Burning draft cards isn’t going to end any war. It’s not even going to save any lives. If someone can be more honest with himself by burning his draft card, then that’s great; but if he’s just going to feel more important because he does it, then that’s a drag.
I don’t know if Bob Dylan and Tom Waits are as authentic as I think they are. Perhaps they’re not. Sometimes you start thinking that maybe Britney Spears or someone like that who’s doing exactly what they want to do in the way that they best know how is more authentic than any of those people you could mention.
Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren’t diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.
There’s nothing wrong with being interested in stuff thats interesting and attractive [i.e., television and mass culture]. What most of us have in common are our very most base, uninteresting, selfish, stupid interests: physical attractiveness, sex, a certain kind of easy humor, vivid spectacle — I mean that stuff that I will immediately look at and so will you. The things that make us interesting and unique and human — those interests tend to be wildly different between different people.
[W]hile you are free to stare at a blank ream of paper for 1000 hours, your publisher will only laugh [if you do]. Jeff Koons can have his interns paint his ideas, John Cage can sit in front of a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, but writers lack the auspices of conceptual absence. Even conceptual writing requires that slow painful aggregate of words, one at a time, making something from nothing. Every word is work. There is no short cut.
I have been blessed with many curses in my life, not the least of which was being born half Lebanese and half American. Throughout my life, these contradictory parts battled endlessly, clashed, never coming to a satisfactory conclusion. I shuffled ad nauseam between the need to assert my individuality and the need to belong to my clan, being terrified of loneliness and terrorized of losing myself in relationships. I was the black sheep of my family, yet an essential part of it.
What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were, and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.
And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.2 It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.
2 There are probably whole Johns Hopkins U. Press books to be written on the particular lallating function humor serves at this point in the U.S. psyche. Nonetheless, a crude but concise way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, “adolescent.” Since adolescence is pretty much acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development — the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations 2a — it’s not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is to “escape.” Jokes are a kind of art, and since most of us Americans come to art essentially to forget ourselves — to pretend for a while that we’re not mice and all walls are parallel and the cat can be outrun — it’s no accident that we’re going to see “A Little Fable” as not all that funny, in fact as maybe being the exact sort of downer-type death-and-taxes thing for which “real” humor serves as a respite.
2a You think it’s a coincidence that it’s in college that most Americans do their most serious falling-down drinking and drugging and reckless driving and rampant fucking and mindless general Dionysian-type reveling? It’s not. They’re adolescents, and they’re terrified, and they’re dealing with their terror in a distinctively American way. Those naked boys hanging upside down out of their frat-house’s windows on Friday night are simply trying to get a few hours’ escape from the stuff that any decent college has forced them to think about all week.
—from an article in Harper’s by David Foster Wallace entitled “Laughing with Kafka”
[T]here went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood.
How many Christians were willing to speak and contradict Falwell’s statement that feminists, abortionists, homosexuals and the ACLU were responsible for attacks? Quite a few, but were they heard? As a society, we like the drama of extremism. Most Christians know that Falwell does not represent them or their views, but whether CNN or The Times want to present a Christian view, he’s the only one that gets called. Arabs come in many shapes and sizes, many beliefs, many religions, yet everyone assumes that extremists are representative. That man who has to work a double shift to support his family, the woman who worries whether her career will take off, the father who wants his son to get good school grades, to get into university, never make the news. They do not make a good story. Extremists do.
