Interpolation: Is “The Entertainment” on the horizon?

Watching TV last night, I was dumbstruck by this commercial for “The Hopper,” a DVR device and service that allows viewers to record up to 2000 hours of programming. 2000 hours! That’s 83 days’ – almost two full months – worth of viewing.

Wallace imagined a video so enthralling that the viewer couldn’t take his/her eyes off of it and would literally die from The Entertainment. With this new device, we don’t need some highly addictive video to keep our eyes glued to the screen. Instead we can watch whatever we want. For 2000 hours.

Are we one step closer to truly entertaining ourselves to death?

I lived Chapter 25, or I served as an AP exam reader

I have a new deeply felt appreciation for the term “mind-numbing boredom.”

About six months ago, I received word that my application to be an AP exam reader had been accepted, and I shortly thereafter booked my flight and hotel for the weeklong reading in Louisville, Kentucky. Then a few weeks ago, as my school year came to an end and before the ink on the diplomas was even dry, I was on a plane to Louisville.

We began at precisely 0800h in an enormous conference room subdivided into three separate reading rooms. Each reading room went through an extensive calibration process: reviewing the essay rubrics, reading and discussing sample essays, reading and discussing more sample essays until all 3000 readers were on the same page, so to speak, capable of giving an accurate score to each essay they would read. Ready for the task of scoring some 440,000 exams.

Approximately forty tables filled each reading room. Five rows of eight tables each. Eight readers and a Table Leader at each table. Several number two pencils and a College Board-approved eraser at each reader’s spot. Three or four candy dishes in the middle of each table filled with M&M’s or Starbursts or Red Vine Licorice. The Question Leader sat alone at a table on an elevated platform at the front of the room.  No clocks anywhere in the entire room.

E– turned a page. A– raised her folder in the air to get the attention of a aide to bring her a new folder. V– stood to stretch her legs while opening a new test booklet. I bubbled in a score. A– reader at another table coughed loudly.  A yawn proceeds across one row by unconscious influence.  T– flagged a booklet with a sticky note for the Table Leader to double check. F– turned a page. E– turned a page. A– grabbed a handful of M&M’s from the bowl in the middle of the table. F– sniffed loudly, attempting to clear her plugged sinuses. T– turned a page. V– bubbled in a score. I turned a page. The Table Leader brought a booklet back to T– to discuss the essay in question.  Ambient room temperature 62° F. F– put on her sweater and zipped it all the way up.  A– turned a page. V– sat back down.  Most sit up straight but lean forward at the waist, which reduces neck fatigue.  A scooting chair echoed through the room.

The Question Leader sounded his duck call to get our attention. “Good work. Enjoy your break. Be back in 15 minutes.”

Long lines formed at the coffee stations and at the restrooms.

The duck call summoned everybody back to the table to work. T– turned a page. F– turned a page. E– reached down for her water bottle on the floor.  The slow squeak of the cart boy’s cart at the back of the room. V– turned a page. I raised my folder in the air to trade with an aide for a new one. V– cleared her throat.  Some with their chin in their hand.  A– turned a page. T– bubbled in a score. E– turned a page. A sneeze could be heard from some far corner of the room. F– raised her folder.  Exterior temperature/humidity 96°/74%.  The Table Leader took an essay booklet to the Question Leader for a second opinion. F– turned a page. I bubbled in a score.

Every love story is a ghost story.

Seven days, eight hours each day. A fifteen minute break in the morning. An hour for lunch. Another fifteen minute break in the afternoon. Fifty-six hours of reading and scoring essays. Some 900+ essays were placed in front of me.

Nearly eight hours in the air and over two hours of layovers to get home. Screaming children on the plane with over-indulging parents. Congested freeways made the drive home longer than it should have been.

And I eagerly await for my invitation to return next year.

The Pale King – Chapter 14

Dear Dave,

Last April I shared a special moment with a handful of Wallace-l listers at Skylight Books in Hollywood.  To celebrate the release of The Pale King we took turns reading our favorite passages from our favorite of your books.  We shared laughs and smiles as we heard excerpts from Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews, A Supposedly Fun Thing, even Everything and More.  Then to close the party, one of the hosts read from §14 of The Pale King, the brief interview in which the nameless narrator tells of the play he wants to write.

He[1] describes it as “a totally real, true-to-life play.  It would be unperformable, that was part of the point” (106).  It’s about an IRS wiggler going over tax returns.  “He sits there longer and longer until the audience gets more and more bored and restless, and finally they start leaving, first just a few and then the whole audience, whispering to each other how boring and terrible the play is.  Then once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start” (106).

Reflecting on this passage – one of the many gems in this great unfinished work – in light of my reading and rereading of the novel and the many discussions I have had about the book, it seems to me that this single page is perhaps one of the best summaries of the entire novel.  This unwritten play in which the wiggler just sits there and nothing really happens is a sort of microcosm of the rest of the book.  The novel is all back story and set-up with no real payoff.[2]  Like the fictional audience, we’re waiting and waiting for something to happen, but it never does.[3]

Further reflection got me to thinking about how if this play is a sort of microcosm of the novel, then perhaps the novel is a sort of microcosm of the human experience.  Isn’t most of life just a lot of waiting around for something to happen?  As you say in “This is Water,” “There happen to be whole large parts of American life that… involve boredom, routine, and petty frustration” (64-65).  Like the audience, we wait and wait and nothing happens, and we get restless, and we get up and move on to other things.

It’s like that borderline-cliché John Lennon line that says, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”[4]  We get antsy and bored and frustrated with the “day-in-day-out” of adult life and don’t realize the things right in front of us that we’re missing out on.  Like the fish in the “didactic little parable-ish story,” we are left asking, “What the hell is water?”

There is so much more to the play, there is so much more to the novel, and there is so much more to our human experience if we will just pause long enough to take notice.

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[1] The nameless narrator, #917229047, is also genderless, but I’m going to use the third person male pronoun here for simplicity’s sake.  I hope everyone’s ok with that.

[2] There’s plenty of payoff in a literary and aesthetic sense, but not so much in terms of plot.  We read about where everyone comes from and how and why they enlisted in the Service, but the story doesn’t really go anywhere after that.  It seems more of a character study and thematic exploration than it does your typical plot-driven novel.

[3] In Antwerp, during our many post-conference-proceedings discussions while enjoying a wide variety of delicious Belgian beers, I posited once or twice that I wonder if the novel was really finishable.  Tragic death aside, is this a story that could be finished?  Can a novel about mind-numbing boredom ever be brought to a conclusion?  If so, what would that ending look like?  Like the play, is the novel “unperformable”?

[4] Well not exactly like it, but kinda close.