#david foster wallce

[essential-existential]

  I think part of the allure of both drugs and entertainment is, is escape, yes? From my problems and my life and having to be stuck in here, I can pretend to be James Bond and so forth. It seems fine over the short haul... but as a way of life? It doesn’t work all that well, no?    So.. if you’re talking about the more general allure of drugs to the extent that I understand it...it seems to me to be.. a pretty natural extension of corporate-capitalist logic which is: I want to feel exactly the way I want to feel--which is good--for exactly this long, and so I will exchange a certain amount of cash for this substance. And I’ll do it, but its all of course a lie because the control gradually goes away and it stops being that I want to do it and it becomes that I feel I need to do it. And that shift from I want something to I feel I need it is, is a big one, yes?  Most of the problems in my life come from me confusing what I want and what I need.   You see its a strange question because who would say entertainment is bad? I wouldn’t say entertainment is bad..hmph But a model of life in which, in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems to me not to be a promising one. 

[infinite-jest-again]

“The night’s so clear the stars shine right through people’s heads.” - p. 617, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[freige-ist]

Der bleiche Kater

[chantiburnette]

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience, It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

[davidfosterwalrus]

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thingas not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

David Foster Wallace

[givemeagoodread-blog]

How one player’s grace, speed, power, precision, kinesthetic virtuosity, and seriously wicked topspin are transfiguring men’s tennis.

Roger Federer brings more to the court than we have seen in a long time. He brings power, aggression and beauty.

“You are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a “bloody near-religious experience.”

[bellalechuza]

No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable form that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

David Foster Wallace, Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed

[fern-and-lilac]

“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”