A Xanadu of Chintzola
In the middle of this week, I sort of wanted to throw in the towel on all this election stuff and just stop paying attention. I had plans to ask my mother how to keep from becoming a person who is either detached or inflamed, because she does a good job of this, because I was feeling like no matter what I do or how many people I talk to, people using deliberately sloppy, perverted language will continue to ruin any chance for reasoned governance in this country.
I'm not a person who is particularly quick to anger, but I don't know what to do with my feelings of actual rage when I hear Rudy Giuliani say Barack Obama has "kind of almost a socialist notion" to use the tax code to "redistribute wealth," while in the same sentence saying that his plan "would actually deprive the federal government of revenues." First of all, the federal income tax redistributes wealth every time it is revised in any way. When any tax law, including a "tax cut" such as George Bush's which favors the very wealthy, is put into effect, THAT IS A REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. So, that's an empty statement. Also, whenever you cut taxes, you are cutting the amount of money the federal government takes in, because people will be contributing less money. So I don't understand how someone can be socialist-ish while claiming less money for the government. Isn't it the Republican platform that it's "your [the citizen's] money?" SHOULDN'T the government BE DEPRIVED OF IT? These are either empty statements, or self-contradictory.
Giuliani also dodged the question of whether the now famous "Obama Sex Ed" McCain ad was misleading - rather than addressing the insinuation that the plan would teach kindergartners about sex, he says twice that "it also talks about HIV-AIDS education for children K through 12," which apparently is ALSO, now, a horrible thing to teach children at any age before they graduate. Yeah, it seems like a pretty irrelevant topic since cases of teenage HIV infection are have recently increased.
David Foster Wallace, who was my favorite living writer, hanged himself this weekend. I told my mom, who I never got around to asking about how to be happy earlier in the week, about it this morning. She didn't know who he was but my shorthand bio was that he was a writer who I really liked, who taught at Claremont (a few hours from my parent's house) that I heard he was a really good teacher, and that he wrote the 1,000 page book that I brought the time our family went to Hawaii. She said something about how some people feel trapped by the world and like they just can't stand to be around other people anymore. I guess I wasn't expecting HER to say it in such a way that it sounded like a sad, but perfectly understandable emotion.
I watched Charlie Rose's 1997 interview with DFW last night in a sleepy melancholy haze, and I find it amazing, though not surprising, how honest and self-conscious and careful he seems to be about diction, even compared to the other not-overly-slick people who are also on that show. At a couple of points he winces when he catches himself saying something which he seems to feel was accurate, but has come out sounding overly nuanced or mannered or qualified, but it doesn't seem like he can be any other way.
In the interview, Rose asks Wallace what a David Lynch moment is, and they go on to talk about movies like "The English Patient" as a way to talk about something besides Wallace's own writing. I can't describe what it means for something to be David Foster Wallace-ian, because I simply identify with the way he wrote about the world too much. I can see anger vibrating out of Dave Eggers, I can see the sometime slackness of Thomas Frank's prose when tighter writing might weaken the emotional power of his argument. I can see the lack of real understanding of how scientists do research when Wendell Berry writes about science rather than topics he owns fully, and I've read only enough Phillip Roth to know he has written some really really bad books. Kakutani's obituary today was appropriately critical, but to me, David Foster Wallace's writing is just as exactly exhausting and confusing as waking up every day and trying to figure out what the hell to pay attention to; who to talk to with candor, what to get done at work, what aspect of yourself to try to improve, and what it wouldn't be a sin to ignore. I'm really glad Hawaii was actually, not just supposedly, fun enough that I've only ever got 1/3 of the way through Infinite Jest.
I'm not a person who is particularly quick to anger, but I don't know what to do with my feelings of actual rage when I hear Rudy Giuliani say Barack Obama has "kind of almost a socialist notion" to use the tax code to "redistribute wealth," while in the same sentence saying that his plan "would actually deprive the federal government of revenues." First of all, the federal income tax redistributes wealth every time it is revised in any way. When any tax law, including a "tax cut" such as George Bush's which favors the very wealthy, is put into effect, THAT IS A REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH. So, that's an empty statement. Also, whenever you cut taxes, you are cutting the amount of money the federal government takes in, because people will be contributing less money. So I don't understand how someone can be socialist-ish while claiming less money for the government. Isn't it the Republican platform that it's "your [the citizen's] money?" SHOULDN'T the government BE DEPRIVED OF IT? These are either empty statements, or self-contradictory.
Giuliani also dodged the question of whether the now famous "Obama Sex Ed" McCain ad was misleading - rather than addressing the insinuation that the plan would teach kindergartners about sex, he says twice that "it also talks about HIV-AIDS education for children K through 12," which apparently is ALSO, now, a horrible thing to teach children at any age before they graduate. Yeah, it seems like a pretty irrelevant topic since cases of teenage HIV infection are have recently increased.
David Foster Wallace, who was my favorite living writer, hanged himself this weekend. I told my mom, who I never got around to asking about how to be happy earlier in the week, about it this morning. She didn't know who he was but my shorthand bio was that he was a writer who I really liked, who taught at Claremont (a few hours from my parent's house) that I heard he was a really good teacher, and that he wrote the 1,000 page book that I brought the time our family went to Hawaii. She said something about how some people feel trapped by the world and like they just can't stand to be around other people anymore. I guess I wasn't expecting HER to say it in such a way that it sounded like a sad, but perfectly understandable emotion.
I watched Charlie Rose's 1997 interview with DFW last night in a sleepy melancholy haze, and I find it amazing, though not surprising, how honest and self-conscious and careful he seems to be about diction, even compared to the other not-overly-slick people who are also on that show. At a couple of points he winces when he catches himself saying something which he seems to feel was accurate, but has come out sounding overly nuanced or mannered or qualified, but it doesn't seem like he can be any other way.
In the interview, Rose asks Wallace what a David Lynch moment is, and they go on to talk about movies like "The English Patient" as a way to talk about something besides Wallace's own writing. I can't describe what it means for something to be David Foster Wallace-ian, because I simply identify with the way he wrote about the world too much. I can see anger vibrating out of Dave Eggers, I can see the sometime slackness of Thomas Frank's prose when tighter writing might weaken the emotional power of his argument. I can see the lack of real understanding of how scientists do research when Wendell Berry writes about science rather than topics he owns fully, and I've read only enough Phillip Roth to know he has written some really really bad books. Kakutani's obituary today was appropriately critical, but to me, David Foster Wallace's writing is just as exactly exhausting and confusing as waking up every day and trying to figure out what the hell to pay attention to; who to talk to with candor, what to get done at work, what aspect of yourself to try to improve, and what it wouldn't be a sin to ignore. I'm really glad Hawaii was actually, not just supposedly, fun enough that I've only ever got 1/3 of the way through Infinite Jest.
