Author's Note
The initial idea for this story began awhile ago, well before its direct inspiration (namely, a conversation with an acquaintace on a rather apocalyptic Philippine new year's day).
I'd been wanting to write--had that creative itch every artist feels from time to time--and while I had a few story-worthy vignettes in mind, nothing was quite right. And I needed the right narrative form. For me, neither subject matter nor form follows the other; an interplay between the two determines both. I'd test-driven candidates, mostly unforgivable derivatives of the lit I'd been reading. I'd been impressed by Dybek's "Paper Lantern" and its telescoping nature (I borrow/credit the term from/to Z.Z. Packer, a student of Dybek's) as well as its journey from the imaginary to the real (not in a Lacanian sense), an effect which might be called "reverse defamiliarisation." I conceived variations for my own story: a series of chronological but thematically unrelated and non-Freytagian events with an initially absurd or at least fantastical premise (e.g., a paper-pusher employed in the Ministry of Literary Destruction, a conversation between two astronaut lovers on an improbably named space station, etc.). But. But but but! Simultaneously--and in direct opposition to the above--I was being seduced by the narrative arc of a protagonist's "slow decline," a phrase that had seemed to bombard me from all sides leading up to the actual composition of the piece, once uttered by Anne Enright (disclaimer: I may be misremembering her words but the idea was there) when she described Cheever's protagonist in "The Swimmer", an idea echoed verbatim in that conversation the following apocalyptic day (my acquaintance referenced a DFW story about a father speaking to his son (I forget the title but I believe it is in the collection Oblivion (anyway: his use of the words "slow decline" probably stuck with me because it had been the title of a song by a friend's band (name: "The Disband") a song which I had used, years before, as the soundtrack for a short film about nostalgia))). Given the final form, I guess it's obvious I'd also been thinking about restricted narrative (which I'd recently read in Ishiguro's "A Village After Dark" and Barthelme's "Concerning the Bodyguard" (the latter of which I'd already imitated, poorly, in a story called "Concerning the Pedicab Driver")). Restriction. Omission. I've always held these effects crucial for the short story (nod to Hemingway on down to Carver). In my story, this effect is pure necessity to the very content (note the paragraph about the chiaroscuro sketch, which the protagonist's companion mentions in passing (side note: sketching is an infrequent but engrossing hobby of mine, and the very idea of pure black and white fascinates me because of the way the brain is able to fill in the gaps, make meaning out of a nonsense of lines and shapes that, when examined up close, bear no resemblance to the real world but when taken wholely and at a distance allow the brain to make meaning)). One clarification, which readers seem to constantly miss: in the subsequent paragraph, the exclamation by the protagonist's companion--"Everything is a Rhorshach test!"--it is misinterpreted by the protagonist as genuine (a nonsense statement whose absurdity the protagonist's companion confirms with the equally preposterous follow-up: "But there are some things more important than meaning" (again lost on the protagonist, though I like to think the companion believes the protagonist recognizes the preposterousness and nods along in implicature, not wanting the companion to lose face)). Conflicting aesthetics, man! Believe it or not, an early draft of the story took (intentionally, intentionally!) an elasticity--transitioning between a multiplicity of forms (I suppose I was remembering Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, the author-proxy whose various literary works are recounted in summary-fashion at various points within real narrative). As any thorough author would, I'd postulated this form to its logical limit: imagine an entire novel made up of incidentals--a preface thirty pages long, written by a fictional stand-in; a massive author's introduction, also by stand in; epilogue, Note on the Typeface, colophon, all of them leviathan; and on the back cover an author's bio and 'Praise for the Book' blurbs swelling to the ten-thousands of words (microscopic font, naturally)--but no novel between the bookends (the incidental material would be the novel). But the only way to realise this was through metafiction and metafiction was the last thing I wanted. Probably already been done, anyway. In any case, that pretty much explains the path the story took to its final form. I'd also been reading Hesse, Bolano, Rizal, Philip K. Dick, and the Bible in a translation of Waray-Waray (the local Filipino dialect I was learning), but none of these influenced this particular story (though I am interested in Bolano's technique of cross-referencing characters and events across his ouevre, an effect which Daniel Alarcon rightly pinpoints as allowing the whole to grow beyond the sum of its parts). As for subject matter (this is where the organic interplay between form and matter comes in) I started with a fictionalization of an actual afternoon spent on a stranger's porch the day after Christmas. I was searching for a story whose action is muted, whose characters intrigue but do not dominate (this story was not going to be a story that was quote-unquote all about the character or quote-unquote psychological). The quiet, effeminate teenager would have been an interesting protagonist (as opposed to the "extra" he plays in the final story--recall the line about the neighborhood kids gradually creeping closer until they were surrounding him while the rain came down and the two main characters sat inside the house, drinking but not enough to get drunk (those children originally functioned as a sort of Greek chorus, by the way (deployed ironically, of course))). You see the vestiges everywhere in the final version, in fact, which convinces me that the artist's choice of content and form is not (or at least should not be) a priori but rather and wholly symbiotic. Or, to borrow a term from a scientist friend, aerophytic. I also had an image in mind from that apocalyptic day--gutters of the small city littered with what originally appear to be leaves as from a New England autumn but are, upon closer inspection, the tinsel from thousands of new year's fireworks. The problem was all I had was just that--an image. In any case, you see that the tone was present before I'd settled finally on the setting. The line, directed at the main character, who has been wantonly pilfering eBooks using bitTorrent technology, "I'm kind of against that stuff" is not meant ironically. If I've ever been didactic in my fiction it is here, at this moment. I am against piracy in all its forms, not just because I am an artist but because it is central to my personal moral code. The main character's name, upon which so much in the plot hinges, was actually pretty capricious. I'd been reading Delillo's _Libra_, which had me pondering anti-heroes with three names. The fact that DFW had been in the forefront of my mind during this period is pure coincidence. I doubt the title needs any explanation. I've been asked about the one overt reference to literature. The WCW poem about the red wheelbarrow, which the protagonist misremembers from a wikipedia page. People seem to think that this is the portal to some grandiose conceit, evidence that the story is really some plastic kunstlerroman. People like this then read it as some kind of quote unquote ars poetica or defense of poesy or whatnot. These people should be shot. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that I put the reference in there in the first place purposely undermines the story's potential as metaphor for the artistic endeavor. How can can direct reference serve as metaphor for itself?! Art can't be an allegory for art! Textbook example of Derridean logic if I ever seen it. After deliberation--and on the good advice of my editor, bless her soul--I decided to leave implicit the moment of sexual consummation. My editor pointed out that any explicit mention might be misinterpreted as fetishistic scopophilia (or worse, eroticism) even if the details of the sex act were relayed clinically (e.g., the amount of vaginal fluid that had collected on the tile floor). So why include the sexual moment at all? Even before Eliot put a name to the need for the more allusive, more indirect, artists have been playing with obscurity. Why? Damned if I know. More often than not it's probably some kind of literary brinksmanship. Eliot meant it sincerely--to open the glorious gap of possibility. I say this sincerely, too: all references in the story were chosen not for effect but out of organic need (and after all, are any really that obscure?). The artist gazes upon his drying canvas. When I consider the final draft in its entirety spans only a bit more than 1,000 words, I initially feel it's a pretty paltry showing, but then I remind myself that Cheever had originally had drawn up 150 pages of notes for "The Swimmer". So I don't feel so bad. A final point: despite superficial similarities, I was not influenced/inspired by Infinite Jest or any other of DFW's work which use the footnotes. I have not even read the book, god damn, and only know of the technique by way of various idiots who swoon about DFW like he is (was) some literary demigod. Demi-tasse is more like it. Anyway, it's not like DFW has a monopoly on the footnote market or anything. Have you ever read that story "The Body" (I forget the author's name)? I haven't, but it apparently is all footnotes.Get Mark's words & pictures by email