David Foster Wallace

A new movie is out on David Foster Wallace. It is based on a book that has long been on my 'wanna read' list, "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace" by David Lipsky. The movie is titled "The End of the Tour", based on a leg of Wallace's promotional tour for his big literary hit "Infinite Jest".

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To prepare for the role, Mr. Segel listened to Mr. Lipsky’s recordings exhaustively, watched clip after clip of Wallace online, formed a small book club with friends to go over the 1,079-page “Infinite Jest” in 100-page chunks, and rented a cabin by himself in the California boonies to read undistracted. He had bought the book in a store, and after a plopping it down on the counter, he recalled, the saleswoman rolled her eyes. “She said: ‘ “Infinite Jest.” Every guy I’ve ever dated has an unread copy on his bookshelf,’ ” Mr. Segel recalled. “That experience alone made it worth it.”

-- Cara Buckley, "Jason Segel Makes a Career U-Turn as David Foster Wallace in ‘The End of the Tour’" in The New York Times

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At least I've read about ten-percent of "Jest". The first pages make up one of the funniest reads that I have ever enjoyed. After that, it bogged down for me into a hopeless slog, and I felt that my short life, and hence my limited time to read books, would be better spent elsewhere. I imagine that I might have better luck with Lipsky's book.

The Beginning of the End

I had trouble trying to order an e-book for my Kindle, another confusion due to Pop's own Kindle. I ordered it specifically for mine, but the text was still delivered to his machine. I took it poorly, and I called Pop out of his nap to get his Kindle and to release some frustration and anger. It was not Pop's fault, but ... for me, it was a kind of perfect storm. I had been holding off on ordering this book until after I finished all the chores of grocery week. I was looking upon it as a special little treat to myself. It is a novel, or novella, some fun fiction, a little escapist getaway for me - and then I run into this headache.

The novel was "The Beginning of the End" by Ian Parkinson. It is not destined to become a classic, but it scored with me, though I don't think it will make it to my shelf of 're-readables'. It is about a lonely man that prefers to lose himself in isolation rather than get into the groove of normal social life. Some spice is provided when he gets a mail-order bride on the Internet, a Thai girl, who even gets into the porno business, of which he is not part. He is a Belgian, by the way, a white guy who can live a middle-class lifestyle without a job, as well as get hot Asian chicks. The Thai girl is only an adventure in an other wise low-key novel of a man wasting away. She quickly winds up murdered, and this apparently makes it harder for him to connect with another mail-order woman, so that he is really gone now, lost in himself, untethered from the larger world. He owns some poor beach-front property, and he just sits there, when he is not sleeping, simply watching the ocean. He concludes, "On my last day of life I will sit in the wicker chair watching the sea, the waves rolling gently on to the beach. Each wave like the last. Then nothing." I could identify, even though I could only rent an Asian girl by the hour, and instead of the waves of the sea, I only have the ebb and flow of the days.