a few words from david foster wallace

David Foster Wallace covered McCain2000 and taught me many things from beyond the grave:

1. Always pay attention to the techs on the bus.
2. The establishment has an interest in alienating voters.
3. To alienate voters it slings mud.
4. Post-mud, all the people who wanted to believe in somebody can’t believe in anybody any more.
5. At which point the base does what it’s told and votes the incumbent back in while this nation’s youth and age are at home watching gullivision.
6. The media collaborate in this boondoggle. Wallace calls the top reporters following McCain around the 12 monkies.
7. They collaborate because they want readers, and readers want excitement, and excitement means the race has to be close, even if it shouldn’t be.
8. Repeat every four years. Monkies, enjoy your promotions.

A few thoughts on writing fiction

1) Love is one vehicle of the imagination. It is curious to know the other, it is by nature a reaching out, and fiction is that gesture multiplied many times. Writing in that generous spirit requires spiritual growth on the part of the author, and may cultivate same in the reader. Examples of this style: Marilynne Robinson, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott.

2) Fiction needs both presence and reserve; it must reveal and conceal to awaken the imagination. What is given are the symptoms of a symptomatic world -- in this sense, the novel equals neurosis. It is that reserve, that holding back which allows the reader to recreate the life on the page.

Anthony Lane, in a movie review, describes this also as the quality of stars:

"You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable sources of that self."

3) Symptoms are cyclic, in motion, out of balance. Each sentence implies not just a cause but a future in germ. The reader, with the characters, is thrown forward even as he explains to himself the past. Trajectory of Janus.