Crib From This gets Hitched.

I know—dumb title; but who cares.

Over the years, we here at Crib From This have characterized the writings, spoken remarks, and ideas of Christopher Hitchens variously as dumb, smart, funny, and irrelevant [this is not a typo—ed.]. Through the thick and thin of these reactions to his work, it remains that Hitch is among the few commentators to appear regularly in the 'mainstream media' (whose ranks Hitchens—previously a longtime columnist for The Nation magazine—joined when he emerged as an early and ardent propagandist for prosecuting the Iraq War) to reliably possess any kind of panache or even sense of humor. So when Hitch revealed, a number of months ago, that he had been diagnosed with a life-threatening form of esophageal cancer, we, of course, felt that this was some pretty crap news.

So, in any event, when we happened accidentally upon a couple of his recent contributions to his column in Slate, we were pleasantly surprised to find that both are pithy and of a high caliber. Neither of them is—as Hitch has sometimes been perceived to be—controversial or even provocative. Rather, they both communicate successfully more-or-less obvious truths that lots of other commentators and/or media lack the clearheadedness or intellectual distance from the daily news cycle to state. This is the kind of commentary that is so thoroughly lacking right now and why 'the news', as it were, has become so unworthy of anyone's serious attention over the past six months or year-or-so.

Anyway, we link, first, to Hitchens's lucid take on the recent, bizarre, Rick Sanchez episode. Rick Sanchez is, by the way, a person I had never previously heard of and someone whose career, etc., I fail to find at all interesting. And this is precisely why Hitchens nails it: he doesn't find Sanchez or his remarks to be particularly interesting either. Part of the reason for this, Hitchens argues, is that it simply isn't controversial to "note the effectiveness of the Jewish Lobby."

And we link, second, to an article in which Hitchens reflects upon the inanities and utter lack of substance detectable in the supposed political 'debates' preceding the upcoming mid-term elections occurring across the country. A taste:

Asking my hosts in Connecticut if there was anything worth noting about the upcoming elections in their great state, I received the reply, "Well, we have a guy who wants to be senator who lied about his record of service in Vietnam, and a woman who wants to be senator who has run World Wrestling Entertainment and seems like a tough lady." Though full enough of curiosity to occupy, say, one course of lunch, that still didn't seem to furnish enough material to keep the mind focused on politics for very long.

And this dearth—of genuine topics and of convincing or even plausible candidates—appears to extend from coast to coast. In New York, a rather shopworn son of one Democratic dynasty (and ex-member by marriage of another) is "facing off," as people like to say, against a provincial thug with a line in pseudo-tough talk. In California, where the urgent question of something suspiciously like state failure is staring the electorate in the face, the Brown-Whitman contest hasn't yet risen even to the level of the trivial.

Hitch then carries this discussion in the direction of a general, broadly applicable, and yet incisive and satisfying question:

Consider: What normal person would consider risking their career and their family life in order to undergo the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college? To face the constant pettifogging and chatter of Facebook and Twitter and have to boast of how many false friends they had made in a weird cyberland? And if only that was the least of it. Then comes the treadmill of fundraising and the unending tyranny of the opinion polls, which many media systems now use as a substitute for news and as a means of creating stories rather than reporting them. And, even if it "works," most of your time in Washington would be spent raising the dough to hang on to your job. No wonder that the best lack all conviction.

This may seem to discount or ignore the apparent flood of new political volunteers who go to make up the Tea Party movement. But how fresh and original are these faces? They come from a long and frankly somewhat boring tradition of anti-incumbency and anti-Washington rhetoric, and they are rather an insult to anyone with anything of a political memory. Since when is it truly insurgent to rail against the state of affairs in the nation's capital? How long did it take Gingrich's "rebel" forces in the mid-1990s to become soft-bottomed incumbents in their turn? Many of the cynical veterans of that moment, from Dick Armey to John Boehner, are the effective managers and controllers of the allegedly spontaneous Tea Party wave we see today.

Populism imposes its own humiliations on anyone considering a run. How many times can you stand in front of an audience and state: "I will always put the people of X first"? (Quite a lot of times, to judge by recent campaigns.) This is to say no more than that you will be a megaphone for sectional interests and regional mood swings and resentment, a confession that, to you, all politics is yokel.

I think that pieces like these—more reflective, more genial, less polemical, and yet every bit as unwavering—suit Hitchens's authorial voice just fine. It's almost as though his longtime infatuation with Orwell has begun to rub off on his style in a more direct way. I like it. Let's hope that the new, 'mature Hitchens' is able to stick around for a good while longer, because we need people to be writing like this in the midst of our present political/cultural landscape.

So, for as long as he continues to turn out work of a high caliber, we say: we'll gladly Hitch our wagons.

David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008

When J, having discovered the news in yesterday's New York Times, told me that David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Friday, I found myself shuddering in disbelief. The only previous occasion upon which I have reacted viscerally to the death of an artist -- one whom I'd known through his or her work exclusively -- was when Mary Hansen, longtime vocalist for the band Stereolab, was killed tragically in an accident at the age of 36. It took me a little while -- and some red wine, and some wallowing sessions to the tune of Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup -- to get over my anger with the bastards for that one.

Wallace, like Hansen, was an artist whose work has at times affirmed my desire to go on living. I passed through a couple of periods as a young man during which Wallace's stories and novels -- especially Infinite Jest -- performed the lofty task of confirming for me the existence of human life somewhere outside of my apartment. Or maybe confirming the existence of human life somewhere in my skull. I don't know; something like that. I'm not a writer the way Wallace was -- I write songs well, but paragraphs and stuff don't come naturally to me --, and that's not just in the sense that Wallace was obviously a genius and I'm not. It's in the sense that it always seemed that he kept 'craft' at arm's length. I don't know whether this is true, or if it was maybe an impression that he cultivated; I'm not sure it makes much of a difference.

Maybe it was that Wallace was trying to and sometimes succeeding at rising above 'craft'. Maybe it was that he was uncomfortable with 'craft' and needed continually to diffuse its pretensions, embed jokes somewhere in the bricks and mortar of his sometimes elaborate, nonlinear plot structures. (Structures which have been described as resembling everything from Möbius strips to parabolas.) I always had this sense that in some of his best and worst work, he was really just trying to find ways of pulling back the Wizard-of-Oz-ian curtain and saying, "Hi; how's it going? The world's profoundly fucked, don't you think? Yeah, me too."


Wallace declared in interviews his interest in devising strategies by which to appropriate the irony and subversive politics of postmodern smart-asses like Pynchon, but to fashion from this raw material a kind of fiction that could be evocative of the human experience (if not necessarily linear), morally engaged and emotionally resonant. And as Wallace's early novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way makes clear, he wasn't interested in building metafictive roller coaster rides in the style of of John Barth, a tiresome and wanky strategy that probably still found favor with Wallace's creative writing MFA faculty, whom he derided as square and as obsessed with a notion of form as an ideal in its antiseptic self.

Wallace seemed to be struggling in his fiction to find ways of coping with life, or at least to document and annotate real and hypothetical attempts to cope with life. Another way of saying whatever it is I'm trying to get at is that he seemed as a writer to be always on the lookout for ways of curing his loneliness, our loneliness. From what little I actually know about him as a person, he was someone who was always struggling with depression and various forms of anxiety. The publication and critical success of a novel he had written as an undergraduate lavished upon him a level of attention that's not all that healthy for a young man to receive, and he become involved with hard drugs, which he kicked apparently with the help of Narcotics Anonymous (although, it seems just as likely that he attended these NA meetings as research for his second and final novel Infinite Jest, one of whose narrative threads involves drug addition and NA). In an essay 'E Unibus Pluram', Wallace describes in some detail that his problem with television is that it's so damn entertaining that it's hard for him to stop watching. He addressed this issue by living without a working television set in his house, apart from a small one with a built-in VCR and no reception, on which he would watch weekly episodes of Ally McBeal, taped for him by friends. Furthermore, he lacked Internet access from his home computer and therefore routinely carried his work on a floppy disk to a computer in different building in order to email it to his editor.

In a way, it's strange that his death affects me as it does, given that I have almost nothing in common with Wallace as a human being, and he probably wasn't the kind of person I'd take to hanging out with. He was reportedly a genius at doing certain kinds of obscenely complicated logical proofs: basically, somewhere in the gray area between mathematics and philosophy; a zone in which the material is so difficult, so beyond my grasp and attention span that I find it most practical simply to prefer Continental philosophy. He was born into one of those well-connected, WASPy families -- of which most of us are equal parts jealous and resentful -- with old-school academic parents, in which things like proper grammar and etymology were spoon-fed to him and his siblings in the form of parlor games. It sounds like a textbook example of a family whose hypereducated brats are as likely to end up having a nervous breakdown as they are to ascend to the heights of some academic or professional field.

Wallace did both. Perhaps as a consequence of being told repeatedly that he was a boy-genius, he developed what I guess you could call a smart-kid rebellious streak, characterized in part by virtuoso displays of sarcasm and wordy arrogance. The difference between his rebellious streak and those of most arrogant, WASPy professor's sons, is that, from all appearances, Wallace had a reverence for and understanding of mischief, an art that is all-too-often bungled by children/young adults of privilege and cultural savvy, who tend to be dilettantish and noncommittal when it comes to most forms of fun. If you want to do it the right way, there's an ethics to being a rebellious kid; you have certain responsibilities to those around you. It's like those gay indie-rock bands that act 'cute' and 'ironic', as if no one's ever done that before; as if everyone doesn't know that they're still a bunch of asshole frat boys. It has to do with whether you are giving something back to your audience of greater substance than simply the opportunity to live vicariously through you.

I'm surmising that Wallace understood and revered mischief on the basis both of interviews and of some of the more rollicking and madcap episodes in his two novels, Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System. I've never seen anyone comment on this, but it occurs to me that in both of these novels, particularly the former, Wallace's depictions of adolescence, undergraduate life, and young adulthood are singularly evocative. Depictions that are not exactly 'realistic' so much as hyper-real, fractured and faithful to the task of capturing the sharpness of focus with which young people see adults for the self-serving hypocrites that they are, part and parcel of which is the ability of young people to police the hypocrisies of their peers, to play fair and to insist upon fair play. This insistence upon fairness, this willingness to cut one's fellow down to size for his benefit, this anarchistic, decentered anti-system of justice that protects friendship from meaninglessness: is this not what we're describing when we use the word mischief?

I now know something that I've suspected for a while now: that I'm never going to get to read a third David Foster Wallace novel. I hadn't been all that interested in his newer stories and essays; he seemed to have gotten himself locked into a kind of holding pattern: the same plodding, technical-manual diction; long declarative sentences; a character's memories narrated in a past perfect tense monotone; a faint tint of themes and allusions, conjured through a delicate threading-together of textures, colors and half-formed thoughts -- a skill at which Wallace's virtuosity is matched in contemporary story-telling only by that of David Lynch --, the results of which could still give you the chills, but the technique for which was becoming sadly predictable, and even tedious. Some of the stuff in Consider the Lobster and Oblivion was great, of course. But I remember thinking that maybe I had moved on a bit from Wallace, or maybe he was perilously close to repeating himself, or maybe the warmth, energy and humor that I had found in Girl With Curious Hair and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and his novels was beginning to elude his writerly grasp. The final possibility, at least, would now appear to have been confirmed in spades.

"Wallace was one of the ones who made it." That's how J put it yesterday as we were trying to pin down why the news of his death -- and the nature of his death -- packed such a seismic punch. "He was one of the ones who made it," she said, "but apparently, it didn't seem that way to him." It was more assuring and life affirming than we realize, I think, to know that David Foster Wallace was out there. It meant that one of the good ones made it. And yet, having gotten there, he was still struggling with such pain and such despair that it had become unendurable. We have lost an important ally in the fight against the charlatans and the liars. God damn, Dave, we're going to miss you.

He was 46 years old.