Piteous Interviews with Brief Men

One of the jobs that writers are supposed to do is to hear lost voices. The narrowing forces of 'education' as a commodity--'education' as the stuff you're supposed to know to be civilized or credentialed. Or something.--are constantly whittling down a life's sustenance to a list of more or less homogeneous lists of what one must read, know, think. And if you're not careful, of course, it's possible to come through a really pricey and plush-carpeted education having learned to confuse the assimilation of lists with thinking itself. (The difference between silently rummaging through data and thinking is almost completely lost on me, for instance. And may be important. (The difference.))But people who read looking for information in aid of a particular project read very differently. Or maybe it's better to say that reading is done differently by people who are looking for clues. They have to listen, follow a faint hum that leads them along. Or that's how it seems to me.

Eliot heard Donne; D. H. Lawrence, weirdly, heard Melville; John Ashbery heard John Clare. Not because, I think, they were looking to land a killing blow in some sort of cultural cage fight. More because they were looking for company, or listening for words to describe an experience of being in the world for which they had not been handed words.

I heard an in interview with David Krasinski on NPR this weekend about his film version of David Foster Wallace's story Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The title alone is so audibly Wallace, right? But Wallace himself was sure that he was inaudible. Or worse, that what was audible in him was not what was best in him, was not what he aspired to, was not what he felt charged to deliver himself of, to make good on. It is very clear that Krasinski has heard him, knows that these fictional interviews are powerful because of a particular kind of honesty that perseveres despite the near impossibility of saying what is true without dragging in what is false in this vocabulary that we speak. Krasinski hears that Wallace's 90's-speak pastiche is not merely hip, self-consciously correct satire--although it is, may God forgive us, that too. Wallace's 90's speak is a form of confession that requires that the speaker never wink at the audience to grant it absolution by including it in the joke, never turn to the audience to collect its gratitude. Krasinski hears Wallace, who as far as we know went to his death believing himself inaudible.

You don't get to know who will hear you.