The Lost Years & Last Days Of David Foster Wallace

Finally printed in full on the internet, for all us slackers.

"He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud."

Perfect Sentence

Karl Rove, appearing as a convention panelist, was accosted on stage by a drunken hippie who tried to arrest him for treason.

The problem with anecdote

Anecdote is one of those things that we use to understand the world. But there's a problem, because while anecdote can help us understand stuff on the minor scale of our personal lives (to prove that a particular person is flighty, for example, we don't expect any more than one story of that person canceling a date*) anecdotes suck about things any larger than our own small circle of friends and relatives. There's always going to be an anecdote to prove both sides of any issue. More than that, it's just kinda an inane way of understanding the world when you get down to it, telling illustrative stories. Check out the latest Brooks column to see anecdote at its worst. The anecdote doesn't add any insight into the situation, and is, well, just kinda weird.

*We can believe something, of course, almost in spite of all evidence if we'd want to. Though we might decide a person's flighty after hearing a single story about them, it might take us three or four or ten or twenty instances of flightiness (or a whole three months' worth of flightiness) in our own experience to come to the same conclusion, because we are wedded to the idea that this particular person is much less than flighty, indeed that they are especially kind, we think, and very concerned about our well-being.

McCain Begins

After reading this New Yorker story about how Palin became McCain's VP pick, it struck me that Palin was kinda like Batman-Begins-era-Katie-Holmes. I mean you've got this product--McCain and the movie--and the product is trying its best to make its case for itself, but then on the sideline you've got someone charismatic, who the media loves, whojust keeps on sucking the juice from the main story. Coverage of Batman Begins was overshadowed by Holmes' 'association' with the sofa-jumping Tom Cruise. Coverage of McCain is similarly overshadowed by his bright-as-a-penny Tina Fey impersonator.

All Koans Are Broken

All koans are fixed.

Boring Stories

You know when you're hanging out with one of those profoundly lonely people and they start telling you a story, only it's about this ridiculously inane thing because they actually have no stories since they're so lonely? Like they start telling you about how they met a man once, right, at a bar, and he we really drunk. And then you're sitting there, waiting for the story-like information, the novelty to hit, but it never hits--that's it?

The worst part about being lonely is that you have the nagging suspicion that when a person spends time with you they will judge you to be just about as miserable as you feel. Like with teen-age self-hatred, the sad part is that this sentiment is, more often than not, justified.

Such as: That rosy-colored distorting lens

Ideology makes us biased. That's pretty easy to admit. We read newspapers that confirm our opinion, we focus on the stories that do not test our beliefs, and we presume the idiocy of anyone who is the other side of an idea. And while we're very comfortable affirming this truth abstractly, I am loathe to admit it personally. I know I read biased sources of information and that I read 'unbiased' information through the distorting lens of my own bias. But I think that I'm above the indignity of being wrong.

Now that's all fine and good . If we second-guessed our every interpretation for signs of bias we'd be closer to going crazy than we'd be closer to the Truth. But it's surprising the extent to which our ideology distorts our views of the world. And it's good to confront this distortion for two reasons. First, ideology's distortion of evidence can explain why reasonable people can so sharply differ in their opinions. The fact that people can believe in the sanctity of a religion or the free market, the sagacity of a particular politician and the saintliness of another , the mystical benefits of Tibetan Buddhism contra the Secret--it's always a bit of a puzzle to me. But such gulfs in opinion are not proof of maliciousness of stupidity (or need not be proof of maliciousness or stupidity), it's proof only that when you believe something you are more likely to see it confirmed. If you believe that prayer can heal diseases, you are that much more likely to read the newspaper story about the healing power of prayer. If you believe that Obama is a vampiremuslimterroristabortionist then you are going to treat news stories about Ayers and Wright differently than if you believe Obama is already President but for the graceful and ineluctable election. That's the first reason why it might be good to admit the distortion of our own ideology.

The second reason is more uncomfortable. Admitting the distortion of ideology we admit we are wrong. And when we are proven wrong we will be as stubborn and as bull-headed and as frustrating as those people who drive SUVs and proudly affirm that global warming doesn't exist. Their problem isn't that they are assholes. (They might be assholes.) Their problem is that they're human. And when you tell a human being they're wrong they are not going to admit they are wrong, as a first reaction--they're going to tell you why you're wrong, slopjob.

What got me started thinking this way was reading a piece by Camille Paglia. This thing stood out to me as one of the most obvious examples of ideologically distorted thought I've ever seen.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant. [Emphasis mine.]

(And here to admit my own susceptibility to distortion, when I first read this I skimmed over the bits where Paglia supports Obama, and thought that she was just another conservative. When drafting this essay, I thought of Paglia in that mode, too, even though she is more complicated, certainly. I faced disconfirmation of my belief, and instead of throwing up my hands and admitting ignorance--I ploughed on.)

Now. I'm wondering now whether to mount a frontal attack on the meat of this quote, or to go from behind. First, the frontal attack, as quickly as I can make it. Sarah Palin's ineloquence isn't striking just because it's hilarious; it's striking because it reveals a lack of detailed thought filled--not with policy knowledge of a deep or shallow variety--but with sound bites. Shakespeare's English wasn't great because it was experimental, but because it more perfectly communicated the human condition. Sarah Palin didn't communicate anything. Her ineloquence is a secondary problem, just as Shakespeare's eloquence is only secondary to his charm.

Now the attack from behind, which is more amenable to my thesis. Paglia approached the debate from the angle that Sarah Palin was "as powerful new [symbol] of a revived contemporary feminism." From that lens, what looks to me as Palin's idiocy looks to Paglia as Palin's brave stabs at unconventional communication. Now I don't get paid to express an opinion, which leaves me in an envious position compared with Paglia. I don't need to have an opinion, and if I do have an opinion, nobody really cares whether it's interesting or not. Paglia gets paid to have opinions that people care about, and so she cannot rest in the middle ground, this led her to servery misinterpret Palin's public performance.

Differences in interpretation are going to be so vast because we select which data to notice based on our beliefs, and so different people will be more or less likely to notice different information. Paglia's gush about Palin is akin to the review we would expect from the parents of Miss Teen South Carolina. Where we see indubitable failure, they, through those rosy-colored distorting lenses of affection, see excuse, interpretation--certainly they don't see a witless bimbo but a charming and nervous girl struggling through a stupid question--they pick out the evidence which supports their love.





Not that I'm ragging on just Paglia. No doubt I have committed far graver epistemic sins, only I'm lucky or unlucky enough not to have those sins survive in print. We all are guilty. If you have a crush on a girl you're much more likely to focus on the things she does which convinces you that your feelings are reciprocated. If you like a sports team you are going to think that their chances in a given season are so much higher than they really are.

The question is, when it comes time for us to face the moment when our beliefs do not match reality, will we go to the tribunal of experience kicking and screaming , or will we go bravely under the cowl of our own ignorance. It is far easier to kick and scream, and better for the ego. It is my personal hope, though, that when it comes my time I will be brave about it, bite my tongue, and agree that I can be every bit an idiot.

The Problem of Synecdoche

Poll question that popped up on my screen watching the MySpace coverage of the presidential debates (paraphrase):

Do you think that another 9/11 will happen on US soil?

I sure hope so. Every year, right after September 1oth.

Ponder this:

Why is it that when you're on a date, suddenly everything seems cheaper? Like two scoops of ice cream at Baskin Robbins is something like three bucks, which I'd never ever spend on my own. But suddenly I'm on a date and three bucks is nothing. Go wild! Put whipped cream and nuts on that shit if you want. I'll pick up the tab for everyone. Then when I'm alone again I will think long and hard about shelling out sixty cents for a candy bar.

The world is vast...

Question asked to me today at lunch:

"At what age do American students start to use mechanical pencils?"

LOLEXPERIENCE

A Fact About Our Bodies

Victims of Havenffeld-Snarksburg Syndrome, a congenital neurological disorder, are unable to understand or display self-deception. Otherwise normal HSS patients find simple statements like "Be honest with yourself..." or "He's pulled the wool over his own eyes," completely incomprehensible. Oddly enough, HSS seems to coincide with deep depressive tendencies. Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRIs) neuro-scientists studying HSS are trying to pin-point the part of the brain devoted to self-deception. Hopefully they will develop a drug to help those of us who are wholly or partially unable to slip into states of pleasant self-delusion.

My Financial Plan

Well, US 'Mericans, it's been a bad couple of weeks. DFW's dead, the stock market has officially come unloosed from any tethers that once held it to the Beachhead Of Empirical Evidence causing stock prices to do a fairly good visual impression of my emotional maturity level at a high falootin' party (unpredictable huge rises and falls, with a severe downward trend), and added on top of that people don't seem to want to buy books, which makes my dream of eating with the money people paid me for my books seem unrealistic, so there's little left to do these days but wait for the upcoming season of 30 Rock.

Given these circumstances, US 'Mericans, I give you my Brendan Mackie-Brand Financial Plan. If John McCain wins the election, that's it, I'm short selling the US. You heard me right. Naked short selling, too.

I'll put my short order in naked. Take that, disappointing 2008!

Snip From The New Yorker

The happy effect that Babar has on us, and our imaginations, comes from this knowledge—from the child’s strong sense that, while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park.

Indeed.

COME ON MEDIA

Okay, reading the Times' comparison of the campaigns' stances on science issues presented a moment which illustrates the frustration of this presidential election cycle. They compare McCain and Obama's climate change policies thusly:

In terms of 1990 levels of carbon emissions, Mr. McCain would ultimately have the nation’s output drop by 60 percent and Mr. Obama by 80 percent.

BUT THEY NEVER MENTION THE MECHANISM FOR CONTROLLING THESE CARBON EMISSIONS. Which is, of course, you know, KINDA IMPORTANT. And the candidates have very different plans. McCain, for one, favors the public auction of carbon credits, which, as I understand it, is just a huge money giveaway which won't actually help reduce emissions at all, in comparison to an actual cap and trade scheme.

It's not like explaining anything like this would take more than ten words. It seems disingenuous at best to compare the two candidates and yet somehow escape any actual comparisons between the two. Perhaps, when you get a detailed enough comparison of policies so that people can actually judge the merits of them it violates journalistic objectivity or something. Because the facts would obviously favor one side. How else do we explain the continued belief that Alaskan oil drilling would have any effect at all on domestic gas prices?

UPDATE 10/6: Umm , it seems that I got confused about the differences between McCain and Obama's plan. Obama does favor the auctioning of carbon credits. I know that there are substantive differences between the two plans, only I am, unfortunatly, unclear as to what those differences are. Also, somewhat lazily, I will use this ignorance to further bolster my original point: we need more policy information in our news sources.

David Foster Wallace Dead

As far as public figures go, this death feels personal to an embarrassing extent. Usually I am somewhat callous towards death, especially about the death of people who one does not actually know personally. But it's not just insensitivity to the public lamentations around Heath Ledger and Princes Di--barring it befalling close friends and family members, death fails to move me. Throw a friend in my lap, inconsolable that her sister's best friend died, and I'll look at them with the condescending incomprehension fitting the observation of forgotten and ecstatic religious rites of some minor deity of the Roman pantheon. But then I read that this author has died, David Foster Wallace--who I have never met and who I have had only the most tangential personal relationship with--I can't do anything but fall to my bed.

Enough of this personal stuff. Well, one more thing. In my senior year of college when I was worrying whether or not I should try to "make it as a writer" I wrote David Foster Wallace with a story of mine. I got a postcard back a couple months later, and he said that my style was "clear and unpretentious" (I can remember that) and he wished me luck in a way that I interpreted as meaning that he saw some promise in me. My number two most recurring fantasy about my novel (number one is having ex-girlfriends and -crushes call me and tell me how my they like me) is that I would get it published and sent it off to DFW and he'd read it and appreciate it and we could become friends.

Of course that's not going to happen.

But that brief brush with the man himself is not enough to warrant my feeling upset by his death. Even taking into account the place that DFW's writing held in my own personal story, his death is not enough to make me fall on my bed and not want to get up and, at a Korean Thanksgiving I was attending, invited by the Tae Bo teacher I have a ridiculous crush on, his death should not make me nearly sob over the tiggim that "My favorite author has just killed himself"--a sentence which elicited nothing but bemused glances from my dining companions, English- and non-English-speaking alike.

The thing that makes Wallace's death so poignant is that it shouldn't of happened. First, we all wanted more. Wallace's was the kind of writing that was perfectly compulsive. The loss of his voice, of the chance of another novel, that's baffling to me.

But there's more, and here's where we might have to get a bit more personal again. Wallace seemed to have struggled with the demons that come with being a smart, sensitive person in the world. And he'd seemed to really conquer them. An aside that will make sense further in this paragraph: You know how you can tell the difference between someone who gets Wallace and someone who doesn't? Someone who doesn't get him will talk about his verbal acuity (or, pretentiousness) those footnotes, that flair. Someone who gets him will talk about his observational acuity. How he seemed to be able to frankly talk about the dark corners of life with such off-putting, shocking accuracy. Like he just peered into your secret, crazy thoughts, described them just right, and told you what to do about it. And so he peered into those crazy thoughts, understood them, and didn't like what he saw.

Is it a cliche to say that the choice of our lives is whether to live or whether to off ourselves? It's something I've thought about. Does the periodic bed-bound wordless sadness that sometimes strikes me--is it worth sitting through to get to the other bits? To get to those times that rank with eating chocolate cake or hearing that your friend gets promoted or sitting at Korean Thanksgiving and having the Tae Bo instructor who may or may not want to date you hold your hand. Does the banal difficulty of life merit the pleasures? Now, sometimes I haven't dared think about that reckoning. But most times I think, pretty solidly, that the pleasures by far outweigh the indignities.

But Wallace, who I respect, who I understand, who I thought got this stuff better than most people out there--he thought otherwise. He thought that life was just too painful to keep going.

And so Wallace's suicide makes me afraid!

I'm not angry at him. I'm not going to throw around any pablum about how it's grossly selfish to kill yourself or anything like that and I'm not going to try to call him crazy for doing what he did. Because if you can't understand why he'd do it, then you're not trying hard enough. And even though those things are true, that suicide is selfish and never the right answer, just saying that doesn't make sense of his death, it doesn't give any sort of comfort.

The tough part is thinking that with all his sensitivity and intelligence, this was his answer. Not another book, no more courses teaching students, not even an easy life reading somewhere eating cake. A rope around his neck. That was his answer. And it's that answer which hurts. Like if you hiked up a huge mountain to meet an enlightened master and asked him what you should do with your life and he turned his eyes towards you and slowly, proudly, asked you what brand shoes you wore.

HOLY SHIT

What's Liz Lemon doing with Colonel Tigh?

... Oh wait.

UPDATE: Huh? (via waxy).

How Training A Dog Is Like Teaching A Korean Schoolgirl

Check out this cool video from the perma-cool TED talks about... dog training. Not the most interesting subject ever, I know, but this must be the most genius dog trainer you'll see. Ian Dunbar, the dog trainer in question, has a really neat perspective on canine discipline. It's pretty simple, like all great things are. You have to make the dog's desires line up with yours.

This is great because I think we can take everything he says about dog training and apply it to the rest of our lives, translating the advice about teaching "sit puppy" to "now learn some English." So many times in the classroom do I find myself making the mistakes Dunbar ascribes to bad dog owners. I punish the kids by yelling at them. I fail to understand why the kids want to talk with each other instead of listening to me patter on in a foreign tongue. Dunbar's strategy is all about empathy--about seeing 'bad' behaviour as something logical and understandable, not as evidence of metaphysical malfeasance. This requires making a greater-than-usual effort to understand another being's perspective, but the pay-off is huge: instead of seeing my students as THE ENEMY who I must forge into a disciplined English-learning machine, I can see them as creatures with their own desires and needs--I just have to somehow shoehorn English learning in there. If he can understand why a puppy acts up, then I can understand why my students want to talk with each other instead of studying English.

Now, what's the practical upswing of all this rarefied theoretical bullshit? My biggest discipline problem teaching is that my (all-girl) students often want to gossip to each other in Korean. So if I can take their relentless social urge and somehow filter it into English learning, then my classes will be significantly easier, and more fun. The great thing about teaching a language which you won't get from teaching math or literature, is that language-learning is hard-wired in our brains. It is as natural as eating. The pay-off is instantly satisfying: communication. Now how to harness that communication, that's the hard part, but I suppose I will spend the better part of my weekend thinking this through.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

One of the reasons why I am the odd critter I am has to be hours of my most impressionable youth wasted soaking up Ren and Stimpy. I was always a little disappointed that real life was nothing like Ren and Stimpy.

THE POLLS ARE IN!

Horse-raceish campaign coverage reminds me of a guy tasked to cover the summer swimming hole who wastes his word count dragging his fat big toe through the water skittishly reporting "The water here at the swimming hole is still cold"--but who never actually girds his swimmers and swims, refusing to grace his exasperated readers with even the most cursory splash.