Wallace on McCain

I am in the middle of reading David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster," which is, like "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," some of the best non-fiction writing I've ever encountered. It's dizzyingly intelligent. This morning I finished reading "Up, Simba," his essay about being on the campaign with John McCain in 2000 the week after the New Hampshire primary. It's pretty fascinating, as you can imagine, to read in the context of the current election, especially because some of the stuff he writes in an essay about John McCain could easily be applied to, well, Barack Obama. I'm speaking specifically about a section titled "Suck it Up" which is about salesmen versus leaders, and how you can't decide which McCain is, but that young people are looking for leaders "who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own" (225).

I highly recommend picking up this book because there are more perfect, awesome nuggets in it than I have time to type into this blog, but it really does peel apart so many aspects of political campaigns -- the routine of the political campaign tour around the country, the role of the media, and especially the ambivalence you feel watching a candidate, knowing that some portion of what he/she does (man, it feels good to write "she" there and have a real example) is calculated and that some portion of it is genuine, but now knowing which part is greater -- that it's very much worth reading at this time in our country's history. Here's another part I really liked (it's long, but bear with me):

It's hard to get good answers to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it's next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he's not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling's enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the political process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn't seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000's adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as "amazingly lifelike"; Steve Forbes, with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G. W. Bush's patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself, with his big read fake-friendly face and "I feel your pain." Men who aren't enough like human beings even to hate -- what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even.
...
As one national pencil told Rolling Stone and another nonpro, "If you saw more of how the other candidates conduct themselves, you'd be way more impressed with [McCain]. It's that he acts somewhat in the ballpark of the way a real human being would act." And the grateful press on the Trail transmit -- maybe even exaggerate -- McCain's humanity to their huge audience, the electorate, which electorate in turn seems to paroxysmically thankful for a presidential candidate somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being that it just has to make you stop and think about how starved voters are for just some minimal level of genuineness in the mean who want to "lead" and "inspire" them.

...There's another thing John McCain always says. He makes sure he concludes every speech and THM with it, so the buses' press hear it about 100 times this week. He always pauses a second for effect and then says: "I'm going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don't agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth." This is McCain's closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder. Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well, it's obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They're cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain's resume and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters' pain but relief from it. Because we've been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It's ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts.

All of this really makes me wish DFW would go on the trail with Obama. I'd really like to see his take on that phenomenon.

No writer's intentions allowed

My head is fuzzy. But I am attempting to blog a bit and clear out some of my many Mozilla Firefox tabs. I loved this little bit from Paul Thomas Anderson about "There Will Be Blood":

Once on the film's Marfa, Texas, set, Anderson continued to whittle at and refine the screenplay with a dedication befitting his own monomaniacal protagonist, taking particular care to remove anything that risked overstating the movie's themes. He describes one offending scene, between Plainview and the mysterious drifter (played by Kevin J. O'Connor) who claims to be his half brother, in which one of Plainview's lines echoed Eli Sunday in an earlier scene. "That's not something I wrote with any kind of writerly intention — to parallel these two guys," Anderson says. "I didn't even notice it was there until somebody on the set said, 'That's an interesting moment.' And my alarm bell went off: Don't do that! No writer's intentions allowed! When you're working on something, there's always a danger of screwing the screws in so fucking tight that it's not breathing any longer."

(from LA Weekly)

Also...

I didn't even realize NaBloPoMo was over until just now... congratulations to me for writing a post a day for November. I plan to continue with it.

Excedrin works

I woke up this morning with a headache -- took two Advil -- came to work and found myself with a worse headache by 10:30. So for the first time in my life I tried the migraine sufferer's friend, Excedrin, and if I am not tempting fate too much right now, it seems to have had at least a slight effect. That's very exciting, I know, but I consider it a small victory today, since today so far has not been super pleasant. I'm filling in for someone at work and finding that a bit challenging (fuck, headache just came back a bit), and this headache was not the best way to start back at work after a week's pseudo-vacation. Grump.

That said though, things seem to be looking up... I have been of course re-evaluating my life and coming up with some good goals (exercise Tuesday through Thursday is one example) and feeling a little centered. And last night's Love Actually viewing was everything I hoped it would be, nerd that I am. Now that my headache's fading I can post here today!

Also, I have to say this: NaBloPoMo has been really nice. I love sitting down for just a bit every day to write something, even the days I only have thirty seconds to jot down a quick hello. It is a nice kind of routine, a mental checkup. So I have to thank you, my meager but dedicated readership, because this is helpful to me to write and so it's even better to know it's being read. Hurray for blogs!

NaBloPoMo! NaNoWriMo!

Which to choose? How about both!! I have crossed the line into crazy!

Or not.

National Blog Post Month is supposed to be chiller than National Novel Writing Month, but I am adopting them both with the same spirit. For the novel thing, I'm not thinking of a novel.. I just want to get some words on paper. The same with the blog. I'm not trying to write deep, insightful posts every day, I'm just doing a little expressing. And I want to introduce a kind of routine, or rather, rhythm, to my life. (Right now the rhythm is like this: AHH CRAZY AWESOME WEEKEND OR WEEKNIGHT, AHH SHIT WORK, AHH SO EXHAUSTED BUT AHH STUFF TO DO, AHH CRAZY AWESOME WEEKEND OR WEEKNIGHT, AHH, REPEAT.) Some kind of quiet routine. Hence: a writing routine.

Wish me luck, and feel free to keep up.

Jumbled

I just read a bunch of McSweeney's lists and feel the need to replicate them except I only have one item for the list.

Incidentally, have you ever thought about the two main formats for McSweeney's lists? They usually go like this:

LIST OF NAMES YOU COULD CALL SOMETHING IF IT WAS OTHER THAN IT ACTUALLY IS (e.g. alternate titles for things, what someone would have written if they hadn't written something else)
-Overly complicated run-on sentence that says something pretty realistic and/or witty
-Punchline (single word, sudden seriousness in place of irony or lightheartedness, or replacement of realistic complication with something pithy and short, or something mundane in conjunction with something lofty)

That's the basic template. The important part is the punchline - it's all about timing.

Actually, it's more complicated than that. Catbirdseat does this "Music-Blogger Best of 2007 list Cheat Sheet" and it's pretty awesome. I feel like I could do a cheat sheet for McSweeney's lists. That may be forthcoming.

Doesn't mean they aren't genius. I love lists and their proliferation in society, and frequently think of (um, for example, wow, I am a nerd, I can't believe I'm about to say this) the tags/labels on my blog posts as a sort of microlist - the same goes for tagging Facebook photos. They border on found poetry.

Anyway. Here is my McSweeney's-style list for today, with only one item on it.

Things that cause me to be consumed with a combination of bewilderment, indignation, and a feeling that possibly God, if he ever existed in the first place, has forsaken me
-TiVo inexplicably failing to record the Office.

DFW is a genius...

I've been meaning to post these bits for a while but forgot this book at Laurel's house. Here are two excerpts from David Foster Wallace's amazing essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," which is in the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

So how then have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling int he culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I've had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow... oppressed.

Think, for a moment, of Third World rebels and coups. Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative. Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves - in other words, they just become better tyrants.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I'm saying." So what does irony as a culturual norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

This is why our educated teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic. And this is why the fiction-writing citizen of our televisual culture is in such very deep shit. What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second answer to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart.

...

It's entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against and aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction's possibilities. The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal." To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.

Not Fade Away

"In case there's anyone who doesn't remember, Corning did not begin with the fiber optics business. In the 1950s, Corning manufactured plates and platters and Pyrex pans. What the company was best known for, though, was casserole dishes. Everybody had them, remember? Their trademark was an abstract blue flower.

Since my dad worked for Corning, my mom had every casserole shape ever made. We had one for stew. We had one for soup. We had one for potatoes. If they'd made one for individual spaghetti strands, we'd have had that one too! I can still see the metal cradles that the dishes sat in at the table...

But wait -- why am I going on about casseroles? I think it's because the approach of death has made me realize that there are no unimportant details in life. That childhood sense of wonder is somehow coming back to me. How can I put it? Things, and the meanings that they have, are being reunited in my heart.

Those old casseroles -- maybe they're just chipped and battered pans, but for me they're connected with incredibly precious things, giant notions like Mother, Kitchen, Family Meals.
So cut me some slack if I get nostalgic now and then over trivialities. The thing is, they don't seem trivial to me. I've come to feel that the big things in life are best understood by way of small things. Ignore the small ones, and the big ones just seem like fancy words, slogans without the truth of something you really know, and really feel."

--Peter Barton, Not Fade Away

Just an excerpt from the book I'm reading right now. I already wrote about it on my Goodreads profile, but the story is that this guy at work keeps recommending it (he forgets he recommended it before, so he's done it about 3 times), so I finally bought it remaindered for about $4. I don't normally read memoirs, especially memoirs or stories about cancer, because, well, as the author of this book notes, cancer is like this thing with a life of its own... once it's in the picture, the picture isn't about anything else. And it makes me think of crappy movies like A Walk To Remember. But anyway, this is sort of different, and I'm reading it now, and it's simple and good and I admire the guy who wrote it, partly because he's such a dad, the way my dad is a dad. I don't know if that makes sense. But the other thing I've been thinking about while reading this is what he talks about here: the little insignificant things that matter. I have lately felt as though I've lost memories of little things, and in my reading of this memoir and Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone, I've felt more and more like I need to start writing the little things down. So I don't lose them forever.

Also, I had, or am in the middle of having, a conversation with Justin about our grandparents, and those stories become the kinds of stories where the little things matter a lot. And then on a meta, writing, authorial level I realized that my feelings about this may be different an interesting if I just write them down... and then I thought, as I have thought a lot recently and failed to put into action, I can write about this. So perhaps I will.

I'll report more about this book when I've finished it.

Nothing like excessive sarcasm and cursing to get your point across. (No, I'm not kidding.)

Young Mustafat, who maintains a strict diet of inner turmoil and bleached hope, looks forward to watching the ESPN-televised event to better understand what gigantically wasteful, fucking super-retards we all are.

While it may be impossible to understand the mental temerity and physical excellence it takes to master these dazzling sports, we can expect great things in the future from exciting athletes like Don Lerman and Mustafat Osmana. And although oceans and even the most basic human rights may separate these two great peoples, we are ALL bound together by the vibrant spirit of competition and grotesque displays of boundless, unapologetic shitheadery.

I never thought I'd say this about Ryan Reynolds, but I kind of wish I'd written that. via Lindsayism (one of my imaginary internet friends).