Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

I recently read the short story collection Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace. The unique aspect of this collection stems from setting almost every story in real moments that occurred in history. The collection reminds you why DFW is a true fiction craftsman but also gave way to some unsettling realizations I have about the author.

The first story - the best IMO - "Little Expressionless Animals" shows DFW at his best. Dancing between reality and fiction, the story outlines the journey of an exceptional Jeopardy contestant and her love affair with the producer's daughter. The constant blurring of that line of what is real and what is not highlights how ridiculous reality can be how. It's fun, thoughtful, and brilliantly composed.

From there the reader is greeted with the collection's title story "Girl with Curious Hair". The piece features realistic settings and concepts but seriously fucks with characterization. It follows a gang of absolute monsters in their exploits in arson, drug exploration, assault, and more. Very reminiscent of a Clock Work Orange.

It's here the collection starts to lose me a bit. I'm not so sure in our time of intolerable cruelty I need to be reading DFW's reality-bending fiction. I'm not saying I want to be comforted by my fiction, but the cruelty displayed in this story tied with the mess of misogyny, racism, and overall power struggles in the stories to come don't need to make you second guess whether men and women are capable of such things.

In the final and longest story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way", we're treated to exploratory dialogue on the nature of fiction itself. I get the sense that without a certain amount of off-putting edge DFW feels fiction is little more than a glorified advertisement, meant to make readers feel good. So he strives to make his readers uneasy; characterizing women as impossibly particular, making his characters disfigured in some way, gratuitous violence.

The thing is we never explore why making a character transgender or disabled makes readers uneasy, why playing to these stereotypes and biases for the purpose creeping your readers out is actually harmful in the greater scheme (ironically DFW complained about David Lynch doing this exact thing with Richard Pryor in his review of Lost Highway). One could argue this isn't the point of the fiction, but then what is the point?

Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky remains cogent as ever in his old age. He's still giving interviews, appearing on Democracy Now, writing, etc. Still, because there are so few voices countering hegemonic US foreign policy the prospect of losing Chomsky is truly depressing. Or it was before reading his book of op-eds Interventions and realizing that time is indeed a flat circle and anything Chomsky has said will apply to all of the exact same things for the rest of time.

For example, tell me if this sounds at all familiar:

"Washington's thorniest problem in the region is Venezuela, which provides nearly 15 percent of US oil imports. President Hugo Chavez, elected in 1998, displays the kind of independence that the United States translates as defiance...in 2002, Washington embraced President Bush's vision of democracy by supporting a military coup that very briefly overturned the Chavez Government. The Bush administration had to back down, however, because of opposition to the coup throughout Latin America and the quick reversal of the coup by a popular uprising".

Interventions is a collection of op-eds by Chomsky during (and in the leadup to) the Iraq War. While each one is short, they work to build a countervailing narrative that we all know now to be true. The takeaway here is not just that Chomsky is right, but rather how easy it is to be right.

US foreign policy is extremely formulaic. Since World War II the US will work discretely to cause unrest in a region in order to apply their disaster capitalist tactics toward privatization, they'll accuse any challenging nation (no matter how small) of being an existential threat, and they'll make up any number of reasons to execute an occupation if necessary.

In reading Interventions, one understands that Chomsky's entire body of work documents this strategy time and time again. It serves as a reminder that we can look to Chomsky and those like him any time state conflict approaches. In the year 2019, as our nation creeps closer to an extended military conflict with Iran, we only have to glance at Chomky's writings on the failure to find Bin-Laden, the source of the post-9/11 anthrax terror, or the Iraqi WMDs:

"for the second 9/11 anniversary and beyond, we basically have two choices. We can march forward with confidence that the global enforcer will drive evil from the world, much as the president's speechwriters declare, plagiarizing ancient epics and children's tales. Or we can subject the doctrine of the proclaimed grand new era to scrutiny, drawing rational conclusions, perhaps gaining some sense of the emerging reality".

As concerned citizens, we owe this level of scrutiny to Chomsky. I wouldn't start out with Interventions as your introductory text, but it definitely makes a great piece to a larger collection.