2-News

12 — Wednesday, October 7, 2020
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

THE B-SIDE: ICONS
Taylor Swift runs music

I was seven years old when 

“You Belong With Me” came 
out, and it still gives me an 
indescribable rush of sheer 
happiness. It’s the song I play 
in the car with the windows 
down, letting everyone else 
on the road share my joy. It’s 
the song that I dance around 
to in my pajamas, feeling like 
I’m at a concert. Every time I 
hear it, I have to stop what I’m 
doing to give it the devotion it 
deserves.

That’s how I feel with every 

Taylor Swift song. That’s how 
so many people feel with every 
Taylor Swift song. 

Barbara Walters once said 

“Taylor Swift is the music 
industry.” She said this in 
2014, after Taylor’s record-
breaking 
album 
1989 
was 

released. 
Six 
years 
later, 

Taylor Swift is still the music 
industry. She’s released eight 
albums since the beginning of 
her career, and they’ve nearly 
all broken records. From her 
self-titled debut album to her 
most recent, surprise release 
folklore, she has never let the 
world down. 

It’s a shame, though, because 

the world has let her down on 
more than one occasion. From 
accusing her of writing only 
about her ex-boyfriends to 
the #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty 
to losing her master license 
over her recordings to having 
beauty standards forced on her 
that led to an eating disorder, 
the world has let her down 
because the world wants to 
hate Taylor Swift.

What makes her amazing, 

though, what makes her a true 
icon, is that she rises above 
it all. She forgives, but never 
forgets. She proves the world 
wrong. When the world said 
that she relies on the talent of 
others to write her own songs, 
she released self-written Speak 
Now (my absolute favorite 
album of all time). When the 
world said she was “just” a 
country artist, she released 
1989, for which she became the 

first female artist to win the 
Grammy’s Album of the Year 
award twice. When the world 
turned on her and called her 
a snake, she embraced it and 
released reputation. When the 
world said that she could only 
ever be a cookie-cutter pop 
star, she released the indie 
folk album folklore, which has 
led her to surpass Whitney 
Houston’s record for most 
weeks at number one on the 
Billboard 200 charts. Taylor 
Swift sits among the most 
revered stars. 

She refuses to let herself 

be torn down by haters or the 
media. As she herself said 
during the 1989 World Tour 
before her performance of 
her song “Clean,” “you are 
not the opinion of somebody 
who doesn’t know you or care 
about you.” And she’s not. The 
number of haters Taylor Swift 
has is the same number of 
people who refuse to give her 
a chance. They see a talented, 
young female star and refuse 
to give her any of the credit 
she is due. 

The people that do love her 

— her fans, her Swifties — have 
never just sat by and let the 
world tear her down. And in 
return, she loves them. Taylor 
Swift invites her fans to her 
house and plays them songs 
before an album’s release. She 
bakes them cookies, sends 
them Christmas gifts, shares 
inside jokes on Tumblr. How 
many artists do that? How 
many artists let their fans into 
their homes, into their hearts, 
the way she does? 

At the core of her being, 

Taylor Swift is an artist. Her 
songs, her words are, for lack 

of a better word, iconic. So 
many people have proposed to 
their significant others while 
“Love Story” was playing. So 
many people’s 2014 and 2015 
Instagram bios read “darling 
I’m a nightmare dressed like 
a daydream.” Everyone knows 
that when you turn 22, it’s 
your “Taylor Swift Birthday.” 
So many people declared 2020 
saved when folklore came out. 

She has proven time and 

time again that she doesn’t 
need 
the 
flashy 
concerts, 

gorgeous 
music 
videos 
or 

vast number of awards to 
be 
successful. 
She 
needs 

her voice, her songs and her 
fans. Taylor Swift appeared 
at the (socially distant) 2020 
Academy of Country Music 
Awards to perform the song 
“betty.” That award show had 
more viewers than the 2020 
VMAs despite the fact that 
country music isn’t a widely-
listened-to genre. The other 
performers played a part for 
sure, but it hardly seems a 
coincidence that the first time 
she showed up at the ACMs in 
seven years was the time that 
millions of people tuned in. She 
sat on a stage with her guitar, 
accompanied by a harmonica 
player 
in 
the 
background, 

and just sang. There was no 
audience, no light-up bracelets, 
no showmanship. It was just 
her, happily returning to her 
country roots. And she still 
managed to capture everyone’s 
attention.

That’s the power of Taylor 

Swift. 

Daily Arts Writer Sabriya 

Imami 
can 
be 
reached 
at 

simami@umich.edu.

SABRIYA IMAMI

Daily Arts Writer

REPUBLIC

THE B-SIDE: ICONS
Icons: David Foster Wallace, beyond the windbreak

It was a year ago when I walked 

into the Dawn Treader Book Shop 
and squeezed past a few other 
patrons to reach the fiction section. 
On a low shelf in the Ws was a faded 
copy of Wallace’s debut novel “The 
Broom of the System.” 

I took the book to the counter 

and a man rang me up. I asked him 
if they had any of Wallace’s other 
books. 

“No, his stuff always sells fast.”
I said that was too bad, as I had 

just read “Infinite Jest” and I was 
looking to read more of his work. 
It was an admittedly pretentious 
brag, and he was not impressed. He 
smiled at me and dismissed me with 
a thin cheerfulness.

“Mm-hmm, well have a nice day.”
And that was that. To those that 

do not like his style, Wallace was 
an overblown mess of a writer — 
arrogant and too frequently labeled 
a genius, despite his books being 
bloated and forcefully intelligent. I 
suspect that the man at the counter 
at Dawn Treader was in this camp.

But 
I 
think 
Wallace 
was 

something else: a deeply troubled 
pop-hero who left his mark on the 
world through his art, his terror and 
his public presence. 

Before I say anything else, I want 

to present the first of Wallace’s 
words that I ever read, from the 
short story “Good Old Neon.” Keep 
them in mind:

“My whole life I’ve been a fraud. 

I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much 
all I’ve ever done all the time is try 
to create a certain impression of me 
in other people.”

***
As far as icons go, Wallace is 

one of the most quintessential. 
He wrote across multiple genres 
of literature, publishing fiction, 
nonfiction, speeches. His work is 
often unapproachable, his books 
so dense and overwritten that they 

almost feel actively averse to being 
read, and that’s what makes them 
attractive. 

Like many of Wallace’s readers, 

I made the mistake of jumping into 
his magnum opus “Infinite Jest” 
too quickly. I went from that first 
40-page short story to a 1079-page 
brick of a book with little regard for 
the health of my corneas.

“Infinite 
Jest” 
is 
more 
a 

monstrosity than a book. The 
pages are large and imposing, their 
combined weight dragging your 
hands to the floor. Following the 981 
pages of the main story is another 
90 pages of “Notes and Errata.” The 
endnotes are vital to the reader’s 
experience, though they sometimes 
left my head spinning as I flipped 
back and forth, back and forth.

The book is simply too chaotic 

and byzantine to summarize, but I 
will say this: the story mainly takes 
place in a tennis academy and a 
halfway house, and it deals with 
topics such as addiction, daddy 
issues, pervasive consumerism, a 
secret service of wheelchair-bound 
Quebecois assassins and a film so 
entertaining that its viewers watch 
it over and over again until they 
starve to death. 

It is as strange as it sounds, but 

Wallace 
embraces 
strangeness 

gracefully. In the mess of gaudy 
and sometimes grotesque language 
there is an undeniable humanity — 
Wallace touches on just about every 
emotion imaginable, every corner 
of human life from athletic stardom 
to copping cocaine to the loss of a 
loved one. And it isn’t his best work.

Don’t get me wrong, a thousand 

pages of wonderfully complex 
fiction is a fantastic achievement, 
one that would put any other writer 
at the top of 20th Century Classics 
lists before they retired to a villa 
somewhere. But Wallace wrote 
better stories. “Good Old Neon” 
is a masterclass in experimental 
structure and pacing, and you can 
read it in about an hour instead of 
a month. His most refined work, 

“The Pale King,” was published 
posthumously.

Before we get into that book, I 

want to take a look at Wallace as 
a person. Don’t worry, we’ll come 
back to his writing, but I first want 
to look at an interview that Wallace 
did with Charlie Rose.

At about three and a half minutes 

into the interview, Rose cuts 
the small-talk and asks Wallace, 
“Respect means a lot to you? Sort of 
the sense that ‘I’m taken seriously 
and respected for my work?’”

Wallace straightens in his chair 

and bites his lip before responding, 
“You can read this in my face? … 
Show me somebody who doesn’t 
like to be respected.”

Wallace then speaks to the 

public response to “Infinite Jest”, 
saying that he didn’t believe every 
reviewer finished the book before 
giving their verdict on it. At one 
point he interrupts his response to 
say, “... I’m sorry that I’m essentially 
stuttering, umm…” Rose reassures 
him, in a voice like that of a seasoned 
therapist, “No you’re not, you’re 
doing just fine.”

Wallace is taking the lead 

reluctantly in this dance. He 
doesn’t make much eye contact. 
He occasionally grimaces at his 
own comments. His voice sounds 
almost dreamy as he speaks low 
and quickly, like his thoughts are 
already loaded and he’s just letting 
them out. But they are just thoughts; 
he doesn’t try to imbue them with 
any special authority. Perhaps 
unknowingly, Wallace is acting out 
his 
every-man-but-not-just-any-

man persona.

This is the person we can see in 

interviews, the man who flexes his 
talent yet at the same time seems to 
almost repress it. But this is not the 
person who woke up every day and 
made coffee and walked the dogs. 
For a glimpse of that man, I’d like to 
share a story from my high school 
English teacher, Hunter Dunn.

Pasadena, 2005. Dunn sees a 

flyer for a workshop on teaching 

writing. There are three names on 
the list of speakers, including David 
Foster Wallace. Why did such a 
famous author appear at a workshop 
in a high school classroom for 40 
people? Dunn doesn’t know, but 
he suspects that it was a favor for a 
friend.

The workshop is held in a 

classroom in a high school across the 
street from Pomona College, where 
Wallace taught creative writing. 
The two other speakers go first, 
presenting their prepared materials 
and 
giving 
readings 
of 
their 

own work. Wallace has nothing 
prepared. He says something like, “I 
would never read my own work to 
students like that.”

At the end of the presentation, 

Dunn asks Wallace a question that 
he has since forgotten. But he still 
remembers 
Wallace’s 
response: 

“Okay, I’m going to answer your 
question, and then I want to know 
what you think.”

The workshop ends; everyone 

files out of the building. As he walks 
out, Dunn spots Wallace walking 
across a courtyard, probably back 
to his office at Pomona. He calls out, 
“Hey! Dave!”

Wallace turns around and sighs 

heavily, “Yes?”

Dunn asks him about an essay he 

wrote on the tennis player Michael 
Joyce. Wallace looks at him intently 
and says “Interesting player, isn’t 
he?”

The rest of the conversation has 

been lost in 15 years of memories, 
but Dunn recalls some key things 
about Wallace. He was an excellent 
listener, working out his thoughts 
before responding. But he was also 
curt, approaching every question 
as an argument, a game he wanted 
to win. He did not appear at all 
uncomfortable or self-conscious — 
he was a confident presence. 

Unlike in his interview with 

Charlie Rose, Wallace did not sound 
conflicted in-person. Perhaps when 
confronted with affirmation of the 
public belief in his brilliance, such 

as during a high-profile interview, 
his normal identity clashed with 
that expected of a genius.

That struggle is also present in 

his writing, but in a different way. 
Let’s return to “The Pale King.”

The story takes place at the IRS 

Regional Examination Center in 
Peoria, Illinois, a setting as boring 
as one can imagine. In a cool 550 
pages, Wallace breathes life into the 
banal and maddening world of tax 
return examination as if he were 
Tolkien constructing Middle Earth.

It was in “The Pale King” that I 

first started to find some clues of 
the real Wallace. The ninth chapter 
is labeled as “Author’s Foreword.” 
Wallace 
writes, 
“Author 
here. 

Meaning the real author, the living 
human holding the pencil, not some 
abstract narrative persona.” 

He explains, “what follows is, 

in reality, not fiction at all, but 
substantially true and accurate. 
That The Pale King is, in point 
of fact, more like a memoir than 
any kind of made-up story.” Of 
course, Wallace never worked for 
the IRS and the events in the book 
are completely fictional. But that 
doesn’t mean he is lying when he 
says the story is true, in a manner of 
speaking.

Wallace 
places 
himself 
in 

the story as a young IRS recruit 
who is mistaken for a high-level 
executive also named Dave Wallace. 
Scared to face the consequences 
of 
impersonating 
someone 
so 

well-respected, 
Dave 
Wallace 

(the character) goes along with 
the mistake and is swept into 
accordingly high-level meetings. 

Dave Wallace (the character) has 

no idea what is going on in these 
meetings. He sweats profusely 
and fumbles the few words he 
speaks. There is intense discussion 
of the tax code that the man he is 
impersonating should be intimately 
familiar with, but of course Dave 
Wallace (the character) knows 
nothing about the tax code. He 
stays silent so as not to reveal that 

he is not who people think he is. He 
writes down notes constantly, filling 
pages so that he will be perceived 
as a quiet but diligent observer, a 
focused participant in this world in 
which he knows he does not belong. 

If ever an author had spoken so 

clearly to their reader. 

***
Wallace committed suicide in 

2008. He left behind many books 
and essays, and in the continued 
publishing of his work he has 
become an icon. The dark sides of 
his life, drug addiction, his struggle 
with depression, have only added to 
his impression as a tortured genius.

In his 2013 biography “Every 

Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life 
of David Foster Wallace,” D.T. 
Max briefly mentions our subject’s 
relationship with the poet Mary 
Karr. Karr volunteered in a halfway 
house in Boston, where Wallace was 
living due to addiction and a suicide 
attempt. There is one particularly 
alarming sentence: “One night 
Wallace tried to push Karr from a 
moving car.”

Wallace’s relationship with Karr 

was mostly left in the dark, and it 
has fallen to Karr herself to speak 
out about it. He stalked her for 
years, even though she was married 
and had a child. He once showed up 
to a party with bandages on his arm, 
and revealed to Karr that he had 
tattooed her name on his skin.

It is very easy to dismiss 

this kind of darkness as part of 
the 
complications 
that 
come 

with genius. After all, is it not 
uncomfortable to think about the 
heinous acts committed by someone 
we like? To extend my consideration 
of a person past the safety of the 
products of their brilliance requires 
more emotional work than does 
reveling in the refined, beautiful 
things they gave to the world.

That is what it is to be an icon.

JULIAN WRAY

For The Daily

THE B-SIDE: ICONS
Bob Dylan: Queer icon?

ANDREW WARRICK

Daily Arts Writer

“Wearing high heel boots, a 

tailored pea-jacket without lapels, 
pegged dungarees of a kind of 
buffed azure, large sunglasses 
with squared edges, his dark, 
curly 
hair 
standing 
straight 

up on top and spilling over the 
upturned collar of his soiled white 
shirt,” an icon stepped off an 
airplane. It was November 1964, 
just outside Columbus. On the 
tarmac, “Businessmen nodded and 
smirked, the ground crew looked 
a little incredulous, and a mother 
put a hand on her child’s head and 
made him turn away.” 

Bob Dylan had arrived.
***
If you asked the average person in 

2020 about Bob Dylan, they would 
probably note his unconventional 
voice, his 2016 Nobel Prize for 
Literature or ’60s hits such as “Like 
a Rolling Stone” and “The Times 
They Are A-Changin.’” What they 
probably wouldn’t acknowledge is 
his relation to queerness. 

While 
not 
queer 
himself, 

two of Dylan’s most profound 
literary infleunces, poets Allen 
Ginsberg and Arthur Rimbaud, 
were 
uncompromisingly 
so. 

Their poetry reflected that. Since 
these two writers were vital to 
Dylan’s creative process, his most 
powerful albums are intimately 
related to the idea of queerness. 
While rarely, if ever, considered, 
a queer framework is vital to 
understanding Bob Dylan’s music 
and place as an American icon.

Wild Electric Visions 
“Old lady judges watch people in 

pairs, limited in sex, they dare, to 
push fake morals, insult and stare . . 
. And if my thought dreams could be 
seen, they’d probably put my head in 
a guillotine”

—“It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only 

Bleeding),” 1965

After stepping off the airplane, 

Bob Dylan was chauffeured to 
Kenyon College for a concert. 
When he learned that students 
were required to wear uniforms 
during the show, Dylan exclaimed 
“Ties? Well, I’m gonna tell them 
they can take them off. That’s what 
I’m gonna do. Rules — man, that’s 
why I never lasted long in college. 

Too many rules.” Dylan himself 
was about to break a whole lotta 
rules. 

He would soon pivot from his 

acoustic folk style, pick up an 
electric guitar and embark on a run 
of iconic albums now known as his 
Electric Trilogy: Bringing it All 
Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited 
and Blonde on Blonde. On top of this 
sonic reinvention, Dylan’s lyrical 
voice sharpened to a surrealistic, 
satirical switchblade, and slashed 
artistic and social conventions to 
tatters with every song. Key to this 
shift were two queer poets.

“Allen Ginsberg is the only 

writer I know,” Dylan said in ’66. 
“He’s just holy.” 

Ginsberg 
was 
a 
Beatnik 

notorious 
for 
his 
surrealistic 

poetry and blatant homosexuality, 
both of which challenged the 
norms of post-World War II 
American life. In the ’56 poem 
“America,” he asserts, “I won’t say 
the Lord’s prayer / I have mystical 
visions and cosmic vibrations” and 
asks the nation “When will you 
take off your clothes?” Ginsberg 
stood alone, championed being 
different 
and 
challenged 
the 

United States of America to do the 
same. Predictably, he was dragged 
into court.

After the ’56 publication of his 

masterpiece 
“Howl,” 
Ginsberg 

was “canceled” nationwide: Many 
bookstores banned his poetry 
and he was even put through 
an obscenity trial. Though the 
judge ruled in his favor, Ginserg 
was no national hero, and still 
relatively risqué, at the time of 
Bob Dylan’s Electric Trilogy in 
the mid-’60s. Yet Dylan called him 
holy. He also brought Ginsberg 
on tour and put him in one of 
the first music videos of all time, 
“Subterranean Homesick Blues.” 
More 
importantly, 
though, 

Dylan emulated Ginsberg in his 
songwriting. 

Allen Ginsberg’s wild, satirical 

style is all over the Electric Trilogy. 
One of the most potent examples 
is “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which, 
like “Howl,” blasts holes into mid-
century 
America’s 
traditional 

facade. In the song’s chorus, 
Dylan mockingly tells a character 
named Mister Jones, and by 
proxy 
masculine, 
upper-class 

white America, including those 

businessmen who laughed at him 
on that tarmac in ’64, “Something 
is happening here, but ya’ don’t 
know what it is, do you, Mister 
Jones?”

While scholarship has dissected 

the rebellion of “Thin Man,” the 
song’s relation to queerness is 
almost never mentioned or, if it 
is, isn’t taken very seriously. Yet a 
queer reading adds radical, perhaps 
even vital, shades to the song. “You 
walk into the room,” it begins. 
“With your pencil in your hand, 
you see somebody naked, And you, 
you say, ‘Who is that man?’ You try 
so hard, but you don’t understand.” 
By the time Dylan tells Jones “the 
sword swallower, he comes up to 
you, and then he kneels, he crosses 
himself, and then he clicks his high 
heels,” it’s almost too obvious. 

When viewed with Ginsberg’s 

context, it’s easy to see how the song 
challenged ’60s heteronormativity 
years before the Summer of Love, 
Stonewall and glam rock. Dylan 
shoved queerness into mainstream 
America’s face and mocked its 
privileged, prejudiced ignorance.

Another Electric Trilogy piece, 

“Maggie’s Farm,” similarly resisted 
American 
boundaries 
through 

a symbolic character, this time 
named Maggie. Her overbearing 
conservatism is similar to that of 
the mother who turned her boy 
away at the airport in ’64: 

“I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s 

farm no more … I try my best to be 
just like I am, but everybody wants 
you to be just like them … I just get 
bored.”

Most critics view “Maggie’s 

Farm” as a general rebellion against 
American conventions, capitalism 
and authority. Yet a queer reading 
is relevatory; one oppressor at 
Maggie’s farm is Maggie’s mother, 
who “talks to all the servants about 
man and God and law.” Clearly 
paralleling Ginsberg’s refusal to 
say the Lord’s Prayer, this line will 
be familar to anyone who grew 
up queer in puritanical America. 
Subsequently, 
Dylan’s 
speaker 

escaping Maggie’s Farm becomes 
not just rebellion, but a necessary, 
touching escape. 

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com

