Out of Reach: Notes from the David Foster Wallace Symposium by A-J Aronstein:

Thinking back to two days of talking about suicide, love, literary commitment, illness, perfection, and grief, it seems silly to sneer at the earnestness of readers who understand Wallace’s work much more deeply than I could ever hope to. I can’t report feeling any closer to a resolution about how writers should carry forward Wallace’s considerations of the constitutive struggles of ordinary life.

The symposium did repeatedly drive home the obvious fact that I don’t miss him as badly (and can’t miss him as badly) as the people who knew him personally. Not just as a spectral, textual, complex set of sometimes life-changing ideas about the world, but rather as a fleshy, six-foot-plus, pain in the ass, bandana-ed human dude who once asked Rolling Stone to provide a special caregiver for his dogs with “emotional issues” before covering the McCain campaign in 2000, and who left behind friends and family and a heap of paper that now sits in catalogued boxes for the rest us all to decipher, dissect, and translate.

More importantly, it revealed something of the motivating force behind our collective desire to discover for ourselves the ordinary humanness of writers we admire, and the ways we go about trying to do it by opening those boxes full of paper.

1. Last week, I decided to fundamentally change my reading habits. For the majority of my reading life I’ve stuck to one work at a time, most often a novel, less often a short story collection, and even less often a piece of nonfiction. And while I can’t necessarily imply causality, I notoriously abandon books before finishing them, even books that I enjoy. But earlier this year I read a blog post (for the life of me I haven’t been able to find the specific one or I’d link it) exploring the advantages of working through multiple books and, perhaps more importantly, multiple types of books at the same time. And that’s exactly what I intend to do. I’ll likely restrict myself to one novel, one story collection and one nonfiction book at a time, only taking on a new book after finishing another. Personally, I’m expecting and hoping to see three distinct improvements in myself as a reader:

• I expect to finish more (and abandon less) books.
• I expect to take and retain more from my reading.
• And I expect to take a lot more pleasure in reading.

I’ve started with Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, The Collected Stories by Amy Hempel and The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer by David Goldblatt and having made progress in all of them, I’ve already found myself more focused and interested. I’ll start to work on more Steinbeck shortly.

2. Last week, I played tennis for the first time this year. My grandfather has played tennis all his life and in his time he was one of the better players in the area. Despite his best efforts, he was never able to inspire me to play as a kid, but in true better-late-than-never style I began playing regularly last year and quickly fell in love with the sport. Waiting out winter was more excruciating than I expected and we finally have weather conducive to playing. I was surprised to find that while I definitely have to shake off some rust, my serve is actually better than how I left it in autumn. I just hope I find enough time to play at least half as much as I did last year.

3. Last week, I made the mistake of walking into a Teavana. In the span of five minutes, Ashley and I were forced to waft three teas, talked into a $7 tin tea container that we will use twice a year, and swindled into spending $23 for 5.5 oz. of a single tea that has turned out to taste like cough syrup. She initially tried to sell us an amount that would have cost $80. I still haven’t been able to replay the events in my mind well enough to figure out just what the hell happened, but it was, hands down, the worst retail experience of my life.

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Album of the week:

1. Last week, I discovered not only why John Steinbeck has earned the esteemed reputation he has, but also why he deserves it. My previous encounters with Steinbeck were probably fairly typical — I read Of Mice and Men in high school and liked it well enough, was assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath but did not (I was probably too busy reading Bret Easton Ellis or something) — and until now I had never had any urge to visit his other work. And then, seemingly out of nowhere I had Steinbeck on my mind. In reading Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy over the past few weeks, I learned that the name for Oldham’s first musical venture, Palace Brothers, was originally titled Palace Flophouse after the locale in Cannery Row. Around the same time I had found a great deal of truth in one of my favorite quotes of all time, from Steinbeck:

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

And I also found myself presented with an opportunity to read Steinbeck. So I took it.

I read Cannery Row over the course of two days, positively delighting in Steinbeck’s prose. Why had I expected it to be dry and dull? How in the world was it so electrifying and full of life? I’ve read truly fantastic, unfuckwithable pieces of fiction with prose to match — Lolita, Gatsby, Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest. But the difference between Steinbeck and Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Wallace (less so Pynchon), is that with Steinbeck I get the impression that it is completely effortless, if only for the fact that it’s so damn consistent. Few pieces of prose compare to the first four or five chapters of Lolita, but Steinbeck maintains an incredibly high bar of quality writing throughout all of Cannery Row.

And it’s not just his fiction. I’m currently reading Steinbeck’s travelogue Travels with Charley: In Search of America, which was written near the end of his life and the prose is to die for. It is vivid and evocative, sincere and genuine, and immeasurably funny. I’m not a writer, but if I were I would strive to write like Steinbeck. I admire very, very much the work of the other authors I’ve mentioned, but I’ve never felt like that with their work.

But beyond the sheer quality of his style, his writing manages also to be perceptive and sad and touching and universal and hopeful and a true joy to read. 

Over the course of the rest of this spring and summer, I hope to read most of Steinbeck’s major work. It’s been a while since I last felt such a connection to an author and such a desire to consume their output, so it’s very exciting. But that’s not all I intend to read this summer and I plan on posting my full summer to-read list soon.

2. Last week, I started cooking. Sort of. I cooked or helped my incredibly talented-in-the-kitchen girlfriend cook three dishes — a refreshing and tasty tortellini soup with zucchini and tomatoes, a very spicy and very cheesy macaroni and cheese, and a traditional Italian sauce and meatballs over angel hair with Italian greens. I suppose I hadn’t previously understood why people who love to cook love to cook. But it really is an amazing thing to be able to take a bunch of separate ingredients and prepare a real meal. It’s another thing I look forward to exploring further over the course of the immediate future.

3. Last week, I learned that being in a long-term, committed relationship means that for every episode of Mad Men you watch together, there are three episodes of The Real Housewives of New Jersey you have to watch together. I’m still trying to work out a formula that tells me whether a life with someone you love outweighs the amount of brain cells the programs on Bravo are responsible for killing every episode. I’ll try to report back.

4. Last week, I heard Alabama Shakes, a blues/garage rock band from Georgia for the first time and immediately made plans to see them this summer. I highly recommend their debut LP, Boys & Girls.

It’s Different for ‘Girls’ by Emily Nussbaum:

When a TV critic reports on a new show, it’s okay to say the series is promising, even the next big thing, but ideally, one shouldn’t go native. One should probably also talk in the third person. In this case, however, I’ll have to make an exception. Because from the moment I saw the pilot of Girls (which airs on April 15), I was a goner, a convert. In an office at HBO, my heart sped up. I laughed out loud; I “got” the characters—four friends, adrift in a modern New York of unpaid internships and bad sex on dirty sofas. But the show also spoke to me in another way. As a person who has followed, for more than twenty years, recurrent, maddening ­debates about the lives of young women, the series felt to me like a gift. Girls was a bold defense (and a searing critique) of the so-called Millennial Generation by a person still in her twenties. It was a sex comedy from the female POV, taking on subjects like STDs and abortion with a radical savoir-faire as well as a visual grubbiness that was a statement in itself. It embraced digital culture, and daily confession, as a default setting. Even before the Republican candidates adopted The Handmaid’s Tale as a platform, [Lena] Dunham’s sly, brazen, graphic comedy, with its stress on female friendships, its pleasure in the sick punch line, its compassion for the necessity of making mistakes, felt like a retort to a culture that pathologizes feminine adventure. As my younger colleague Willa Paskin put it, the show felt, to her peers, FUBU: “for us by us.”

[…]

But really, the show Girls most closely resembles doesn’t involve a girl at all. It’s FX’s Louie, the acclaimed DIY cable comedy now filming its third season, created by the middle-aged comedian Louis CK. The top stand-up in the country, Louie CK has become a bit of a secular saint to his followers, a model of the auteurist show­runner—the man who didn’t compromise his vision. Like Dunham, he writes, edits, directs, and stars as a character based on him. Of course, Louie is a recently divorced middle-aged comic with two kids; Hannah is a twentysomething memoirist hooking up in Brooklyn. Yet the two share many qualities: They’re Mr. ­Magoos of the dating world, stumbling into mortification, then exploiting it as material. Each exposes an imperfect body for slapstick and self-assertion. These characters are sensitive solipsists, artists struggling through a period of confused limbo, prone to fits of self-pity—although the fictional personae are far less driven, hardworking, and ambitious than their creators.

Dunham is interested enough in the parallels that she dressed as Louis CK for Halloween, in a bald cap and facial hair. She posted a picture to Louis himself on Twitter, apologizing for the poor resemblance. But that experiment clearly left her with mixed feelings. She tweeted, “Me dressing like a man for Halloween does not have a Melanie Laurent in Beginners-ish quality. No Jules & Jim vibe. I look like Pat. Ugh.” Then the next day: “Chances are if you dressed as a sexy cat this Halloween it feels different to live in our minds.”

Pass the Books. Hold the Oil. by Thomas Friedman:

Add it all up and the numbers say that if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century, don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students. “Today’s learning outcomes at school,” says [Andreas] Schleicher, “are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.”

Commenter Rajiv matter-of-factly points out some of what we need to do here in the United States to that end:

It is high time that states invest in education and make it a core competitive value. Let’s make the decision to pay a little more in taxes so that we can make our states more competitive than others. Increase days in school, pay teachers more, make teacher pay performance oriented, and end tenure. More than anything else, invest for success.