“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.”
-David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
(via notational)
super 8
with today’s release of the movie super 8, i will take this opportunity to renew david foster wallace’s assertion in 2001:
…the founders of the Super 8 motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate.
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source: david foster wallace, tense present; harper’s magazine (April 2001).
game set match
It is in areas like math and metaphysics that we encounter one of the average human minds’s weirdest attributes. This is the ability to conceive things that we cannot, strictly speaking, conceive of.David Foster Wallace: Everything and More. A Compact History of ∞ (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
Reblogging to read later.
it’s really quite lovely
(via lesparapluiesrouges)
This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.David Foster Wallace (via michelledean)
(via lesparapluiesrouges)
The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
The first sentence of DFW’s “The Depressed Person”.
By mixing heightened feeling and unrelenting repetition (“pain”, “pain”, “pain”) with a Latinate, clinically declarative voice (“component”, “contributing factor”), Wallace delivers his readers right where he wants them: inside the hellish disconnect between psychic pain and the modern means of describing it. The rhythm of the sentence is perfectly matched to its positive content. Indeed, from a writer’s point of view the two aren’t separate. If we could separate meaning from sound, we’d read plot summaries rather than novels. (via The Art of Good Writing)
No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays (via: mianoti & ohnonotme)
(via postmodernmarvel)
His relationship with Mary Karr was volatile. She inspired a character in the novel—a radio host named Madame Psychosis who ends up in the halfway house. Wallace got a tattoo of a heart with Mary’s name on it. He signed his letters to her “Young Werther.” He proposed to her. They fought. “Someone you get sober with is like someone you were in Vietnam with,” Karr remembers. They split up. One day, according to Karr, he broke her coffee table. She billed him a hundred dollars. He paid her and said that the remains of the table were now his. Karr told him that she’d used them for firewood, and that all he’d bought was “the brokenness.David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass Infinite Jest (via nonwriting)
(via drinkyourjuice)
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My name is Dan. I live in Edmonton. Sometimes I take pictures. Sometimes I draw things. I like cars and photography and science. You can talk to me on Twitter or ask me a question.
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