And there you have it: even then Didion was a writer who could produce something in 48 hours that your sophomore-year roommate wouldn’t quit quoting for years.
In Bloomington, Wallace struggled with the size of his book. He hit upon the idea of endnotes to shorten it. In April, 1994, he presented the idea to Pietsch, adding, “I’ve become intensely attached to this strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it.” He explained that endnotes “allow … me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns … 5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.” He also said, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.” Pietsch countered with an offer of footnotes, which readers would find less cumbersome, but eventually agreed.
I humiliated him as he should be humiliated,” Hemingway says of the “rich Cadillac psycho,” choosing to “omit details.” “Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for 11 years,” he adds. “Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs.
NEW OPTICAL ILLUSIONS
Two lines, where the first line looks longer than the second line. But when you take a ruler to measure them they’re actually the same length. Pretty standard illusion, right? Wrong. Because the ruler you used to measure the lines, it’s now a Snickers bar.
Stop demanding to be spoon-fed like a baby. Figure out how to deal with art that you disagree with without throwing a fucking temper tantrum.
If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire. He was somewhere, he had come back through vast regions from nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar. He needed no further consolation.
Something About Occupy: (With a Primer)
There are few answers to be found here. For a while now, I’ve been setting out to write about the much discussed Occupy Wall St. movement. I have written here and there little bits, no more than notes, about my impressions of it at any given moment. I have cautiously spied local iterations of the group, half-heartily observing it from a block or so away — not interested in engaging with it here on a street level. I have discussed it with friends, some who see it as a force for good, others who see it as the reaction of entitled youth or just entitled do-nothings. I myself have seen it in various lights: as well-intentioned but ultimately unimportant; as the next great movement of the left; as desperately doomed to fail, ill-conceived.
I have read every other article from my favorite writers, journalists, and politicians, attempting to triangulate my position a bit better. A part of me figured my uncharacteristic lack of defined opinion was simply due to having not read enough about it. Yet, the more I read, the more I tried to impose some order on this movement, the more my opinions shifted their legs.
And then I realized something: the problem wasn’t my inability to find the solid ground of an opinion; it was the ground itself quaking. The cacophonous rattling and shouting from directions left and right was sending my mind reeling. I have never experienced a real earthquake but what was happening now seems reminiscent of the stories from those who have lived through them; that ominous onset of the rumble slowly gaining power, resonating through the ground, the walls around you, a sense of panic that there is nowhere you can run to find the steady safety of solid ground — I ran regardless.
My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.
A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.
