Preverse Pleasure

A strange look inside David Foster Wallace's private reading collection. Beware, this is a rather intimate look inside the man's mind and almost feels to me like an invasion of privacy.

So much is written about DFW, I find the discussion about him as a writer more interesting than his writing. Perhaps I'm just lazy, but I've always felt like he over-wrote, tried to cram everything in and it just gets tiresome. He has great moments of insight, but you need to read 5 pages to get those single paragraphs. Nevertheless, one of those moments appears as part of his unfinished novel, soon to be published (this must be why stuff about him is all over the blogosphere).

We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries–we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?

Very well put. Who makes the pie indeed - that's the question I've been pondering for years now.

And here is another smart point by the writer of the article:

I am making an informed guess that these things that we dwell on with our therapists—they may or may not be false, but almost necessarily, they're only the tiniest part of a picture that is so very much larger. To dwell on the terrible things is to miss the point. To fail ourselves, in a sense.

I am fairly public about my beef with therapized culture. This idea of incessantly talking about our preoccupations and breaking ourselves down into "root causes," etc, etc. is itself missing the point. I like how the writer puts it above. Now...this should not be confused with therapy to deal with trauma or acute problems with depression or whatever. I actually think therapy in these cases strikes me as a relatively cheap, risk-free, and useful. But I live in Los Angeles and work in the entertainment industry. Therapists in this culture - and they way they are presented - are more like friends all too happy to take loads of money and listen to problems that really aren't problems. But hey, everyone needs to make a living, right? I just don't see these people as adding to the pie-making process.