Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library

DFW on Kafka

i think self-help will have to be put on the way-side for now: but it clearly will resurface as an issue in the not-to-distant future.

We were thinking after our somewhat paltry meeting last night which at-least included old fashioneds and candle-light that it might be interesting to read together:

Lucretius' De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things)

Emerson's Nature

We were also thinking of examining the two books already read more closely; I have wanted to read Emerson's Nature anyway: which is under 150 pages; the Lucretius looks quite hefty: i would suggest if this is undertaken we should only read book 1 for the first discussion... Machiavelli copied out the poem (which is upwards of 300 pages) in his youth.

We also threw around the idea of reading Susan Sontag's diaries Reborn which I read this summer alongside Agnes Martin because their approaches to self-hood or how to direct ones aspirations are quite different; of course Agnes Martin's writings are meant for an audience and any diary reveals vulnerabilities even if she imagined her lovers occasionally stealing glances at her words.

Part of my interest in this book-club generally was to read books, examine how the reading of them affects me, and look to others to see how they've been affected: how the books have been used. I hated reading How to Win Friends and Influence People (which I did not finish) although I did see myself loosely following some of he prescriptions: but I could only really follow them if I thought about following them every-day or there was a religious consistency to my reaching for the book to glean advice from it. I taped on my mirror, as prescribed:

"I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again." I wonder whether Carnegie had this taped up in his mirror actually or whether he just wrote that he did; as Machiavelli writes from XVIII How a Prince should keep his word:

"How praiseworthy it is for a prince to keep his word and to live with integrity and not by cunning, everyone knows. Nevertheless, one sees from experience in our times that the princes who have accomplished great deeds are those who have thought little about keeping faith and who have known how cunningly to manipulate men's minds; and in the end they have surpassed

those who laid their foundations upon sincerity." (my translation: p. 60; Becky's would employ more flowery language)

I suppose my taping was not quite sincere... and the mirror I have now is quite gaudy (I haven't had it for very long) and it's gaudiness became distasteful to me because my room isn't incredibly large so I had to take it down... and wasn't really planning on reading the phrase each day anyway: even if it in effect is an effort at sublimating narcissism. My approach to reading Carnegie was double-edged: to what degree am I going to dupe myself into following the poorly written text filled with quite believable and legitimate anecdotes and factual stories from the lives of Lincoln among others and to what degree am I going to separate myself from the purported need for such texts: return to an insular reliance on the musings of my mind? To what degree would it be better to conscientiously follow the 10 Commandments which I suppose in my childhood I never really even digested beyond their being handed down by authority figures and hardly reinforced than to follow Carnegie's prescriptions which while they emphasize sincerity to a degree and some notion of moral-underpinnings combine this confusingly with an equal emphasis on self-gain/capitalist achievement and success.

[to be continued... caught off]

From Agnes Martin's writings.. What we do not see if we do not see... p. 119:

"It is hard for your mind to get through to you because of the jumble it is in.

With seeing the direction the energy necessary to carry out the action is given. When it is carried out the energy is taken away so that you can rest.

If you feel tired it is because you cannot see.

If you cannot see the next step you will take and the happiness you will know taking it. Then you cannot see.

If you cannot see you must withdraw yourself till you see what your next action will be.

In confusion and blindness there is no help for you anywhere except from your own mind.

From your own mind there is all the help you need."

Cicero: DE OFFICIIS

Maureen Dowd op-ed

charlie rose ralph lauren interview from 1993

DFW Infinite Jest p. 157

"Jim, Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations' relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them. No? Well it was because of Brando you were opening that garage door like that, Jimbo. The disrespect gets learned and passed on. Passed down. You'll know Brando when you watch him, and you'll have learned to fear him. Brando, Jim, Jesus, B-r-a-n-d-o. Brando the new archetypal tough-guy rebel and slob type, leaning back on his chair's rear legs, coming crooked through doorways, slouching against everything in sight, trying to dominate objects, showing no artful respect or care, yanking things toward him like a moody child and using them up and tossing them crudely aside so they miss the wastebasket and just lie there, ill-used."

BOOK-CLUB meeting time now changed to October 10th at 5:00 pm.... sorry for changing so much but i'll be busy next sunday afternoon...
will be sending out an email-reminder too

I sadly keep coming up with book ideas instead of actually delving further into anything... thus:

Kierkegaard "The balance between the esthetic and the ethical in the development of the personality" from Either/Or

a taste from just a few pages in: (it's written in the form of a letter.. an older man to a younger man... Kierkegaard using these two created positions without aligning himself with either)

"Life is a masquerade, you explain, and for you this is inexhaustible material for amusement, and as yet no one has succeeded in knowing you, for every disclosure is always a deception. Only in this way can you breathe and prevent people from crowding too close upon you and making it difficult for you to breathe. Your occupation consists in preserving your hiding place, and you are successful, for your mask is the most enigmatical of all; that is, you are a nonentity and are something only in relation to others, and what you are you are only through this relation..."

Berlusconi's Machiavellian Moment

more book ideas... (the top two pulled from the new yorker article; The Secret can be on the table too although I've always had a bit of distaste in my mouth when thinking about it... and the article actually killed some of my excitement too... reading about Barbara Ehrenreich's take on things (she wrote Bright-Sided: How positive thinking is undermining America)):

Emerson Nature (essay published anonymously in 1836)

Wallace D. Watts The Science of Getting Rich 1910

memoirs...

some of Agnes Martin's writings would be great to read in conjunction with something else

New Yorker article on Rhonda Byrnes who wrote The Secret

First Meeting: (October 2nd)

Machiavelli's The Prince and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People

C.N. towards a metalanguage of evil quote (written 1992):
"There is a meta-game available for use in the United States. The rules of the game, or even that there is a game at all, are hidden to some. The uninitiated are called naive, provincial, liars or suckers...
"Tabloids already make use of many of the game's tactics by foreshortening and cropping celebrities, blowing them up, and, in the case of National Enquirer television commercials, reducing them to photo-objects and then animating these objects. These papers regularly publish little bits of the rules gleaned from popular psychology books about how to manipulate people. These books have their genesis in the old warhorse, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, whose own primogenitor is The Prince by Machiavelli..."

Thus we're given a good starting point for reading both of these... whether you have in mind while reading how to "help" yourself win friends and influence people or are reading with analytic twinges of irony or a more historical perspective... If anyone wishes to focus on Cady Noland's text in particular then please do and I'm thinking I may create a comments-blog once I've started reading... throughout (in broad terms) I will be thinking about what kind of audience each text is directed towards, the specific historical context of this audience, how this audience/ the way in which the books are read or used has changed, and (of course) what kind of guidance I glean from them... I may also research people who site them as particularly influential books in their personal progressions..

A tip from Carnegie to be applied to both....:
"If you want to get a real, lasting benefit out of this book, don't imagine that skimming through it once will suffice. After reading it thoroughly, you ought to spend a few hours reviewing it every month. Keep it on your desk in front of you every day. Glance through it often. Keep constantly impressing yourself with the rich possibilities for improvement that still lie in the offing. Remember that the use of these principles can be made habitual only by a constant and vigorous campaign of review and application. There is no other way."

Possible and random book ideas: (not yet knowing what the trajectory of the group will be.... as some of these seem much more texts from the western canon and the others the more or less serious materializations of 20th and 21st century life; it's a good juxtaposition though)

Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus w/ Samuel Becket's Endgame
Shakespeare's Hamlet w/ Greg Behrendt's He's Just Not That Into You
The Andy Warhol Diaries w/ Joseph Murphy's Think Yourself Rich
Free to be You and Me w/ Sex for One
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations
What color is your parachute
Vonegut's mother night
General strange how-to-become-books (how to become an alien, how to become a good dancer) rife with diagrams
the self-help books that make you feel embarrassed in bookstores