I respect that.
And. I was engaged, moved, saddened, heartened as I sat there in a packed theater watching the film. What a man, what a mind, what tender nuance was he. That bandana and those dogs. His wanting to be accurate, not shaped, not distorted by his bitter Rolling Stone interviewer, David Lipsky. His desire to live free of the self-doubt that accompanies both fame and obscurity.
This morning, in the wake of that cinematic experience, I read as much as I could about Wallace's widow, Karen Green—her art, her writing, her memoir. Having watched the film I felt it necessary to balance me out with her words.
Inside a Guardian interview, I was returned to Wallace himself, to words written to Jonathan Franzen in a 2005 email. Here Wallace is talking about the difficulty of writing past the known beats and grammar. Of continuously going out to a new edge so that one does not repeat oneself. His words brought to mind all the writers I've read who burst onto the scene with something new, refine that new over the next few books (if they are that lucky, few are), and then begin to tread the same water, return to the same tricks, become a parody of themselves, become (I have used this word a lot this summer, for I've reflected, perhaps too much, on all I've seen) a brand.
That's it, right? How do writers not become a parody of themselves? How do they avoid getting locked into their own deliberate constructions?
Wallace, who had so much to teach us, was thinking about that here:
"Karen is killing herself rehabbing the house. I sit in the garage with the AC blasting and work very poorly and haltingly and with (some days) great reluctance and ambivalence and pain. I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic. It's a dark time workwise, and yet a very light and lovely time in all other respects."
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Some may wonder why a review of this movie is at The Beat, but Wallace was a big fan of pop culture, especially movies.
If the massive “Infinite Jest” looks daunting, start with his book of essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” You won’t regret it.
Thanks for that George! I believe a number of comic scribes are avowed fans of Wallace as well. On that subject, while watching the film with Hannah, I had this story from Matt Fraction’s portion of his and Kelly Sue DeConnick’s newsletter running through my mind (reproduced here on someone else’s Tumblr): http://totesmccoats.tumblr.com/post/105516545419/its-march-1997-and-im-about-to-come-to-portland
Thanks for the link, Kyle. Here is Wallace on the ’97 Charlie Rose show that Fraction mentions. He doesn’t look or sound a lot like Segel does in the trailers (at least to my eyes), but I’ll reserve judgment until I see the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLPStHVi0SI