Welcome to Forgotonia

David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, will hit stores April 15. Chances are, if you follow the book/lit/publishing world at all, you’re already well aware of this fact.

I first read about it on NPR.org (“The Magic Of David Foster Wallace’s Unfinished ‘King’”). The next day I did a tiny metaphorical eye-roll when I opened TIME to find another feature on Wallace’s “Unfinished Business.” I mean, perhaps Wallace never even meant to have it published. And what about all the struggling, living writers with finished works that aren’t getting any attention? Wallace killed himself while working on The Pale King. And, forgive me,  but there is the media-saturated part of me that feels like our culture lionizes too many writers and bandleaders after they’ve committed suicide.

That said, Wallace was indeed one of the most important contemporary American writers, not at least in part because, as Lev Grossman puts it in that TIME article, his novel Infinite Jest “reshaped the skyline of American literature.”

And it is kind of fascinating, (if not a little bit morbid), to read about how others put the book together after Wallace died, and to obsess a bit over what was going through Wallace’s mind before he decided to end his life.

But perhaps most importantly, how could I not be interested when I learned this little tidbit about the work that Wallace left behind?

His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he’d been working on it…. [but] she had no idea how much of it he’d managed to finish. She did know it had an unlikely subject: the lives of a group of IRS employees in Peoria, Ill.

I can’t help but be curious about how and why Wallace had Peoria, of all places, on his (brilliant, troubled) mind. Did he feel tied to central Illinois (or, conversely, critical of it) because he was born in Champaign and had lived and taught in Bloomington-Normal? It’s equally fascinating to wonder if he found Peoria valuable as a poetic or metaphorical setting. (A few years ago, one his short stories published in the New Yorker was set in Peoria, too).

And as for the title? The TIME article mentions that the editor who helped piece together the unfinished book never figured out what that phrase “The Pale King” refers to; it’s used to describe a certain character only once and then never explained.

I coulda told ‘em. (Obviously, the TIME writer and the editor are not from the pasty Midwest).

I just watched the most amazing movie: Get Low, starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, and Sissy Spacek.

First of all, how can you go wrong with those three in the cast? I especially loved Duvall and Murray’s performances–probably my favorite “serious” performance by Murray.

On top of that, it’s built from the nugget of a true story (and one of my favorite things in life is the prickle of excitement I get when hearing a true story that’s just as good as, if not better than, fiction.)

And to top it off, it turns out this is one of those underdog movies that took years to secure funding for, etc. –and the director who got it off the ground, Aaron Schneider, just happens to be from a small town in central Illinois.

I remember reading in the Peoria Journal-Star several years ago that a Peoria-area native was nominated for an Oscar for a short film he’d made. This story obviously stayed in my mind, but…yeah, short film. I didn’t see it.

Then, a year or so ago I saw another story in the PJ Star that the same guy had made a feature film, and I seemed to remember Duvall and Spacek being attached. But I had forgotten all about this when I went to the video store last night.

So it was pretty cool when I watched the DVD extras at the end, (still feeling spellbound by the beautiful movie I’d just watched, and Duvall’s performance especially), and there was a clip of a press junket with Duvall teasingly saying something to the director about “being from Peoria, Illinois.”

So I went a Googlin’ this morning to find that PJ Star article about Schneider making Get Low: here ya go. (Gotta love that picture of Schneider “teaching” Duvall how to shoot! (And oh…btw, Dunlap “counts” as Peoria, right?)

Even better, here’s a longer feature on Schneider’s getting the film off the ground, including the fact that he got the lead investment with the help of his high school prom date.

If you haven’t seen Get Low, which is part folk tale, part mystery, part love-story, part small-town rural-life tale, I honestly don’t think you can be disappointed if you check it out.

And it only adds to the film to know the back story about Schneider–yet another example of a wonderfully creative mind coming from a place known for bein’ backwards and stodgy.

If you’ve already seen Get Low, please leave my your thoughts below.

1. No wonder Keokuk stinks!
   According to WGEM, Roquette America Inc.’s corn wet-milling facility in Keokuk is paying a $1 million environmental civil penalty for air pollution violations (apparently the factory responsible for the weird smell I used to say was “cold french fries” when I was little? My description makes no sense, of course, but that’s what I associated it with when I was a kid.) It’s the largest environmental penalty ever paid in the state of Iowa. (The next largest? By ADM. The company that’s part of the conspiracy in the Matt Damon movie The Informant!, which comes out this month, finally. I have only been waiting for it since 2008, when I first learned that my friend’s dad got his way into the movie by allegedly plying the producers with donuts.)
2. Cougar on the loose! Cougar on the loose! And I don’t mean Courtney Cox!!
   One of my esteemed readers has reported a sighting near Tennessee, IL. It happened this week at approximately 7:30 a.m. My source is a good source, trust me on this. She knows my cougar obsession and would not float me false information just to feed it. She may also have had another witness: a guy in a pickup truck who had stopped near the Rock Quarry on the Blandinsville Blacktop, apparently because he, too, was watching the animal run across the quarry’s parking lot area. So: write to me, Guy in the Pickup Truck, and confirm!My cougar-sighting-reporter couldn’t help but shudder a bit at the realization of how close this allegedly-non-existent-in-Illinois animal (at least according to the IDNR [Illinois Dept. of Natural Resources], anyway), was to her home. But hey, take comfort in this, dear reader:
3. at least it was not a bull crashing into your foyer!

I will be meeting C-Nor in Peoria tomorrow night to see the hilarious and delightfully nutty Maria Bamford.

(If you don’t recognize her name, I’m betting you will instantly recognize her face and voice.)

So, in other words, I will be

• driving in the dark to a next-door-to-a-strip-club comedy club,
• on a weeknight,
• to a town an hour-and-a-half-away,
• possibly blowing big bucks on a hotel room afterward so I don’t have to drive back to Forgotonia on a two-laner in the dark.

My priorities are tight, yo.

(But if you are getting older and broker by the day, isn’t laughter an appropriate form of therapy?)

So, in case you’ve never been to the Jukebox Comedy Club in Peoria, let me tell you a couple of interesting things.

As I mentioned last week, Chris and I got tickets to see Brian Posehn, a comedian who’s currently got a role on the Sarah Silverman Program.

Neither of us had ever been there before, so, as we followed the directions and navigated through the fall darkness, we were a little unsure of ourselves. But Chris’s trusty little GPS thing-y knew the way, and we followed its directives. (Even though I kept saying “How do we know it won’t tell us to turn into a lake like it did to Michael Scott on ‘The Office’?”)

And because I had lived in Galesburg for six years–meaning, I went to Peoria a lot on the weekends to shop–I was quite familiar with most of the places we were passing–in other words, the outdoor mall, then the indoor mall.

But then when we Farmington Road, we seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the, um, bright lights of Peoria and into a kind of industrial area. We passed a dog kennel, a couple of bars, a couple of mechanic’s shops.

Then suddenly I see giant spotlights crisscrossing in the sky–you know, those kind that, if somebody placed a big stencil on ‘em, would cast the Batman signal up into the air.

“Hey, I think we’re almost there,” I said. And sure enough, we approached the Jukebox–and, as soon as we pulled into the parking lot, realized with a brief moment of confusion that the spotlights were not, in fact, being used to draw attention to the comedy club, but to the STRIP CLUB RIGHT NEXT DOOR. I mean, like, 10 feet away. (note the pic.)

Perhaps needless to say, I was a tad apprehensive as we approached the door of the comedy club, wondering how, uh, “upscale” it was going to be inside.

But in fact it turned out to be a totally respectable little joint–(minus the one drunk guy in the corner who had to be reprimanded by management for drunkenly hollering “skeet! skeet!” throughout Posehn’s set every time Posehn made a joke about, um, male genitalia or, um, male orgasms, which was, um, like every other second.)

When you first go in, you’re in this tiny little lounge area that almost looks like it might have once been a 50′s diner, and you wait there and drink or eat or both until the showroom doors open for seating.

The lounge is wallpapered with glossy prints of all the comedians who’ve performed there. And, since the club has been open since 1990, we enjoyed examining all the CRAZY MULLETS on the comedians of yore.

And how cool is it that, before they even introduced the opening act, they paid homage to Peoria-native comedians, the legendary Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison?

Once we were allowed in to the showroom, we had a front-row table that literally touched the stage. Brian Posehn was more, uh, foul-mouthed, as my mom would say, than I had expected, but hilariously self-depricating. (At one point he referred to himself as looking like a giant version of Beaker from the Muppets.)

And, as you might have already guessed, he included plenty of cracks about the, er, ‘establishment’ next door (as did his opener, Anthony Jeselnik: “So Brian Posehn and I went in to Fantasyland. I’ve never seen so many women who were from ‘before’ posters.”)

Before the show had started, Chris had joked–upon seeing Fantasyland right next door–that “I know where Brian Posehn will be going after the show.”

But Posehn stated otherwise, during his act. “I used to go to strip clubs all the time,” he said. “But I’m married now, and I don’t go anymore. My wife just doesn’t like it when I come home with my glasses smelling like fake t__s.”

[p.s. you can watch a clip of the opener guy, Jeselnick, on Conan here. Every joke in this clip, he did in Peoria.]

We’re gonna find out tonight!!

Remember this guy? His name is Brian Posehn. He used to be on “Just Shoot Me,” and right now he’s got a gig going with the Sarah Silverman Show.

Chris is a big fan. When he found out Posehn was going to be in Peoria, he was shocked and happily surprised. He couldn’t believe this guy would come out here to the middle of, well, you know, and play at a little place like this: the Jukebox Comedy Club .

We’re going to see him tonight!

If you click on the link above, you can watch a clip of him telling Conan O’Brian that he’s pretty friendly and approachable after shows.

If we talk to him, I hope I don’t have to admit that um I never really watched Just Shoot Me.

Sorry.

PS I will have to find out if this is the same Peoria club where one esteemed friend got into a kinda drunken yelling fight with Dave Attell. (‘Nother story.) Which reminds me of another story, which is a rumor I once heard that Gallagher got kicked out of a bar, for fighting, in Galesburg. ‘Nother time.)