I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
From David Foster Wallace
The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
This is so American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.
One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.
For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going.
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives