Have to be fair. Nothing he writes could leave me unaffected, so I thought. I did remember some additional things about the story. But I still didn’t like it.
I read the book on a respite from Infinite Jest, about which more will come later. I have reached page 300 of this monstrous tome, a page of note, because I am reading more quickly and understanding what I am reading without having to reread. In the back of my head, a place readers go with books they hard read, I had traveled off the pages too often into my own experiences, real and imagined, not to mention the travail of understanding what I was reading and seeing the vivid images created by the words. Moseying around at the Fletcher Free Library, I saw two copies of Phil’s book, a book I had not bought due to the less than favorable reviews. Hey, out of sorts actor who lost his skills who has an affair with a lesbian after his wife leaves him late life who cannot figure out if he should die in the fire or put it out, and only 140 pages, what could be bad!
But it turned out to be about a suicide. David Foster Wallace committed suicide. I had not escaped. And, in the book, Phil, I always call him Phil when I read his works, writing him letters in a journal and scribbling notes of what I would ask him were I to interview him or have a glasss of wine with him or go for a walk with him in the woods, refers to many major literary masterpieces where suicide is part of the plot. I hadn’t read any of them or if I have, I didn’t read them closely enough, and, if I did, I didn’t understand what I was reading then, have forgotten, or could use whatever message they bring— now—to my mind in its present form.
Further, I don’t know who Prospero was in Shakespearean form and I never read Checkov’s Seagull. All the referenced works feature depressed people who kill themselves, something not on my list of activities for the forseeable future and not something which I have ever considered, even though others around me may have thought it was or should have been an option. It is bad enough that readers more experienced than I have said that a thorough knowledge of Hamlet would aid in understanding Infinite Jest, I don’t want the interruption, especially when my usual dose is one-hour and thirty minutes, regardless of how many pages I have read.
So, I didn’t like the narrative, as if you couldn’t tell, but what brings me to this longer than I wanted to blog post, is that when I read a book, especially one where I welcome the challenge, I don’t like not knowing the meaning of artistic works, scientific words, or historical figures whom the writer has inserted in the work, not necessarily to say they are smarter or better read than you, but to make a point, one that I only understand on some superficial level.
I am not ready to Kindle read, looking up all the things I don’t know, even if I can do it with just a computerized trip to Wikipedia or Google. Not being intelligent enough to fully understand makes me feel smaller than I sometimes feel in the face of the literary giants I allow into my private space. This place of discomforture in which I find myself could be the source of some displeasure.
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None of that is going to happen, therefore the two sides are never going to stop fighting unless and until one of them is forced to do so. Period, end of sentence, end of paragraph, end of story. They have, as we say in the law, “irreconcilable differences.” Unfortunately, they cannot divorce nor divest, which is usually the remedy for same. So this will go on. Forever. It’s not going to stop. Ever. 🙂
If I had not already decided long, long ago that Bill Bonner is just right when he says that people come to believe the things they need to believe when they need to believe them, I would have no logical explanation for how anybody can believe in “the peace process.” Israel is not going to give up Jerusalem, nor allow itself to be un-Jewished at a blow by granting the “Right of Return.” The Palestinians are not going to settle for Jerusalem being held by Israel, nor will the surrounding Arab countries ever grant the sixty-year-plus “refugees” citizenship or take them out of their reverse Potemkin-villages. 🙂
If there is one thing I DON’T want to see, it’s Spencer Pratt’s pasty a** on my TV screen, especially if it’s anywhere near his wife, who appears to be made of Playdough. I threw up in my mouth just typing that. This man is a bottom feeder. Please die, soon. And why the h*ll is he BEIGE?!? I don’t know if he’s a albino who discovered spray tanning or what, but he’s the only person I’ve ever seen who is truly monochromatic. .
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