David Foster Wallace, speaking of something missing.
(excerpted from this interview, offered up as evidence)
In light of this, I’m going to try switching up my style - posting everything on Mondays as a collection of what I thought worth saving from the last week. Hopefully this will encourage me to punctuate it more with stories, thoughts, and other things that make me too self-conscious to justify their own blog posts. Really, anything works that will fit in the flow.
To match the style, I’ve switched themes to Thijs Jacob’s Stationery. It pushes a paper-metaphor, but keeps the visuals abstract enough to work on the web. Stationery cries out for a one-post-per-page style, and provided a good deal of the inspiration for adopting this new technique of posting; it really is good enough that you should click through to each post of mine, instead of reading each off the dashboard (which omits little things like horizontal rules and H3 styling). Another inspiration was Things Magazine, who rattle off a few paragraphs and loosely-connected links every few days in one big chunk. Finally, I wanted to get in the habit of using Notational Velocity and Simplenote to continuously tweak my writing, whether sitting at my computer or simply re-reading a draft on my iPhone. Writing in Markdown has helped tremendously, and will even make footnotes super-easy if I decide to scratch that itch.
With that said, here goes nothing.
I’m watching The Wire again with my girlfriend, and it’s been great to get her perspective as a first-time viewer. I had permanently consigned it to simply being the “best show ever” on my first watching, but with the perspective of having watched Mad Men now, the picture is much more complicated.
The beginning of the show is deliberately cluttered and messy, with major characters being introduced as late as the third episode. It’s nothing out of the norm for any usual show, but in the hyper-dense ensemble of The Wire we’re shocked to see Omar suddenly appear in episode 3 without much warning or explanation. For someone already grappling with the Baltimore dialect and the constant shifting of scenes in space and time, it can be awfully overwhelming.
One unexpected element was the technique - shared by David Foster Wallace’s works and a few other (usually auteur) productions - of repeatedly circling a point and hinting at it from all sorts of angles without coming out and saying it. The Wire occasionally breaks this to engage in nearly-fourth-wall-breaking quips and aphorisms, but at its best maintains the effect.
This technique of elision is becoming more popular over the years, I think, largely because it produces a dread of things unseen that seems particular to the modern world. For all Thomas Friedman’s annoying habits, his exultation of globalism did hint at larger cultural forces that go beyond simple economic trends. We live in a web of interconnections, but are only able to grasp a small fraction of the links at any one time. In dumping the traditional catch-all explanations for bad things - religious, ideological, or otherwise - we are still left with the unspoken sense that something out there is menacing us.
The Wire hints (and more) at a world where the institutions we’ve built have ensnared us, where we are now tools for the once-tools we built. Mad Men hints that our identity may be at once both more and less than the sum of our actions, and in a social morality that is askew from our interpersonal instincts and any imagined attempt to correct it. A Serious Man asks if we can be counted on to remain ourselves in the face of chaos and hardship, and whether the world is even knowable at all. All rely on the niggling feeling that we’ve lost one of the reels of the film, that though the characters stories are concluded, the tension that beset them is still out there, coiled up in the world and in ourselves.
A selection of links
I posted this infographic of the projected Pacific tsunamis from the Chile earthquake, and it’s still gorgeous. Thankfully, the tsunami in Hawaii and other places was less than feared.
A classic YouTube video made trippier, and another still cracks me up every time.
David Foster Wallace would have been 48 years old last week. It still hurts, but re-reading McSweeney’s memories and tributes helped.
Nick Currie was interviewed on Marketplace of Ideas and transcribed on 3QuarksDaily, and I was really taken by this quote (which explains some of the appeal of Lost in Translation):
Japan is just a classic parallel world: it’s an island on the other side of the world from Britain, kind of the same shape as Britain, and yet so totally different… When you look at Last.fm top ten lists for countries, people scrobbling their favorite music all over the world, Japan is the only non-Anglo-Saxon country that has 70 or 80 percent of scrobbled tracks coming from their domestic territory. That’s kind of incredible, because is suggests that Japan is the only advanced “other” culture that exists out there.
The Chinese are, at least as they’re using Last.fm, are not listening to Chinese material beyond, say, ten, 20 percent. The French might go to 40 percent: they’ve got Phoenix, Daft Punk, Air and Serge Gainsbourg, but that’s unusually high. Most countries are totally supplied by the Anglosphere when it comes to pop music. It’s a one-way culture flow. It’s a hub-and-spoke model: there’s this powerful center, which is the while, Anglo-Saxon center, allied with black music also, which is spreading popular music and culture from this central point which is L.A., London, New York, outwards, all over the world. And it’s globalization serving a very small number of interests, these five mega music corporations which are very centralized.
I find it fascinating that the Japanese have managed to, by a kind of passive aggression, set up an alternative culture which is super-advanced — I would say even more advanced than ours — and yet has totally its own cultural landscape, its own TV shows. You don’t see American shows on Japanese terrestrial TV, you don’t hear — of course, you can buy every Western artist you want in a Japanese record store, but mostly the Japanese are just interested in their own culture, the culture they make, and it’s so different.
