"We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd."
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest
"As far as I can tell, for my generation and maybe the kids younger than us, there are different things that we’re afraid of. We’re afraid of being trite, we’re afraid of being sentimental, we’re afraid of being mawkish, we’re afraid of being stale and formulaic — unless we’re stale and formulaic in a way that pokes fun at its stale, formulaic quality. I mean, we have been taught, so much, both by the lessons of television and the saturation of television, what are the things to be afraid of. And one of the big reasons why irony — and it’s been kind of the mode of discourse in the culture — has really ceased to be palliative or helpful, is that irony is this marvelous carapace, that I can use to shield myself from seeming to you to be naive, or sentimental, or to buy the lush banalities that television gives. If I show you that I believe that we’re both bastards, and that there’s no point to anything and that I was last naive at about age 6, then I protect myself from your judgment of the worst possible flaw in me: sentimentality and naivete, the way a proper appearance of decorum would shield me from your judgment of me as deviant or offensive 30 or 40 years ago."
David Foster Wallace, replayed in BBC Radio 3’s 2011 documentary “Endnotes,” originally from a 1995 BBC Radio 3 interview. (Unavailable at bbc.co.uk, but here’s a working bootleg.)
Geoff Ward, professor & cultural historian of American literature, introduces this section:
In Wallace’s fiction, irony is the enemy, a once-useful tool that is now ubiquitous and empty, co-opted by TV and crass entertainment. Authenticity and sincerity have receded from our sight, but must be recovered somehow.
(via kidbijou)
(Source: notesonresistance)
"There may not be something wrong with 6-8 hours of television a day, but it would be very nice for you to remember that you’re essentially being offered a sales pitch and a seduction 6-8 hours a day. If we forget that, then for some reason, just intuitively, I think we’re in huge trouble. At a time in the US, I think, when it’s very hard to find and commit to things that you think are important or good, at least for me, in some elements of fiction it seems to me…it’s a rather high-minded agenda: to try to wake people up to the fact that our experience is weird now. There’s something weird and thrice-removed from the real world about it. And a lot of us don’t realize it. What’s at stake is, in many ways, human agency about how we experience the world. Would I rather go muck around in the hot sun by the seashore or watch a marvelously put together documentary about the death of egrets? But by the time I go to the god damned seashore and have seen the egrets, I have already experienced the smooth documentary so many times that it becomes, quickly, incoherent to talk about an extra-mediated, or an extra-televisual reality. Now that fact in and of itself is frightening. And it’s that kind of almost just sort of shooting a flare into the sky and inviting people to say how weird that is. I can go to the ocean that I’ve never seen before, but I’ve spent a thousand hours {there}. I mean it’s…who would wanna live when you can…watch?"
"The metaphysics of pleasure in writing, pleasure for extended periods, aren’t easy to unravel. There’s an electrical impulse connected to language and when it takes you into untouristed parts of your consciousness, this can be the deepest writerly pleasure — but it’s not likely to happen except in brief bursts, for a sentence or two, or a short paragraph. Longer-term fun is a function of some mysterious combination of writer, story, characters — the book’s developing form, what it allows you to do and not do, feel and not feel. I think fun has to announce itself."
David Foster Wallace’s annotations of Don Delillo’s Players
"The Victorian Age made one or two mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is, mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They thought that commerce inside a country must certainly promote prosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these were experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If we continue the capitalist use of the populace — if we continue the capitalist use of external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not be on the dead."
G. K. Chesterton
(Source: victorianweb.org)
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tagged: amazing discoveries audio holy shit lit lou reed poem quote dreams fulfilled
tagged: amazing discoveries audio holy shit lit lou reed poem quote dreams fulfilled
"Dear Iraq: Do like us. After 100 years let your slaves go. After 150 let your women vote. Love, Uncle Sam."
Kurt Vonnegut, The Infinite Mind
"Now, I’m a fan of Nietzsche- he got a bum rap with that whole Nazi thing, he certainly did, but anyway, as he said, what governs our actions today is our future. And I look at where I’ve been now, I’m 83 and I’ve been everywhere I’m going to be and it seems to me that I have been steered."
Kurt Vonnegut, on the existence of Luck
"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another until I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
Jack Kerouac (via comelylittletree)
(Source: slychedelic)
