Nov 1, 2011 at the Free Library of Philadelphia

He was introduced by his freshman college roommate from Brown (they started there in 1978; the plot of The Marriage Plot is set in 1982, as that class of students is graduating).  He didn’t know that Andy, his old roommate, was going to be introducing him.  He said that a passage of the novel in which two roommates don’t speak for many months was inspired by Andy, but that they were going to go out for a drink afterwards.

He read the part of the novel directly leading up to Leonard and Madeleine’s breakup, which included not one but two sex scenes, one of which I thought was uncomfortable.

The audience was on the old side, almost entirely white.  There was a lot of tittering and laughing, even at parts that weren’t funny.

The second question of the Q&A session asked if the character of Mitchell (the third point in the novel’s love triangle) was more autobiographical than the others.  This was as close as the questions got to the DFW controversy.  He said that he puts a lot of himself into all of his characters, including Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard, though Mitchell is perhaps the most direct, because that character is Greek, from Michigan and travels to India to work at Mother Teresa’s orphanage, as he did.  But he also said that none of the major events of the book actually happened, and that the parts that were the most autobiographical were the most difficult to write, because it’s hard to edit yourself when you’re remembering.

He said that when he’s constructing a character, he first imagines a general outline of what they’re like.  Then him imbues it with qualities from everyone he knows that seem to fit.  Finally, he fills in the character with the perspectives and experiences of his own that are appropriate.

I believe that.  I don’t know, of course, but I think he just did a clumsy job of incorporating a bunch of DFW’s qualities (and at least one quotation) into Leonard, and is probably put off and possibly embarrassed that so many people noticed.  That said, the novel is a marriage novel.  I’m about halfway through.  If, at the end of it, the heroine chooses the Eugenides character over the DFW character, thus symbolically choosing pleasurable narrative over deconstructionist post-modernism, well, forget it.

He was very thin — he must either run or bicycle (I wonder which one); 50-year-old men don’t stay in that kind of shape without a lot of cardio — and very well-dressed.  He was a little goofy, and little “dad embarassing.”  At the book signing table, he was friendly and open, but not chatty.

He’s a hard-working writer.  Responding to a question about process, he said he writes from the early morning until dinnertime every day when he’s working on a novel, aiming to produce at least 800 decent words a day, a little more than two pages.  He is certainly very intelligent, but didn’t have the otherworldly quality that writers sometimes have.  He came from the Midwest, went to an Ivy League school, worked really hard and became a successful novelist.  He said pretty candidly that he thought he didn’t have a lot to offer the Princeton writing students (freshmen and sophomores) in his workshop, that they were so intelligent and creative that they thought of most things he might say about the student writing they were critiquing.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, p. 546 (Notes & Asides). 

Things like long-distance running and yoga have an element of this, in addition to their physical aspects.  Boredom can approach meditation under the right circumstances.

In Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, the protagonists spend the second half of the movie  pursuing the most fabulous object in the world, the most perfect home appliance imaginable.  It turns out to be pure evil.  David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is likewise structured around an Entertainment (viewed on ‘teleputers’) so alluring and pleasurable that once you watch it, you’re compelled to watch it again and again until you eventually die, pleased and exhausted.

Rats like to push buttons that give them pleasure.  People do too.  Interacting with things like smartphones literally pushes the pleasure button, activating reward pathways in your brain (the crackberry nickname is dead on).  You get the pleasure pulse when you get a message, play a video game, make a purchase. 

The thing that freaks me out about the iPad is that Apple has made a terrifyingly good pleasure device for the mass market.  Push its buttons, and it will deliver pleasure.  Idle pleasure isn’t the worst thing in the world — I’ve been a casual video game and pinball player off and on my whole life, and TV can serve the same purpose in moderation; everyone needs downtime — but to put a beautiful pleasure device right in the center of one’s life scares me.

I say this as someone who recently bought a previously hailed ‘most fabulous object in the world’, Google’s Nexus One. Even the N1 is a little scary; it’s taken an effort at  compartmentalization to not let it take over my life.  But it can work, and by work I mean make my life better: I used to sit right down at the computer when I got home from work, but now I do my web-browsing on the train, so I’m free for life in all its glory or banality when I get home (except when I sit down to type out alarmist diatribes about consumer electronics).  

Why am I taking the trouble to write this?  One of the things I want in life is less button pushing and less looking at glowing rectangles, and more life.  It’s not always easy and I succumb all the time, but I struggle towards this.

I don’t mind looking at glowing rectangles for work.  Work is work.  I’m lucky and privileged to have a geek-collar job (what’s the color for that?).  It beats the hell out of working in a coal mine.  But outside of work I want life, only more life.  The synthesis of all of our current forms of media — web, music, video, games, even books — into a near-perfect pleasure device makes me worried and sad, because it will be so easy to just push those buttons and not actually live.  DFW took this idea to the extreme: when his characters watched the Entertainment, they couldn’t look away, and eventually died pushing that button over and over again.  But we won’t die, we’ll just live less life.

I’m not buying an iPad for the same reason I don’t want a video game system, a reason my friend Kyle once noted to me — if I had one, I’d spend lots of time playing it.  Down with button pushing and pleasure machines and glowing rectangles.  Up with life.

P.S. There’s another entirely different set of good reasons to dislike the thing, too. (Hat tip: AS.)