May 2009
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An Interview With David Foster Wallace by Larry... →
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Ok. I promise to stop putting David Foster Wallace stuff here if all of you promise to click that link above and read it. Deal? Deal.
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“All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s...”
– DFW
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“…getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like...”
– DFW
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LM v DFW
LM: The media seems to me to be one thing that has drastically changed this relationship. It's provided people with this television-processed culture for so long that audiences have forgotten what a relationship to serious art is all about.
DFW: Well, it's too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV's ruined readers. Because the U.S.'s television culture didn't come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at--and realize that this is "all it does"--is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there's always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV's going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy.
LM: You really think this distaste is distinctly American?
DFW: It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that's causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something's wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going. But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country- from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression--you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem. And so pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se. Look at utilitarianism--that most English of contributions to ethics- and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
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A Fine Tooth →
jaredgeller:
the best place for fitted trousers.
reblogged for ME.
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April 2009
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Bookworm interview with David Foster Wallace about...
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The David Foster Wallace Audio Project →
Holy. Shit. (for Zachary, Nathan, Kelly, Ronen, and maybe Jared [if he can get past that McCain piece I’m not positive he actually read])
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“My whole life is a rehearsal for my Charlie Rose appearance”
– Jared Geller (via ronen-v)
So is mine, Jared. So is mine.
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Watch“I Used My Imagination”
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Choice Blindness
(…) For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. In some trials, immediately after they made their choice, we asked people to explain the reasons behind their choices.
Unknown to them, we sometimes used a double-card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other so they ended up with the face they...
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“Maybe gods are human brains personifying complex concepts like good, evil,...”
– tlvx: Pareidolia
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