Time for some more gushing and praise for DFW

It's been awhile since I obsessed about DFW, so I figured now is a good time to check in. :) I'm working on reading The Broom of the System right now . . . though I don't have anything to say about that just yet. But I figured I'd clean out some of my old notes and ramblings . . . so here goes.

Just some things I love.

Really really incredible, moving essay on "The View from Mrs. Thompson's"
"LOCATION: BLOOMINGTON< ILLINOIS
DATES: 11-13 SEPTEMBER, 2001

SUBJECT: OBVIOUS"

I love this short essay. I want it.


Quote in Up, Simba (which was overall fantastic) . . . ."'catered lunches' which today are strange bright red ham on Wonder Bread, Fritos, and coffee that tastes like hot water with a brown crayon in it. . ." this made me laugh out loud

and this wonderful description

"Even the network techs, practically Zen masters at waiting around and killing time, are bored out of their minds at today's F&F, where after racing back and forth to get all their gear off the bus in the bad neighborhood and making a chaise of it (the gear) here in the back there's nothing to do but they also can't really go anywhere because their field producer might suddenly need help feeding tape. Te way the techs handle deep boredom is to become extremely sluggish and torpid, so that lined up on the ottoman they look like an exhibit of lizards whose tank isn't hot enough."

!!! :)

And now a long one.

david Foster Wallace p 95 in "Authority and American Usage" about words. I LOVE HIM.

"Take, for example, the Descriptivism claim that so-called correct English usages such as brought rather than brung and felt rather than feeled are arbitrary and restrictive and unfair and are supported only by custom and are (like irregular verbs in general) archaic and incommodious and an all-around pain in the ass. Let us concede for the moment that these objections are 100 percent reasonable. Then let's talk about pants. Trousers, slacks. I suggest to you that having the "correct" subthoracic clothing for U.S. males be pants instead of skirts is arbitrary (lots of other cultures let men wear skirts), restrictive and unfair (U.S. females get to wear pants), based solely on archaic custom (I think it's got something to do with certain traditions about gender and leg position, the same reasons girls' bikes don't have a crossbar), and in certain ways not only incommodious but illogical (skirts are more comfortable than pants; pants ride up; pants are hot; pants can squish the genitals and reduce fertility; over time pants chafe and erode irregular sections of men's leg hair and give older men hideous half-denuded legs, etc. etc.). Let us grant — as a thought experiment if nothing else — that these are all reasonable and compelling objections to pants as an androsartorial norm. Let us in fact in our minds and hearts say yes — shout yes — to the skirt, the kilt, the toga, the sarong, the jupe. Let us dream of or even in our spare time work toward an America where nobody lays any arbitrary sumptuary prescriptions on anyone else and we can all go around as comfortable and aerated and unchafed and unsquished and motile as we want.

And yet the fact remains that, in the broad cultural mainstream of millennial America, men do not wear skirts. If you, the reader, are a U.S. male, and even if you share my personal objections to pants and dream as I do of a cool and genitally unsquishy American Tomorrow, the odds are still 99.9 percent that in 100 percent of public situations you wear pants/slacks/shorts/trunks. More to the point, if you are a U.S. male and also have a U.S. male child, and if that child were to come to you one evening and announce his desire/intention to wear a skirt rather than pants to school the next day, I am 100-percent confident that you are going to discourage him from doing so. Strongly discourage him. You could be a Molotov-tossing anti-pants radical or a kilt manufacturer or Steven Pinker himself — you're going to stand over your kid and be prescriptive about an arbitrary, archaic, uncomfortable, and inconsequentially decorative piece of clothing. Why? Well, because in modern America any little boy who comes to school in a skirt (even, say, a modest all-season midi) is going to get stared at and shunned and beaten up and called a Total Geekoid by a whole lot of people whose approval and acceptance are important to him. In our culture, in other words, a boy who wears a skirt is Making a Statement that is going to have all kinds of gruesome social and emotional consequences."

Anyway, I guess I was pretty focused on the fact that he is dead when I was writing all these thoughts below . . .

For most people who die when they still have loved ones left to mourn them, people are sad for the loss of that human being. But there is another kind of mouring which comes for people whose life work is so significant that we must also mourn what we will all miss by them not being alive anymore to contribute. David Foster Wallace is such a person. I am genuinely sad at what we will never hear.

When I read Shakespeare, I don't think "God, I cant' beleive he's dead," nor do I think "When I finish Midsummer Night's Dream, there will no more Shakespeare left to read!", but for people who might ostensibly be comfortably alive at this moment (John Lennon, for example, who could still have been writing music and touring even today) there is a certian kind of tragedy to their non-existence. What MORE could they have done during this time? What will we never hear. What books are not written, essays not published, opinions not shared. And it occurs to me that this is perhaps a sign of real artistic success -- that if you were to stop making what you make, there would be peole who would deeply mourn the loss of your contribution. To have a contribution that is so meaningful, and so unique, and so singular that it must come from you alone, and that what you gave people is something they will miss when there is no more of it, seems like the highest compliment that you can pay to a creative person. It is not the kind of success that means you are necessarily famous, or wealthy, or in history books, though the people that come to mind mostly were, at least famous. But it is more that the person you are and the work you did were so . . . unique and individual and dare I say personal that people will miss what you made, because it means that they cared about what you did, they loved it in a much more personal way that left them wishing for more, for the next thing. To never run out of new essays to read or new songs to listen to. I imagine what it might be like for someone (not even a lot of someones, but just some stranger who doesn't know the full you, but just your work) to await my paintings because they are in love with what they do or what they say. This is how I have felt about so many others (though mostly writers, comedians, etc.) that it seems like a fairly decent goal. It sounds like I'm aspiring to something really . . .I don't know . . . cheesy maybe . . . but I think I like this marker of success more than others because even though it sounds like a very very self-aggrandizing aspiration, but I think its actually kind of a humble thing, or at least I'd like to think it is, because it's about being so genuine and so real to who you are and making some kind of connection with another human being through your work.

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