If You Have Nothing Good to Say . . .

Yesterday, Goldman Sacks announced that they're making some very minor changes to their executive bonuses. Dennis Berman translates the text of their press release, which turns out to say very little. Normal corporate press releases explain what a company has done in plain English so that reporters can investigate and write them up for general consumption, but Goldman Sacks's press release does the opposite: it says very little in very complicated language. Tortuous language is often telling because it's a great tool for giving false impressions. Take, for example, Sarah Palin. Her reliance on empty buzzwords is not unlike Goldman Sack's use of vague legalese to hype an almost meaningless, one-time change in their bonus payouts. And yet, Palin has convinced many that she is knowledgeable on a wide range of issues, despite the fact that see seems to talk almost exclusively in prepositional phrases and dependent clauses. Similarly, Goldman hopes you think they're finally getting tough and tackling the serious problems in the way they do business and reward their employees and executives.

GNC Holiday Promo

Anyone else find this disturbing?

A Formal Place Setting for Thorksgiving

Info here.

Bad Lieutenant

I have only a vague interest in the movie itself, insofar as it's the latest from Werner Herzog, but I was just reading the reviews on Metacritic thinking, first, that it has been at least two decades since Nicolas Cage last played a recognizable human being, and second, the movie doesn't seem to require that, so it may actually be the right role for him.

Failure of Imagination

Just when I thought Sarah Palin's media blitz could get more annoying, along comes PETA.

Senators Draw State from Memory

Re. GA: You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Doin' Us Proud

Two hometown boys, Rep. Nathan Deal and his mild mannered spokesman Harris Blackwood (who moonlights as a community reporter and columnist for the Gainesville Times, drew the attention of Talking Points Memo for jumping on Birther bandwagon.

Feet Are Like Spiders That Are Attached to Your Body

According to this month's Harper's Index, 57% of women are always, frequently, or sometimes embarrassed by their feet. My girlfriend is a notable exception, so it's certainly not universal, but it does seem like almost every woman I know is grossed out by feet in general and her own in particular.

Music Video

Atlas Sound, "Walkabout"

Video

Micachu & the Shapes, "Turn Me Well"

Some Videos

Fleet Foxes, "Blue Ridge Mountains"
Sunny Day Real Estate, "Seven"
New Order, "Blue Monday"

Monday Video

More Alexie v. Kindle

Over at Edrants, Sherman Alexie clarifies some of his remarks from BEA about the Kindle:

I consider the Kindle elitist because it’s too expensive. I also consider it elitist because, right now, one company is making all the rules. I am also worried about Jeff Bezos’ comments about wanting to change the way we read books. That’s rather imperial. Having grown up poor, I’m also highly aware that there’s always a massive technology gap between rich and poor kids. I haven’t yet heard what Amazon plans to do about this potential technology gap. And that’s a vital question considering that Bezos wants to change the way we read books. How does he plan to change the way that poor kids read books? How does he plan to make sure that poor kids have access to the technology? Poor kids all over the country don’t have access to current textbooks, so will they have access to Kindle?

He makes some good points. I recommend reading the whole interview.

UPDATE: Alexie has agreed to meet with Amazon.

Sherman Alexie, No Friend of e-Readers

NYT:

At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”

I've never been punched in the face by a famous author, but I can think of better reasons why I might.

Quotes from My Morning Meeting Taken out of Context and Posted for Your Amusement

"The rocket ship is a little too fun."

"It's too cosmos-spiritual."

"The idea of the dog and the woman looking out over the water is just right."

"Maybe if she was sitting it'd be less like, 'I'm standing there and someone's taking a picture of me.'"

Segregated Proms

It's hard to believe, but in some parts of the South, there are still privately organized segregated proms. Sunday's NYT Magazine had a good article about the proms of one such high school in Montgomery County, GA.

“My best friend is white,” said one senior girl, a little glumly. “She’s in there. She’s real cool, but I don’t understand. If they can be in there, why can’t everybody else?”

It's a depressing state of affairs, but rather than moralizing, the story's writer, Sara Corbett, does an excellent job of capturing the tension between so-called tradition and social realities of the school. I recommend reading the whole thing. The audio slide show is also well worth watching.

Wednesday Music Video

Jessica Lea Mayfield, "Kiss Me Again"
Jessica Lea Mayfield is 19. Damn musical prodigies. They make the rest of us look so lazy and untalented. If anyone asks, I'm hording away my talent for use on an unprecedented work of genius that will only be unveiled upon my passing from this world.

Music Video

Blur, "Bank Holiday"

One Small Step for . . . ?

We're going to let the Hubble fall into disrepair and die, but isn't it reassuring to know that NASA is making great strides in developing technology that allows astronauts to drink their own pee?

Quote of the Day

Laura Miller on evocriticism:

If sociobiology has yet to come up with a truly persuasive evolutionary explanation for homosexuality (and it really hasn't), then it's certainly not in a position to explain Shakespeare.

Wednesday Videos: Telekinesis

Telekinesis, "Tokyo"
"Coast of Carolina"
Hat tip to Monitor Mix.

David Foster Wallace

A couple weeks ago, my friend Brian wrote a short post at The Fiction Advocate in response to David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College (now published as This is Water). I've been thinking a lot about Wallace lately, probably more than is healthy, and I intend to post more later, but for now, I'm going to stick to countering several points in Brian's argument.

According to Brian, the thought processes that made Wallace's life so hellish were also those that made his writing great. On this much, we agree. Wallace's great talent was being able to make sense of a great deal of chaos. On a basic level, all narratives are about ordering facts and creating meaning, and no one needs narrative and meaning more than a depressive.

The general thrust of Wallace's Kenyon speech is that it's crucial and yet very difficult to stay fully attentive to the world around you. This has been a theme in much of Wallace's writing, though the distractions are often externalized. Wallace was very interested the way individuals filter through the barrage of often conflicting messages delivered through various media, an experience he tried to recreate in his writing through his liberal use of endnotes, footnotes, digressions, and asides. The Kenyon speech, however, is concerned specifically with the problem of getting lost in one's own thoughts and losing track of what's occurring in reality. This is also a feature of Wallace's writing, one that takes the forefront in his essays and many of his short stories, but it's clear that in the Kenyon speech Wallace is speaking more candidly than in much of his other writing if for no other reason than that he directly addresses one of the most common criticism lodged against Wallace's work.

Where I perceive candor, however, Brian sees "someone who's been exposed to too much clinical therapy and prescription drugs." My problem with Brian's assertion is, first, that it misconstrues the main point of the the speech and, second, that it seems emblematic of a certain knee-jerk disdain for modern psychiatry that both glorifies and oversimplifies depression.

As Brian sees it, the speech employs "psychotherapy jargon" to "implor[e] the graduating class to regulate their lives to the point of normalcy." Here's the passage he cites:

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education—at least in my own case—is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

That sounds vaguely academic, but it's hardly full of psychological argot. Moreover, the point isn't to regulate one's life but to simply pay attention and try not to be a self-absorbed asshole. Sure, self-absorption is a problem that depressives struggle with more than most, but the tendency to get lost in one's own world to the exclusion of other people is natural and plagues everyone. It's as universal a theme as you'll find anywhere in his work.

The issue I take greater umbrage with is the claim that Wallace had undergone "too much" treatment for his clinical depression. While it may be arguable that Wallace could have been better served by different treatment, had he not received treatment at all, he'd have died much earlier. What the D.T. Max's profile in the New Yorker makes clear is that neither Wallace nor his wife and family believed his treatment was the problem. His widow, Karen Green put it bluntly: "The person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the person he liked."

Toward the end, of course, Wallace, did choose to go off medication. He had been struggling with writer's block for a long time, and if the naysayers of therapy had been right, he'd have begun working on a new opus. Instead, it exacerbated his paralysis. David Foster Wallace penned his last words in a private letter to his wife on September 12, 2008, and while there may still be writing to be found in his personal records, there certainly won't be anything new. He finally got lost in his own head for good.

The Kenyon speech's main theme is that one should try, against all obstacles to avoid too much indulgent and abstract navel-gazing. It's a very simple, even common idea, but it's important. That Wallace struggled to extract himself from the labyrinth of his own mind is not lost on me, but the struggle itself wasn't what made his writing great. Rather, it was his frequent triumph. Had he merely succumbed to it, he'd have never written a word. That Wallace was capable of talking opening about the difficulty of trying in the most basic way to be good—that is, by simply paying attention to other people and the world around you—without resorting to platitudes nor skirting the complexity of the problem is miraculous. The result is a sort of secular homily for our age. That it's central theme can be dismissed out of hand seems like a great shame.

Reading

My friend Jane Berentson, who just published her first novel Miss Harper Can Do It, is reading this coming Monday at McNally Jackson.

Put the Cobwebs Back in Place

Over at his new blog the Fiction Advocate, my friend Brian has a post about his distaste for instant memoirs.

I'm a bit hesitant to rebut Brian here. After all, despite having written and published one, I do find instant memoirs a bit gimmicky. Still, I think they're good exercises that teach writers to distill what's essential about their narrative, and in any case, I think Brian's argument needs some unpacking.

We dislike these instant memoirs because they are not long enough to be confessional or revelatory; because nobody is more than pruriently interested in the confessions of an unremarkable stranger, and because the internet makes these writers too self-conscious to be both honest and objective. The amount of contrivance that goes into an instant memoir brings it more in line with fiction than autobiography, and yet it’s a terrible kind of fiction, designed to make the writer sound witty, and to make a cynical reader chuckle, briefly. Instant memoirs do not set the record straight.

Earlier, Brian argues that instant memoirs "have more in common with the 'About me' paragraph on a MySpace page than with the literary form of the memoir," but instant memoirs bear a closer resemblance to the submissions at PostSecret, and at their best, they are inherently confessional.

According to Brian, instant memoirs are too short to be "revelatory," which is true to an extent. Some instant memoirs, however, can evoke recognition of shared experience. Instant memoirs may not be able to deliver the insight of longer narratives, but empathy itself is a kind of revelation.

As for contrivance, memoir has always been a dirty form of autobiography, and it pays to be skeptical of all narratives. What makes instant memoirs different?

It's unfortunate, that most instant memoirs are just plain awful, but the same can be said of any genre of writing. And yes, they are a bit too of-the-moment. Still annoying or not, they shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

Monday Music Videos

Deerhunter, "Hazel Street"

Crystal Castles, "Vanished"

Beat Happening, "Black Candy"

Pavement, "Here"

Miss Harper Can Do It

My friend Jane Berentson's new book Miss Harper Can Do It is now on sale. For more info, please check out her website.

A Thought

What the world needs now is more books and movies about neurotic urbanites.

Wednesday Music Video

The Replacements, "Bastards of Young"

Bastards Of Young @ Yahoo! Video

DFW Audio Archive

Thanks to Brian for sending me a link to the David Foster Wallace Audio Project.

Economic Woes Force NYT to Stop Printing City Section

People who can't stop talking about where they live to people who also live there upset.

Tea Bagging

I thought the tea bagging jokes could only go so far, but MSNBC (of all networks) has proved me wrong.

Perhaps you've heard about Amazon dropping LGBT titles from their rankings, but you might also be curious to know that they have a history of similarly disgusting behavior.

Good News and Bad News from the Obama Administration

The good: They're planning to restore the Pell Grant program gutted by the Bush administration.

The Bad: They're still sticking by some of Bush's unconstitutional denial of habeas corpus for terror suspects.

Music Videos

My Bloody Valentine, "I Only Said"

Jolie Holland, "Mexico City" Playing tonight at the Housing Works Used Books Cafe.

Cut Copy, "Lights and Music" What an annoying announcer.

The Body Snake

Noted without comment.

Depressing News Story of the Day

Birth-Control Pill Lands Fairfax Girl 2-Week Suspension

The View from of the Other Side

David Wiegel of the Washington Independent has posted some photos and comments from his trip to the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot.

Some Music Videos

The Bats, "North by North"
I found this band by accident last year when I downloaded a mix of music from the Deerhunter blog. The Bats' "Block of Wood" was followed by a great live recording of the B-52's playing "Private Idaho."

Sebadoh, "Brand New Love"
The song I was looking for was "Magnet's Coil," but as far as I can tell, no video was ever made for it, and there are no live recordings of it on YouTube. Just the same, I love this song, in particular the manic-depressive turns and how the hope in the chorus is undercut by the burning loneliness of the verses.

Pulp, "Disco 2000"
Jarvis Cocker likes to play tricks. The one he plays over and over again in Pulp songs works like this: he gets you to sympathize the character in the song, and then he takes the song somewhere that makes your skin crawl.

Passion Pit, "Sleepyhead"
When I listen to this song, I feel like I'm being drowned in liquid sugar. Beyond that, I can't describe why I like it, and really I don't want to. There are several live videos worth checking out on YouTube because they show the band with a real audience and you can see the energy in the room.

New Order, "Ceremony"
Still one of my all-time favorite songs.

Har, Har

It's kind of funny how every once in a while I get a notion that I'm going to start regularly updating this fucking thing.