Madonna

In high school, I borrowed a Ray of Light cassette from someone whose taste in music I should have trusted more, whose tape collection I should have tried to duplicate, whose non-classification of music I should have tried to emulate. She sits Sixpence None the Richer, Smash Mouth, Mariah Carey, All Saints, Sugar Ray, Barenaked Ladies, Fatboy Slim, TLC, New Radicals and Spice Girls amongst each other, gathers them around in her stack like unassuming kindergarten pupils, unaffected by each other’s differences. I liked most of what’s in Ray of Light especially Shanti Ashtangi which was nothing I’ve heard before, Sky Fits Heaven, and Power of Goodbye, one of her bestest ballads, but ended up not buying it, the album, because when you’re a teenage boy in high school, buying a Madonna album was just weird and gay. And to me then as it is now, buying an album is crucial to the appreciation of an artist’s music.

It’s not that I was afraid somebody’d shoot me if I was seen buying a Madonna album, it’s that it was inconceivable to me then as a high school boy to obtain one. I’m shallow like that. It’s irrelevant to point out that I still didn’t buy Ray of Light in college because there are other things to buy and pursue, one diva seemed enough, and college is all indie/alternative music time, without the slightest idea what indie/alternative music even means, but yes, I still didn’t get any of her albums during this period, the phony period.

Although there’s still no point in celebrating the day I finally got Ray of Light, its purchase was the moment that I learned how to get over myself and stop fussing over the purchase of a CD. If this sounds like a dishonest and contrived nothing admission, let me just say how I used to buy more than one buffer CD every time I trek to the church to get whatever diva albums are out, which looking at my stack, were a lot, because I’m ashamed to be handing over Tower Records cashier people with discernible smirks on their faces the new Mariah/Tori/Aaliyah. So I have now, rotting and molding in their respective areas of the CD rack, copies of probably never again to be played albums of Coldplay, Basement Jaxx, Death Cab for Cutie, and all other sorts of diva album buffer. So I mean, I’m not just saying, ’Look at me getting over musical taste sophistication issues by buying Madonna’s Ray of Light!’ The purchase of this album was really somewhat momentous. You can say, it came to me like a ray of light.

I didn’t like all of Ray of Light, however, because my youthful perception of her gravitated towards the drag queen idea of her and this perception was magnified ten times over by Frozen wherein she ups the drag queen persona/gay icon ante in the video, which looking back on it now, was a really good-looking, understated video. But this is something I would never have admitted or known in high school because it’s high school. Besides, I didn’t know understated. For some reason, you never come off as gay or weird if you had a Mariah album. I know several jocks/big boys in HS who had Butterfly and Number Ones. But it’s quite a different matter with Celine Dion, Tina Arena and Madonna, and so I steered clear. Clearly, I had conflicts with certain issues during high school.

Maybe it was William Orbit’s production that hooked me, but I wasn’t aware of songwriters or producers during the time I was starting to get a taste of her. All I knew was that these are beats that are so weird and pretty, and I recall really liking most of them. Shanti Ashtangi was just too gorgeous to me.

For years, I rolled my eyes so hard over the idea of Madonna. I didn’t like her singles (Music, Frozen, Ray of Light, 4 Minutes), and I only bought her albums in a non-committed, obligatory way you buy certain albums, which was how I bought Something to Remember. When she released Confessions on a Dance Floor, it was still out of obligation that I bought it, but then I thought it turned out to be one of her most enjoyable albums, and that was when I started to enjoy her music as the creatures that they are. It’s puzzling to me though how I chose to begin with Something to Remember over any of her albums, it being a ballad collection and ballads not being her strongest suit, to start off with the Madonna discography discovery.

My appreciation of her, my almost-switched-to-the-other-diva-camp moment happened with Confessions on a Dance Floor and more so by the Confessions Tour DVD. Watching this super freak concert, I kind of suddenly understood why people go crazy over her, in spite of the nasty things said of her, in spite of her self-absorbed/self-important reputation via political outrage in some of her music, which was something of a turn off to me. But fuck that already. I’m pleased to have discovered her before it was too late. I loved the Confessions-era Madonna and I hope she never ages. I hope she stops aging for a while. She will age of course but I hope she never acts it. Time goes by so slowly anyway.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I read it.

It begins with the monologueing Hal Incandenza, taking stock of the room he’s in, in the Year of Glad. It begins where it’s supposed to end, where the eventual, you-could-totally-see-coming result of the day-to-day, presumably mind-numbing, substance addiction-causing routine of his being a tennis player, in a tennis school, would drive him to.

This book is about many things and but though I highly doubt that tennis is one of those things, tennis the sport plays an important character. It is a sport that resembles life, at least according to a signage in the Headmaster’s House or some place I won’t anymore bother to check, ie that life is a sport usually won by those who serve best. The tennis thing, it’s tough pointing out it’s significance in this except for maybe that it’s vital since DFW himself was a tennis player, but it looks to me like it’s somehow used as a comparison for life, which I know is such a trite and maybe moronic observation, but that’s my take, because it’s the kind of sport that seems to reward excellence and in nature, more random than most sports, but which if you think about it, it is like every other game which sole aim it is to win as much matches as possible and some of that life-sport metaphor things, but that like life too, tennis is mechanical, it’s a sport whose eventual winner is preordained and that some just happen to be so good at it, some have the body, mind and heart for it, but that every move you make in it, in tennis, is going to lead to something that is premeditated, and that if you’re not good now, you’re not going to be much good at it later, even if you try hard enough as to go crazy. Or something.

Infinite Jest is either one of the most rewarding reading experiences of my life or one of the most dreadful. It’s probably both. If a 6-8-month-long slogging can be called rewarding then consider me satiated. Slobbering over it aside, it’s also one of the most challenging, most make-you-feel-stupid, most self-satisfied work of literature I have ever had to commit to. It’s a cock-tease of a book. Some parts of it makes your eyes googly with adoration, some parts you dread having to go back to get through to. Some days I spend reading any random 2 pages of it twice. But I chalk this up to my comprehension limitations than to DFW’s deranged but ostensibly brilliant idea of how drug addicts’ and depressives’, well, people’s story should be told. No one does depressive fiction better than DFW, I think.

It’s one of the heaviest books I’ve ever had to carry around and my desire to finish the fucking thing hurt not only my brain but also my back. Content and weight-wise, Infinite Jest is heavy. Aware as I am of its pretentious perception tendencies, ie reading it in public not only makes you look foolish (because of the insistence) but more obviously, it makes you look like pretentious person who doesn’t know better than to read a David Foster Wallace book in public, casually, and not think of the back or shoulders’ welfare, not to mention, the brain’s. It’s the kind of book most likely to draw ‘It’s one of the most _____ books ever’  conclusions because of its enormity, both in scope and ambition and it mostly deserves it.

I hadn’t thought of romanticizing the reading experience since there were days when getting through just 2 pages of it is painful to the head but I got sad when it ended. I forgot how much end notes it has that when I got to the last few pages, I was, well, I was sort of glad that I can move on with other things.

Notice how I’m more inclined to talk about reading it than what’s actually in it. You are probably thinking, why read something you can’t really get? But maybe I’m being stupid about this kind of perception because it could be that there really are people who read stuff that they won’t be able to digest totally, and flip about it. But if you’re dying to know, I read it because I was morbidly intrigued by the author’s suicide. That and because I can. Because I like to spend on things, on books and I can say with total conviction that that 700 Pesos was one of the most well-spent 700- Pesos I ever used my credit card on.

Notice too how I’ve become more self-contained though I’ve always been. Because you know what, I feel like it spoke to me, when Molly Notkin said something about what I’ve been obsessing about work for some time, this idea:

…a classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of the post-industrial capitalist mechanism, whose logic presented commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-which-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal

exactly at a time when I was thinking, what is the point of all of this consuming and working and consuming and collecting and working, and thinking having and consuming things is going to be the cause of my happiness/contentment, when in fact I am only becoming more unsatisfied with what I can’t have than with what I already have. Which is kind of the point of The Entertainment, the piece of entertainment that’s so entertaining it causes its consumer to literally die of amusement.

I remember reading this and being too aware of how corny I was being when I stood up from my seat and made connections to this idea and went to the nearest set of ears and said something like, I’m amazed wow this is terrific book, like that.

There are plenty of things in this book that I wish I could re-post somewhere but I will trouble you some other time with them.

I’ve never been more self-aware with my choice of reading than with this. Sadly I have no great realizations or analysis, and all I have are memories of smelling it, of trying to understand it, remembrances of smiling through passages that seem tailored for me (me me me), people like me, of laughing through the fart jokes, its gore and other tragedies (Orin Incandenza, for example, gets his testicles done something to by roaches through the genius of that Swiss hand model, a character I only have a vague recollection of, significance-wise – the memory is still so fresh), the times when I felt like smashing or punching it not out of love and moment of great understanding though I love it, sort of, but because it hurt to think that I may not be able to finish it in this lifetime, not unless I resign from my job, not unless I put an end to all connections with fellow human beings, friends, lover and foes.

I know it’s a little annoying when some fanatical book nerd attaches himself to a work of fiction just because he thinks he understands it, gets what the characters feel, and makes plans to name children after these characters, but some books, they deserve being the causer of people’s annoying tendencies.

Towards the end, Hal Incandenza gets finicky about the big deal tennis event as is the rest of the ETAers, Gately is stuck in the coma ward still delirious, Joelle van Dyne is not getting her lethally beautiful face back which was damaged to a devastating extent because of a deranged set of parents, it remains unknowable what is in the The Entertainment, and Mario Incandenza is still a retard. I have no fucking idea what these elements were supposed to be about or if they were supposed to tie each other up but I loved most of them because they’re either funny or real-like or they’re written so sharply and I’ve been with them for 8 months!

(Thank you, reading buddy, for indulging me in this. I hate to imply that we’ve been such phonies trying to do recaps of this mammoth book, making comments at this blog’s trying-to-be-purposeful recaps because you may not agree, you might say you were simply looking for a really good, serviceable piece of literature to consume you which might be only slightly true for me, and you did not go into this thinking ‘I’m great and good’ just for doing this, but just the same, thank you that you did not leave me to be the only one who seems phony and pretentious, etc, supposing we ever did for a moment seemed like those, for having the nuts to Read Infinite Jest. High five!)

Infinite Jest reads like a huge book about a lot of nothings but it is not trashy and I think it’s saying something to me? I do not know. What I do know is that it gave me the howling fantods, whatever that might ever mean.

Infinite Jest sounds like every other book written by and about sad people. In the world of these fuck-ups, there are no resolutions, only more fuck-ups. But if there’s one book about human sadness you think you could afford to read, devote not just spend huge chunks of your time and life for, even if you don’t care to know what is rooted in really depressed people’s sadness, I would humbly suggest this marvelous book. I would hate to have to call this book marvelous, terrific, excellent or anything that’s supposed to suggest it as great, but like those who did before me, about the subject of this book’s actual greatness, I just have no words, obviously.

I think Infinite Jest is about the futility of human exertion to look for and obtain happiness, but that’s just me. But thank you, David Foster Wallace, for saying, because I would not have believed it myself.

Money won’t make you happy, the adage, sort of rings true when pay day approaches and you’re not jumping for joy, when normally, it makes you jump so high for joy, often figuratively, like the 15th/30th is the second coming and Jesus himself is handing you your paycheck, or more realistically, Jesus himself electronically transfers your salary to your payroll account. I really like to rub it in, the venting. Like Shirley Manson and her rain, I’m only happy when I vent.

Writers Echos

My offtake of an article about writing entitled What We Write About When We Write About Writing:

He says,

In the Internet Age, everyone can have a blog. Everyone can voice an opinion about every little thing. Anyone can, by force of personality, gain a following for his or her writing, regardless of writing talent. But does that make everyone a writer?

First, I had to look up the word ‘offtake’ before I decided to keep it in there, and make sure it will mean what I mean it to mean. I use words arbitrarily. It’s fun and it doesn’t cost me anything except the occasional embarrassment sometimes dealt me when I think I have something worth saying, eventually decide it’s not worth saying, and end up saying it anyway, and people point at me and say nye! because I use words I feel like using. People actually never point at me and say nye! but when you’re putting embarrassing things on the Internet, what they actually do, I think, is they vow to never pay any attention to you for as long as they have Internet connections. Or they pet your web site, your little corner of the web, smirk at you from a distance, and symbolically spit at your earnest attempts at attracting attention, at your periodic pouring out of the heart as if Romeo to a sexless Juliet, because you have Such Strong Feelings about… something, even though these things are often too personal or too mundane to be even considered worth spending kilobytes on. Besides which why waste time reading stupid blog when the unstoppable world of FB awaits.

To answer the guy’s question, no. I know it’s a rhetorical question but it has been asked many times before and it’s begging to be answered.

What is it with Writers anyway? Writers are whiny little shits who feel the whole world is upon them all of the time and everyone are in one way or another demeaning them, underpaying them and not giving them enough credit for their big, fat Craft. Not all writers are shit, obviously, but writers, ahem, serious writers who studied writing, memorized sentence structures, read novels of Greek and Latin origins, the ones who take super serious offense at instantaneous, unstudied and unedited prose machinery that is the blogs and blog-making, see writing as their territory. There is a type. I realize it’s a sweeping, sweeping statement and I love a lot of writer writers but there’s definitely a type.  Those types of writers are not so nice.

The author of the above statement would probably be unhappy at having one of his statements grossly taken out of context because he’s not really about non-writer writing bashing, and I’m kind of making him look like he is. But maybe I’m the type who takes a chunk of a statement off of something and give my take on it. In fact, he will go on to say that It’s Fine, Everyone. Pour your hearts out and make yourselves heard,  etc. He also makes a stinging but kinda truthful remark about mediocre writers patting each others’ backs, by which I imagine he imagines  the way bloggers in blogging communities do, those who virtua-high five each other by saying You Write Great! You Take My Breath Away With Your Prose! and varieties of that, in bloggers’s blogs’s comments section which he feels these communities tend to mix up. According to him, online writers conflate feelings expressed in a blog and readers confuse them with skill, talent and all that echos. True that it’s kind of annoying but it’s not criminal. I blog because I like wallowing in my own specialness sometimes and judging from the number of precious-in-their-blogs people like me there are in the www, I’d say this particular trait isn’t unique to me. And I think it’s okay.

Sometimes though, I think there’s too much thought and analysis that go into the subject of people and their Internet-broadcast thoughts and how destructive their silly attempts at writing are to the “Prose Creation”. It’s even worse when non-writer writers/bloggers themselves make commentaries about writing which truly grates me every time. Everyone has terribly urgent and important things to say about writing, writers and mediums of writing that can all be valid but which can also be pompous.

I hate so much to have to sound like a defender of the non-writing school writer, lousy blogger, mediocre writer peoples. I know my place in the world and it is a place that is characteristically devoid of any sort of conviction on anything substantial and urgent and I’m thinking of staying. But when I feel like saying anything, as long as they’re not going to cost me my Non-Writing Job or valuable personal relationships, it’s fine. Although to quote the late, great David Foster Wallace, most of our thoughts aren’t all that interesting, and I want so hard to abide by that every time I feel like saying something. Sometimes, I have absolutely no words. And everything in the world is still great.