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David Foster Wallace, dead at 46
Author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion. Roughly two hours ago, his wife found him at home, an apparent suicide by hanging. According to the NY Review of Books, his works had given us “a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok.”
“You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” –Infinite Jest
And, I think, his greatest contribution to the contemporary literary world was his palpable frustration and vehement rebuttals of our current writers’ (i.e. Dave Eggers, The Believer, David Sedaris, etc.) obsession with irony:
“[It] tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.’” –E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
let’s see how elegant this universe really is…
The collider is the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date. It rests 300 feet beneath the Swiss-French border and is 16.8 miles long.
The New York Times states CERN‘s aspirations thusly: “Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the mysterious invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.”
Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescopeof inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.
Check out these sites for more info:
CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
One last word (or warning?): Some theorists are worried that the scientists at CERN have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Over the past three years, they have filed many lawsuits against CERN – all of which have been dismissed.
My Neo-Nihilistic Tantrum*
What is the goal of all humanity? What are we working towards? What exactly do we think we’re doing? I’m not sure. We’re working towards peace, harmony? – what sorts of fancy things do we think we’re trying to do?
I mean, we’re (allegedly) going to wars so that we can establish more peaceful societies, so that people can learn. We want people to learn so that they can establish more knowledgeable societies, so that they can express themselves in the arts. And they want to do that…why? Arts and learning are what start all our wars. We have no purpose, no goal.
Everything – every answer we have just asks another question. And the second that we start to act upon one of those answers, we’re denying the possibility of asking more questions. Once we start to act on it, then we start formulating our own truth and getting ourselves, basically, stuck at a lesser answer than we could possibly reach. But what makes asking more questions better? Why continue doing that? What are expecting to attain? And where are we going with it?
It seems like greater knowledge just breeds more misery. Because the more knowledge you have, the more you realize how much you don’t know. So why are we doing it? What’s the point of it? We’re just working towards more war, more tension. The point of going to war is to make a peaceful society; a more peaceful society is made so we can think & be pensive & study the arts. And the arts just open you up to more questions. And all these unanswered questions – and all the answered ones, too – really just lead to more factions and more war. I say, let the world implode, let it fall apart. There’s no reason.
There can be no final Answer. Every answer brings another question. Everything can be deconstructed further and further. This is true of the physical world, the mental world, the spiritual, emotional – whatever we wanna call it – it’s true of the entire world. So when we decide to start acting upon one of those answers that we know is not the final answer (but by acting upon it we are choosing to accept it as the final answer), we’re not being honest with ourselves. We’re not being true to what we know is real.
*note: I dictated this diatribe to my phone during a nap. This is the complete transcription of my somewhat-muddled naptime musings.
Efficiency & Gracefulness
I’ve always been profoundly fascinated by every-thing’s (especially people’s) potential for greater efficiency. I’ve also been very intrigued by the gracefulness of dancing (more ballroom dancing than…um, club “dancing”). I guess I never realized the intimate connection between the two, until recently. Dance seems to represent our body’s capability for Absolute Efficiency – there are no wasted movements. No wasted time; every step, gesture, and beat has a specific purpose.
The herky-jerkiness of our everyday motor-skills seems irreparably inefficient:
<-this, instead of…this->
oh, the time we could save!
I remember, as a child, reading “Cheaper By the Dozen” and becoming completely absorbed by the father’s desire for maximum efficiency. One day, he decided that all 12 of his children should receive tonsillectomies, so that he could videotape the procedures. He planned on examining the videos and then reporting this findings to the doctors – in order to help them utilize their potential efficiency. Unfortunately, the video technician forgot to put videotapes in the cameras, so the experiment was wasted. Regardless, I loved the father for that. He was (& is) a hero of mine.
So, I’ve kinda rambled off-point…
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