by
Mark Greif
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"But how can you ask other people to lower their salaries, without giving your life to charity first? Isn't it hypocrisy to call for change for everyone without turning over your own income?" Morality is not saved by any individual's efforts to do charity, a pocketful here, a handful there. Charity is the vice of unequal systems. (I'm only repeating Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism.") We shouldn't have to weight whether our money would do more good in a destitute person's pocket, or our time do more good if we ladled soup to the hungry, or our study do more good if it taught reading to the illiterate. It always, always would. Because it is hard to give up your money, however, when not everyone else does, and hard to give up your time when not everyone else does--and nearly impossible when you have less time, and less money, than the visibly rich and comfortable--and frankly, because it's not often a good idea to give up your true calling or your life at all, our giving is limited and fitful. It can never make a large-scale difference.
in a short but good essay advocating for greater redistribution and thus less inequality
comes back to choice in how you live your life and what metrics you optimise for and how you balance competing stances
The threat from those who oppose this line of thought is that, without "incentives", people will stop working. The worst-case scenario is that tens of thousands of people who hold jobs in finance, corporate management, and the professions (not to mention professional sports and acting) will quit their jobs and end their careers because they did not truly want to be bankers, lawyers, CEOs, actors, ballplayers, et cetera. They were only doing it for the money! Actually they wanted to be high-school teachers, social workers, general practitioners, stay-at-home parents, or criminals and layabouts.
Far from this being a tragedy, this would be the greatest single triumph of human emancipation in a century. A small portion of the rich and unhappy would be freed at last from the slavery of jobs that aren't their life's work--and all of us would be freed from an insane system.
If there is anyone working a job who would stop doing that job should his income--and all his richest campatriots' incomes--drop to $100,000 a year, he should not be doing that job. He should never have been doing that job--for his own life's sake. It's just not a life, to do work you don't want to do when you have other choices, and can think of something better (and have a $10,000 cushion to supplement a different choice of life). If no one would choose to do this job for a mere $100,000 a year, if all would pursue something else more humanely valuable; if, say, there would no longer be anyone willing to be a trader, a captain of industry, an actor, or an athlete for that kind of money--then the job should not exist.
there's obviously more to examine here--what should the actual ceiling be, what effect would that have on inflation etc, how do you ensure quality of life for everyone is preserved--but it's a good line of thought that i pretty much agree with
[...] Lorne went searching for pigeons' eggs and found two. I cut the top off one and sucked out the contents, but perhaps it was a bit too late in the nesting season because there was a bony sort of consistency about it, and although it was nearly dark Lorne must have seen my face, because he refused to eat his.
This would have been the moment to run for it, except that we could think of no satisfactory answer to the question, 'What do you do when you find yourself in the middle of Leipzig, in RAF uniform, on a summer afternoon, with no money, no papers and no food?'
[...] In Sabrina, he wrote an advice column caled "Ask Bill," in which readers were invited to bring their questions to Professor Kennick. Bertrand Russell wrote in to reveal his crush on Alfred North Whitehead and ask what he should do. "Any relationship that depends for its security on the proposition that monistic atomism has any relevance to post-Enlightenment conceptions of phenomenological reality is not worth saving," the Sabrina Kennick sternly replied. Most stories were collaborations, but Wallace revived his childhood love of Hardy Boys mysteries to write "The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster" himself:
Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the Sabrina brothers!
Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.
"Crikey!" exclaimed Joe. "It's a good thing we're characters in a highly implausible children's book or we'd be goners!"
Wallace writing for the campus humour magazine, which he revived with Mark Costello
His anguish, he wrote, had multiple sources, from a fear of fame to a fear of failure. Behind the ordinary fears lurked the fear of being ordinary.
Wallace while working on IJ ... I can relate
"Sad" became the tocsin ringing through the piece, sadness as the consequence of too much plenty: sad waiters, sad cruise ship-goers taking pointless videos of other sad people pointing video cameras at them from their own cruise ships, and sad, senseless attempts by Americans to amuse themselves in the absence of any larger spiritual idea. "Choose with care," Marathe warns in Infinite Jest. "You are what you love. No?" Walace's cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.
On the cruise ship piece
[...] his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness. Scott also accused Wallace of fencing off all possible objections to his work by making sure every possible criticism was already embedded in the text. Brief Interviews, especially, the critic wrote, was not so much anti-ironic as "meta-ironic," driven much like the characters in its stories by the fear of being known. This sort of writing, he continued, was clearly connected to the self-centered self-absorbed culture of late twentieth-century America, but "does Wallace's work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it's both." Wallace was not pleased but he was impressed. In the margins of a draft of the story "Good Old Neon," which he began around this time, he noted (punningly), "AO Scott saw into my character."
idea for a fake review lol
[...] It was their Catcher in the Rye, a Catcher in the Rye for people who had read The Catcher in the Rye in school. [...]
In August, Stirling suffered an athletic injury, and Green wanted to be with him, so Wallace's parents stayed with Wallace for ten days. He was close to giving up hope.
intriguing because I wonder what it's like to be Stirling and to know that, however indirectly, he triggered that suicide