David Foster Wallace: The Pale King

I'd read some of David Foster Wallace's short stories and non-fiction before, enjoying his essays on David Lynch and tennis and especially cruise ships, quoting lines from the latter to anyone stupid enough to go on one, but I'd never tackled his novels. Given my fondness for long books, Infinite Jest has always tempted me, but the comparisons to Pynchon, the deep postmodern multiplicity of it, and all those damned footnotes, had me daunted. Details of The Pale King however had me itching to read it: its exploration of the tedium and emptiness of life in contemporary white-collar employment seemed both enticingly Kafkaesque and incredibly prescient. It's one of those books I enjoyed so much being immersed in that I'm sad I no longer have it to look forward to. Sadder still that we no longer have Wallace around to give us more.

There is no disguising the unfinished status of The Pale King, but editor Michael Pietsch has done a commendable job of fashioning the book into a cohesive and highly readable structure. For the most part it reads like a short story collection linked by the IRS, with the majority of stories taking place around an internal revenue processing facility in Peoria, Illinois in the 1980s. Tangential stories exploring the earlier lives of characters who wind up in this facility are less closely linked, yet the air of bleak cynicism is consistent and ties them to the overall plot regardless of narrative divergence.

In the NY Times Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, discusses two ways of reading The Pale King:

The first is as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale: a grand parable of postindustrial culture or “late capitalism,” and an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual who finds himself caught in this system’s mesh. The setting that Wallace has chosen as his background (and foreground, and pretty much everything in between) could not be more systematic: the innards of the Internal Revenue Service — the sheer, overwhelming heft of its protocols and procedures...

...the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward — properly and rigorously forward — in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents “the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info.” He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also “called to account.” It’s hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer — nor, given Wallace’s untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide.

Sadness, nostalgia, regret, hopelessness all pervade The Pale King, making it a particularly bleak suicide note. Combined with his speech to graduates about the difficulties of daily life and 'making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head', it makes a conclusively depressing suicide note, but one so beautifully drawn as to allow readers to effortlessly succumb to its downbeat charms. Furthermore, as an essay on the hopelessness, meaninglessness and misery of contemporary working life, and the soullessness of consumer society, from its pervasive ugliness, overcrowded roads, bad architecture, meaningless drudgery, unsatisfactory personal relationships, selfishness, unfairness, violence, etc. etc. etc., The Pale King provides an articulate summary of what's wrong with life, and an urgent - but failed - plea to open our eyes, notice this horror we're in, and do something about it.

Terry Castle: Do I Like It?

Fascinating article in the 28 July issue of the London Review of Books (and first of my subscription to arrive) on Oustider Art. Castle's personal and constantly self-critical approach to writing about art is infitnitely more arresting than the dry and detached earnestness of NYRB's art writing. Here's Castle on artist and illustrator Louis Wain:

My interest in such bizarrerie only intensified over the years. Thanks to an artistic mother I’d grown up with a precocious liking for post-impressionism, modern art and especially surrealism: Klee, Calder, Bacon and Salvador Dal í were all icons in this junior-varsity phase. But I remember being mesmerised, too, by a short documentary I saw in high school about art made by schizophrenics. (This would have been in the late 1960s, the heyday of R.D. Laing’s radical anti-psychiatry movement.) Most gripping were the magnificently demented illustrations of Louis Wain (1860-1939), a hugely popular British artist who after a successful international career as an illustrator and cartoonist, spent the last ten years of his life in an asylum near St Albans. Wain specialised in comic illustrations of cats, and scores of his cat postcards, cartoons and children’s books can still be found.

Like Degas or Mary Cassatt, Wain could draw a perfectly normal-looking cat when he wanted to – at least for a while. But over time the anthropomorphised expressions become more and more intense, bug-eyed and oddly sinister (notably when the feline subject is shown smiling). Colours and backgrounds gradually turn more febrile and abstract. Late 19th-century ‘mad-wallpaper’ backgrounds proliferate. And especially when rendering Persians and Angoras and other long-haired breeds, Wain begins to show his cats with fur brushed up, as if full of static electricity. The effect is often so marked that in some images the pointed tufts of fur surrounding the cat’s body make a kind of jagged, phantasmagoric aura that fills up or overwhelms the picture space. In the psychedelic sequence below, one can see this development taking place in an almost stop-action way:

Once the quintessential (if eccentric) insider, Wain seems here to metamorphose into an outsider – which is to say, a lost soul – before our very eyes.

Wain’s valedictory works illustrate a characteristic many contemporary outsider artists share: an aversion to blank space: a horror vacui and a manic compulsion to fill every inch of the available paper or canvas with some kind of colouring or mark. Seeing pictures by Wain no doubt prepared me for this obsessive mark-making: the worked-over supports, the tendency to hypnotic patterning and the distorted and ambiguous figure-ground relationships one finds in an important strand of outsider art. You might call Wain’s ‘mad’ style a version of the outsider mode in its paranoid or maximalist aspect. It’s as if one needs protection and this protection is best achieved by filling in the image to absolute repletion. Obviously the creation of such imagery takes a great deal of time and requires thousands of small repetitive actions with brush or pencil or tool. Yet one can imagine how such a practice might serve a victim of mental agitation as a form of superstitious magic, as self-soothing or self-medication.

Find it in its entirety here.

George Prochnik: In Pursuit of Silence

The introduction to George Prochnik's In Pursuit of Silence sets the author up as a cranky old killjoy, despite his protestations. A self-confessed quiet freak, Prochnik is more obsessive than most in his quest for quiet:

I've snitched on contractors who started work early. I've battled neighbours who hold large parties - and befriended them to get into their parties as a way of trying to befriend the noise itself. I've worn so many earplugs that if they were laid end to end they would probably extend all the way around a New York City block.

Yet the key to this book's success is to be found in the second sentence above - Prochnik is less opposed to noise itself than in praise of silence and the diversity of (moderate) sound, and is both realistic and adaptable, again as the sentence above demonstrates, in how best to make sense amid the noise of contemporary urban life.

Prochnik's journey then is personal, and it's this modest approach, combined with his self-deprecating personality and an awareness of the futility of his mission, that makes his book such an understated joy. We follow his travels among the freaks obsessed with both noise ('boom car' enthusiasts, audio marketing execs and sonic weapon manufacturers) and silence (monks, quakers and agoraphobes) and realise how similar they are - both sensitive to sound in one way or another. Having not read Steve 'Kode 9' Goodman's Sonic Warfare I wonder how much overlap there is in the sections on the military and deterrent use of sound. He notes that the first use of Muzak in the workplace was soon stopped by unions who viewed it, rightly, as an incentive to speed up the pace of workers. Prochnik also notes the effects loud music has on shopping, eating and drinking and how this has had a major impact on the retail and restaurant industries, but his assessment as 'worrisome' the way that 'acoustic stimulation heightens the effect of MDMA' is naive and misguided.

Interesting too is the currently-defunct-but-bound-to-return phenomenon of 'Audiac', audio analgesia. Once used widely and successfully by dentists and in birthing clinics, Audiac therapy involves the use of high level sound by subjects experiencing mild pain. Apparently contemporary firm Sound Pain Relief is looking into reviving this practice, which would seem to work as a sensory distraction much like a sonic form of the vibrating Tens Machines used during labour.

Where I found myself warming most to Prochnik and his mission is where he describes his love of the richness of sound to be found in quiet places. He repeatedly echoes John Cage - and quotes him - in emphasising that true silence doesn't exist, and his time spent in the Japanese gardens in Portland, Oregon made me recall the incredible sonic experiences I'd had in gardens in Japan.

Unlike in Western landscape design where a single structure serves as a focal point, a Japnese garden will present myriad centres of attention: stepping stones, pines, a lantern. All the elements are presented: the movement of branches, the sound of wind in the branches, our own movement.

After visits to an expo on soundproofing, through the bureaucratic malaise of European 'Noise Maps' and on architectural soundwalks with the deaf, Prochnik's final plea is for governments to recognise the value of silence and to lobby for the creation of more silent spaces: parks, pocket parks, and church-like places of 'silence-worship'. This is the most easily achievable outcome one could envision in the war against noise, and certainly the most positive, if somewhat resigned: an understanding of the necessity of noise within contemporary capitalist society and the futility in opposing the true creators of noise: marketing and the military.