by bill | Dec 31, 2008 | Whatever Else |
I was inspired by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll’s list of the 10 Best Things of 2008 to create my own list. In alphabetical order, they are:
1. Barack Obama: Like, duh.
2. Chicago: Spent a few extremely rainy days there in September, found it charming and hospitable. Lots of art and comedy and culture. Not sure I’d want to live there; don’t have much of a tolerance for wind and cold, and finding a decent burrito was a problem. But for the most part, my kind of town.
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by bill | Dec 27, 2008 | Whatever Else |
Occasionally I like to update an old joke or saying for the modern day.
For instance, ancient Chinese wisdom tells us that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. These days, though, I think the journey of a thousand miles begins by googling “journey of a thousand miles.”
by bill | Dec 26, 2008 | Read it in books |
So after David Foster Wallace, the next book at the top of my pile was Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for the Age of Anxiety, where within the first 20 pages I read this:
When belief in the eternal becomes impossible, and there is only the poor substitute of belief in believing, men seek their happiness in the joys of time. However much they may try to bury it in the depths of their mind, they are well aware that these joys are both uncertain and brief. This has two results. On the one hand, there is the anxiety that one may be missing something, so that the mind flits nervously and greedily from one pleasure to another, without finding rest and satisfaction in any. On the other, the frustration of having always to pursue a future good in a tomorrow which never comes, and in a world where everything must disintegrate, gives men an attitude of “What’s the use anyhow?”
Consequently our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to “dope.” Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This “dope” we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction—a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time.
To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family…and so ad infinitum.
This is no caricature. It is the simple reality of millions of lives, so commonplace that we need hardly dwell upon the details, save to note the anxiety and frustration of those who put up with it, not knowing what else to do.
Double ouch — although I’m thinking that maybe Alan has some suggestions to offer, so I’d better keep reading.
by bill | Dec 22, 2008 | Read it in books |
I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace lately, which is a dangerous thing, because one then wants to start writing like David Foster Wallace. This is something that should only be attempted by professionals, and as a semi-pro at best, I need to tread carefully. Wallace was a writer of effortlessly burnished prose (or seemingly effortless, anyway) laden with long, intricately structured sentences, pithy observations, entertaining asides, footnotes and footnotes within footnotes. DFW (as I shall hereafter call him) was also a big fan of acronyms and Stylish Capitalization, both of which have become rather cliche in his wake and should probably be avoided, except that I personally happen to quite enjoy them.
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