Two

I'm reading a few things currently. I like to try to balance non-fiction reading (vegetables) with fiction (sorbet...is it weird that I think of my reading habits as a vegan-like responsibility?). The thing is, I do really like vegetables. And non-fiction. Reading works of non-fiction make me want to write, and reading fiction makes me want to read more fiction. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that I prefer reading the genre that spurs me to create.

I'm currently working my way through David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." I say I'm working through it because it is, indeed, a bit of work. The first essay, Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley, mostly chronicles the author's tennis career that almost was, battling wind, adolescent awkwardness, and pushing the limits of his audience's capacity for math reading:
         "Unless you're one of those rare mutant virtuosos of raw force, you'll find that competitive tennis, like money pool, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles. Because the expansion of response-possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by the sinh of opponent's talent and the cosh of the number of shots in the rally so far(roughly)."

The second essay, E UNIBUS PLURAM: television and U.S. fiction, deals with an "existentiovoyeuristic" conundrum, namely about how television presents the illusion of voyeurism and how fiction writers can be inspired by this as a source material, though that, in the end, is somewhat of a false prophecy as true human experience does not really happen on television.  It's hard to believe this was written in the early 1990s, and certainly is an interesting idea post-advent for reality television.  I love this essay, and certain bits about the self-hating TV watcher and critic hit a little too close to home (we spend an awful lot of time with television, and there are, truthfully, many things we hate about what we watch, even if we don't realize it).  A favorite excerpt, on the topic of syndication:
         "Sunday-morning syndication is also intriguing because it makes for juxtapositions as eerily apposite as anything French surrealists could come up with.  Lovable warlocks on Bewitched and commercially Satanic heavy-metal videos on Top Ten Countdown run opposite air-brushed preachers decrying demonism in U.S. culture.  You can surf back and forth between a televised mass's "This is my blood" and Gladiators' Zap breaking a civilian's nose with a polyurethane Bataka."

Overall, I love his style, and can't wait to get into more of DFW's fiction writing.  He has a unique observational skill that, while present in many writers and comedians, not only captures an image, but processes it and develops it through an unusual lens.  Sometimes, for Wallace, that lens is math, sometimes it is being a fiction writer, and sometimes it's just plain absurd.

Next time, dessert. I'm finally reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.  I know, right?