Let's Make a (New) Deal

Is it just me, or does Blogger hate IE? I could never get the fucking photo tool to work with IE, and now that I use FireFox it works just fine thanks very much.

-or-

My snot is bright green, with a viscosity similar to Elmer's Glue.

-or-

CocoRosie was overrated, until their newest album got savaged by Stylus, Pfork et alia: now they're just rated. (And served, they got served!)

-or-

You could say the Brits have a more fastidious sense of style and usage; but then again, you could say that that belongs to the Midwest.

-or-

Grammar, what's the big deal anyway?

-or-

We've always enjoyed the thrill of filling up inventively a white page with black lines, like building fabulous Lego castles with a pen.

-or-

Name that film: "Do you still pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?"



Every day I'm going to post one idea. That's the hook. (And as John Popper intoned famously: The hook brings you back, I ain't tellin' you no lie.) I'll level, dig. I've been sick for the last two and a half weeks; like, really, really sick. So now I feel a little better and I figured out something to do and my job has calmed down and everything has settled into a little groove and this is going to be fun for me again to do that is to post one thing per day but only one thing, and it will probably be brief.

Vanishing Point

David Wallace on a David Markson novel: pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country. The irony of Markson’s writing Vanishing Point.

Thesis On Certainty

So this is what we would call something of a cop-out post. But, well. (We hate how hyphenated words looks; Joyce was the most stylish writer ever. We were reading out loud "Araby" a few nights ago and the way he puts one word against another word to make a sentence--it's so beautiful. You can learn everything about writing with beauty (not that that would have to be your goal) by reading out loud and typing or writing Joyce's writing: Joyce constructed neologism-type words by omitting hyphens and jamming words together, not that that was the phenomenon about which We were talking directly above, but that is the thought that got usonto this topic about Joyce.)

We're going to paste in here the first part of ourcompleted thesis. We're really happy with how it came out. And, We'll, like, do something else later.

[This here below is the epigraph. Following that is the first page or so of the thesis.]

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most
demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness,
flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call
courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one
exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical
variables. Given that a net that’s three feet high (at the center) and two
players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot
is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these
determinants is itself determined by still other variables—for example, a shot’s
depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined
with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball’s height over the
net itself determined by the player’s body position, grip on the racquet, degree
of backswing, angle of racquet face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the
racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the
strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out, on and on,
and then on even farther when the opponent’s own positions and predilections and
the ballistic features of the ball he’s sent you to hit are factored in.
No CPU yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single
exchange—smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking
involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious
entity, and then only unconsciously, i.e., by combining talent with repetition
to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without
conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of
art.
David Foster Wallace[i]

Notes

[i] David Foster Wallace, “Tennis Player
Michael Joyce’s
Profession Artistry As a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice,
Freedom,
Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” in A Supposedly
Fun
Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1997),
235-36.

About two-thirds of the way through On Certainty,[i] Wittgenstein seemingly encapsulates his entire philosophic
project in one day’s worth of propositions.
471. It is so difficult to find
the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the
beginning. And not try to go further back.

472. When a child
learns language it learns at the same time what is to be investigated and what
not. When it learns that there is a cupboard in the room, it isn’t taught
to doubt whether what it sees later on is still a cupboard or only a kind of
stage set.

473. Just as in writing we learn a particular basic form
of letters and then vary it later, so we learn first the stability of things as
the norm, which is then subject to alterations.

474. This game
proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not
the ground.

475. I want to regard man here as an animal; as a
primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a
creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means
of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from
some kind of ratiocination.

Taken in order, we believe (surmise)
that these five propositions position cogently Wittgenstein’s thought about the
limits of thought, and therefore philosophy. The first proposition is the
kernel—the essential seed—of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: his work tries to
exorcise from the reader the urge to “try to go further back.” This urge
spurs on philosophers to raise nonsensical questions, to which they proffer
nonsensical answers; from this urge results what we would call
“metaphysics.” On the one hand, the metaphysical urge catalyzed Platonism
and Aristotelian auto-affective notion of God. Both of these doctrinaire
systems assume that there is an underlying cause that lies further back from the
sensible world. Both Platonic formalism and Aristotle’s conception of the
“unmoved mover” as pure being-at-work suppose an impoverished view of reality;
both try to supply a metaphysical backdrop that secures for reality a more full
meaning.
And we find on the other hand, thousands of years later, Moore
taking up another aspect of going “further back.” His attempt to prove
realism fails for similar reasons, over which we will go later. Attempts
at proving realism and idealism; deriving transcendental categories of the
understanding; and even the search for totally certain knowledge all arise from
the metaphysical presupposition of the existence of a “further back.”
Philosophers rely on this “further back” in order to ground their thought in
apodicticity or transcendence—it is the site of the a
priori.

Where Wittgenstein provisionally situates the “beginning,” then, is the point at
which “a child learns language.” As he says, attendant to learning
language, a child must learn quite a few other things: the stability or
uniformity of the objects expressed by language; belief in the regularity (of
the meaning) of language; the authority of the teacher. These things
simply cannot be the language-learner’s theme of investigation if he is to learn
language. But it would be a mistake to think that these uninvestigated
themes comprise the “ground” of language-learning. The game—in this
instance, language-learning—“proves its worth,” but this worth doesn’t ground
the game. A game’s ground is “further back” from the practice of the game,
and the ground is not itself part of the game: it is a condition of the
possibility for the game. This ground would have to come prior to the
practice of the game, and it is part of Wittgenstein’s task to show—in general
terms—why the transcendental ground—or the urge to find a transcendental
ground—is not a proper theme for philosophy.

[i] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).

Foster Wallace + Serious Writer + Federer

David Foster Wallace cares.


DFW is the most talented living American writer. When he was younger he seemed a little too precocious and in love with his own ability. But his last few books show something new, something that he even proclaimed in his essay on Dostoevsky from Remember the Lobster. His writing now has a moral gravitas. And if you know me, you know that I'm all about moral gravitas. Something about recovering from sin. It's appealling. But, so. DFW maintains his technical genius while aiming it precise like a laser at Things That Matter.

His article on Federer, for example. It seems at first that he's writing about Aesthetics. As something transcendental, something that urges us to go past the bounds of language (a task in which we fail), this tack would seem aimed at something that Matters.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

[...]

You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

[...]

he looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow,

[...]

Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

Within this smattering of breathless talk about the Aesthetic value of Federer's game, DFW intersperses technical detail. No surprise. But if I'm correct in assuming that DFW decided early on (likely just after his debut, Broom of the System) that he wanted to be a Serious Writer, he realized something: There is nothing higher than the transcendent. The variety of descriptions one desires to use have the form of analogy, simile and metaphor. DFW uses these well. And I don't make a claim for his originality here, but I think he realized another avenue to the transcendent--exhaustion. He exhausts subjects with comprehensivness, vocabulary, descriptive overload and technical detail. Endless chains of chemical formulas and syntheses; in-depth descriptions of the inner workings of cruise ships; being a floating eyeball at a porn festival. Through exhaustion of subject matter DFW manifests something higher: boredom, ennui, loathing, frailty, desire, exhaustion itself. DFW makes through sheer persistence of assertion through structure a narrative framework that is itself unsupported yet self-sustaining. He manifests Ethical and Aesthetic problems and solutions.

(I'm running up against the limits of my language.)

At first I thought it was a DFWian trope. He has little ticks, little verbal-descriptive-narrative ticks. He early in the article described the final cointoss for the serve in the match between Federer and Nadal. A child who had overcome cancer tossed the coin.


Later, at the top of page 4 DFW interpolated a little bit of seemingly unrelated data about the child with the cancer. For a little gravitas, right. He uses this technique and it's pretty neat. He did it all the time in his 9/11 essay and his McCain essay and, well, all the time in Infinite Jest. Neat, an interpolation.

Another neat thing about DFW's style is the footnote thing. You might hate it, 'natch. But in this essay--wow. I quoted the body's final paragraph above, it's the last quote. It seems to wrap up the body-Aesthetic thing a little. It's a little bit of fluff. But the final footnote really ends the article. It ends it a few paragraphs before the article actually ends in the body.

DFW takes the same path that, say, Blake took in writing Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence. Little lamb, who made thee? Tiger, what immortal hand or eye formed thy fearful symmetry? The Big Thing: how could the creator of the lamb, so meek and mild, be also the creator of the Tiger, of burning bright in the forests of the night fame. This might not be that interesting of a question. But DFW makes the same move.

One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.

But there's more. The "just look at him down there. Look at that" reemphasizes the Aesthetic concern. White liberal guilt, maybe, necessitates such a concern, but: Why isn't DFW writing a prolix, verball impressive and sure to be widely-read article about children with cancer? Why is he at Wimbledon? In the lap of luxury? Watching a sport? As much work as it is to compete, watching sports is something of a leisure activity. Tennis? LaCoste? Isn't all a little bourgeoise?

But DFW almost anticipates this concern. It would be grotesque to think that, say, a million cancerous children equals one Roger Federer. But there is something transcendent to a Federer. Trying to get at this transcendental-ness, isn't this a worthy task? If you can't heal sick children, what better alternative is there than to give sustenance to the human faculty that values physical genius and spiritual rectitude? Even in a fluff piece on tennis, DFW continues to make a bid at being The Serious Writer. (Compare this piece to his piece on Michael Joyce from Esquire. But there is no comparison [as the saying goes]: It's the difference between a church and a stripclub.)