On The Darkest Day Of The Year
Where I live we are currently getting 3.5 to 4 hours sunlight. Sunrise was at 11:28 and sunset will be at 3:11. The light is coming back after tomorrow, at six minutes a day. With all do respect, Balk, screw you.
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On Women Good At Criticism
@jolie I still can't tell if that quiz was meant as satire or not.
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On Excerpts From 'How to Be: North Dakota'
Okay, I am completely stumped by the cover. Someone explain??
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On Do You Have Garbage Taste in Music? A Quiz
I can't tell if this is a parody or not. CHOIRE????
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On A Supposedly True Thing Jonathan Franzen Said About David Foster Wallace
@Stacy Reading it again, I take your point in defence of Franzen actions as a means of keeping the actual memory of his friend alive, as opposed to the memory of the public figure. I remember hearing the eulogy of friend where the speaker said "he was kind to all, blah blah blah" and thinking at least that half the people in the room had been royally fucked over by the deceased. So yeah, you've made an excellent arguement here, and I can sort of wrap my brain around Franzen's motivations when I view them through that lens. I still think he misses an opportunity for compassion and undermines some of his friends insights into the condition of depression, but I imagine it's because he's fucking furious, which is a totally natural response to mental illness stealing someone you love. I don't know why Franzen has to make it so public and snide, and so much about him, but he's only human, I suppose, and he doesn't have to be any more selfless because he's well known. Thanks for your thoughtful response.
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On A Supposedly True Thing Jonathan Franzen Said About David Foster Wallace
@Stacy @Stacy @Choire Sorry, this "half-witted, hero-worshipping jackal" wasn't putting forth the arguement that DFW was a saint. as much as his writing had capacity for deep compassion, it also had the capacity for cruelty ( he admitted as much himself). And because I *didn't* know him, it wouldn't surprise me if he could have been every bit as pretentious as Franzen appears to be here.
What I object to is the systematic delegitimization of mental illness as a real, sometimes, untreatable thing that is so profoundly awful to live alone with (and you live it alone, despite anyone's "investment of love"), so isolating, so crazy-making, that sometimes your brain can convince you that the only relief is death. From what I gather, DFW underwent Electroconvulsive Therapy, Talk Therapy, and courses and courses of anti-d's to try and get out of the place he was in. Those don't strike me as the actions of someone who thinks suicide would be a super awesome way to be remembered as a genius or to "get back" at people for not loving him enough. Those strike me as the actions of a desperate man who would do anything to get better.
Okay, so you're mad your friend killed himself? Yeah, I get that. But he did not do it to hurt *you*, or his wife, or to spite the world, or to create a legacy. He did it because he was ill. And that illness is real, even if *you* haven't had it. I don't "know" Wallace, but his body of work went a long way in extending some compassion to the mentally ill that I had not previously seen. It painted depression for what it is—something that attacks, rather than something people just need to "shake off". Something ugly, rather than romantic. I happen to think he drew the line between compassion and permission far better than anyone who would jingoistically tell a clinically depressed person "it gets better" . Because he was brave enough to not try to explain away or make smaller what is a fucking unimaginably painful condition.
That Franzen takes from that that his friend was "dishonest" tells me he missed a large piece of his humanity entirely, and that he continues to perpetuate the idea that mental illness does not kill makes him far less honest a writer than DFW was even if every word of "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." was a complete and total fabrication.
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On A Supposedly True Thing Jonathan Franzen Said About David Foster Wallace
@lululemming Sorry, TL;DR. What Tulletilsynet said.
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On A Supposedly True Thing Jonathan Franzen Said About David Foster Wallace
"The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend."
From Infinite Jest, a work found in the fiction section:
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
I'd argue that the more mercenary deceit here is Franzen misrepresenting his spiritual proximity to "Dave Wallace" when he was alive, as anyone who has undertaken a close reading of DFWs work couldn't possibly think that his suicide was a gesture of self-aggrandizement, or worse yet, something that was about *them*.
Wallace did not court depression or pursue it as wind, nor was he content to let suicidal ideation serve as a stand-in for nobility or genius or legend status. My reading of his writing about "the depressed person" is that is was a battle cry against succumbing to the romance of one's own mental illness.
And maybe I'm a fool, but I never read the cruise ship or state fair pieces thinking that the quotes of experiences were verbatim, I fully expected that some of it was invented to magnify the truth of a thing in order to expose the essentiality of the experience more accurately. Or just to underscore the fucking absurdity of it all.
In any event, if Franzen wants to deride the work of his dead 'friend' out of anger, or jealousy, or attention-seeking petulance, let him have it. He's winning his argument on a technicality. And that shit is for the birds.
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On Kids Sing Smiths Song
I get why this is supposed to make me go "awwww" but seeing children sing "Haven't had a dream in a long time" makes me profoundly sad. Also, I feel like whomever is behind this is trying to trick me into having kids by assuming that my uterus is nostalgic for the '80s. Finally, while I get that the lyrics probably have different meanings to children, I'd rather they be kept apart from misanthropy until it becomes a necessity. Moping and adoring children are diametrically opposed pleasures, and trying to make two great tastes taste great together is perhaps better left to the good people at Reese's.
/killjoy.
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On The 18 Purplest Musical Artists Of All-Time, In Order
My favourite kinda racist anthropomorphized claymation fruit singing group will not be ignored. Also, Morris Day & The Time(I know) and James Brown.