Does Dave (only) Tell us How it Feels to Him?

I have been writing and thinking about terrorism, ordinary life, patriotism, trauma, and collective identity a lot in the past two years. (Again, really, I'm a happy person in general disposition). This week I reread The View from Mrs. Thompson's, a brief essay by (I know, I know) David Foster Wallace. In light of the official publication of his posthumous novel The Pale King this week as well as the beautiful Jonathan Franzen essay in The New Yorker--and because I just realized (reading this thing for the tenth time is no less heartbreaking, of course) that he "gets" the things I wanted to "get" better in four pages than I did in thousands of writing, reading, revising, rehashing, suffering through--here are a few thoughts on Dave's account of "The Horror."

In the first half of his essay "Tell me How Does it Feel?" James Wood indicts novelists interested in writing the "Great American Social Novel," claiming: "they will sooner or later be outrun by their own streaking material." In other words, a writer attempting to capture the totality of a social moment--its interpersonal, economic, demographic, horticultural (etc) elements—will always fall short of actually describing the world. And worse, in the process of trying to do so, she will also fail to document anything essential about human feeling. Yet Wood seems to rely on the assumption that human feeling should reside solely within the world that the author portrays. He ignores the possibility of locating feeling within the narrative voice.

I’m not sure if this perspective necessarily addresses Wood’s concerns—and perhaps it merely suggests that writers are vain and solipsistic and can only talk about the interior landscape of their own heads. But if this portrayal is honest and curious, and conducted with the interest of connecting the writer to a reader, is it something we should lament?

In The View from Mrs. Thompson's, David Foster Wallace takes it as a given that it would be impossible to describe all of the elements necessary to understand how to synthesize the feelings induced by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The piece does not attempt to portray the totality of the moment; rather, by cataloguing details he observes from the ordinary lives of individuals in Bloomington, Wallace in effect tries to at least give the reader an understanding of how he makes an effort to cope. He describes some conditions “on the ground” in Bloomington--but does so in order to give readers insight into the only consciousness that he feels able to occupy in the wake of “the Horror”: his own.

An Evening of Gentlemanly Pursuits, Part II

Part II: Solipsism is Just a Kind of Self-Love

My ambitions at the start of the whole process of writing about Paul Kahan far outstripped my abilities as a journalist and reflect the naive belief that one can fake good intentions and yet write something that people actually want to read--something, that is (and maybe I'm assuming incorrectly about what readers want to read, but I'd like to think that I'm not too far off here), honest about the world that we inhabit that explores why and how we choose to inhabit it together.

Essentially, I was bored and broke--reading a lot of novels and living off of excess student loan money and the occasional sale of stock. I wanted to eat at fancy restaurants and pretend that I was a writer.

So I said I wanted to write something about Chicago and its relationship to food. I said I wanted to write something about the stagnation of twentysomething upward mobility in the midst of a recession. I said I wanted to write about politics. I said I wanted to write about happy hour crowds choking down organically fed pork and going nowhere very fast, but laughing very, very hard.

An Evening of Gentlemanly Pursuits, Part I

Some background.

Grant Achatz, Chicago celebrity chef/darling/villain/prettyboy, will open two new restaurants in the West Loop very soon: Next and Aviary. Though he rose to fame with Alinea, now ranked among the greatest restaurants in the world, he is trying to woo a new following. Enter Donnie Madia and Paul Kahan. The pair essentially started the West Loop’s renaissance when they first opened Blackbird more than ten years ago. More than that, Kahan literally grew up here, working at a deli on Green Street. Achatz would be nowhere near West Fulton Market Street were it not for Kahan, Madia. And now he’s elbowing into what is very much their territory.

This piece began as an article about the restaurants that Donnie Madia and Paul Kahan opened.

Last year, well before I knew about Achatz, I wanted to find out why all of the restaurants in the Kahan-Madia empire—there are five, soon to be six, in all—are so popular. I pitched the story to a writer for The Atlantic, who said he liked the idea, but it never got published. Why it never got published will become apparent, I think, almost immediately. But the more I think about that night, and everything leading up to it, the more important it seems to become. So here, after rewrites and more rewrites and revisions, in roughly 1000-word installments (and with Achatz as an excuse), is the article in a radically different form than the one I first “submitted.”

One last thing. It’s no longer as much about food as it is about other things. Some things are reconstructions, imaginations, and outright lies. A writer's claims to veracity are always conditioned by his or her sense of how words relate to reality; by the substances they consume while "researching"; and by whom they're trying to impress. To varying degrees, my own sense of the relationship between language and the world is affected by all of these. The piece is nonfictional to the extent that it aims to capture a real mood, a sense, a bundle of affects that characterizes a particular moment in my life and the life of a friend. In this way, I have convinced myself that the writing is honest. And maybe only in this way.

Part I: Aftermath

I woke up on the hardwood floor in Tyler’s apartment, twisted into a crumpled pile of chewed up meat. There was blood everywhere. On my shirt, my pants. The tip of my thumb was sliced somewhat less than totally open, and had turned an alarming shade of purple. There was a crust of stale sweat coating my body. It felt as though the alcohol had sucked all the fluids out of my skin, and now I lay as dried out as an iguana. Pieces of malignantly flaking skin hung off my lips. I ran my shriveled tongue against the raw roof of my mouth and felt something scrape off. I swallowed and coughed, as the day began to insist upon consciousness, sputtering like a dying fish on the deck of a listing ship.

Everyone in Between: Toronto Artist Arowbe on the Borders

It's easy to have good conversations with Toronto-based poet/musician/composer/performer Rob Bolton. But this particular conversation was having a tough time getting off the ground. When we finally got vchat to work on two finicky wireless networks, important business interrupted:

“Hold on one second, I think my coffee is ready,” he said. It was Saturday morning.

Rob writes and performs for the group Broadway Sleep, as well as for the duo Times Neue Roman (which has a new video dropping today for Hands no Hands). He has also written songs for artist Tanika Charles, including Silly Happy Wild, which was nominated for a Stylus Award in the category of Canadian Best R&B Single. He participated in TEDx Toronto as a solo artist and with Broadway Sleep. He writes hip-hop odes to Music and Math; homages to motown; and writes Lacanian lyric poetry. In other words, he's pretty busy these days.

Touch the Art...No Really.

I picked up Emma Stein underneath the El tracks at Robert Bills Contemporary--where she spends her days working as Gallery Director--on a sloppy, gray afternoon last week. It's the time of year when even optimistic Chicagoans start to wonder if Spring will ever arrive, and as a native Californian, Emma has had more than her fill of snow and slush.

Weather aside, Emma has thrived in Chicago. Having completed her MA in Art History at the University of Chicago last June, she won high praise from the Tribune for her most recent curated group show: Exploding Faces, Confining Spaces. But she has also been working on her own project proposal for an exhibition that rethinks the senses and sensations associated with the consumption of art in the gallery and museum. Playfully titled Please Touch the Artwork, Emma's project considers how the blind experience what we traditionally call "visual arts." It's a deeply personal issue for her, as two members of her family--including her mom--are affected by a degenerative disease that affects the retinas, often leaving patients legally blind. Emma's idea not only has the potential to raise awareness about the problematic way museums attempt to address accessibility, but also to expand how individuals conceive of their relationship to art.

(Why touching the art matters...after the jump)

AMIWWL: Zodiac and Targets

[I'm going to categorize most of my future posts on film as: "Analysis of Movies I Watch with Lindsey" (AMIWWL), mainly because I can never say exactly what I think about them until way after. I'm not used to analyzing film. I'm used to reading at my own glacial pace (sometimes I think I read at a fifth grade level). In general, I'm not a very quick writer either, and need to take my time and let thoughts congeal, and then get them down. As you might imagine, this makes me a really awful conversationalist, especially when it comes to film. But since we're all expected to be critics of movies, I'll make some efforts].

[Oh, also, I spoil everything]

This week it was Zodiac and Targets, two films that are roughly 40 years apart and extremely different--but that both try to get at the heart of what might be an obsession-in-transition in the American psyche: the Serial Killer. Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 film Targets, starring Boris Karloff, draws (in many places quite overtly) from the infamous University of Texas bell-tower shootings of 1966. David Fincher's 2007 Zodiac examines the exploits of the Zodiac Killer, who murdered seven people (though he claimed responsibility for almost 40 murders) in the Bay Area during the late Sixties and early Seventies. Unlike Targets, Fincher's film takes up the perspective of the investigators assigned to the case, though it also reconstructs scenes from the perspective of Zodiac's victims.

Covert Urban: Chicago Artist Gwendolyn Zabicki

"Somebody called me the Bruce Springsteen of painting," said Gwen Zabicki. We were eating homemade steak and ale pie, sitting in Ikea recliners in her UIC studio. Gwen is one of only three painters in the most recent crop of the University's MFA students. "And I thought, oh no, so I'm really earnest and hamfisted and there's a honking sax in the background." It seemed like a real concern, especially because Gwen paints subject matter that can be easily associated with the middle or blue-collar urban class. In other words: solidly in Springsteen territory. But after our conversation, it was readily apparent that there is an important difference between earnestness and inquisitiveness. The former is about latching onto an emotion and glorifying it. The latter seems more about asking why we feel a certain way in the world, and whether we might be able to feel differently by changing our perspective.

In thoughtful and measured paintings, it is this territory that Gwen's work inhabits.