Man, The Point seems like a fantastic magazine (see also). This is one of the better DFW appreciations I’ve read, looking past the form and into the function, his mission, if we may call it that. Special focus is given to E Unibus Pluram and Infinite Jest. It’s one of those articles that makes me want to read more. Great, great stuff.
Death is Not the End – David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics – The Point Magazine
One of the best things I’ve read this summer. Great writing. Well worth the time. (via)
The essence of passionate love, what grants it the nobility that the others do not possess, is what Stendhal calls crystallization. Just as the naked branch of a tree will gather diamond-like crystals if it is dropped into a salt mine, a lover will gather perfections about the crooked timber of his beloved.
Love in the Age of the Pickup Artist: Stendhal Among the Seducers – The Point Magazine
It kind of gives you hope. If you do creative work, there’s a sense that inspiration is this fairy dust that gets dropped on you, when in fact you can just manufacture inspiration through sheer brute force. You can simply produce enough material that the thing will arrive that seems inspired.
The Wrong Stuff: On Air and On Error: This American Life’s Ira Glass on Being Wrong
More specifially, on books about “how to succeed”:
It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation.
Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can’t be a cheap workman; he can’t be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise.
mr youse needn’t be so spry
concernin questions artyeach has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain partygimme the he-man’s solid bliss
for youse ideas i’ll match yousea pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.
It’s terrible to be a bad loser. I like Soros’s proverb that you should never marry a woman you wouldn’t want to divorce.
The Wrong Stuff : Hoodoos, Hedge Funds, and Alibis: Victor Niederhoffer on Being Wrong
I love the Cup because it stripped away all the things about professional sports that I’ve come to despise. No sideline reporters. No JumboTron. No TV timeouts. No onslaught of replays after every half-decent play. No gimmicky team names like the “Heat” or the “Thunder.” (You know what the announcers call Germany? The Germans. I love this.) No announcers breathlessly overhyping everything or saying crazy things to get noticed. We don’t have to watch 82 mostly half-assed games to get to the playoffs. We don’t have 10 graphics on the screen at all times. We don’t have to sit there for four hours waiting for a winner because pitchers are taking 25 seconds to deliver a baseball.
Ben Casnocha infers two myths from Derek Sivers’ How to Get Hired:
The first is that we all have one or two things we are destined to do. In fact, I think you can become good (and thus) really interested in a range of things. The second is that the way to find what you “really want to do” is through inspection and reflection. In fact, introspection seems never to bear the fruit you’re promised; personal discoveries and self-knowledge seem sooner found via experiments and activity.
For the Documerica Project (1971-1977), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hired freelance photographers to capture images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970s.
Fidel Castro has a blog, apparently. Recent posts focus on the World Cup and the coming nuclear war.
A digest of advice from the masses.
Peers have an effect on your own ambition. More money acquired → more happiness. More money desired → less happiness. I like Eric Barker’s 3-point takeaway near the end, too.
What’s the relationship between money, ambition, and happiness? – Barking up the wrong tree
Lots of good ideas here. Positive psychology seems cooler and cooler every day.
How long we take off probably counts for less than we think, and in the aggregate, taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones. We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it. And interrupting a vacation — far from being a nuisance — can make us enjoy it more. How a trip ends matters more than how it begins, who you’re with matters as much as where you go, and if you want to remember a vacation vividly, do something during it that you’ve never done before. And though it may feel unnecessary, it’s important to force yourself to actually take the time off in the first place — people, it turns out, are as prone to procrastinate when it comes to pleasurable things like vacations as unpleasant ones like paperwork and visits to the dentist.
For a while there, Charles Dickens was suffering from insomnia, so he took up walking “houseless” around London until the sun came up. A great portrait of a city and state of mind:
The restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep, formed one of the first entertainments offered to the contemplation of us houseless people. It lasted about two hours. We lost a great deal of companionship when the late public-houses turned their lamps out, and when the potmen thrust the last brawling drunkards into the street; but stray vehicles and stray people were left us, after that. If we were very lucky, a policeman’s rattle sprang and a fray turned up; but, in general, surprisingly little of this diversion was provided. […]
At length these flickering sparks would die away, worn out–the last veritable sparks of waking life trailed from some late pieman or hot-potato man–and London would sink to rest. And then the yearning of the houseless mind would be for any sign of company, any lighted place, any movement, anything suggestive of any one being up–nay, even so much as awake, for the houseless eye looked out for lights in windows.
Through childhood I hiked, roamed, tirelessly explored the countryside: neighboring farms, a treasure trove of old barns, abandoned houses and forbidden properties of all kinds, some of them presumably dangerous, like cisterns and wells covered with loose boards.
These activities are intimately bound up with storytelling, for always there’s a ghost-self, a “fictitious” self, in such settings. For this reason I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression.
Who knew Joyce Carol Oates was a runner? On how running and dreaming are alike:
I think that when we’re stationary, we have a somewhat thickened sense of the ego or the “I,” and we’re just sort of self-conscious and aware of ourselves. But when we’re in motion, or when we’re in a dream, the “I” entity starts to dissolve. Some people, including myself, and possibly you, are capable of having dreams in which your own personality is really almost dissolved. You know, way, way down in the depths of the ocean there are creatures that are transparent. They’re like jellyfish, a lot of very transparent creatures. And I was thinking it’s almost analogous to the human experience of sleep, where when you’re really, really deep into sleep, your own physical self is often not even there. It’s like you’re transparent. And, it may be a process that we just will never understand, descending somehow deep into the primitive brain – like the brain almost at the brain stem – and away from the consciousness. And, somehow running replicates that, I think. I would think that if you were running very fast, if you were in an instinctive situation where you were terrified – say you were being pursued, and your life was in danger – you would be flooded with adrenaline. I would think probably the “I” or ego was almost gone, that you’re just running like a physical entity, the way a soldier might just start [running], or a boxer, or someone like that. But when you’re writing, there’s … as I say, we have this more thickened or more solid sense of the self, because it’s usually in some stationary situation with social definitions.
I like that it’s ugly, because it keeps the city empty and cheap and it keeps away the non-serious. There are not many (any?) splashy major sights. Even the Wall is mostly gone. The way to see and experience Berlin is to do things. The ugliness selects for people who want to enjoy the city’s musical, theatrical, museum, and literary treasures.
Berlin is evidence that most tourists don’t actually care so much about history, culture, and museums, as it is not for most people a major tourist destination, despite having world-class offerings in each of those areas. Mostly tourists like large, visually spectacular sites, or family activities, combined with the feeling that they are taking in culture or seeing something important.
Mark Larson 