Not clark

Hello! It’s Clark, one of the fiction editors for Indiana Review: Online. I thought I’d share what I’m currently reading. David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” defies fascination. It prefers to pull you in with the force of a black hole. 

The stories in this collection focus largely on sex and relationships. Namely, the way we might experience disconnects and exist on different wavelengths than the people we strive to understand. The collection is hilarious in it’s situations, poignant in it’s portrayals of humans. 

The story, “Octet,” is a collection of vignettes formatted as pop quizzes. The first, “Pop Quiz 4,” proposes a scenario: 

“Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat.” 

One of them is gravely ill. The two proceed to share the coat, sitting close together, leaned against an alley wall together throughout the night. Then, the vignette finishes with the “quiz” component:

“Q: Which one lived.”

I can’t talk about this collection without mentioning “Datum Centurio,” not so much a story but a collection of entries from a DVD dictionary from the year 2096. It’s just as lively as any other story in the collection. The entries portray sexual relationships as something regulated, scientific, calculated — absent of all emotion or connection to other human beings.

In the stoy, the word date has the following entry: “the process of voluntarily submitting one’s nucleotide configuration and other Procreativity Designators to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neurogenetic complement for the purposes of Procreative Genial Interface.”

Across the entire collection, DFW seems interested in the increasing application of technology in replacing sincere human connection. I wonder what he would say about modern applications of social media and internet.