Dispatches from the Culture War
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” – Joan Didion
“We tell each other stories in order to live together” – i2b
People accuse the i2b team of elitist snobbery, of being blind and deaf to the kinds of entertainment that “real people” might enjoy. P’tah, saith the team: The i2b brow covers the full range, from low to high and all points in between.
Validation. Some people crave it. Some could care less. Most of us probably fall in the muddy middle, swinging willy nilly between craving and caring less.
Sometimes, Your Narrator is reasonably content – yea, even fully satisfied – to do something well and enjoy the doing for its own sake. A well-written post. A nicely turned phrase. A lyrical, melodic line on the guitar. Mastering a new tune. That sort of thing.
Sept 12 – David Foster Wallace died 7 years ago today. Maybe died isn’t the right word, though it’s at least partly true. He killed himself; took his own life. This fact still makes me sad and angry and scared all at once.
The best way to counter these feelings is to read some of his work.1If for no other reason than that his work is the only part of him that we have any legitimate claim to. Angry at the guy? Shit. I owe him. His essay from the January, 1996, issue of Harper’s, which became the title piece from his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, is the single funniest and most “readable”2Readable here connoting ‘something not too weird or difficult’. In fact, everything I’ve read by DFW – which is pretty much everything that’s been published plus a glimpse of a few of his notebooks at the Whitney Biennial – is terrifically readable and worth every second it takes to look up unusual words, refer to yet another footnote, or just to re-read certain sentences over and over because they are just too wonderful to take in at once. piece in his entire output. I’ve just finished it for the eleventieth time and it’s got me hungry for more. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” is up next,and it’s sort of an essential piece for anyone interested in culture and the challenge of retaining our humanity amidst a dazzling array of shiny objects.
References
I come here not to bury shame, but to praise it. Sort of.
There has been a surge in the media about the damaging impact of shame on our individual psyches. In general, these are pretty much outstanding discussions about how we internalize shame and allow it to debilitate our lives in ways subtle and not-so. In particular, I recommend this talk by Dr Brene Brown:
