/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.7415498]

Has anyone read Church Not Made With Hands by DFW? It's from BIWHM, and it's perhaps the most compelling story in the collection, imo, which can be found via torrent if you're so inclined to join this dicussion and haven't read it (it's very short).

It seems to be about redemption and faith wrapped up in a dense, poetic language and there's a lot of elements of linguistic deconstruction taking place, I'm wondering what critical lens would be best to view this with- something along the lines of Derrida or Heideggar?

[Anonymous No.7415507]

just read it senpai

[Anonymous No.7415531]

>still have trouble reading the interviews themselves
what's the point

[Anonymous No.7415680]

>>7415507
I've read it about 10 times now. Very slowly. It's quite dense but I find new rewards each time I visit it.

>>7415531
>>still have trouble reading the interviews themselves
How so anon, maybe I can help? I've read em all and studied quite thoroughly

[Anonymous No.7415689]

>>7415531
How? The Interviews themselves are pretty easy to digest.

Unless you just really hate DFW's style, which is understandable.

[Anonymous No.7415711]

>>7415689
>Unless you just really hate DFW's style, which is understandable.
this, i love the guy and his interviews but his prose is fucking garbage.

[Anonymous No.7415752]

have you ever read a review that so wholly misses the point of a book family?
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/01/books/books-of-the-times-calling-them-misogynists-would-be-too-kind.html

[Anonymous No.7415760]

>>7415752
I wonder if this is Michiko Kakutani
It is

[Anonymous No.7415776]

>>7415752
>talking shit about forever overhead

10/10 IM MAD AS HELL

[Anonymous No.7416016]

>>7415752
>It is unclear just what point Mr. Wallace wants to make with these boring, repetitious and frequently repellent profiles, aside from the obvious one of examining the ways in which men can take advantage of women
>let me just point out the obvious and claim that's it
Has this reveiwer taken English 100? It reads like a 9th grade analysis, doing book reviews for NYT no less. Nepotism or something?

One thing I'm wondering specifically abt the story is the name of "Day" the main character.
Is it a metonym for David? Is there any relation? Are we just supposed to think in broad strokes with a character that sound like "archetypal human/day-night cycle of the planet"

Also, would rank the oeuvre
>Oblivion
>Brief Interviews
>Broom
>Pale King
>IJ
>consider the lobster
>everything and more
>girl with curious hair
>kenyon commencement speech packaged and marketed for profit after his death even tho he never put it to writing
>Oblivion

[Anonymous No.7416146]

CHURCH NOT MADE WITH HANDS

(for E. Shofstahl, 1977–1987)

ART

Drawn lids one screen of skin, dreampaintings move across Day’s colored dark. Tonight, in a lapse unfluttered by time, he travels what seems to be back. Shrinking, smoother, loses his belly and faint acne scars. Bird-boned gangle; bowl haircut and cup-handle ears; skin sucks hair, nose recedes into face; he swaddles in his pants and then curls, pink and mute and smaller until he feels himself split into something that wriggles and something that spins. Nothing stretches tight across everything else. A black point rotates. The point breaks open, jagged. His soul sails toward one color.

Birds, gray light. Day opens one eye. He is lying half off the bed Sarah breathes in. He sees the windows parallelograms, from the angle.

Day stands at a square window with a cup of something hot. A dead Cezanne does this August sunrise in any-angled smears of clouded red, a blue that darkles. A Berkshire’s shadow retreats toward one blunt nipple: fire.

Sarah comes awake at the slightest touch. They lie open-eyed and silent, brightening under a sheet. Doves work the morning, sound from the belly. The sheet’s printed pattern fades from Sarah’s skin.

Sarah pins her hair for morning mass. Day packs another case for Esther. Dresses himself. He fails to find a shoe. On the big bed’s edge, one shoe on, he watches cotton dust rotate through the butteryellow columns of a morning that gets later.

BLACK ART

That day he buys them a janitor’s broom. He sweeps rainwater off the tarp over Sarah’s pool.

That night Sarah stays with Esther. Touches metal all night. Day sleeps alone.

Day stands at a black window in Sarah’s bedroom. Over Massachusetts the sky is smeared with stars. The stars move slowly across the glass.

That day he goes to Esther with Sarah. Esther’s bed’s steel gleams in the bright room. Esther smiles dully as Day reads about giants.

“I am a giant,” he reads: “I am a giant, a mountain, a planet. Everything else is far off below. My footprints are counties, my shadow a time zone. I watch from high windows. I wash in high clouds.”

“I am a giant,” Esther tries to say.

Sarah, allergic, sneezes.

Day: “Yes.”

BLACK AND WHITE

‘All true art is music’ (a different teacher). ‘The visual arts are but one corner of true music’s allcomprising room’ (ibid.)

Music discloses itself as a relation between one key and two notes locked by the key in dance. Rhythm. And in Day’s blown predreams, too, music consumes all law: what is most solid discloses itself here as rhythms, nothing but. Rhythms are relations between what you believe and

[Anonymous No.7416149]

>>7416146
what you believed before.
The cleric appears tonight in monochrome and collar.

Bless me

Do you take this woman Sarah

To be my

How long

For I have

since your last confession to a body with the power to absolve. Confession need

As I those who have swimmed against me

not entail absolution, lay bare, confession in the absence of awareness of sin,

Bless me father for there can be no awareness of sin without awareness of transgression without awareness of limit

Full of Grace

no such animal. Pray together for a revelation of limit

Red clouds in Warhol’s coffee

arrange in yourself an awareness of.

ONE COLOR

That day he is back at work’s first week. Sunlight reverses HEALTH pink through the windshield’s sticker. Day drives the county car past a factory.

“Habla Espanol?” Eric Yang asks from the passenger’s side.

Smoke from a smokestack hangs jagged as Day nods his head.

“You wanted to be shown ropes,” Yang says. His eyes are closed as he rotates. “I’ll show you a rope. Habla?”

“Yes,” Day says. “Hablo.”

They drive past homes.

Eric Yang’s special talent is the mental rotation of three-dimensional objects.

“This case speaks only Spanish,” Yang says. “Lady’s son got himself killed last month. In their apartment. Nasty. Sixteen. Gang thing, drug thing. Big area of the kid’s blood on her kitchen floor.”

They drive past hard hats and jackhammers.

“She says it’s all she’s got left of him!” Yang shouts. “She won’t let us clean it up. She says it’s him,” he says.

Mental rotation is Yang’s hobby. He is a certified counselor and caseworker.

“Your job today,” Yang twirls an imaginary rope, lassoes something mental on the dashboard, “is to get her to draw him. Even just the blood. Ndiawar said he didn’t care which. Just so she has a picture he said. So we can maybe clean up the blood.”

[Anonymous No.7416155]

In the rearview, past himself, Day can see his case of supplies on the back seat. It’s not supposed to be in the sun.

“Make her draw him,” Yang says, releasing a rope Day can’t see. Yang closes his eyes again. “I’m going to try to rotate this month’s phone bill.”

Day passes a white van. Its windows are tinted. Saucers of rust on the side.

“Today we see the poor lady who loves blood and the rich man who begs for time.”

“Old teacher of mine. I told Ndiawar.” Day checks his left. “Art teacher in a former life.”

“The nuisance in the public, Ndiawar calls him,” Yang says. He furrows, concentrating. “I’m rotating the duty log. We’re going to go right by him. He’s right on the way. But he’s not first on the log.” “He was a teacher of mine,” Day says again. “I had him in school.” “We go by the log.” “He influenced me. My work.”

They pass a dry lot.

ART

Tonight, at the window, under stars that refuse to move, Day nearly makes it and dreampaints awake.

He paints it so that he’s standing on the pool’s baggy tarpaulin when he rises into the lunchtime sky. He ascends without weight, neither pulled from above nor pushed from below, one perfect line to a point in the sky overhead. Mountains sit blunt, humidity curls in the valleys like gauze. Holyoke and then Springfield and Chicopee and Longmeadow and Hadley are dull misshapen coins.

Day rises into the sky. The air gets more and more blue. Something in the sky blinks, and he’s gone.

“Colors,” he says to the screen’s black lattice.

The screen breathes mint.

“She complains I turn colors in my sleep,” Day says.

“Something understands,” breathes the screen, “surely.”

Knees sore, Day jangles pockets with his hands. So many coins.

TWO COLORS

Blue-eyed behind his County Mental Health Director’s desk, Dr. Ndiawar is a darkly bald man of vague alien status. He likes to make a steeple with his hands and to look at it while he speaks.

“You paint,” he says. “As a student, there was sculpture. You took psychology.” He looks up. “In large amounts? You speak languages?”

Day’s slow nod produces a dot of reflected office light on Ndiawar’s scalp. Day births the dot and kills it. The Director’s desk is large and strangely clean. Day’s c.v. looks tiny against its expanse.

“There are doubts,” Ndiawar says, “which I have in my mind.” He broadens the hands’ angle slightly. “There is not money in it.”

[Anonymous No.7416158]

“There are doubts,” Ndiawar says, “which I have in my mind.” He broadens the hands’ angle slightly. “There is not money in it.”

Day gives the dot two brief lives.

“However you state there are independent means, through marriage, for you.”

“And shows,” Day says quietly. “Sales.” A scarlet lie.

“You sell art you make in the past, you have stated,” Ndiawar says. Eric Yang is tall, late twenties, with long hair and muddy eyes that close and open instead of blink.

Day shakes Yang’s hand. “How do you do.”

“Surprisingly well.”

Ndiawar is bent to an open drawer. “Your new art therapy person,” he says to Yang.

Yang looks Day in the eye. “Look, man,” he says. “I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally.”
“You and you, part-time, become a field team who travel crossward throughout the county and environs,” Ndiawar reads to Day from something prepared. Both hands hold the page. “Yang is senior as, together, you visit the shut-ins. The very badly off. The no room for them here.”
“It’s a talent I have,” Yang says, combing his bangs with four fingers. “I close my eyes and form a perfect detailed image of any object. From any angle. Then I rotate it.”

“You visit the prepared log’s schedule of shut-ins,” Ndiawar reads. “Yang, who is senior, counsels these badly off people, while you encourage, through skill, them to express disordered feelings through artistic acts.”

“I can see textures and imperfections and the play of light and shadow on the objects I rotate, too,” Yang says. He is making small hand gestures that do not seem to signify anything in particular. “It’s a very private talent.” He looks to Ndiawar. “I just want to be up front with the guy.”
Dr. Ndiawar ignores Yang. “Influencing them to direct aberrant or dysfunctioning affect onto things which they artistically make,” he reads in a monotone. “On objects which cannot be harmed. This is a fieldmodel of intervention. Such as clay, which as an object is good.”

“I’m practically an MD,” Yang says, tamping a cigarette on his knuckle.
The steeple reappears as Ndiawar leans back. “Yang is a caseworker who consumes medication. However he is cheap, and has in that chest of his a good heart…”

Yang stares at the Director. “What medication?”

“… which goes out toward others.”

Day stands. “I need to know when I start.”

Ndiawar extends both hands. “Buy clay.”

Sarah walks Day to the pool on the night before Esther gets hurt. She asks Day to touch water that’s lit from below by lamps in the tile. He can see the center drain and what it does to the water around it. The water is so blue it even feels blue, he says.
She asks him to immerse himself in the shallow end.

[Anonymous No.7416162]

Story right here (halfway down page)

http://mreadz.com/new/index.php?id=367714&pages=36

[Anonymous No.7417344]

>>7416162
bump