June 2013
33 posts
“The history of medicine is a really hideous history, comparable only with that of priestcraft.”
—William James, Address on the Medical Registration Bill
“Stop trying to ‘get it together’. The biggest lie we’re told when we’re growing up is that soon as we’re adults, as soon as we’re in college, finish college, get that job, have that steady income, find that someone special, ‘find ourselves’, find that perfect house, get that retirement fund, have those children, everything will fall into place. Here’s a secret: it won’t. Every new development in your life, good or bad, big or small, will come with its own very special set of challenges. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.”
—Unknown (via erraticintrovert)
David Foster Wallace's "Octet" and the Torture of Writing
One of my most intelligent students last semester told me that he’s always had a hard time getting into David Foster Wallace because he feels like if he fails to “get it,” he’ll feel stupid. Having sat through graduate courses on Postmodernism and…
Sherman Alexie Starts a Twitstorm over Grammar
Grammar cops are rarely good writers. Imagination always disobeys.
— Sherman Alexie (@Sherman_Alexie) June 12, 2013
I enjoy grammar cops defending themselves. It’s like real cops defending police brutality.
— Sherman Alexie (@Sherman_Alexie) June 14, 2013
The Pleasures of Narrative
As usual, I’m late to the party and just came across this excellent piece by everyone’s favorite green, be-shortsed film critic on the spoiler conversation following this season’s penultimate episode of Game of Thrones (be not afraid, there are no…
“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like “deadly dull” or “excruciatingly dull” come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen iPods, Blackberries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called “information society” is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”
—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Last night, sis and I Doctor Who fangirled for a solid 45 minutes in front of our parents at dinner. Then we made them watch Vincent and the Doctor, and then I forced her to watch the first two episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yes, we’re both adults. One of us is over 30.
“Fact: the birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. No one will pay attention because no one will be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues monumental dullness.”
—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Literature Survey Final Project
I used to hate “creative” school projects when I was a student, since simply writing an exam required a whole lot of less of me, but for this year’s upper division American lit survey I decided to subject my class to just such a final assignment because…
