DFW: R.I.P.
A journal assignment for my Ethnographic Doc/Film Production class was to write on: noticing things. It sort of turned in to a rememberance of the recently departed David Foster Wallace.
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I’m usually a little put off by people who “notice things.” I have this buddy who loves to talk about how much he notices things – he’s actually not a very nice guy. He doesn’t seem to notice how totally self-absorbed he is in his noticing. My in-laws were to Chicago for a visit recently and remarked, “Have you noticed that Chicago has a lot of pink billboards.” Despite the fact this is almost certainly quantifiably incorrect they seemed to search the observation for hidden meaning. Another consequence of noticing: stereotypes. – A lot of black people seem to belong to gangs. – Have you noticed how many Mexicans are poor?
Why is it that the news will inaccurately claim the worst lies, but when a great man is found hanged in his living room they dutifully, suggestively assert that it was “reportedly a suicide” or worse “an apparent suicide?”
I’ve noticed that if I’m walking past someone’s garbage can, like through an alley or something, and I have a banana peel or apple core, as I often do on my morning commute, I feel embarrassed or at least a little shy or else defiant to throw my fruit waste away in someone else’s garbage.
In tense or awkward situations why do people tend to make little jokes? Why do I make them – even if there is no one else around?
Steven Berlin Johnson talks about this in his book Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. He spent a day hooked up to an fMRI machine, taking pictures of his brain. Most of the time his brain activity was normal, flat, maundering; but periodically there would be little peaks of activity. These peaks corresponded exactly with Johnson’s attempts at humor. Turns out the author had a dopamine addiction and would regularly crack jokes to give his brain a boost. It may be that I joke in tense situations in order to heighten my concentration – to better notice.
(Do you know Steven Berlin Johnson? He has a fascinating book called Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. I think you would like it.)
Sometimes when I’m walking and I see an attractive woman I slip my wedding-ringed left hand into my pocket. I’m not an unfaithful husband; it’s just something I’ve noticed. Actually, there may be no relation between the two. Another casualty of noticing: the self-fulfilling prophecy.
One thing you can’t help but notice in Chicago is how the sidewalks are polka dotted with those dirty black spots that look like discarded gum. I wonder what that is. I wouldn’t even know whom to ask.
Why do I do that? I’m always recommending stuff, media usually. It’s like a default reaction: Nothing to say? – Hey, have you seen that film…? – I just read this great book I think you’d…
I recognize that this is technically an Academic paper, yet my writing has been very conversational. Probably I noticed, or I guess deduced, or maybe just guessed, that you would be okay with a more conversational-style English (though I did use that proper “whom” up there). That is something that I like to notice: how people adapt their speech, their way of speaking, of manipulating the English language, depending on their situation, the company they are keeping & c. David Foster Wallace remarks in his excellent essay (here I go again) Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage that “little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They’re learning about Discourse Communities. Kids learn this stuff not in English or Social Studies but on the playground and at lunch and on the bus. When his peers are giving [him] monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there’s serious learning going on…”
“David Foster Wallace was found dead Friday night in Claremont, reportedly a suicide. He was 46.” Why did I cry when I heard this news? I didn’t cry when Jane Jacobs or Kurt Vonnegut died; or when Hunter S. Thompson took his life.
When someone who thought and created art about the human condition commits suicide people go back through their oeuvre looking for clues, a secret suicide note embedded in their work, their life; usually with a lot of creative re-interpretation. With some cases it’s a bit easier: i.e. Kurt Cobain or Elliot Smith – though these are still “apparent suicides,” one can never discount the angry girlfriend. In the remembrances and obituaries written since there’s been numerous references to a couple lines in DFW’s inspiring 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address: “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.” Here, we hope, lies an answer to why this genius, who wrestled prolifically with what it means to be human, opted to off himself. But, this answer would be shallow missing DFW’s 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. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
I guess I’m sad because I worry: David Foster Wallace, what did you notice that I haven’t?
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