Swan Songs

By Josh Corman

What If?

What if John Lennon had been shot in 1969 rather than 1980? What if, just weeks before the release of Abbey Road, the most significant member of the most significant musical group in history had left this world? And what if, instead of leaving behind a fully recorded, mixed, and mastered piece of visionary art, John had struggled to finish some of his compositions. What if only half the vocals had been laid down, or what if he had never quite been satisfied with the guitar on "Come Together?" What would the rest of the group have done? What would the release day for Abbey Road have looked like if fans knew, beyond any doubt, that the last glimpse into John Lennon's genius, moving full steam ahead, would come on October 1st, 1969, and that it really didn't look like what he would have wanted out there?

What a shame it would have been, obviously. It's sad enough when a towering creative figure dies at the end of a long, productive life and career, or even when they die young, but with their best creative days likely behind them. But when a Kurt Cobain or James Dean goes, right at what should be the apex of what they've striven to give the world? We listen to that last record or watch that last film, and we search for something, some flicker of the promise we know we've lost, and it comforts and pains us all at the same time.

The Pedestal

The most fascinating novel ever written about taxes and accounting.

For a number of reasons, I looked forward with near unhinged madness to this year's Spring Break. Besides all the usual perks of a work-free week, I had been saving something very important: David Foster Wallace's final novel, The Pale King. The combination of wild anticipation and anxiousness with which I had looked forward to reading Wallace's final work (he committed suicide in 2008 after a long, troubled battle with depression and addiction) was something that I hadn't experienced since reading the final Harry Potter novel in 2007. In that case, I was only anxious because I wanted so badly to love the story and discover the answers to questions I'd been asking for years. The Pale King brought with it a different layer of emotion. This was the last time I would read a novel by one of my three favorite writers of all time, and knowing you're losing a character doesn't feel nearly as bad as losing an author. I had devoured Wallace's previous two novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest, near the beginning of last year and read one of his two nonfiction collections, Consider the Lobster, the previous Christmas. In the time between reading those works and opening The Pale King, I had watched approximately ten hours of interviews with Wallace, read his Kenyon College Commencement speech, "This is Water," probably fifteen times, and gobbled up every interview, profile, and review I could find written about the man or his work.

This is dangerous behavior. I'd put DFW on a pedestal. Rarely, if ever, does anything good come from putting a writer, musician, actor, or sports star on a pedestal. Creating hopelessly high expectations (especially for a dead person) leads mostly to deflation and letdown because of the narrow pathway it leaves for our idols to tread. Take Cobain as an example (my Verbal Infusion contract requires me to make mention of Nirvana or Kurt Cobain no fewer than twenty times per year; I'm trying to add a few tallies to that ledger). When In Utero came out, a lot of people were disappointed with the record's raw sound, but that disappointment didn't really stem from the quality of In Utero. Rather, it was that In Utero didn't sound enough like Nevermind for many fans' tastes. They had created a Platonic version of Nirvana in their minds, and when In Utero didn't mesh with that narrow conception of what the band should be, they reacted unkindly. History has a way of salving the sting in most instances like this (and it certainly has for Nirvana's second album), but time and again the pedestal effect plays itself out.

And so, having placed The Pale King on a pedestal next to its author, setting aside a week to read it during which I would have plenty of time and focus to spare and essentially creating an environment in which the book could do little but disappoint me, I finally read the thing.

Man, did it hurt. The Pale King is funny, poignant, and philosophical, and it shows flashes of brilliance that even Steinbeck can't match for their harrowing, pummeling pathos. And now, 560 pages later, it's all gone. I knew this ache would come. The effect of feeling, for real, that I would never get to engage with this voice (in this form, at least; Wallace has short fiction collections and one more nonfiction collection that I'm working hard to create pedestals for) in a fresh way again. It doesn't feel like regret, exactly, but it stings in kind of the same way.

The Afterglow


One of the hardest feelings for me to describe to people is that of having just finished a book that you know is going to stick with you for a long time. The words are simultaneously buzzing around in my head, striving to leave a singular impression and quickly fading from memory. What's left is usually just a holistic impression that feels unworthy of the massive effort that you know went into what's been read.

My immediate holistic verdict was one of gratitude and awe. Gratitude because when Wallace died, his editor put a tremendous amount of work into marrying the three hundred or so neatly typed pages that represented the most complete part of The Pale King and then cobbling the rest of it together using found notes, rough drafts, and computer files. The result is, as the cover indicates, unfinished, a word that only adds to the ache I mentioned earlier. The awe I felt wasn't new. The way guitar players are in awe of Hendrix or Morello, poets in awe of Whitman or Eliot, actors in awe of Brando or Lewis, that's the feeling even two or three consecutive DFW sentences make me feel. The fear that "unfinished" meant "lacking quality" vanished pretty quickly. The Pale King met the immense challenge I had set for it, but it made me wonder about what will come next.

David Foster Wallace is my John Lennon (even though John Lennon is also my John Lennon, he was dead five years before I was born, so it doesn't work the same way), my Kurt Cobain, my James Dean. He left behind a few thousand pages, and as I've worked through them, I've thought about this end point often. The way I see it, I've got one of two choices: I can convince myself that finishing Wallace's last novel is tantamount to losing a best friend, develop an unhealthy literary solipsism where I see everything through the DFW lens, thereby ensuring that I hate ninety-five percent of what I read because it doesn't measure up, or I can acknowledge that it's been a hell of a ride, that my twelve pound copy of Infinite Jest isn't going anywhere, and that Wallace will always be there, waiting to be reread and rooting for me to find something that's just as great as he was. Instead of being bummed or even afraid because I've read his every word, I should just appreciate what he gave me and move on.

That second choice is really the only choice for us, if we want to enjoy our favorite pastimes, but I don't know if it's the one we choose most often. If you saw the story in the news about the Tupac Shakur hologram closing out Dr. Dre's set at the Coachella music festival last weekend, you might understand what I mean. Tupac was a titan of his field, to be sure, and for much of the last seventeen years, a lot of hip-hop fans have been hung up on what his loss meant, and what his death cost in terms of his art. It's a callous way to approach the loss of a life, but when we lose an artist, it's hard not to think about their work first, because it's really the only connection we have to them.

The concept of a rapping Tupac hologram is weird, but it's also frightening. Dr. Dre, the man who dreamed up the idea, has said that this is only the beginning for this technology and that there are plans to send the hologram on tour. How long do you think it took for someone to call Yoko Ono's or Courtney Love's agents and pitch the idea of a Beatles or Nirvana reunion. I can only pray that neither one of them would have the audacity to give such a plan the thumb's up, but until I hear a definitive "no," I'm going to be a little nervous. But there are those who might get excited at the prospect. I am afraid of these people.

See, I don't want to be somebody who can't let go. I won't ever read a new David Foster Wallace novel or listen to a new Beatles record or see a new Heath Ledger movie, and I need to be okay with that. Increasingly, I think I am.

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

Ripping Out the Roots

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

We here at Verbal Infusion don't usually post such similar items in such close proximity to one another, but, then again, we here at Verbal Infusion don't always check the site prior to writing said items to be sure that just such a flap is avoided, either. In any case, we're sticking with this whole sports thing because, in all honesty, we just don't get to talk about sports very much on here, and the NCAA Tournament Championship has bought us a little leeway, we'd like to think. Enjoy.

The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.
- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King


When I graduated from high school, I was just entering the beginning stages of what I would term the blooming of my culture tree. I voraciously ingested new bands and filmmakers and authors, and they all became their own burgeoning branches, increasingly heavy with fruit—their as-yet-undiscovered debut albums and esoteric indie films and short-story collections. I couldn't get enough. This was largely by choice, but, after a while, I became a type of automaton, buying albums and movies and books because I couldn't bear the thought of not being completely up to date on the latest trends, even if I didn't really care about the individual pieces of work as I lapped them up.

This lasted until probably a couple of years after I got married. At that point, it became far less justifiable to feed my personal little culture tree for reasons both financial and temporal, and I started doing what I imagine a lot of people entering their mid-twenties do: trimming the culture tree. As much as it pained me to not race out at midnight to buy any more just-released DVDs, I soon came to terms with the change of course and found myself not much worse for wear. As my responsibilities increased, I trimmed the tree to make room for the people and things that needed my more focused attention.

It should be clear from these paragraphs that I am a reasonable person, perfectly capable of making sane, rational decisions, even about excising some of those things which, for a season of my life, I spent a probably inordinate amount of attention on. Let's all agree on that premise, shall we?

Hard to believe, but this picture is to scale.

During this whole tree-trimming period, I briefly turned my attention to sports. I say briefly, because in just about the same moment that I thought about scaling back my sports intake, I realized that it would not so much involve trimming branches as ripping out the roots of my culture tree. See, sports matter to me like very little else in my life, and when people hear a statement like that, they often have one of two reactions. The first reaction is knowing empathy. They nod and start citing sports-related moments from their youth and adolescence that provide much of the context for those times in their lives. These people are lifers, and if you find a lifer that supports the same team or teams that you do, you've probably found a friend who'll be around for a long time (obviously, having this same conversation with someone who supports a different team can render this person instantaneously insufferable).

The second type of reaction is a mixture of incomprehension and near hostility, with a dash of dismissive arrogance thrown in, like someone who took a couple of Spanish classes in high school trying to keep up with native speakers and failing miserably: they resent the people and the language they're speaking. These people, as Nick Hornby noted in his memoir Fever Pitch, simply don't get it, and it's unlikely that they ever will. They view sports as trivial and unworthy of serious consideration. In a world so overflowing with art and politics and fine cuisine and actual strife, sports simply do not warrant their attention.

It goes without saying that these people think of me much as Nick Hornby thinks of them. They would say there's something out of whack with my priorities, that all the energy and attention (and eventually money for heart medication) that I spend on sports is wasted, floating out into nothingness, an investment in a void.

And I'll admit, sometimes I feel like they're right. I mean, I've never thrown Abbey Road on and had Nickelback come out of the speakers, and I've never opened a copy of a Steinbeck novel only to find the text cruelly replaced with Sue Grafton's prose, but the equivalent happens in sports all the time. Fans invest their time and energy and appreciation into a given team or athlete, they feel like that investment will surely be rewarded, only it isn't. The pass falls incomplete, the shot rims out, the ball hits the crossbar (again and again and again, in some cases), and all those people who could have been off sampling a choice cut of steak or soaking in the hammering beauty of Beethoven are brought low by their apparently foolish allegiance to this or that squad of athletes, many of whom don't seem to bear a burden half as heavy as many of their fans. And this happens far more than its inverse. Any sports fan worth their salt has a half-dozen stories of anguish for every moment of championship-induced euphoria (excepting perhaps Yankee and young Manchester United fans). We accept this as part of the odd bargain we make as investors in these volatile, amorphous entities called teams.

But why? It's a fair question, and one I've pondered dozens of times. Hornby says it's an addiction for him. He knows his behavior is not sane, but that Arsenal Football Club simply have their hooks in him, and like a true addict, he needs the fix more than he's bothered by its effects on him. Kurt Vonnegut said we do it because we want our lives to mirror the stories we read, so we build constructs like sports to imbue them with a sense of drama, not worrying about the contrivance.

I don't know the answer, despite having lived out sports fandom as intensely as anybody I know. But I suspect that besides being fun to watch and a reminder of our youths, sports also offer us a few hours at a time when we are connected to other people through something that transcends political leanings, class, race, and any of the other hundred stratifications that make up our culture. This is not a new thought, but I think it strikes most closely to my personal experience. I've heard some argue that such connection is fabricated, that we're all just fools rooting for laundry, and that any meaning imposed upon grown people's performances playing children's games is illusory. It's a cop out to say that anyone making that argument "doesn't get it" (despite how true it is), so I'll try to counter it with something a little more potent.

Tonight, the sports team I have supported more fervently than any other will play for its eighth national championship, its third during my lifetime. When Kentucky tips-off against Kansas, I will transform into an anxiety-ridden ball of sweat, weak knees, muttered profanity, and reckless intensity. But so will millions of other people just like me. People literally around the globe will watch this game. They will cheer with me and sigh with me and no matter the outcome, they will empathize with me. I can think of precious few other things in the world about which the same can be said. Yes, millions have read some of my favorite books, but outside of the few days following the release of, say, a Harry Potter book, they aren't all doing it at the same time, suffering through the same suspense and elation and devastation that I am. Because that's a big part of what sports are: the knowledge that others care about what you care about, the knowledge that you aren't alone.

What DFW said about how we spend our attention is true, and he also said that the reason that art exists is that we are constantly attempting to make ourselves feel less alone, that the reason novels and films and poetry and music speak to people so intensely is that those are the ways in which we assure ourselves that there are other people out there like us, other people who care about the same things and experience the world in roughly the same way that we experience it. That's a wonderful thought, if you ask me, not to mention a true one. I think the same thing can be said of sports. By watching these games and following these teams, we're doing more that just escaping from our lives or killing a couple of hours; we are reaching out, knowing that other people share our joys and our heartaches and our excitement.

And that's a feeling worth chasing. If you need me tonight after 9:30 EST, I'll be running hard after it. Well, me and a few million friends.

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

Hard Work, Great Art: The Radiohead Effect

by Corman

Sometime during my freshman year of college, when my musical curiosity was only just blooming, I illegally downloaded a bunch of Radiohead songs. The band had just released Hail to the Thief, and every music publication and grumpy record store clerk (is there any other kind?) that I consulted was preoccupied with the album and the band that released it, so naturally I became preoccupied with them too. If I liked their stuff, I would support them by purchasing their records. If not, I could erase the files and pretend the whole thing never happened.

At this point, I couldn’t have named a single Radiohead song, so when I started downloading their music, I stuck to the albums that most frequently showed up on the “Best-of” lists in those aforementioned publications: The Bends, OK Computer, and Kid A. I don’t remember the exact point when I actually became afraid of what I heard, but I’ll wager it was somewhere during “Idioteque,” a stuttering electronic spasm of a song that sounded nothing like the blues-based rock I ingested by the gallon in those days.

This? I thought. This is the greatest band of their generation? Who did these guys bribe?

But then, I started to worry. What if it’s me? What if they really are great, but I just don’t “get it?” What am I missing? This sort of self-criticism is, I think, pretty natural any time a work of art is praised and awarded high status but doesn’t resonate personally. At the time, though, I was haunted just trying to figure out which of my reactions was closer to the mark. Were the critics and fans just fooling themselves into crying “classic” because they wanted so badly for it to be true, or were my critical faculties not sophisticated enough to understand what I was listening to?

To be safe, I did what any intellectually astute young man faced with such a quandary would do: I ignored it. I shelved the whole Radiohead experiment, intent on proceeding with my Beatles and my Hendrix and my Pink Floyd.

But, oh, how it gnawed at me. I was pulled time and again back to Radiohead’s music no matter how I resisted, even going so far as to buy copies of a couple of their early, much more listener-friendly albums. They repelled me, then drew me back in, pushed me away and beckoned me again until one day, almost five years after I had first listened to their music, everything fell into its right place. I saw Radiohead in concert during the summer of 2008 and was blown away. It was like I had spent those five years wrestling with a complicated equation, and on that night, I finally solved for X. They played the hell out of every song, even the ones I was less familiar with, the ones that had scared me off years earlier. Suddenly, they just made sense. Part of it was the energy behind the performance (it’s easy to forget with all the electronics that the band actually plays all of those songs), but I think mostly it can’t be qualified.

That performance sparked Radiohead’s ascent to their current status as my favorite active musical artists. I eagerly anticipate the release of every new album and single. I salivate over the rumors of a 2012 U.S. tour. I adore this band and their music.

But all of this came very close to never happening. My initial urge to dismiss the band’s status as a byproduct of the hipster hype machine very nearly won out, and if it hadn’t been for that little niggling urge that drew me back to something I hadn’t originally grasped, it would have. And then where would I be? Who would I be? Does the question seem ridiculous? It shouldn’t, not if you believe that, at least in part, our identities are in some way shaped by the art we love. Or, at least, the types of art we love.

Let me explain. My Radiohead example is just one of many from my life. Often I have encountered albums, novels, films, and even television shows that have taxed and perplexed me. My initial reaction is always, no matter how “sophisticated” I think I’ve become, to push the art away, write it off as pretentious. But the good stuff, just like Radiohead, responds in kind. It calls to me, invites me back, slowly reveals a beauty or poignancy or sharpness that was hidden during our first encounter. Eventually, I had to concede that my first impressions could not be trusted, and while some great art does not require this level of, for lack of a better word, work, all great art rewards our persistent efforts at relating to and interacting with it.

I understand that some don’t see it this way. Many believe that art should meet you where you are, and if it doesn’t speak to you immediately, then that probably means it never will. These people look, like I once did, at what they don’t enjoy or understand (though they are often loath to admit the latter) with disdain, unable to grant even the possibility of value. This view is easier, but it is not best practice.

I don’t mean that we might, if simply enough effort were expended, come to enjoy everything. Our tastes will still direct us to that music and writing and film which resonates with us, but we must rely on more than simple taste. We must be willing to wrestle with and even struggle through difficult, challenging works to mine from them the value within.

The reward, though hard won, is inestimable. The reward is Vertigo and There Will Be Blood, The Brothers Karamazov and Infinite Jest, In Utero and The Age of Adz, The Wire and Twin Peaks. The reward is engaging with some of mankind’s greatest achievements and coming out the other side enriched, fulfilled, and maybe even changed.

I don’t know what’s out there waiting for you, but the only way to find out is to get to work.

Normally, I would end there, but I’d like to invite my fellow Verbal Infusers to take a crack at my central question: How hard should we have to work to appreciate great art?