I read with great interest David Foster Wallace: The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and The Shrub. Just as I read a number of David Foster Wallace things recently. I don’t know why his death was especially frightening and sad, but it was. Perhaps moreso for writers, for if he with his industrial-strength talent and his ability to nail a thing it never crossed your mind could be nailed … Binding an existential wound you didn’t know could be bound …
It’s true, his writing plugged some of the holes through which leaks one’s vital matter, source of so much agony in life. Which suggests that pain is retrospective, and it probably mostly is. The courage to tolerate being in less pain, the wherewithal to live in full awareness what you suffered in the past… Perhaps this happened to David Foster Wallace. Perhaps he died of happiness.
Hard to excerpt from a DFW piece, as you can imagine, but I really wanted to talk about Cindy. It occured to me, she is, probably, and probably always has been, an abused woman.
Another kind of captivity. Something binds them: her guilt, his temper. There is nothing so binding as the secrecy of abuse. Not that I want to go there, but neither do we want this woman as First Lady. I fear it would kill her. Perhaps kill them both.
Rolling Stone, April 2000: Behind the buses’ digestive areas is another couch-intensive section, in which right now Mrs. McCain’s personal assistant on the Trail, Wendy … is using her cellphone to try to find someplace in downtown Charleston where Mrs. McCain can get her nails done.
… Mrs. McC.’s sedulous attention to her own person’s dress and grooming is already a minor legend among the press corps, and some of the techs speculate that stuff like getting her nails and hair done, together with being almost Siametically attached to Ms. Lisa Graham Keegan (who is Arizona’s Education Superintendent and supposedly traveling with the Senator as his “Adviser on Issues Affecting Education” but is quite obviously really along because she’s Cindy McCain’s friend and confidante and the only person in whose presence Mrs. McC. doesn’t look like a jacklighted deer), are the only things keeping this extremely fragile person together on the Trail, where she’s required to stand under hot lights next to McCain at every speech … and stare into the middle distance …
Eight years ago, people. Before McCain lost his mind—and, apparently, his soul.
The current Rolling Stone has, of course, the scorched-earth version , and it’s hard to disbelieve a single word. As Saul Bellow so famously titled his last work, It All Adds Up.
None so blind. I figure that what the American public sees, when they look at McCain in the debate, as well as what they hear—is what they themselves want to see and hear.
Whereas Barack Obama has something to tell. His words carry meaning, little packages of sense for the ear to take in, the mind to unwrap.
That’s a b-i-i-i-i-g bitchen divide.
