** Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking? **
** What exactly does “faith” mean? As in “religious faith,” “faith in God,” etc. Isn’t it basically crazy to believe in something that there’s no proof of? Is there really any difference between what we call faith and some primitive tribe’s sacrificing virgins to volcanoes because they believe it’ll produce good weather? How can somebody have faith before he’s presented with sufficient reason to have faith? Or is somehow needing to have faith a sufficient reason for having faith? But then what kind of need are ... (查看原文)
As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as "economically disadvantaged" rather than "poor." Where I he, in fact, I'd probably find the Politically Correct English (PCE) term insulting -- not just because it's patronizing (which it is ) but because it's hypocritical and self-serving in a way that oft-patronized people tend to have really good subliminal antennae for. The basic hypocrisy about usages like "economically disadvantaged" and "differently abled" is that PCE advocates believe that beneficiaries of these terms' compassion and generosity to be poor people and people in wheelchairs, which again omits something that everyone knows but nobody ex... (查看原文)
Helping [most college writers] eliminate the [most persistent and damaging error] involves drumming into student writers two big injunctions: (1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind -- anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue -- your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you're trying to argue for.
Because (1) and (2) seem so simple and obvious, it may surprise you to know that they are actually incredibly hard to get students to understand in such a way that the principles inform their writing. The reason for the difficulty is that, in the abstract (1) and (2) are intellectual, whereas in practice they are more th... (查看原文)
He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of the law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes—and you never know when, is the thing—sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call … humanness.” It turned out the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors—so... (查看原文)
It’s very easy to gloss over the PoW thing, partly because we’ve heard so much about it and partly because it’s so off the charts dramatic, like something in a movie instead of a man’s life. But it’s worth considering for a moment, because it’s what makes McCain’s “causes greater than self-interest” line easier to hear.
You probably already know what happened. In October of ‘67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and flying his 23rd Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both of McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies over Hanoi.
Try to imagine how much this would ... (查看原文)
But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone, have come to a point on the Trail where you've started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain's refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs' cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where on... (查看原文)
The four extant volumes of Dostoevsky make it clear that the crucial, catalyzing event in FMD's life, ideologically speaking, was the mock execution of 22 December 1849 during which this weak, neurotic, self-involved young writer believed that he was about to die. What resulted inside Dostoevsky was a type of conversion experience, though it gets complicated [...]. What seems most important is that Dostoevsky's near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer -- a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory -- into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values ... more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved.
The big thing that makes D... (查看原文)
...I will confess that I even borrowed a friend's battered leather jacket to wear on the Trail so I'd better project the kind of edgy, vaguely dangerous vibe I imagined an RS (Rolling Stone) reporter ought to give off.. (查看原文)
As you might already have gathered, Rolling Stone dislikes the 12M intensely, for all the above reasons, plus the fact that they're tight as the bark on a tree when it comes to sharing even very basic general-knowledge political information that might help somebody write a slightly better article, plus the issue of two separate occasions at late-night hotel check-ins when one or more of the Twelve Monkeys just out nowhere turned and handed Rolling Stone their suitcase to carry, as if Rolling Stone were a bellboy or gofer instead of a hardworking journalist just them even if he didn't have a portable Paul Stuart steamer for his slacks. (查看原文)
It's not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us." Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression - for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. (查看原文)
That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality's almost impossible to describe or account for straight out - it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility - and critics' attempts to reduce it to questions of "style" are almost universally lame. (查看原文)
and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — g... (查看原文)
Hecuba’s detective’s explanation is intriguing, at least to yr. corresps., because it helps explain part of the deep appeal of hard-core films, films that are supposed to be “naked” and “explicit” but in truth are some of the most aloof, unrevealing footage for sale anywhere. Much of the cold, dead, mechanical * quality of adult films is attributable, really, to the performers’ faces. These are faces that usually appear bored or blank or workmanlike but are in fact simply hidden, the self locked away someplace far behind the eyes. Surely this hiddenness is the way a human being who’s giving away the very most private parts of himself preserves some sense of dignity and autonomy — he denies us true expression. (You can see this very particular bored, hard, dead look in strippers, prostitute... (查看原文)
But it’s also true that occasionally, in a hard-core scene, the hidden self appears. It’s sort of the opposite of acting. You can see the porn performer’s whole face change as self-consciousness (in most females) or crazed blankness (in most males) yields to some genuinely felt erotic joy in what’s going on; the sighs and moans change from automatic to expressive. It happens only once in a while, but the detective is right: The effect on the viewer is electric. And the adult performers who can do this a lot — allow themselves to feel and enjoy what’s taking place, cameras or no — become huge, legendary stars. The 1980s’ Ginger Lynn and Keisha could do this, and now sometimes Jill Kelly and Rocco Siffredi can. Jenna Jameson and T.T. Boy cannot. They remain just bodies. (查看原文)
作者: David Foster Wallace 副标题: And Other Essays isbn: 0316013323 书名: Consider the Lobster 页数: 343 定价: USD 16.00 出版社: Back Bay Books 出版年: 2007-7-2 装帧: Paperback
