"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."
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David Foster Wallace’s legendary This Is Water 2005 commencement address. (via explore-blog)
(Source: , via explore-blog)
Document for David Foster Wallace’s class entitled “English 183A Your Liberal-Arts $ at Work” in which he points out common grammatical errors.
"Let me see if I have this right: Weary of converting past experience into currency, Jonathan Franzen goes on a vacation, which he immediately converts into a lengthy article for the New Yorker. The article, ‘Farther Away,’ which eviscerates his ‘friend’ David Foster Wallace, appears very nearly on the publication date of Wallace’s unfinished novel. Franzen, who claims that Wallace committed suicide as a career move, responded to Wallace’s suicide at the time by asking, ‘Does it look now like David had all the answers?’ Franzen is horrified on behalf of all of us that there’s a difference between Wallace’s persona and his actual existence. Perhaps the difference that Franzen should contemplate instead is the one between Wallace, who delved, heroically, into the darkness of his own soul, and his ‘friend’ Jonathan Franzen, whose oeuvre (and this article in particular) is devoted to fighting off any insight into himself and locating instead all shade and shadow elsewhere, out there, the next precinct over."
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Via:
In one fell swoop, David Shields annihilates everyone’s favorite anti-everythingist. (via explore-blog)
I soured on Shields after his last book, but I see little to argue with in the above passage.
I also like this:
Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley, the co-founders of the Necronautical Society and co-authors of the “Joint Declaration on Inauthenticity,” when asked to present their declaration at the Tate Britain, found and trained two actors to pretend to be them. Many people in the audience were angry when they discovered that the actors were not actually the authors… of a declaration on inauthenticity… presented in a museum.
Tom!
