But What the Fuck do I Know?

 

I’m staring at a blank page wondering what to write. Can a writer feel at some point he has nothing left to say? Like, Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson towards the end of their lives, feeling like things are all over?

The other day I watched The End of the Tour, a film about a month-long interview of author Henry David Wallace by Rolling Stone columnist David Lipsky. And frankly, the film left me flat because there was little talk about the art of writing. Instead coming off as a bullshit session and party. 

Lipsky would ask questions like, 

why do you wear the headband, David? And the author would answer, 

why did you have to ask that? 

Wallace answered in a deeply wounded manner often.

To see what the interview was like I listened to an excerpt from it on YouTube, and indeed it was a bullshit session.  

Anyway, I wanted to see what Wallace’s work was like, so I downloaded his only available book on PDFdrive, the other was in Turkish, Girl with Curious Hair, and after reading a few pages, I found I loved his work, here’s an excerpt for you,

It’s 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The gray clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway. Two small children are brought out of the car

by a young woman with a loose face. A man at the wheel of the car stares straight ahead. The children are silent and have very white skin. The woman carries a grocery bag full of something heavy. Her face hangs loose over the bag.

She brings the bag and the white children to a wooden fencepost, by the field, by the highway. The children's hands, which are small, are placed on the wooden post. The woman tells the children to touch the post until the car returns. She gets in the car and the car leaves. There is a cow in the field near

the fence. The children touch the post. The wind blows. Lots of cars go by. They stay that way all day.

What came to mind reading the extended paragraph was a Norman Rockwell painting, or the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression.

Wallace’s characters in the bit are as nondescript as shadows, and now I see what all the fuss is about.

Henry Foster Wallace committed suicide at 46 in 2008, and the act had nothing in common with Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson, authors who offed themselves because of extended writer's block, and poor health. Foster had suffered from depression throughout his life and was a powerful writer to the end. 

Watching The End of the Tour left me with a foul taste in my mouth, then I read some of Girl with Curious Hair, and was gassed. 

 

Let’s stay the course here, moving on to Thomas Pynchon. 

Some years ago I wrote a story, Hey Babe, it’s the High Hat Club which included a bit on Pynchon.

Thomas  Pynchon earned a B.A. in English from Cornell University in 1958, then spent a year in Greenwich Village living  Bohemian life and writing short stories. 

In 1960 he moved to Seattle and was hired as a technical writer for Boeing where he worked for 2 years, eventually leaving the company to write full-time. 

In 1963 his first novel V was published, a cynical tale about a Zelig-like character who time travels and shows up at crucial times in European history. 

The novel won the Faulkner Foundation Award which would be the first of many awards for Pynchon. When Pynchon's 3rd novel Gravity’s Rainbow was published in 1973 it won critical acclaim from American literati.  

Pynchon’s heavy use of metaphor is meant to seduce his readers to use imagination rather than reason. Basic themes such as— system vs freedom, reality vs illusion, and life vs death are paired opposites that interact and work as engines that power his work.

Years later in 2014, his book Inherent Vice became a Hollywood film, winning an Oscar for Best Screenplay, another accolade for Pynchon. 

Thomas Pynchon is a world-famous recluse, who makes JD Salinger look like Mohamed Ali or Jack Sparrow. Pynchon hasn’t appeared before the media since 1963, reigning supreme among reclusive novelists. 

When Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award, another trophy, Pynchon, as you would guess sent someone else to accept the award on his behalf. 

After reading 20 pages of Pynchon’s book V, I threw the book into a metal trash can and poured lighter fluid on it, then lit it,  and watched it burn and diminish into a small grey mound of organic ash matter. 

Burning V was more fun than reading it. 

Most likely, Thomas the-escape-artist Pynchon is hiding away in upstate New York, in Steuben County maybe, sitting on a lone stool in front of his basement bar drinking and staring at his collection of awards, carefully hung on the wall,  

but what the fuck do I know?