They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are somewhat stickier.
Hey gang, I haven’t been doing very much writing of my own yet. The basic plan as of now is to secure one of those “Here’s how to Write X” books, and to go through the exercises and to put them up here and to brainstorm and sift through ideas and settle on something to write and then to write it and to use the blog as a) a potential source of criticism/dialogue about what I’ve written, the practice of writing, etc. and b) a repository of writing which is just public enough to start innoculating myself to the black terror that settles into my intestines whenever I try to show people my embarrassingly bad and abortive attempts at writing.
I haven’t gotten much done because I’ve been getting through my first week of summer school and having a new job at the library and just general “it’s summer and I want to be horribly lazy for a little while, please.” Anyway, I expect (and hope fervently) that next week will allow much more time for writing, but we’ll see. Another factor is that I have been in the process of re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for about nine months now, and I really want to finish it during the summer while I can take advantage of the free time. Jest is a very important book to me, but a book which I am also gaining much more appreciation for as I go through it a second time, as a older, smarter and somewhat wiser individual. That said, I recently read a passage from the book which has struck me particularly, and I want to share it with anyone who reads this because I think it’s wonderful and because I want to remember it.
(from page 694 in my copy)
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It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naїveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have liked about J.O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naїveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly consistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naїveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naїve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.
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