I think Brief Interviews, among other things, is a nervous breakdown about how even if you're attracted to sincerity, and trying to enact the idea of it - you can find yourself, against your will, using that idea to take advantage of others. — csalisbury
DFW knew that it was about facing suffering, and avoiding ironic distance - but he so often left it in the realm of ideas (balanced with photoreal observation) - what he never really seemed to explore was methods from getting from the pomo thing to sincerity. — csalisbury
So you can take the Iraq war and just treat it like a TV spectacle and you analyze that. But then you don't mention the millions of civilians which were killed. And that's a problem, if this is overlooked. — Manuel
It's fun, y'know? You just have to keep two bookmarks. — thewonder
They believe that their existential status has been called into question. It's their very way of life that they believe to be at stake. If anyone is serious about bringing an end to the war, they will have to take that into consideration. We need Kanye West to bring us there, though. That's what I'm saying about the Postmodern condition. — thewonder
Maybe you can expand on this last point a bit, see If I can make more sense of it. — Manuel
To be honest, it's my lack of genuine emotional state that I rebel against more than anything else. I care more to be let to feel as I should about the world than anything else. Everything, it seems, stands in my way.
We desire authenticity to the point of psychological terror. Anything that lets us feel again is somehow good. I've just been invoking extreme examples to point this out. — thewonder
hink about The Waking Life, for instance. People consider for it to be the worst form of pseudo-intellectual trite. It was a good film, y'know? What I'm suggesting is that this idea that we should care for and consider the world as it actually is should not have been a passing trend. — thewonder
The idea in Capitalist Realism is that there is no Capitalist ideology. It's already cynicism. I think that the danger is of a more generalized cynicism than any form of indoctrination. — thewonder
User participation within the production of goods and services does offer a certain degree of choice. It's, of course, considerably more troubling when you think about companies collecting massive amounts of data to build profiles of people to know what to market them. The experience is very strange, almost akin to schizophrenia. It seems like the ads are speaking to you directly because they kind of are. — thewonder
I was just saying that it's as if you're not let to feel as you should about the human experience. There's no boundless joy, whimsical caprice, emotional depth, righteous indignation, or catharsis. There seems, to me, to be a somewhat deliberate attempt to disrupt how we naturally feel about things. That's what I'm saying bothers me the most. — thewonder
Yes, I think this is a problem too. Wallace was good about pointing this out. I mean, I think it still happens, but it can get co-opted quite easily. But I take your point. — Manuel
If you consider what his ideas actually are, it'd seem that were they to actually have been into place, the situation there, though still with certain predicaments, would be preferable to what exists now. United States collaboration with right-wing authoritarian regimes was born out of a cynical anti-democratic anti-Communism and not some form of genuine Neo-Liberalism. — thewonder
There are all kinds of problems with Neo-Liberalism, but I don't think that it is really what to cite as what has made the Liberal democratic project, to me, at least, insufficient. — thewonder
A person's way of life and relationship to the world can be very easily utilized in order to manipulate them. You should only really care about your way of life and relationship to the world, however. It's just something that you can't ever let go of. — thewonder
The world is as it is now and what is in the past is in the past, I guess. I'm just saying that there was something to The New Sincerity that people shouldn't have let go of. — thewonder
That's an interesting take on Wallace. Again, going back to D.T Max, he was asked at one point, I think it was in an interview, about one scene in Wallace's article on the cruise ship. Wallace was looking at the ocean and he was saying that the ocean was vast, dark and empty. Don't quote me strictly on that. But I believe he said something to that effect.
Max asks, was that Wallace simply describing what the ocean felt like to him or was that his depression talking? I don't know. What you say about Wallace constantly tormenting himself reminds me of that.
And I think this is true. It's hard to explain Wallace better than he explains himself, but I think one can say that his acute and amazing powers of observation and detail must have applied to everything, not only his short stories or his books, but to himself too. It's the price he had to pay for the gift he had.
Nevertheless, I still think sincerity is sincerity and that can be used in a perverse manner too. But by now, given how much literature has expanded, it's just extremely hard to come up with something new to say something tried and true in an original manner. So it's said "naively" as it were, and can come off as cliched. Too bad, but, then again, this is person-dependant. What I find to be just cheesy sentimentalism, others find profound. And what I find deep others find verbose or obscurantist. Oh well. — Manuel
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