This is Excellent
There's a great passage in a David Foster Wallace essay I'm reading: it's brilliant, funny, and truthful. The context is a discussion he's started about how contemporary fiction writers ((he wrote the essay in 1990) should respond to the reality that irony, once the sole reservation of the postmodern artist, is now squarely and completely in the hands of television. The explication of that sentence is rather long, and difficult - the essay is 60 pages and the book is 9x6, which means on regular 8x10 paper it would be somewhere in the vicinity of 46 pages - but it's only necessary to know that it's about writers reacting to the reaction to society. Got it? Cool. Here's what he said:
"One obvious option is for the fiction writer to become reactionary, fundamentalist. Declare contemporary television evil and contemporary culture evil and turn one's back on the whole spandexed mess and invoke instead good old pre-1960s Hugh Beaumontish virtues and literal readings of the Testaments and be pro-Life, anti-Fluoride, antediluvian. The problem with this is that Americans who've opted for this tack seem to have one eybrow straight across their forehead and knuckles that drag on the ground and really tall hair and in general just seem like an excellent crowd to transcend. . . most of us will take nihilism over neanderthalism."
What a lively way of calling Christian Conservatives neanderthals. And the essay, up to this point (I'm about 45 pages into it), has been extremely reserved and descriptive (i.e. non-prescriptive). So this interjection and actual prescription comes as 1) a surprise and 2) an instance of what appears to be a necessary truth.
Oh, and I guess this means I've started reading David Foster Wallace, after writing that post (my second or third, four hundred years ago) about his virtual nonexistence among my generation before his suicide (which catapulted him into the stratosphere of Rock Gods who've died [Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, etc.] because, even at 46, he looked and talked like a Rock God - and committed suicide, all existentially and stuff). I've read a dozen of his essays, some short stories, and a speech or two - I haven't gotten to the novels, yet - and my only report is that he has, thus far, the most brilliant mind I've come across in a long, long while. Explanation is unnecessary - this guy is the shit.
"One obvious option is for the fiction writer to become reactionary, fundamentalist. Declare contemporary television evil and contemporary culture evil and turn one's back on the whole spandexed mess and invoke instead good old pre-1960s Hugh Beaumontish virtues and literal readings of the Testaments and be pro-Life, anti-Fluoride, antediluvian. The problem with this is that Americans who've opted for this tack seem to have one eybrow straight across their forehead and knuckles that drag on the ground and really tall hair and in general just seem like an excellent crowd to transcend. . . most of us will take nihilism over neanderthalism."
What a lively way of calling Christian Conservatives neanderthals. And the essay, up to this point (I'm about 45 pages into it), has been extremely reserved and descriptive (i.e. non-prescriptive). So this interjection and actual prescription comes as 1) a surprise and 2) an instance of what appears to be a necessary truth.
Oh, and I guess this means I've started reading David Foster Wallace, after writing that post (my second or third, four hundred years ago) about his virtual nonexistence among my generation before his suicide (which catapulted him into the stratosphere of Rock Gods who've died [Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, etc.] because, even at 46, he looked and talked like a Rock God - and committed suicide, all existentially and stuff). I've read a dozen of his essays, some short stories, and a speech or two - I haven't gotten to the novels, yet - and my only report is that he has, thus far, the most brilliant mind I've come across in a long, long while. Explanation is unnecessary - this guy is the shit.
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