The Pale King

True Story: In my sophomore/1st junior year of college, I took an upper-level photography class. I had taken the intro course, learned the nuts and bolts, and decided to continue on, in the hopes of getting laid. Because that’s what art is for.

Second year, my classmates became significantly distilled. Earlier, we were just a disparate group of people, basically paying to be taught a hobby. Now we had weeded out the tourists, and everyone’s artistic personalities were allowed to flourish, for better or for worse.

It was a colorful bunch, most notably the guy I thought of as ‘Dark Jimmy’. He had the brooding artist rap down cold. I remember him to be quietly intense, always jotting down notes about f-stops and who knows what in his stupid moleskine (full disclosure: I like moleskines now. Back then, my 19-year old skate punk brain was like, ‘Ugh. Get a legal pad, faggot.’). He was one of those people that instantly annoyed me based on nothing more than the way his face worked, and I never found reason to think otherwise. Vindication came with our first portfolio assignment. This guy’s turn comes up, and he sets up a series of black and white photos of cold cuts, arranged to look like vaginas, nailed to pieces of driftwood. He tucked some hair behind his ear while half-muttering some lame justification about feminism and commercialization and other bullshit he made up, and while our professor nodded in acceptance, the class dominatrix (yup) gathered her photos of herself in Victorian dress posing in a cemetery (yup),  walked up to Dark Jimmy, said ‘fuck you’, spit on one of his photos, and walked out.

Years later, I would see a photo of David Foster Wallace for the first time and be struck by his resemblance to Dark Jimmy. The same stringy long hair wrapped in a ridiculous doo-rag. The same wire frame glasses. Basically, the whole stupid face complete with that awful week-beard. Far be it from me to hold one man accountable for another man’s terrible taste and lack of ability, but… I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.

I have tried to understand why everyone has such a hard on for Wallace, oh Lord how I have tried! My experience in trying to read Infinite Jest was as though Wallace was jacking off the English language and blasting me in the face with 1100+ pages of word jizz. I thought perhaps I was biting off more than I could chew, and an earlier book would prove to be the Rosetta stone I needed to understand just what the hell this goofball was saying. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men had its’ moments, but on the whole, seemed no less indulgent or incomprehensible. I’m just not part of the tribe.

It seems like Wallace is the sort of author ‘kind of’ smart people like, because he provides them with the illusion of being ‘very’ smart. The same way certain dudes listen exclusively to Captain Beefheart demos, or the entire concept of molecular gastronomy, Wallace’s books have the effect of creating a wholly separate plane of cultural elitism wherein you don’t enjoy so much as you accumulate XP. It’s just another example of this bullshit intellectual brinkmanship that’s ultimately responsible for creating authors like Wallace and his post-mortem, Mad-Libs-in-a-duffle-bag book and its’ Jonestown jack-off cult of apologists. It’s a vicious circle that has metastasized into a self-sustaining organism that has apparently learned how to cheat death, Wyld Stallyns-style.

My wife (rapidly becoming my favorite critic) put it wonderfully: “I majored in literature. I’ve read a lot of great literature by great authors. This (Wallace) ain’t it.” Seventeen words, cutting through the bullshit like a diamond made out of lasers. And here it’s taken me just over six-hundred just to tell you I’ll never read The Pale King.

Wakka Wakka. You ass.

SCORE: The Pale King gets a 0 out of 5, based on purely moral grounds.