A video for the new issue of GUSTAF, which is out now.
Students will practice using emoticons to create powerful dialogue and to establish dramatic irony. They’ll learn to gracefully integrate complex expressions into their IM writing, substituting the trite LOL (“laughing out loud”) and “meh” (the written equivalent of a shrug) with more-advanced expressions like BOSMKL (“bending over smacking my knee laughing”) and HFACTDEWARIUCSMNUWKIASLAMB (“holy flipping animal crackers, that doesn’t even warrant a response; if you could see me now, you would know that I am shrugging like a mofu, biotch”). Students will be encouraged to nurture their craft, free of the restraints of punctuation, syntax, and grammar.
[This is a] U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears.
—from page 83 of ‘Infinite Jest’
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.
—‘A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life’ by David Foster Wallace
When I watched baseball as a child, I always felt strange when I saw the Seattle Mariners on TV. I wasn’t sure then why I felt strange, but now I think I know. I think it’s just that the blue uniforms they used to have made it seem like they were ‘merely screwing around.’ The blue uniforms, in combination with being called the Mariners, made me feel strongly that they actually wanted to be playing Marco Polo in a swimming pool but were forced into professional baseball and so wore blue uniforms to ‘continue the dream’ of ‘screwing around’ in a swimming pool for five hours every day with no responsibilities. Ken Griffey Jr. was a Mariner then and he seemed to be the perfect example of what I just typed about. He seemed to always be trying really hard at being good at baseball which to me only conveyed that he was distracting himself really hard from thoughts about wishing he lived in a special world where each day you woke up, played games in a swimming pool with other adults, ate dinner, played more games in a swimming pool, and went to sleep.
—from the hilarious ‘What I Can Tell You About Seattle Based on the People I’ve Met Who Are From There’ by Tao Lin
I think ‘influenced’ means I read them and liked how I felt and then wanted to make new things that would make me feel how they made me feel. Mostly I write what I want to read. That is why I am mostly impervious to criticism. I am the only person who knows what I want to read. If someone interrogated me using intense psychological methods and discovered exactly what I want to read I would still be mostly impervious to their criticism, because ‘what I want to read’ is always changing.
—Tao Lin introducing his book of short stories entitled ‘Bed’
At the halfway house, Wallace got to know people with radically different backgrounds. ‘Mr. Howard,’ he wrote his editor, ‘everyone here has a tattoo or a criminal record or both!’ The halfway house also showed him that less intellectual people were often better at dealing with life. They found catchphrases such as ‘One day at a time’ genuinely helpful. To his surprise, so did he. As he later told Salon, ‘The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting—which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff—can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, [post-modern] stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important.’
—from ‘The Unfinished’, an article in The New Yorker about David Foster Wallace
JLG IN USA
Included in the March/April issue of The Believer is a DVD containing JLG in USA, an anthology of five short-film/video works documenting Jean-Luc Godard’s travels in America. These short films are virtually unknown and have rarely (if ever) been publicly exhibited.
Sitting alone in a room for hours while essentially talking in your head about people you made up earlier and then writing it down for no one you know does have many aspects which are not inherently fulfilling. Then again, making something out of nothing, overturning the laws of time and space, building something for strangers just because you think they might like it and hours of absence from self – that’s fantastic.
—‘Writing for a living: a joy or a chore?’ in The Guardian
