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23 What I know of John Updike is largely by reputation: I read Rabbit Redux while sitting in cozy guard towers throughout the Sinai Peninsula, straining to escape the nagging feeling that I was a negligible cog in the everturning wheel of Americana, yet too jejune to extrapolate anything meaningful from the book. I’ve read a few of his essays, more of his forewords, and seen his name appear in relationship to anthologies and all things literary. In short, I knew he was an eminent American literary figure even before I knew why. He passed away earlier this year, and it was only posthumously I learned of the breadth of his influence because of his prolificacy and stylistic mastery both, and having learned of the significance of his genius in the weeks that followed his death, I was inconsolable in my bereavement: A great man had died, and I had missed the opportunity to chase after that notional intimacy that results from reading an author’s works while they are yet alive. What I know of David Foster Wallace is largely anecdotal: I frequented a Barnes & Noble where a woman who had studied beneath him during his term at Illinois State University introduced me to him by association. I was seduced by her stories of him, and an intimacy developed and blossomed as I read his opus, Infinite Jest. I became a consumer of all things DFW, and his companionship by proxy, the vital force that exerted itself in his prose, accompanied in the ensuing years. When I read of his tragic suicide, I cycled through the stages of grief quickly, disbelieving the words on the page, outraged that the world had failed him when he had offered so much, and wondering if I had only read his most recent release, Oblivion, a bit more closely, would it have made the difference. I was despondent for weeks to follow, plunged into an existential quagmire, if prose did this to a genius like David Foster Wallace, what effect might it have on an amateur like me? I stopped writing, hoping to spare myself his pain, drinking more, reading less, and watching the DFW tomes stare back at me from my bookcase. It is this cross I carry now. Of course I have established that I probably don’t know enough of Updike to say this, and convictions formed in ignorance are always reckless, but I hope you’ll take my meaning: Had DFW survived the rigors of his own dissatisfaction, had he been able to overcome his mental illness, had he been able to linger on as the literary tour de force that he was, David By Kyle Swan Foster Wallace could have been the next John Updike. Sadly, DFW was not able, and this tradition was truncated before ever being realized. In an interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” In so many words, that’s what Wallace’s works were about, the human condition, in all its idiosyncratic glory, from his mind to the page. His was no average mind. At Amherst College, he majored in philosophy with a focus in math and logic. He found the successful completion of proofs to have an aesthetic appeal, relating the experience to what Yeats called “the click of a well-made box”, and from then on, described that experience as the click. At age twenty, his passion for mathematics and philosophy faded, and he floundered. Around that time, he dabbled in writing, and during that fall, between his reading and writing for fun, he discovered “the click” in literature. The rest, as they say, is history. Except that it isn’t, quite. This story is that of a metafictionalist who used metafiction to demonstrate the shortcomings in itself, who took on consumerism and overstimulation, who wrote frenetically, who wrote a story of an artist who literally excreted good art. This is the story of an author who wrote about what it meant to be a human being but did so with such passion, sensitivity, and insight into the condition that he exalted the art to a level it had not been at since the likes of Proust.
“We cool?” Carlos Robson asks the small crowd gathered in the Cabaret after he finishes up his first poem. He may be a poetry slam champion but this young artist makes the audience feel as though they’re listening to a close friend rather than an accomplished performer. Believe it or not Robson is a performer. He mesmerizes the crowd as he sings, stutters, and throws his entire being into his poetry taking on various personas in the process: a heroin addict from Washington D.C., a small boy with special needs, and his grandfather who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder. He slides from one character to the next with ease and never once does he lose the audience. This is the mark of a great storyteller. That’s what Robson says his style is. “I was never very good at the traditional stuff”, he tells me, “I was good at storytelling”. The storytelling style is actually rare, he adds, Buddy Wakefield and I are the only really prominent ones on the scene. I guess that’s one of the things that made Robson stand out when he started slamming in 2005. Robson is from North Carolina and is part of the Concrete Generation, a group of slam poets, there. In the hour he spends with us he shares more information than most people do if they spend an entire day with another person. He tells us how his family came here from Cuba in a bathtub, how he is born of ink, hates to fly, and teaches us about slam poetry. He explains how his coach thinks he should just write without thinking but his usual method is constant rumination of his If you want to experience some slam poetry first hand check out: The Nuyorican Poets Café on 236 East and 3 rd Street (Between Aves. B&C) in NYC. Every Friday night at 10 PM. Admission is $10. topic until he has the entire thing written in his head before he puts pen to paper. He reads us a love poem with the disclaimer that every poet should have at least a few love poems in his repertoire and then tells us it’s trash. It’s far from it. As he speaks I get chills and I can tell the rest of the audience knows they’re in the presence of real talent. I ask him what he wants people to take away from his poetry. “Humanity,” he says, “I want them to see the humanity in each other.” I think he picked the right medium to convey his message. There’s something about spoken word poetry; everything just jumps off the page and you just can’t help but listen. The LAS Poetry Slam in the Cabaret. Watch Marist Students compete in this campus wide competition on April 2 24 nd . Admission is free. By Jennifer Sommer
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