another take on irony vs. sincerity.

(1)

(don't click to enlarge)

This piece of—what, guerrilla art?—on either Bond Street or Great Jones makes me mad.  Slash sad.

I don't know the story behind it, I don't know the intention, but I can't help but feel that making some kind of joke—or, I don't know, statement, even—about the fact that this man, this human being with a wife and children, got murdered...  Look, I don't think I'm exactly a prude [not quite the right word] when it comes to "appropriateness" or "offensiveness," but it just seems to me that what's going on in "art" like this (which, by the way, I've seen before, this kind of bullshit, specifically with Lennon involved—and done by teenagers, and in like 1995—so A+ for originality, jackass) is a basic disregard for, or disbelief in, the reality of the humanity of other people.  So this guy was in the Beatles and he was an icon and a major public figure, bigger than Jesus etc., fine.  Also, he was a human being, and he got shot.  So what's your point in drawing a bullet hole in his head?  Is it funny?  Meaningful?  Are you trying to say, "Look, sometimes major public figures get murdered?"  Yes, thank you, we know that.

Am I being unreasonable?  Maybe I wouldn't care if it were somebody else (I'm a Lennon man, for sure)...but I'd like to think I would.

(2)  Finished rereading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and much but not all of it qualifies for the label "heartbreaking work of staggering genius."  To be fair, I may only be so enthusiastic because I just got walloped by the penultimate story, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men [#20]," which I read I guess for the third time because I read it when it came out in the Paris Review before the book's publication (or at least its title, I think) was even officially announced.  A few things:

a.  That story is incredibly good, and if everything DFW ever wrote were like that, he'd make my Top Five Writers, no problem.

b.  Around page 266 I began, like the "hideous man" (like both "hideous men," making I suppose three of us) to feel rather emotional and thought I might actually start weeping right there in the tony Upper East Side paninoteca where I was having lunch.  This experience was no doubt enhanced (aggravated?) by my suddenly recalling that of course this writer killed himself, and as this story goes on—a story by the way that is all about the failure or success of our attempts to connect, truly connect with other human beings, and not just our loved ones but yes, them too—I find myself [switching into the stylistic present tense for some reason and] getting pretty much exactly the same sad/scared feeling that the hideous men are having and, given recent news headlines, what the writer himself was evidently feeling, and then just as the characters in the story and the reader too must feel very uncomfortable about being sort of bonded to this psychotic but it turns out deeply unhappy fictional character in the story, suddenly this bond turns out to be also a bond with a deeply unhappy nonfictional man who is expressing furiously in his own easy-to-misunderstand way, and what can I say? what can I say?  Every word seems dead before it "leaves my mouth" (which problem, incidentally, DFW covers in the story, too).  What can I say?  Good story.  Good story, Dave.  I wish you didn't kill yourself.  I really wish you didn't.  And can I say that and make it 100% sincere without any irony in it or melodrama or self-satisfaction or...  I mean, can you say something just frank and straightforward like, I wish that this sad man hadn't killed himself, without its sounding...

Fuck how it sounds.

c.  A while back, in one of my unjustified, irrational, and almost but not ultimately incomprehensible attacks on Michael Chabon, I quoted Pynchon's "eyes like two piss-holes in a snowbank" as an example of writing I like.  Well, here's DFW with a similar line, but different in just exactly the way you might expect from someone who, among other ways, differentiated himself from Pynchon by hanging himself and killing himself and dying by his own hand: "His eyes were holes in the world."

Can you feel that?