Colbert's response to this British pop band winning a VMA:
‘You don’t know you’re beautiful. That’s what makes you beautiful’
First of all, great dating advice. Remember girls, low self-esteem: very attractive to men. Guys always go for the low hanging fruit, okay. Easy pickings.
Second, the lyrics are incredibly complex. You see the boys are singing, “‘You don’t know you’re beautiful. That’s what makes you beautiful,” but they've just told the girl she’s beautiful.
So since she now knows it, she’s no longer beautiful. But it gets deeper. She’s listening to the song too, so she knows she’s not beautiful. Therefore, following the syllogism of the song, she’s instantly beautiful again.
It’s like an infinite fractal recursion. A flickering quantum state of both ‘hot’ and ‘not'. This lyric as iterated algorithm could lead to a whole new musical genre. I call it ‘Mobius Pop’.
Showing posts with label existential. Show all posts
Showing posts with label existential. Show all posts
09 September 2012
30 May 2011
Transient pleasures, drastic measures.
I had read Falling Man by Don DeLillo and was not impressed. It's a story about a marriage breaking apart in the aftermath of 9/11, but has just too many scattered segues into trying to form a plot. However, I decided to give his fiction another try, as I had admired his writing style, as well as the authors he'd influenced, for many years. Enter White Noise, which has an infinite setup for each of its sardonic passages, such as the end of chapter 1: "I am chairman of the department of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill." Set in the late 80s, as far as I can tell from the book publication date and the prevalence of station wagons, it follows a college professor, his exercise-obsessed wife, and their brood of children from failed marriages through a Midwestern winter full of radiation waves, the airborne toxic event, and dealing with the side effects of our media-saturated world. Jack, our narrator and Hitler expert (who doesn't speak German), leads us through lengthy descriptions of his world, his disguises, and his personas, while finally reaching my favorite chapter, on page 293 out of 332, a Socratic discussion about the individual's fear of death with his colleague Murray.
Murray is a New Yorker who has traveled to this quaint little college town to study the American essence of culture. He's fascinated by the mundane, by all this white noise that surrounds us, that creates in us this fawning consumerism as a repressed, unconscious sort of mannerism: expressway traffic, fast food environments, ATMs, and of course, supermarkets and televisions. Television is ''the primal force in the American home, sealed-off, self-contained, self-referring, a wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages, like chants...Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.'' This concept is reflected in Jack's life as there are phrases that pop into almost every conversation he has with his precocious children. The TV is always on in the background, swirling in their dreams, with its incantations of "Toyota Celica" for his daughter, or listing side effects of mind-dumbing medications for him as he strolls through the living room.
The events in this town seem to happen in waves, rolling back onto previous lives and looking into future apocalyptic ones. Every discussion is laced with ominous undertones, unvalidated emotions, and a sort of hurtling toward fate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Socratic method-esque discussion that Jack and Murray have while strolling along the college campus:
Murray: "Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?"
Jack: "What good is preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious, quivering thing.
Murray: "True. The most deeply precious things are those we feel secure about. A wife, a child."
Jack: "So how do I get around fear of death?"
Murray: "You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. Technology creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies."
Murray, continuing with other ways to get around the fear of death: "There are two kinds of people int he world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage, or whatever it takes to be a killer. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions."
Jack: "Are you saying that men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others?"
Murray: "It's obvious...The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life."
Though the technology of the 80s was not even half as impressive as today's gadgets and advances, Murray was expounding upon the timeless debate of the good and evil in any invention. Technology has brought us life-saving antibiotics and revolutionary surgeries, and it has also brought us bullets and drones. It can aid us both in the creation of our self-focused lives, and in the destruction of ourselves and our world.
Murray is a New Yorker who has traveled to this quaint little college town to study the American essence of culture. He's fascinated by the mundane, by all this white noise that surrounds us, that creates in us this fawning consumerism as a repressed, unconscious sort of mannerism: expressway traffic, fast food environments, ATMs, and of course, supermarkets and televisions. Television is ''the primal force in the American home, sealed-off, self-contained, self-referring, a wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages, like chants...Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.'' This concept is reflected in Jack's life as there are phrases that pop into almost every conversation he has with his precocious children. The TV is always on in the background, swirling in their dreams, with its incantations of "Toyota Celica" for his daughter, or listing side effects of mind-dumbing medications for him as he strolls through the living room.
The events in this town seem to happen in waves, rolling back onto previous lives and looking into future apocalyptic ones. Every discussion is laced with ominous undertones, unvalidated emotions, and a sort of hurtling toward fate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Socratic method-esque discussion that Jack and Murray have while strolling along the college campus:
Murray: "Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?"
Jack: "What good is preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious, quivering thing.
Murray: "True. The most deeply precious things are those we feel secure about. A wife, a child."
Jack: "So how do I get around fear of death?"
Murray: "You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. Technology creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies."
Murray, continuing with other ways to get around the fear of death: "There are two kinds of people int he world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers. We don't have the disposition, the rage, or whatever it takes to be a killer. We lie down and die. But think what it's like to be a killer, to kill a person in direct confrontation. If he dies, you cannot. To kill him is to gain life-credit. The more people you kill, the more credit you store up. It explains any number of massacres, wars, executions."
Jack: "Are you saying that men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing others?"
Murray: "It's obvious...The killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life."
Though the technology of the 80s was not even half as impressive as today's gadgets and advances, Murray was expounding upon the timeless debate of the good and evil in any invention. Technology has brought us life-saving antibiotics and revolutionary surgeries, and it has also brought us bullets and drones. It can aid us both in the creation of our self-focused lives, and in the destruction of ourselves and our world.
08 June 2010
The Entertainment
Although I’m guessing David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest as early as 1993 or 1994, the year of publication was 1996, at which time I had reached 15 years of age. Muddled memories include Driver’s Ed class; going to every boys’ basketball game because the senior class of 96-97 was super-attractive; emailing friends rarely, mostly to gossip (and email being dial-up and separate from the internet, i.e. Juno); talking on the phone a lot, maybe instant messaging; working full time at Subway during the summer; going downtown to the bay to swim and to watch skaters doing ollies off railings; etc.
Older techno-geeks can inform me if any of the following was in even pre-existent creation in 1996 B.S. (Before Subsidization)¹ : The videophone (okay I do remember this being around) – but videophone leading to a panagoraphobia which opened “huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and delivery”; cell phones, like very small and quite interactive; DVDs /HDTV which he calls “cartridges” but are like High-Definition CD-ROMs and the HDTV is also your computer(!); laptop TPs (teleputers); DVR, nixing the commercials and everything; “Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!” –Netflix-type instant-watch; “Aapps, Inc” controls the TV choices; interfacing like Skype programs and webcams (which are really videophones re-imagined); and finally, “Twitter”. I’m kidding about that last one, but in the first chapter of the book, Wallace really does use ‘twittering’ as a verb like ‘chatter’ at least ten times. How could such a visionary-type genius have left us in a world devoid of his revolutionary ideas?
Sadly, I found out about this greatly troubled man only after his death last year. That was when the ‘Infinite Summer’ group started, of people across the world pledging to read his 1100+ page book together throughout the summer. There was a scheduled online book club set up and I was on track with the articles and discussion. Then I slowly dropped behind the page I was supposed to be on, mainly due to the fact that each word, and page, and section of each chapter is dense reading, along with lengthy footnotes comprising the last 100-page section of the book. I stopped around page 240 and the book’s been gathering dust until this most recent month of May (2010 B.S.) when I picked it up again and decided it must be finished.
The main interlaced storylines consist of:
Enfield Tennis Academy – containing prodigies like Hal Incandenza² or Michael Pemulis, elaborate descriptions of the hierarchies of instruction and drills and other sports elaborations that surprisingly don’t bore me. Includes the live-action Risk-like game of Eschaton, which I now wish to play.
Ennet House – halfway house nearby the academy for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Mainly starring Don Gately, deals heavily with the background of addictive personalities. Especially intriguing to me is the constant debate (excerpted below) regarding its mind-numbing platitudes:
“By AA’s own logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting fellowship of AA even more than someone who admits his problem.”
Gately: “The slogan I've heard that might work here is Analysis-Paralysis. You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing.”
“AA’s response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.”
O.N.A.N. – political backdrop wherein through the Great Concavity agreement, the U.S. has a treaty with Canada to give them various parts of New England and consequently catapult all of our trash (Toxic Waste Management) into said areas, through the use of fairly magical dumpsters. This literally makes our streets and country clean, a treaty proposed by germaphobic President Johnny Gentle, a former actor who sounds a lot like Schwarzenegger.
“Himself” – James Incandenza, Hal’s father, a filmmaker (see footnote 24, well over 10 pages of his film titles and descriptions, mainly documentaries, such as interviewing over 200 people in the U.S. named John Wayne) – married to a Canadian and highly involved in the title of this book.
One of the premises argued throughout the political chapters is that of ‘delayed gratification’ – that is, how everyone in America is guaranteed the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in hopes that if we’re all moving toward this goal, everyone will be simultaneously happy, but if we’re all like kids who don’t know when to stop eating candy, we’re all getting sick and making others sick with our American dreams. Consequently, we have thousands of choices, we have ‘freedom’ but no one has taught us how to make good choices, in other words stopping at the limit of the candy/sickness level. Or to use the technology example, when the cable kabal of 504 channels is available, we have 504 choices, but when Netflix-instant-watch is available, we supposedly have the ‘freedom’ to choose anything we want, but we don’t necessarily possess the wisdom or direction to make quality choices. In modern terms, it’s doubtful Wallace would’ve been a fan of the Real Housewives in the Year of The KFC Double Down, Subsidized Time. But he’s probably also referring to my ability to turn on the Weather Channel at 7:20am every morning and select Local Weather and immediately obtain a 30-second long 5-day forecast, which I rather like. All of this I’ve written at having only reached page 470. Full speed ahead…
___________________________________________
1. My favorite is the Year of The Trial-Sized Dove Bar
2. Hal frequently suffers from The Howling Fantods, which would be an excellent name for a rock band.
postscript: Colin Meloy weighed in with similar summarizing thoughts last summer, with or without Pemulis’ yachting cap.
Older techno-geeks can inform me if any of the following was in even pre-existent creation in 1996 B.S. (Before Subsidization)¹ : The videophone (okay I do remember this being around) – but videophone leading to a panagoraphobia which opened “huge new entrepreneurial teleputerized markets for home-shopping and delivery”; cell phones, like very small and quite interactive; DVDs /HDTV which he calls “cartridges” but are like High-Definition CD-ROMs and the HDTV is also your computer(!); laptop TPs (teleputers); DVR, nixing the commercials and everything; “Break Free of the Confinement of Your Channel Selector!” –Netflix-type instant-watch; “Aapps, Inc” controls the TV choices; interfacing like Skype programs and webcams (which are really videophones re-imagined); and finally, “Twitter”. I’m kidding about that last one, but in the first chapter of the book, Wallace really does use ‘twittering’ as a verb like ‘chatter’ at least ten times. How could such a visionary-type genius have left us in a world devoid of his revolutionary ideas?
Sadly, I found out about this greatly troubled man only after his death last year. That was when the ‘Infinite Summer’ group started, of people across the world pledging to read his 1100+ page book together throughout the summer. There was a scheduled online book club set up and I was on track with the articles and discussion. Then I slowly dropped behind the page I was supposed to be on, mainly due to the fact that each word, and page, and section of each chapter is dense reading, along with lengthy footnotes comprising the last 100-page section of the book. I stopped around page 240 and the book’s been gathering dust until this most recent month of May (2010 B.S.) when I picked it up again and decided it must be finished.
The main interlaced storylines consist of:
Enfield Tennis Academy – containing prodigies like Hal Incandenza² or Michael Pemulis, elaborate descriptions of the hierarchies of instruction and drills and other sports elaborations that surprisingly don’t bore me. Includes the live-action Risk-like game of Eschaton, which I now wish to play.
Ennet House – halfway house nearby the academy for recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. Mainly starring Don Gately, deals heavily with the background of addictive personalities. Especially intriguing to me is the constant debate (excerpted below) regarding its mind-numbing platitudes:
“By AA’s own logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting fellowship of AA even more than someone who admits his problem.”
Gately: “The slogan I've heard that might work here is Analysis-Paralysis. You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing.”
“AA’s response to a question about its axioms, then, is to invoke an axiom about the inadvisability of all such questions.”
O.N.A.N. – political backdrop wherein through the Great Concavity agreement, the U.S. has a treaty with Canada to give them various parts of New England and consequently catapult all of our trash (Toxic Waste Management) into said areas, through the use of fairly magical dumpsters. This literally makes our streets and country clean, a treaty proposed by germaphobic President Johnny Gentle, a former actor who sounds a lot like Schwarzenegger.
“Himself” – James Incandenza, Hal’s father, a filmmaker (see footnote 24, well over 10 pages of his film titles and descriptions, mainly documentaries, such as interviewing over 200 people in the U.S. named John Wayne) – married to a Canadian and highly involved in the title of this book.
One of the premises argued throughout the political chapters is that of ‘delayed gratification’ – that is, how everyone in America is guaranteed the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in hopes that if we’re all moving toward this goal, everyone will be simultaneously happy, but if we’re all like kids who don’t know when to stop eating candy, we’re all getting sick and making others sick with our American dreams. Consequently, we have thousands of choices, we have ‘freedom’ but no one has taught us how to make good choices, in other words stopping at the limit of the candy/sickness level. Or to use the technology example, when the cable kabal of 504 channels is available, we have 504 choices, but when Netflix-instant-watch is available, we supposedly have the ‘freedom’ to choose anything we want, but we don’t necessarily possess the wisdom or direction to make quality choices. In modern terms, it’s doubtful Wallace would’ve been a fan of the Real Housewives in the Year of The KFC Double Down, Subsidized Time. But he’s probably also referring to my ability to turn on the Weather Channel at 7:20am every morning and select Local Weather and immediately obtain a 30-second long 5-day forecast, which I rather like. All of this I’ve written at having only reached page 470. Full speed ahead…
___________________________________________
1. My favorite is the Year of The Trial-Sized Dove Bar
2. Hal frequently suffers from The Howling Fantods, which would be an excellent name for a rock band.
postscript: Colin Meloy weighed in with similar summarizing thoughts last summer, with or without Pemulis’ yachting cap.
10 December 2009
I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.
Albums of the year /making twenty-oh-nine palatable
Brother's Blood, by Kevin Devine
Poetic literary aural perfection. Looking for communion.
"A flaming ferris wheel spun where the sun used to be"
"All those foxhole prayers full of fear you shared with a bored and distant sun"
"You're burnt sky, the fever moon that makes the sun jealous at night"
"The hungover sun sneaks back in the sky"
"Stubborn sun spites the hallways, paint chips blink yellow, white"
"Every morning the sun comes - to shuttle you back to your man"
[those were just the sun lyrics, see: "the entire album"]
From Sumi to Japan, by Brian Bonz & The Dot Hongs
Ambient wonder. Makes me happy. Growing up.
"The pattern of dependence has got me down"
"And you're pushing three decades with that bottle now"
Mean Everything to Nothing, by Manchester Orchestra
Emotional. Spiritual. Whilst entirely rock and roll.
I may or may not have listened to The River my entire 13 hour trip back from Lollapalooza.
"I guess it's true you never knew the passive power of the truth so cut me loose"
"So I prayed for what I thought were angels, ended up being ambulances"
"I'm gonna leave you the first chance I get"
Curse Your Branches, by David Bazan
Just gorgeous. Questions, theology, faith.
"And it's hard to be, hard to be a decent human being"
"Causing the doubt to begin to spread like original sin"
The Hazards of Love, by The Decemberists
Mutton chops and suspenders.
I think the songs work on their own but it was nice to see the entire album performed as well.
"And the wanting comes in waves"
"And I'd wager all, for the hazards of love"
"Tell me now, tell me this, a forest's son, a river's daughter/So let's be married here today, these rushing waves to bear our witness/And these hazards of love, nevermore will trouble us"
The Life of the World to Come, by The Mountain Goats
Thematically sound. Retrospective. Love my nasal singers.
"I used to live here"
"In the burning fuselage of my days"
When The Devil's Loose, by A A Bondy
Haunting. Ocean. Harmonicas.
"This is the light that shines, and I can see the pines are dancing, this is the leaving of another love..."
"And when I come, I will come on like a dream, with the crimson moon shining down upon my devil's ring"
Just released, and/or just started listening:
Height, by John Nolan
"Well I'm a born disciple, but I'm inherently suspicious"
"I keep trying to think of clever ways to say: that I don't believe you. But nothing comes to mind so I'll just make it plain: I don't believe you."
Daisy, by Brand New
It's a trip so far.
Interesting how we compare: I've never heard #3 and #7 but otherwise similar (and wasn't sure what year Mini Ts came out and forgot about Koufax since I didn't see them live- but they are lovely and Czech!)
22 July 2009
I'd Like That Redacted
Book Review of prelude to a SUPER AIRPLANE by Brian Spaeth
I am afraid to fly. My first airplane trip occurred at age four when most of our family moved across the country. I do not recall this experience in any detail. My second airplane trip was at age twenty-one during Spring Break. At this point I still followed the flight attendant's detailed instructions for turning off my electronic device for the majority of the hour-long flight. I find I have no problem once the plane is actually airborne, it's the takeoff and landing that makes my heart skip several beats. If I am stuck in the aisle seat and cannot see the ground when the plane is taking off, my anxiety levels increase and I don't want to stare past the person in the window seat. I detest "puddle-jumper" planes and always hit my head on their small overhead compartments. All this to say, prelude to a SUPER AIRPLANE has renewed my childish sense of wonder and amazement regarding the creation of flying machines. Although I just returned from vacation wherein our plane inexplicably sat on the runway for two hours, then sputtered to life, I no longer think of flights with quite the anxiety-inducing terror of my past. Plus, the TSA employing robots would be incredible.
Spaeth's tome draws the reader in to the magical colliding worlds of super airplane construction, finding love in airports, instant messaging via Facesbook (so no one will sue), self-proclaimed orphans, authorial intrusion, Mayan prophesies, and the cabal of energy-drink addicts. From the man who "also knew that this [deed] would propel him into the national spotlight as a war hero, even though America's Secret War With Brazil was a secret" to the psychiatrist who "was suggesting ill-conceived courses of action to her patients, so that their problems became larger than hers", the characters come alive through their bizarre and idiosyncratic actions. This book is perfect for the self-referential, ADD crowd of the twenty-first century, who still express Native American history incorrectly, have thumb blisters from Blackberry addiction, and want to live on a 47-story super airplane. Spaeth causes the reader to ruminate on such heady topics as how the most awesome name ever in the history of horse-naming is a horse called Pencils, and how Warmth For Monstero would be a good name for a rock band, all while trying to piece together each character's path to the super airplane.
In reading prelude to a SUPER AIRPLANE, I was taking a break from my summer commitment to read 1100-page Infinite Jest. The short paragraphs, short sentences, and absence of fatal drug overdoses in Spaeth's book piqued my interest, but I was soon caught up in comparing him to Wallace. First, they both use the word "twitter" at least once in their books, as in, "to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird." At least, I'm sure that's how Wallace meant it, as Infinite Jest was published in 1996, long before our generation's incessant need to share what we had for lunch. Next, they both use glorious footnotes[1] to further delineate important expositions to the reader. After these come footprintnotes[2], and many chapters set in the future--whether it be 2012 or the Year Of The Trial Sized Dove Bar--with newfangled technology predicted. Brad Radby's complete filmography might be largely comparable to Incandenza's own film career--the indescribable footnote 24 in Infinite Jest. Escapism is good for the soul, and in prelude to a SUPER AIRPLANE we can all fly away together.
[1]. I don't know how to make numbers appear smaller and footnotey in Blogger.
[2]. I made up that word.[1]
[1]. It means a footnote of a footnote. Alternately, toenotes.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
End of Part 1:
1. Me. Women are the only gender who can multitask, therefore I could think about airplanes whilst attending to my normal activities. (Ex. I was just thinking about airplanes, reading your book, watching The Daily Show, replying to an email, and on the phone with my sister).
2. Cheese, musicians, peanut butter, time-travel, gingers.
3. Cheese: it can be easily eaten on an airplane.
4. Fork. It cannot be easily transported on an airplane because of its weapon-like qualities.
5. Yes, it's me, Demi Lovato.
copyright: me, 2009.
15 July 2009
Need to DEAR (drop everything and read) to finish this beastly wonder
“So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you’re willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it’s a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it’s very high-tech and it’s very “become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z,” but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he’s really the only one there who to me is saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. And part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we’re really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we’re creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing about fascists is they’ll tell you what to think, they’ll tell you what to do–they’ll tell you what’s important.”
DFW in an interview about Infinite Jest (1996).
Brought to my attention by Bailey, I'm now wondering if David Wallace in The Office is named after DFW.
29 June 2009
I concur.
Complaint: It totally sucks that pages 17-27 of Infinite Jest (Erdedy waits for pot) are 100 times better than any short story I will ever write, and yet are only 1/100th of the whole.
(from infinite summer community)
in other news, bringing this beast of a book with me to the airport. with notebook. pens. highlighters. bookmarks. (one for footnotes). this man was a genius. why didn't any of my writing profs make me read this masterpiece?
26 May 2009
D.F.W.
May 21, 2005, commencement speech. David Foster Wallace.
So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- at least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
And I submit that this is what the real value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.
But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
come on, you know you want to read a 1,000 page book with me this summer. (Infinite Jest)
So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- at least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
And I submit that this is what the real value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.
But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.
But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
come on, you know you want to read a 1,000 page book with me this summer. (Infinite Jest)
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