THE PALE KING

I just slept eleven hours and then gorged myself on all the new DFW-related material on the New Yorker website. reading posthumous stuff is becoming a routine experience, one I know well enough to distinguish the various stages - a burst of excitement, and then subsequent melancholy on realizing that there won't be new material forever. I mean, there won't be anything forever, but there is always that weird brush with infinity after reading something posthumous. you do get the sensation on reading a new piece that DFW has once again gotten completely outside of himself and what's already been written. it's the same thing as hearing a new Radiohead album - you just think, this person can do anything. I can think of a few artists who just recreate the last thing they did, and it's like The Last Thing I Did 2.0.

what I am amazed by anew is DFW's total mysteriousness about what he was working on - you don't realize how many gaps there are in your knowledge until you read an article like this one, which stitches together his life and fills in a bunch of holes. like, he made a comment in some article about taking an accounting class way back in the late nineties or something, but that's almost all he said about it. there were bits and pieces for years, but their subjects were so diverse - that one about the kid who has to put his lips on every part of his body (I love this one), the "evil child" piece in Harper's, and "Good People" in the New Yorker, which I was astounded to find out was part of this larger work - that I really didn't think there was any single project being worked on. I think the speculation in the DFW community was that it would involve a series of portraits of children (which may have been another project in the works, but not the big one). turns out he was just really really good at keeping quiet about that stuff.

anyway. this is the most important part, the excerpt from the novel, The Pale King. I'm going to be reading it many times over the next few weeks, but I'm struck, on a superficial level, by the lack of quotation marks and how the dialogue is just streamlined with the rest of the text - just another one of those things that seems so intuitively right and simple and makes me wonder why the hell I didn't think of it - and, though this echoes Gately in IJ, the discrepancy between the hyper-verbal interior state of the ghost versus the relatively pedestrian comprehension of the protagonist (when he hears a word he doesn't know DFW writes him as inventing a string of simple words that it sounds like to him, like "bone after tea").

the deeper and more far-reaching things about boredom, its difficulties and possibilities as the subject of a novel, I probably won't be able to comment on until I read the whole thing (which I have no doubt will come out in some form), but I will reiterate my astonishment that DFW seemed to reinvent himself with every work, and not only on a stylistic level but in his philosophy of life and writing. I am as obsessed with his career arc as I am with the writing itself.