Comments on: Self Defense

By: tothesound » All of these things are right

tothesound » All of these things are right — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:46:39 +0000

[…] I start moving to San Francisco. Three days after I wrote this post everything changed again to prove there’s no point in planning for anything. I’m going […]

By: tothesound

tothesound — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:56:33 +0000

Justin I think that’s probably the least selfish way to read it, and it is better as a defense. The problem I have still is with calling it out, I guess, like if ending a book this way is going to be a strategy to try to lighten whatever darkness is being dealt with, why does he still have to say that he always wanted to end a book with the word mayonnaise. That’s what seems like it’s not about some personal dealing with demons and instead an abrupt and weirdly placed moment of metafiction that serves mostly just to intensify whatever quirk I was willing to ignore throughout the rest of the book. Since this post was ultimately about my inability to escape my own ego and selfishness, though, it is no surprise that I can’t open it up the way you saw it–which I get is not supposed to be an excuse, but at least a forgivable thing. Also that last sentence of your comment is probably the best thing ever written in these pages.

And Peregrine I think you’re right, absolutely, and it explains why I saw it this way (as a futile attempt at control) whereas it could have been the other (therapy, strategic, a fight). I’m afraid I don’t really get what you mean by the ending/beginning comment, unless if you’re meaning that this is supposed to be the end of my being a whiny, worried thing– if that is it, even I don’t know that beginning, but whatever it was it was dumb.

By: Peregrine

Peregrine — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:10:20 +0000

I have a friend who only sometimes claims to have read Infinite Summer, because he did, but barely remembers it, and every now and then he pulls it off a shelf to flip through and is surprised by what he sees. To me, this is significant only because I don’t think art that is about sadness and loneliness is guaranteed to evoke and/or dismiss sadness and loneliness, in the same way that I don’t think quirk is necessarily a weapon or a tool of anything except in terms of an individual and whoever thinks like said individual. And this is one of the many many reasons why writing-as-communication feels like an impossible task to me, but one that resonates personally as more meaningful than writing-as-therapy via mayonnaise.

If this is an ending, I am curious what your beginnings look like.

By: j

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:51:13 +0000

I tried to read that book and the other when I was in college because of their titles mostly especially the one about sugar but I could not get myself past the silliness and quirkiness of them to actually read much, even though I myself was generally a much more silly and quirky person then than now (a more happy one, too). I never knew Brautigan killed himself, though, and to me knowing that he killed himself is kind of a defense against the silliness of the mayonnaise, it makes me feel slightly better about mayonnaise being the stupid and arbitrary ending of a book although I didn’t actually read the book so I could understand how someone like you who actually has might disagree and be pretty pissed off at mayonnaise as an ending, that seems reasonable. To me, knowing that he killed himself slightly redeems the idea of him ending his book with the word mayonnaise, if that doesn’t sound crazy (I know it sounds crazy), not that being sad is an excuse to make bad art, which I don’t think it is, but if someone is so sad that he’s going to kill himself and sooner rather than later, I like that he was maybe trying to use his writing as a strategy to stop this from happening, that maybe he was wielding quirk as a weapon against dark things in his head. A while ago I wrote a fairly long thing for my place about how wrong this infinite summer shit was, how that was a book that was by design supposed to be hard and make you feel lonely and sad and that if you were doing scheduled reading and following a stupid “reader’s guide” and engaging in blogroll circle jerks and that you would not get the effect from the book that you were supposed to get from it, that the author wanted you to get, that is the whole reason you are fucking reading it in the first place. But then I deleted this thing I wrote because I thought, like, maybe it isn’t a good thing to feel as lonely and sad as that book can make you feel or at least made me feel and maybe these people with their stupid online hipster book club have found an answer to the loneliness problem that even somebody as smart as David Foster Wallace couldn’t find before it was too late. Maybe, but I don’t know. To put it another way, sometimes I think it would be good if everybody who has ever written for McSweeney’s.com killed themselves but then I think, fuck, that would be an awful lot of dead people.