Category Archives: Writing

I'm reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, his unfinished novel. There are lots of dark passages. Here's an excerpt which addresses, as DFW often does, terrible truths:

I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we've lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it's all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it's not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than "die," "pass away," the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday…

And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have heven heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money toh ave put in to make sure we're remembered, these'll last what — a hundred years? two hundred? — and they'll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I'm cremated the trees that are nourished by my windbown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, to only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1863, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to imagine, in fact, probably that's why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

Have a great day!

Alexis Madrigal has a great, long post in response to Zadie Smith's essay. The whole thing is worth reading for insights on technology and society. I particularly liked his paragraphs on Smith's aesthetic revulsion to the the kind of writing one sees in social media. It's true that much of what's written these days in emails, blogs, tweets, are OMG so pooorly ritten dont u think? Just spend one night looking at Twitter trending topics. His money sentence explains it (italics are my own): "I think we confuse the [new] ability to see what everyday writing looks like — and probably has for a long time — with a change in how people write."

It's key to Smith's reasoning that Facebook implicitly creates more opportunities for people to say maudlin, ugly, or otherwise silly things. But we've been expressing ourselves in ways like that forever. Consider even good pop music. One of the best punk rock love songs of all time, "Ever Fallen in Love With Someone" goes like this, "You stir my natural emotions / You make me feel I'm dirt /And I'm hurt / And if I start a commotion /I run the risk of losing you / And that's worse / Ever fallen in love with someone?" And as we all know, this is just one example out of hundreds of thousands.

Perhaps I've been inured to this sense of a fallen English language because I've rooted around in the history of technology. I've read telegraphs between figures who were decidedly non-literary and engineers' papers. If your vision of the past language is mostly Melville — the stuff that's endured — then, yeah, English seems like it's in damn sorry shape. But if it includes all those other low and middle-brow writings, the bad letters, the telegraphs, the stupid poems, you end up with a spikier, less formal take on language. Consider that in 1870, 20% of the population was illiterate. Surely, on that basis alone, we now live in a far better place for words. Or consider the way dialect writers, like a Ben Brierley, tried to capture how normal people talked (and presumably wrote, whenever they did if they could). He would write things like, "They tell me these wenches con write books, play th' payano like angels, an' talk like saints. But I wonder what they'd do wi' a stockin ut's too much dayleet letten in at one window."

Perhaps this is an old argument, one about the sanctity of language, but I think it's newly important. When professional writers, especially ones trained in the literary arts, see horrifically bad writing online, they recoil. All their training about the value of diverse (or, you know, heteroglossic) societies and the equality of classes goes flying out the window. Social media acts as a kind of truth serum, as Marshall Kirkpatrick likes to say: This is how the masses of people talk. This is how the masses of people write. Not moonlighting bloggers. Not the 20 million NPR listeners. But the other 300 million people trying to LOL their way through boring days at office jobs or in Iraq.

I think we confuse the ability to see what everyday writing looks like — and probably has for a long time — with a change in how people write. Toss in that the traditional (usually religious) practices and sayings around serious topics like death or childbearing have lost valence, and you get people just saying what comes to mind. It's not always pretty.

(hat tip to Alex Mann via Delicious)

The Jorge Luis Borges worldview, in his own words:

Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges – beyond spatial and temporal prisons – a personal vision.

Art as a copy of the environment's objectivity or the indivudal's pyschic history — that's realism. Art that forges a personal vision, refractions and all — that's Borges.

I heard Latin American fiction scholar Jill Levine read aloud this excerpt in her conversation with Colin Marshall on the Marketplace of Ideas podcast.

#

I was chatting on the phone the other day with a friend, and he said this: "The very best art and fiction is more powerful than the very best non-fiction. Average non-fiction is more powerful than average fiction."

In a profile of Roald Dahl, author of The BFG (one of my favorite stories of youth), there's this note on his last words before death:

The endings of Dahl’s stories are almost always surprising, even when we know the twist is coming. This talent, it turns out, applied equally to the author’s own life. In a hospital, surrounded by family, Dahl reassured everyone, sweetly, that he wasn’t afraid of death. “It’s just that I will miss you all so much,” he said—the perfect final words. Then, as everyone sat quietly around him, a nurse pricked him with a needle, and he said his actual last words: “Ow, fuck!”

Wonderful. (Thanks to Chris Yeh for the pointer.)

Speaking of last words, look at the power editors wield. The New Yorker's truly moving piece on the (apparently unjust) execution of Cameron Willingham closes with Willingham's last words:

The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for twelve years for something I did not do. From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the Earth shall become my throne.

Except those weren't all of his last words. His full statement made a couple references to his ex-wife:

Yeah. The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man-convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do. From God's dust I came and to dust I will return-so the earth shall become my throne. I gotta go, road dog. I love you Gabby. I hope you rot in hell, bitch; I hope you fucking rot in hell, bitch. You bitch; I hope you fucking rot, cunt. That is it.

This afternoon I had a fleeting thought: “Where the hell is my Great American Travel Writing 2009 book?”

I had been reading it in Atacama. In the book I had written lots of to-dos and ideas about various topics, using the blank pages as all-purpose jotting space while baking in the desert sun by the hotel pool. Also, I wanted to blog about sentences, paragraphs, and essays in the main text itself.

I rose from my desk chair and searched and searched my apartment. No luck. I emailed two friends who may have borrowed it. Nope.

After 30 minutes of searching, I declared the book lost. I was pissed. Unusually pissed. That lost to-do list. Those lost ideas. My previously good day: sullied.

I sat back down at my computer and stared at some new emails that had arrived in the intervening minutes. About each I felt negativity and was tempted to testily reply. I knew better. Then I tried to write a new blog post, but as the cursor blinked menacingly for a minute with no words appearing, I decided it wasn’t going to happen.

So I lay on the couch and began reading a book. 30 minutes into the reading session, I felt my mood shift from “irrationally very pissed” to “irritatingly annoyed” to “grumpily subdued.” Then I noticed my mind sharpen. I enjoyed heightened focus on the text. And I generated a stream of new ideas about a project I’m working on. In other words: I entered a creative flow.

Jonah Lehrer writes about this phenomenon in his article Depression’s Upside:

The new research on negative moods… suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.”

I have long noticed that when I am most joyous and happy I tend to get little real work done. Similarly, when I’m enraged or feeling depressed about something, I spin my wheels. The productivity sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle of that emotional continuum.