, they like to hole up and dig in. They like to listen and think before they speak. And they find social situations draining.
What surprised me most about this book was how strongly I fit the introvert profile. I work in a profession and in a role that requires me to work in teams, conduct meetings and make presentations on a daily basis. But on Cain’s unofficial introversion quiz, I gave the “introvert” answer for 19 out of 20 questions. I prefer to work alone, quietly. I like to have my own time, my own space.
The troubling thing for introverts is that corporate America is increasingly built for extroverts. Offices are giving way to open environments. Time to solve problems in solitude is being edged out by brainstorming meetings. Business schools teach students that it’s better to speak and be wrong than to sit silently in a meeting. This all creates an environment that is difficult for introverts, who make up an estimated 1/3 of the workforce.
Cain makes the point that the success of collaboration via open-source Internet has in one critical way been misunderstood: those collaborators were not brainstorming together. They were working solo, then adding their solutions to the mix. Studies (and painful painful experience) indicate that brainstorming meetings are inefficient, and Cain explains why: ten people brainstorming in a room are rarely ten people exploring ten different solutions. More likely, there’s one person speaking about one solution, while the other nine are waiting their turn to speak.
Cain discusses ways to make the workplace friendlier for introverts—mostly by understanding and appreciating them. She discusses cultural differences in business, how Americans value confidence and bombast while many Asian cultures prefer modesty and deference. She also gets into introversion in interpersonal relationships (spouses, parent-child, etc.). I found these last bits less novel. And at times Cain makes it seem like all introverts are just quiet geniuses being held in check by loudmouth bullies. But overall, the book offers a new perspective on the importance of having a workplace that still provides opportunities for quiet contemplation as well as a culture that recognizes that the best ideas aren’t always said with the loudest voice.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
This is hands-down the nerdiest book I have ever read, but man is it fun.
The year is 2044, and things have not gone so well for most people on earth, including Wade Watts. Wade, an orphan, grows up with his nasty aunt in “the stacks”—a sprawling structure made of trailers stacked on top of each other (the American trailer park meets Kowloon) in Oklahoma. But he spends the majority of his time plugged into the OASIS, an online virtual world accessed with VR goggles. In this world, he is Percival, an avatar named after one of King Arthur’s knights who searched for the Holy Grail. Like his namesake, Wade is on a quest of his own.
When James Halliday—the software tycoon who created the OASIS—dies, he leaves his entire fortune to whomever is first to find an “easter egg” hidden deep in the OASIS. He leaves a few clues to kick the contest off and, with so much at stake, it kicks off more than just a friendly game. Legions of “gunters” (short for “egg hunters”) set off on the quest to find the egg. Some band together. Others go it alone. Corporations even get into the game, with one corporation funding a massive army of searchers.
But what makes this novel so novel is that Halliday was obsessed with 1980s pop culture. So 80s video games, movies, music and commercials all play a critical role in the massive, virtual scavenger hunt. They are often parts of games within the game. What do you remember from the 80s? The show Family Ties? The video game Joust? Lyrics to that Midnight Oil hit? If you grew up in the 80s, there are pop culture references that will make you cheer out loud. Even if you weren’t into Dungeons and Dragons (I wasn’t), you can probably remember Choose Your Own Adventure. Or the movie War Games. Deep Pac-Man strategy? Cline has created a world where giant Japanese robots, light sabers, magic spells, and DeLoreans can co-exist. It is shameless in its nerdiness, and it is awesome.
Would I recommend this book to everyone? If you were born before 1965 or after 1989, maybe not. But if you spent the majority of your childhood with an Atari joystick in your hands, dreaming of Ally Sheedy or anxiously awaiting the day X-wing fighters would be available for purchase, you might just love this book.
UPDATE: My buddy Greg put together a Ready Player One Pinterest board with all of the references from the book he could find.
Ray Kurzweil is an expert in the field of artificial intelligence, an inventor and a futurist (a scientist who makes informed predictions about the future). In this book, he explains his theory of how the human mind works and how that understanding can be used to engineer artificial intelligence. His model, called the Pattern Recognition Theory of the Mind, proposes that the mind is made of hierarchical pattern recognizers that allow us to quickly process the massive amounts of information we encounter at any moment.
The core of this book is interesting, particularly when Kurzweil discusses the various ways computers are designed to mimic (and surpass) human intelligence. But he also makes bold statements that engender skepticism, as when he declares that his theory is the only possible way the mind could operate. Not everyone shares his view; his work has actually received quite a lot of criticism from the scientific community and in the mainstream media. He also wanders off onto various other topics—e.g. a long section on consciousness, a section where he recounts the predictions he made in a previous book and how they fared, and another section where he defends some of his previous work from specific criticism it has received. All of this would be better suited for his blog, and he comes off as full of himself. There are some interesting ideas here, but you have to kind of sift through some other stuff to get to them.
“Did I make me up, or make the face till it stuck?
I do the best imitation of myself.”
-Ben Folds Five
“Best Imitation of Myself”
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I keep a pile of article clippings in my office. Things I find interesting–trivia, stories, lines. I clip them out and stack them on the corner of my desk with other clippings and books until it’s impossible to move. Then I sort through it all, throw most of it out, paste some of it into my journal and keep some in a box. Library science it is not.
Today I found a two-paragraph clipping in which I’d highlighted this sentence: “Relieved of the minefield of self-doubt that constitutes my basic personality, I was a hell of a shot.” There’s no context as to what the article is about other than the reference to shooting. I think I liked the “minefield of self-doubt” bit. But the thing that caught my eye this time was the next paragraph.
It’s possibly the world’s biggest cliché that we’re our own worst enemies. In yoga, they tell you that you need to learn to get out of your own way. Practices like yoga are meant to help you exhume the person you are without all the geologic layers of narrative and crosstalk that are constantly
That’s it. That’s all I had. I googled this passage and found the context for it, but before I get to that, the reason this second paragraph jumped out at me is that I recently read David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon.” The story won an O. Henry award in 2002. It deals with the concept of true self vs narrative/fictional/created/masked self.
In that story, the narrator—an über-intelligent, successful, popular young man—wrestles with the idea that everything he has ever done has been calculated to create a certain perception of himself—a perception that is not the true him. The story begins:
My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired.
Despite his success, enjoyment of that success eludes him because he is hyper-aware that his image, his likability, is based on his past and continued success. It’s a part of him now, so he feels constant pressure to strive for further success out of fear that anything less would destroy this image of himself that he’s created.
And so goes the rest of the story. It is a mobius strip of contradictions and paradoxes, of metacognition gone haywire. The narrator can’t enjoy anything because there is this hyperawareness and the constant noise of doubt. When he feels up a girl in high school, the only emotion is fear that he might not get to do it again. And as he passes through his day, everything he does or says is a chess-like move, over-analyzed and calculated to elicit a response in others to further craft his own image.
Throughout the story, the narrator plays cat and mouse with his psychoanalyst, always aware of where he is leading Dr. Gustafson with his answers. One gets the impression that the narrator is manipulating us as well. Like when you admit to a small lie to hide a larger lie, the narrator removes his mask for us, but it is a magician’s trick—he’s wearing another mask underneath. And in the end, what drives him ultimately to kill himself (not a spoiler as he tells us this in the first few pages) is that he has lost himself in this game. He peels off mask after mask, only to find another mask. And he suspects there may be nothing underneath it all.
“Good Old Neon” is likely heavily drawn from Wallace’s own experience. He was a celebrated, brilliant over-achiever and undoubtedly felt beholden to that reputation. In Maria Bustillos’ article “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” she reports extensive notes and markings in Wallace’s copy of a book called The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller.
So Alice Miller says the gifted child has to perform all the time, perform even to himself, and is thereby sundered from himself profoundly…Miller’s gifted child splits into two: one is the grandiose child, who is a super-achieving, obedient, reliable and “good” child, and the other a depressed child who never was loved never was allowed to be a child, who was forced to perform and excel from such an early age that he has become irrecoverably lost to himself.
…
It is one of the turning points in analysis when the narcissistically disturbed patient comes to the emotional insight that all the love he has captured with so much effort and self-denial was not meant for him as he really was, that the admiration for his beauty and achievements was aimed at this beauty and these achievements, and not at the child himself.
This matches the description of what the narrator in “Good Old Neon” experiences. A fissure between true self and public self, and a recognition (or belief) that the untrue self—the success—is the actual recipient of love from family and friends.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND BRAND OF SELF
On the second page of “Good Old Neon,” the narrator says that he, like myself, worked in advertising, the perfect career for someone obsessed with image creation:
…at only twenty-nine I’d made creative associate, and verily as they say I was a fair-haired boy on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all, whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody because it was such a cliché—‘Tears of a Clown,’ ‘Richard Cory,’ etc.—and the circle of people who seemed important to me seemed much more dry, oblique and contemptuous of clichés than that, and so of course I spent all my time trying to get them to think I was dry and jaded as well…
I’ve worked with a lot of jaded, cynical people in my advertising career. Many of them are very good people. Brilliant, creative, cool, often kind as well. But I can relate to the pressure that exists to carefully create a mask in that environment.
When I was in advertising school, one of our teachers told us that we should create a brand for ourselves. Like shoes or cars or other products we would be selling, we should be known for something, known to stand for something. She’d always worn big jangly earrings and pant suits, she told us. We all raised our eyebrows at each other in a way that asked, “Is she fucking serious?”
Nobody has since so enthusiastically recommended jangly earrings, but in my business I often hear about the importance of creating a personal brand. Of having an online presence, tweeting, blogging, etc. In fact, Miami Ad School, where I have taught classes for eight years, has a class titled The Brand Called You, the description of which includes this phrase: “It’s what you are and what you want to be.” We may not be there yet, but our image can be. Our image precedes us. It isn’t earned by our actions or our thoughts, it is crafted in the same way we’d craft a tagline or a television commercial.
Enter the greatest tool in history for self promotion: social media. Never before have we had so much control over our own image. Social media allows us to create an online persona that may or may not reflect who we really are or what our life is really like. Rather, we can create the image of the person we want to be perceived as being. What is a status update if not a two sentence publicity statement? We become characters of our own creation.
A year ago, Facebook reconfigured users’ homepages to a timeline format, and at the bottom of each person’s timeline is his or her birth. The significance of this was not simply a new layout. The not-so-subtle implication is that this is the person’s life before us, metered out from start to present. It was a shift from news flashes to story. We were no longer just an update here, an update there. Timeline collected these all together into one biography. An autobiography. But the question is, are we Frederick Douglas or are we James Frey? Is our autobiography non-fiction or tall tale? We’d probably be found out if we claim to have won yet another Nobel Prize, but nobody’s going to fact check if we did indeed have farmer’s market preserves on our organic whole wheat bagel for breakfast like we claimed on our Facebook page. And that minutiae, not the Nobel Prize, is what makes up most of our modern lives.
When David Foster Wallace wrote “Good Old Neon,” social media wasn’t nearly what it is today, yet his paranoia was prescient if one values truth. Writers, in particular storytellers of the non-fiction type (journalists, Frederick Douglas, etc.) are the lens through which everyone else sees much of the world. I am reminded of Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo is describing for Kubla Khan cities in the far reaches of his kingdom that the aging Khan will not have the time to visit himself. The descriptions are complete fantasy, but it is really all the Khan has to go on and so, to him, it’s just as true as any other truth. What is the difference between these cities: one which has been described to you but you will never visit and one which has been imagined and described to you?
Although we have greater means to find the truth, we still rely on others to paint our world for us. As an example, I could not confirm for you with 100% certainty that Libya actually exists as a country, much less what is happening there. I’ve never been to Libya. I therefore rely on strangers to tell me what’s going on there. In the way that the great explorers returned with new maps that literally changed the world—at least what people understood to be the world—journalists, for example, create a reality for us. They create our world.
For some, such as E.B. White, there comes a certain responsibility with being a writer:
I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.
With social media, everyone is creating a map of themself, their own egocentric world. But those posting status updates on Facebook feel little obligation to journalistic standards. Most probably don’t even consider themselves “writers.” E.B. White’s call for greater truth in writing doesn’t apply to status updates.
It’s not that people are outright lying in their ongoing social media biographies. It’s that the choice of what to share and what to leave out requires some degree of consideration, careful or otherwise. It is image creation. A form of mask-making. It is impossible to engage in social media without a constant, looming awareness that people will read what you write and will, to some degree, judge you based on it. Social media even looms over the way we act and the decisions we make in our everyday lives. Who hasn’t been in the middle of an experience, no matter how big or small, only to be distracted by the thought that it will make for a great Facebook post? The story we will tell about the experience impacts the experience itself.
What Wallace does in “Good Old Neon” is to turn that kind of social media self-awareness into a regular everyday self-awareness. And he takes it to such an extreme that the narrator has lost his real self under layers of constructed image. In a blog post on the story, Joe Winkler describes it well as an “endless loop of mind obsessed with itself.”
STEVE BLASS DISEASE AND TRANSCRANIAL DIRECT CURRENT STIMULATION
There’s a condition that sometimes affects high-level athletes. Steve Blass, who has the dubious and perhaps unfair distinction of having the “disease” named after him, is a former Major League Baseball pitcher. He was a World Series Champion and led the National League in shutouts in 1971. He was an All-Star in 1972. But what many people remember Blass for is, after all this success, an acute, seemingly inexplicable inability to perform. With a suddenness that suggested some kind of medical impairment, his pitching became wildly inaccurate and erratic.
Steve Blass Disease isn’t a physical medical condition. It’s mental. He psyched himself out. It’s a condition that has befallen many high-level athletes. The common explanation is that an athlete makes a mistake, then tries to overcompensate, focusing on their form, their technique, really thinking about what they’re doing rather than just doing it. All this extra thought, all this additional analysis, the chattering classes of the mind, only serves to exacerbate the situation. In trying to concentrate harder, the brain actually distracts itself. Anyone who has ever been able to consistently perform a physical act—shoot a free throw or hit a mid-range putt—and then lost that ability under pressure has probably experienced the downward spiral these compounding failures can cause.
In a way, that’s what happens with the character in “Good Old Neon.” He is so distracted by self-doubt, so obsessed with analyzing and criticizing his every action, that he can’t just live.
The “minefield of self-doubt” quote I referenced at the beginning of this is from an article I snipped out of The Week magazine. The article is “Better Living Through Electrochemistry” by Sally Adee. She describes an experiment in which she shot target practice with an M4 assault rifle. Then she performed the exercise again, this time with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which electrodes are placed on the head and a small amount of electricity flows through the brain during the exercise. Her marksmanship improved remarkably.
Firing a gun at a target is similar to shooting a free throw, sinking a medium-range putt or throwing a strike. A good portion of it is about focus. About shutting down the chattering voices in the brain, the over-think, the self-doubt, the analysis, and just doing what your body has been trained to do. Apparently, the electric current of tDCS silences these voices (It would be interesting to know if tDCS could have improved Steve Blass’s condition).
David Foster Wallace suffered from severe depression. After experiencing side effects from his anti-depressants, he underwent various forms of therapy, including electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Also known as electroshock therapy, it induces seizures through electric shock. The exact mechanism of ECT is unknown, with some doctors believing it increases neural activity by “jumpstarting the brain” and others believing it actually damages the brain with a beneficial side effect. A wildly uninformed hypothesis: looking at the instantaneous benefits of tDCS on shutting down the over-analytical part of the brain, I wonder if ECT has a similar, more long-term effect on the self-doubting voices in the brains of people like Wallace and the narrator of “Good Old Neon.” Does the electricity quiet the chattering classes of the brain and allow the patient to focus on “just living?”
SO WHAT IF IT’S FAKE?
Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m at the lunch counter about to order a sandwich. I consider the deep-fried roast beef, but then think that when I later post what I ate for lunch on Facebook (and judging by the number of posts about what was eaten for lunch, it must be important), I don’t want people to think I’m a deep-fried roast beef kind of guy. So instead I order the vegetarian sandwich. In this way, my idealized Facebook version of myself has actually influenced me to make a better decision. How I’d like to be perceived (i.e. better than I actually am) has actually made me better.
One might argue that this hypothetical situation illustrates a little-talked about benefit of social media. I’ve changed my behavior to live up to the better image of myself I’d like to portray on social media. But this creates exactly the kind of feedback loop addressed in “Good Old Neon.” I’m constantly wondering if my decisions will live up to the demands of the image I want to convey. It creates self-doubt and, one could argue, a splitting of the person. There is the idealized vegetarian-eating person and the true person underneath, the person who wants deep-fried roast beef. Which sandwich I actually decide is in a way inconsequential. Either way, there will always be the twin self in conflict. A real self and a false self.
Is there a danger of replacing true self with fabricated self? Whether the fabricated self comes as a result of chasing prestige, an obsession with social image via social media or, as in “Good Old Neon,” constantly playing a role because that is what one believes is expected of him, when a mask is worn for so long that it becomes the face, the face is lost. Or, perhaps, this is just a very convoluted way of expressing what happens to people everyday: they change. They decide there’s a better version of themself, and they change their behavior to become that person. And who’s to say what is the mask and what is the truth? Who can even tell? And does it matter?
Mark Landis is a painter, one of the most prolific painters of forgeries in America. He has donated over 100 phony works to museums. Last year, the University of Cincinnati put 90 of Landis’s works on display, purportedly to educate the public about forgeries. But most people who walk in off the street can’t tell the difference. They might as well believe they’re walking into the most amazing gallery on earth. Only the experts can spot the truth.
The writer Jonathan Franzen, who was a good friend of David Foster Wallace, seemed able to be able to tell the difference. In his essay “Farther Away,” he discusses, among other things, social media’s relation to fame and the difference between the private friend he knew David Foster Wallace to be and Wallace’s public persona. Although “Good Old Neon” was ostensibly about a character that was not Wallace, the obsession with image was something Wallace shared. Or, as Franzen describes, the bad David Foster Wallace—that is, the one off his meds—relied on others for his sense of self-worth. To Franzen’s dismay and anger, Wallace was even hyper-selfaware in his own suicide. In a move that the good David would loathe, “he chose the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.”
So how does someone know what part of your life is real and what is a forgery? Your true friends know. They’re the experts who can tell the real from the fake. That’s what Franzen was to Wallace. He could see the façade, because he knew the real DFW and could tell when he was just playing a part. But what about the people who wander in off the street and take the forgery for the truth? And back to the question of façade vs. change: when does the mask become the face? How many of us have done something or made a decision to do something specifically because we thought it would make a good Facebook post? I know I have. And if we get to that point, the image is no longer reflecting the action. The image is controlling the action.
This may be what Wallace was getting at in “Good Old Neon.” His narrator sees the façade. And he cares. It vexes him that he’s not projecting his true self, that he’s a fake, that he’s chasing a simulacrum. But he can’t do anything about it. It’s an “endless loop of mind obsessed with itself,” and it causes the same distancing from true self that social media creates, without the social media part of it.
For Wallace, fame was the stand-in for social media, while for most of us social media is the stand-in for fame. We become obsessed with image creation because we can. The temptation to craft our own narrative, to focus the lens on what we believe will be our more admirable attributes, our most clever thoughts, whether we realize we’re doing it or not, is almost irresistible, particularly for younger people who are still finding/creating an identity. We then have a built-in pressure to live up to this image, to keep presenting ourselves as we have presented ourselves in our carefully crafted narrative.
I recently came across a 2006 article by Paul Graham that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot since I read it, particularly because advertising, as an industry, is obsessed with itself. Fame. Ego. What Graham calls prestige. Prestige, he says, is the “opinion of the rest of the world.” In a way, Facebook’s LIKE button is a prestige button. It’s social validation. Graham warns about falling into the prestige trap where, rather than doing what brings us happiness, we chase what everyone else has told us is important.
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but on what you’d like to like…Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forwards, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on.
Prestige is just one pressure that compels us to carefully craft an image for ourselves, but it seems a particularly perilous one as it builds a worth based on the validation of others. And social media is the perfect apparatus to feed and then measure this validation obsession. How many friends do you have? How many followers? Likes? Retweets?
Graham’s advice: “What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinions of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.” Easier said than done (as I post what would have, a decade ago, been nothing more than a private journal entry to my blog for the world to see and judge. If you like it, please follow my blog, share, retweet, etc. It will mean a lot to me).
This is a pretty slim book, but it’s full of great advice on thriving in today’s creative economy.
On inspiration:
You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life…You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.
On being in uncharted waters:
There’s this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It’s called “imposter syndrome.”…It means that you feel like a phony, like you’re just winging it, that you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing. Guess what: None of us do. Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth: They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.
On changing yourself:
Pretend to be something you’re not until you are—fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to.
On imitation:
In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying. We’re talking about practice here, not plagiarism—plagiarism is trying to pass someone else’s work off as your own. Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works…As Salvador Dalí said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
On computers:
Step away from the screen…While I love my computer, I think computers have robbed us of the feeling that we’re actually making things…If you have the space, set up two workstations, one analog and one digital.
On focus:
Don’t throw any of yourself away. If you have two or three real passions, don’t feel like you have to pick and choose between them. Don’t discard. Keep all your passions in your life.
On the company you keep:
Stand next to the talent. You’re only going to be as good as the people you surround yourself with. In the digital space, that means following the best people online—the people who are way smarter and better than you, the people who are doing really interesting work. If you find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.
Those are just a few of the things I highlighted. There’s lots of other good stuff in this book.
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
About 10 years ago, I read DFW’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I hated it. I think it might have been over my head at the time. Whatever the unfortunate reason, I didn’t come back to Wallace until recently, via a Jonathan Franzen essay which led me to Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon” and eventually here. Now I’m going in. I have the considerable weight of Infinite Jest pressing down on my bookshelf next to the recent biography (D.T. Max) and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again just arrived in the mail. That, more or less, summarizes how much I liked this collection.
If you were to divide David Foster Wallace into three people—the writer, the thinker and the character—I would find each one fascinating in their own way. Together in one person, well, to avoid sounding like some gushing fanboy, I’ll just say that I know of no one else like him, and although I’m disappointed it’s taken me this long to get into his work, I’m happy that I still have plenty of it ahead of me.
As a philosopher, mathematician, logician and journalist all wrapped into one, with his hyper-intellectual mind and pervasive self-awareness/doubt, there are probably few places where Wallace wouldn’t be an outsider. In these essays, that works in his favor. He is at his funniest when he is far, far out of his element. The best two examples of this are the absurd “Big Red Son,” in which Wallace attends the Annual AVN Awards show—the Academy Awards of the porn industry. It is a celebration of the best (extremely subjective, I would suppose) of the nadir of entertainment culture. It is classic fish-out-of-water. The other similar, though less absurd, essay is “Consider the Lobster,” in which Wallace attends the Maine Lobster Festival. That essay, in signature DFW style, follows the thread of a tangential thought, and before we know it we’re down a rabbit hole—this one about the nature of pain, specifically as experienced by animals.
Part of what makes these essays awesome is that, in the case of the lobster story, for example, Wallace was sent to the festival by Gourmet Magazine. Imagine the editor at Gourmet Magazine receiving the draft of the article on the Maine Lobster Festival and it’s mostly about how a lobster senses pain. “Big Red Son” was for Premiere magazine. I used to subscribe to Premiere (they stopped publishing it in 2007). It was a film magazine that was a couple notches more serious and in-depth than Entertainment Weekly. Wallace’s full essay for the magazine is 47 pages long. (It was published, in very truncated form, under the pseudonyms Willem R. deGroot and Matt Rundlet.)
Wallace is famous for his tangents, sometimes handled as footnotes, sometimes in more inventive ways (his profile of a conservative talk show host employs the use of nested boxes and arrows to organize his asides in a kind of Internet-as-print form), but I would say that, based on these essays, what makes his approach unique is that he uses his tangents to eventually achieve a meta viewpoint of his subject. In what was surprisingly the best piece in the collection, “Up, Simba,” Wallace turns a piece on John McCain’s 2000 presidential primary campaign into a look at campaign reporting. This is far more interesting (and more timeless) than a simple profile of McCain.
And despite the fact that Wallace is most likely always the smartest person in the room, he is self-effacing and likable. He is rarely much of a presence in his essays, although we’re obviously seeing everything filtered through his magnificent brain. But most importantly for these essays, he does not mock his subjects. As outlandish or wrong as they may be, or as much as every cell of his being might disagree with them, he treats them with respect.
There are a few essays that are more academic, more Wallace in his element. They are also very good (I immediately ordered Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground after reading his essay on it and had an urge to order all of Dostoyevsky’s books), but a little less enjoyable. Still, this book is a great Wallace primer. I couldn’t be more excited to dive into his other works.
