Nothing profound to say about it, but my hometown baseball team, the Milwaukee Brewers, are in the playoffs for the first time since I was seven years old! They’ve been so close before, but they finally did it! Awesome.
Month: September 2008 Page 1 of 2
Blast Off: Take the challenge. — the Huggy Bear Picture Challenge (put a picture of McCain hugging Bush at or near the top of your blog).
Miranda July and Carrie Brownstein have thoughtfully compiled a (mildly humorous) range of choices for how to contribute to Barack Obama, including the option of purchasing up to three videos produced eight years ago for $10 a piece (which will then be contributed directly back to Obama).
I say, right on.
Fellow iPhone 3G suckers consumers customers:
This is an adaptation of what I posted on Metafilter about the death of David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite authors (despite my relative neglect of his work in the recent past):
I can’t say anything that others haven’t already said, but I’ll say it anyway, and I’ll say it relatively simply, despite that not being precisely the way DFW would have done it.1
I loved his work. I finished Infinite Jest years ago. I will read it again.
I’m really sad that when I finish Oblivion and the various other essays I haven’t read that that’s it — no more David Foster Wallace.
I’ve been thinking about Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams and Hunter S. Thompson in the wake of this horrible shock. This is different, though. DFW was a hero and an influence that was closer to a peer than any of those other heroes of mine. I recognized something in him, and in his writing, that reminded me of me, more than any other writer, of someone who could see the complexity and the absurdity of everything, of someone who was from the Midwest and smart and young-ish and a little bit angry and a little bit sad. Or maybe a lot of each. (More than I evidently knew.)
I’m not going to get over this quickly or easily, even though (or maybe because) I never met him in person.
I’m glad that I heard the news from Will, who introduced me to DFW, though it was strange that it was in a Facebook posting.
I have felt really alive lately, really engaged in my life to a degree that I hadn’t been for a few years, but this was like a punch in the gut. And the head. And the heart.
Goodbye, David.
.
1 (Mostly because, among many reasons, and obviouslya, I am not he.)
a [I hope]
From “Cars won’t always rule the world and its cities” by architect Arrol Gellner in the SF Chronicle:
“history has a way of casually demolishing institutions that seem impregnable”
Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle columnist, remembers author David Foster Wallace after his suicide at age 46.
I loved David Foster Wallace’s work and I was very sad to hear of his death. DFW was brilliant and he knew it. He skewered the absurdities of our society by being as complex as the ridiculous world we live in. And yet, as reported by Mr. Carroll, DFW understood that:
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
“That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
Apparently, my hometown has been “long known for its compulsively clean streets.”
Well, Milwaukee is furthering that tradition with a GumBuster. Huh.
Oh, no, he didn’t.
Oh, yes, he did, in the #1 Freudian slip of the election so far: Tom Ridge defends “John Bush,” aka John McCain!