David Foster Wallace

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
A DWF video popped up in my suggesteds today and that weird doo rag/bandana he wore is enough to put me off reading him ever again.
 

version

Well-known member
Apparently that was to mask what he thought was a sweating problem, but he also claimed it was to stop his head exploding.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
What comes after postmodernism?

Not trying to sound cute, but I would call it "postmortem." As in, after viral or non-reflexive discourse (just everyone shouting at once) leads to splatter, the generation that comes after us will have to clean up the mess and then try to document and explain it. The splatter could take so many forms, maybe every possible form: worldwide total doxxing (my personal favorite) where everyone's private shit becomes public, or nuclear holocaust, or environmental catastrophe, maybe meme/discourse/cyber warfare. Addiction to social media and reality media (tabloids, porn) , ie the state of being perpetually trapped in a cycle of hyper-mediated communication that moves too fast, and provides too much instant self-gratification for intellectual distance or reflection, means crisis solutions become impossible.

Man that image from Infinite Jest with the liaison dead in front of his teleputer (I read it 15 years ago, forgive me if my memory's fuzzy) still haunts me. Wallace knew we were getting sucked into a void, guess he realized we crossed a critical threshold, and thought death was his only escape. WRONG.

Well, back to The Wizard starring Fred Savage. How did these kids avoid getting molested, and how were they staying hydrated?
 
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version

Well-known member
Not trying to sound cute, but I would call it "postmortem." As in, after viral or non-reflexive discourse (just everyone shouting at once) leads to splatter, the generation that comes after us will have to clean up the mess and then try to document and explain it.

Wallace said something along those lines.

For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back–I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back–which means “we’re” going to have to be the parents.
 

Agent

dgaf ngaf cgaf
Love that quote, especially the part at the end: "Oh shit, we have to be the parents now. We have to clean up the mess!" I suspect if DFW were alive today, he'd say we failed to face that challenge, failed miserably (especially artists), which is why the most powerful person in the world is an adult infant. Infantalization is how splatter manifests in human personalities, which is translated into political and cultural discourse, creating a feedback loop.

A poll was released today by CNN: 52% of Americans believe Trump will be re-elected in 2020. Grab a mop. Or a noose.

I can't stand when adults try to act, sound, or look "cute." It triggers homicidal impulses. Watching adults dance in synchronization, which I just did while viewing LaLaLand for the first time (opening scene), just makes me boil over with inchoate rage. Like boiling black molasses. The rest of LaLaLand was pretty good though. Beautiful elegy to the end of Hollywood and its plastic dream machine.
 
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