by
David Lipsky
View all notes
Y'like candy?
Yeah. Of course.
What if you ate it all the time? What would be wrong with that?
Bad for teeth and very fat very quick.
Real pleasurable, but it dudn't have any calories in it. There's somethin' really vital about food that candy's missing, although to make up for what it's missing, the pleasure of masticating and swallowing goes way up. There seems to me to be some analogy to what--I'm talking about very seductive commercial entertainment. There's nothing sinister, the thing that's sinister about it is that the pleasure that it gives you to make up for what it's missing is a kind of ... addictive, self-consuming pleasure. And what saves us is that most entertainment isn't very good. (Laughs)
[...]
I guess entertainment would describe a continuum--I guess what I'm talkin' about is entertainment versus art, where the main job of entertainment is to separate you from your cash somehow. I mean that's really what it is ... And I'm not, there's nothin' per se wrong with that. And the compensation for that is it delivers value for the cash. It gives you a certain kind of pleasur that I would argue is fairly passive. There's not a whole lot of thought involved, the thought is often fantasy, like "I am this guy, I'm having this adventure." And it's a way to take a vacation from myself for a while. And that's fine--I think sort of the same way candy is fine.
[Of course, one interesting thing is he buys Pop-Tarts and stuff to eat; lots of candy.]
The problem for me is in entertainment, it's, at least in the book--God, if the book comes off as some kind of indictment of entertainment, then it fails. It's sort of about our relationship to it. The book isn't supposed to be about drugs, getting off drugs. Except as the fact that drugs are kind of a metaphor for the sort of addictive continuum that I think has to do with how we as a culture relate to things that are alive.
[...]
I'm not saying there's something sinister or horrible or wrong with entertainment. I'm saying it's--I'm saying it's a continuum. And if the book's about anything, it's about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It's not about the shit; it's about me. Why am I doing it? And what is so American about what I'm doing?
You know, why are we--and by "we" I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy--why do we feel empty and unhappy?
[...] probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. You know? For us, it's gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we're either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn't all that fun minute by minute, but that builds muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? [...]
read this and re-read this because fuck it's right on
[...] I'm talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don't believe in politics, and don't believe in religion. And believe that civic movements and political activism are either a farce or some way to get power for the people who are in control of it. Or who just ... who don't believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific ironists and pokers of holes. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just, it doesn't seem to me that there's just a whole lot else.
[...] Pauline Kael has this great thesis about, what's terribly pernicious about a lot of movies, is that they make the bad guys wholly unlike you. They turn them into cartoons. That you can feel superior to. Instead of making you realize that there's part of the villain in all of us. [...]
[...] I really had this problem of thinking I was smarter than everybody else. [...] And I think if you're writing out of a place where you think that you're smarter than everybody else, you're either condescending to the reader, or talking down to 'im, or playing games, or you think the point is to show how smart you are.
Is that the great lie of the cruise is that enough pleasure and enough pampering will quiet this discontented part of you. When in fact, all it does is up the requirement. That's the sort of thing that it's about. And yeah, my little corner of that experience, some of this had to do with the writing, you know? I can remember being twenty-four years old and having my, you know, smiling mug in the New York Times Magazine, and it feeling really good for exactly like ten seconds. You know?
when really you just have to live with the discontentment and in a way turn it into contentment
Having declared that language is ultimately self-referential, Barth has also affirmed that novels themselves, because they do not refer directly to a knowable reality, unavoidably refer instead to other novels. This latter idea directly informs his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," discussed at greater length in chapter 1. Briefly, Barth argues that all the advances in novelistic technique introduced by the modernist masters—from stream-of-consciousness to spatial form—were originally designed to provide a more accurate access to reality. Now that "reality" is understood to be nothing more than a construct of language. Since all literary conventions have been "exhausted" from overuse and have been undermined by recent theories concerning the relationship between language and the world, the postmodern novel would employ literary conventions self-consciously, thereby warding off the "death of the novel" by writing novels that dramatize that death. The end result would be a fiction that overcomes exhaustion by dramatizing it. Or, as Barth explains, "An artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work—paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation, in the same way that the mystic who transcends finitude is said to be enabled to live, spiritually and physically, in the finite world."'
I put a post-it flag on this page so I apparently thought this paragraph was worth saving but I'm not entirely sure why
Metafiction fails because it does not invite us inside but rather makes us stand back and watch the author look at his own reflection; the reader is left outside, alone, and the one thing Mark hates more than anything in the world is "to believe he is alone. Solipsism affects him like Ambrosian metafiction affects him. It's the high siren's song of the wrist's big razor" (303). [...] Wallace's work, conversely, seeks not to depict solipsism but rather to overcome it.
Even more importantly, Hal possesses a quality that Kierkegaard would call "hiddenness" and that most intensely identifies the aesthete. In Kierkegaard's analysis, aesthetes use self-conscious thinking in order to hide from themselves. Likewise, Hal, in hiding his marijuana smoking from his friends and family, also in a sense hides it from himself. As the narrator explains, "Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger is secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high" (49).