3/24/07
With all due regard to modesty, I like to think of myself as a pretty smart guy.

That's actually a more accurate construction than it appears. Though it's not superficially apparent, there's a much stronger correlation between "pretty" and "smart" than there is between, say, "smart" and "bench presses 300 pounds." While many desirable human attributes are attained through suitable application of will, determination, endless repetition and similar good Christian virtues, a stultifying preponderance of intelligence appears to be congenital, like hair color or nose shape or, well, prettiness. Nothing to be proud or ashamed of, just a condition, another little award in the Unfairness Derby of life.

But my upbringing was such that I developed, contrary to the principle just stated, one skunk stink of pride in my unearned virtue, so much so that I obviated a lot of its utility by constantly rubbing every passing stranger's face in my overweening straining bloated intellect. Since my parents were products of both the Great Depression and the subterranean eugenic impulse of that period, which likely as not engendered their desire to brighten up the race in the drooling face of what were so ably characterized by C M Kornbluth as "The Marching Morons," perhaps I bear the burden of my forebears' insecurity. It wouldn't be the first time.

Most of the time, my rancorous delusion of virtue ex intelligence gets borne out by experience. I very seldom meet a subject I can't at least get traction on the fundamentals of, be it scientific, philosophical or purely social. Sure, I'm not one of those savant types (let's leave the idiot part out for now) who memorize everything they read and reconstruct gnomic branches of mathematics on the backs of scrapwood planks with a charcoal stick. But who wants to be one of those (I'm so glad I'm not an Alpha...)?

But pass me non-trivial renderings of quantum physics or the development of Positivism and I'll chew them up and spit you out the salient points as well as any overbred east coast grad student. Plus I didn't have to spend all that tuition. I read Thomas Pynchon for fun, boyo! Ask me anything about Gravity's Rainbow! Anything!

Recently, though, I've been treated to a humongous bitch-slap in the Department of Brains, an awakening of severe proportions. I've encountered a force of natural smartypants far too big for any britches I might care to donate to the Battle of the Mind.

I'm referring, in case you haven't already guessed, to David Foster Wallace.

It would behoove us (be-what?) at this stage of the spew to take a moment and refine the perceived definition of "smart" currently in play here just a mite. There's actually a number of different species of egghead to scramble up.

There's your garden variety walking dictionary, offended by posers who only think they know it all. There's the crafty don't-give-away-the-store types who say "ain't" a lot and only draw the sharpened sword of their intellect to skewer perceived impediments to their unstated goal of world domination. There are Captain Industry swashbucklers who revel in their wealth, obtained without the aid of higher education or fru-fru degrees. There are the oblivious sports of nature we mentioned back up the road there, safely ensconced in some laboratorial or collegiate cage with plenty of attendants to change the bedding and fetch feed and water while they churn out the gemstones of their highly-refined mental processes.

And o'course there's the independent eccentric, blessed with too few dollars and too much sense, camped out in a cardboard box under a bridge of obscurity warming his hands over the tincan stove of his self-perceived brilliance, said brilliance being mostly invisible to the vast population around him. Which is sorta kinda more or less where I fit in. If even there.

So, boho hobo brainiac me saunters down to the library (literally -- it's walking distance from the house and I need the exercise) one fine cusp-of-spring day for some light entertainment and neuron stretching. Good old library! Free mental food! Yayz socialism! The Delridge branch, abbreviated though it may be, is great for browsing: there are so few books that you're liable to overshoot Computer Science and find yourself deep in the heart of Botany or Celebrity Biographies. So, right down from popular physics and You Can Learn Chemistry The Easy Fun Way In Fifteen Minutes Or Less For Total Freaking MORONS (one of a series that includes tomes on Tree Pruning, Television Repair and Picking Up Members Of Your Preferred Sexual Persuasion) is a section of Cunning Essay Collections.

And here in this Eden of Books is where we find, snake and apple all in one, the aforementioned Mister Wallace, Sir, in the flesh of a tome titled Consider the Lobster. Hmm -- weird title. I know that guy from somewhere -- always some reviewer or other discussing his penchant for postmodern dialectic deconstructionism or the like. Might be worth checking out what the fuss is about. What the hey, it's free. I bear the viperous volume back to my sanctuary of smug superiority.

Normally, I can vet high-IQ lit and dismiss it to one or another category in the first ten pages of perusal. Well, that's dumb. That's not so dumb. That's actually kinda profound. Hey, this guy is firing on all six! and so forth. I was totally prepared to dump this crawly specimen into one or another chloroform jar and pin it to the mat. Another one bites the blotter.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the specimen room: every time I constructed a neat little container, this refugee from the Land Of Pretentious Celebrities With Three Names evanesced blithely through the boundaries and headed off in another direction. Humorless brahmin? Heck no, he's funnier'n snot! Sophomoric Encyclopedia Brown? Nupper, he's doing a post-Fear-And-Loathing take on a porn convention here. Hypergangliated style-strangling wordificationizer? Nuh uh, he's a transparent (if endlessly appended) read that could give Hemingway a run for his clarity. Okay, at least he's conceited, right? All that showoff I-know-everything-neener-neener Latin quoting and bizarre obscure vocabulary? Shockingly, DFW laughs at his own erudition at least as much as at everything else. Damn, he's even humble (in a conceited sort of way).

As a musician, I tend to classify other practitioners of my chosen craft three ways: those who aren't as good as me (no disparagement, just observation -- yes, I am better than some others), those who are perhaps better than me but whose abilities are recognizable and perhaps even attainable with a few decades of woodshedding, and those who might as well be supernatural spirits or aliens from Proxima Centauri for all that I can make out how they do the preposterously complex and difficult things they do, even if I understand the things themselves.

As a self-styled wild intellectual, however, it's rare for me to run into somebody so well-rounded, so piercingly insightful, so resoundingly awake to the connections between so many different fields of study and expression from so many strata of society and so many different eras that he leaves me, not in the dust, but simply floored.

Kicks my ass, son. Ouch.