The badness of the music and of the TV fuse into an epic horror in the music videos. The standard structure is an angsty love story (guy picks up pen for girl; smiles at girl; contorts face to show he really wishes he talked to girl; randomly sees girl at restaurant; smiles at girl; contorts face...ad nauseum) intercut with the singer wearing sunglasses plucking away at an acoustic guitar (regardless of what instruments happen to be playing in the actual song) and crooning like man, he really gets what it's like to want to talk to that girl whose pen you picked up but you're too much of a pussy to do it. They play videos like this for hours. They jar with my experience of actual courtship in Thailand, which as far as I can tell takes place mostly in bars and discos and is terrifying but pretty straightforward.
I get some sports channels, but they are hamstrung by showing cricket and rugby a significant amount of the time. Maybe this sounds like cultural bigotry. Let me make two points to counteract that assumption. 1. I really like watching soccer. 2. Have you ever tried to watch a game of cricket? They can go for days.
But I was going to talk about reading. I just finished David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which I can't believe I haven't read until now. Astute readers may have noticed me trying to copy Wallace's prose style in my last couple posts. The title resonated with me since I remember saying to my freshman RA (at this time I had never heard of Wallace's book), "Sometimes you have to do something just so you'll never have to do it again."
This is how I feel about pretty much all social engagements. One thing that has often prevented me from enjoying reading is a feeling that I ought to be out doing something. At the age of 23 I will now deliberately go to a party I know I won't enjoy so that after I come home I can read comfortably, knowing that I already tried the alternative. This is the kind of thing that Wallace totally gets and is really good at writing about.
By diagnosing fiction writers as oglers and shut-ins, Wallace even rekindled my hope of one day writing fiction.
"The persons [TV actors] we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins study, feel for, feel through most intently are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand people's gazes. And we, trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily on the subway."My one moment of disappointment with the book came when Wallace recounts losing to a nine-year-old girl at chess. Although the incident contains some classically funny DFW moments ("Deirdre pulls up a chair and says she usually likes to be black and informs me that in lots of cultures black isn't thanatotic or morbid but is the spiritual equivalent of what white is in the U.S. and that in these cultures it's white that's morbid. I tell her I already know all that.") overall it has the showoff-y fascination with technical terms of someone who knows just enough to make an ass of himself. For example: "My first inkling of trouble is on the fourth move, when I fianchetto and Deirdre knows what I'm doing is fianchettoing and uses the term correctly." Fianchetto is a legitimate chess term and it appears that his opponent, Deirdre, is the one who actually says it out loud. What's off-putting is the need to use it twice in one sentence, and his sense that her speaking the term means "trouble." I think someone saying "fianchetto" out loud indicates the opposite. It would be a little like a one-on-one basketball game in which one player attempts a hook shot and the other player says, "Aha! I see you're going for a hook shot." Neither of these guys are Kobe, if you see what I'm saying.
And again: "The Nadir's [the cruise ship] Library's got cheapo Parker Brothers chess sets with hollow plastic pieces, which any good chess player has got to like. [footnote:] Heavy expensive art-carved sets are for dorks." It's true that good chess players hate fancy weird-looking sets, which mess with your carefully developed board sight. It's easier to play in your head than with a set like that. But we hate the cheapo plastic sets almost as much, because the pieces are always falling over, especially in speed chess. Good players tend to use either the practical tournament sets, which include roll-up vinyl boards and plastic pieces with some heft to them, or, if one is a available, a nice wooden board with the classic Staunton piece design.
Is it just bitchy to nitpick Wallace's chess understanding like this? Overall, it's one of my favortie books of all time. I'm justifying it to myself by reasoning that this is kind of a strategy game blog, so it makes sense to focus on that part of the book. The thing is, when an author falls down in your area of expertise, it can make you question what he really knows about everything else.
My dad, an economist, makes this claim about The Economist (which in my experience just about every political science major is prepared to die for). He says the few times the magazine has written on his area of his expertise it has been absolute nonsense, which makes him suspect that the whole thing is just a lot more nonsense disguised beneath a snooty prose style. Can anyone verify/disprove this? Has The Economist ever covered something about which you are extremely knowedglable? How did it do?
3 comments:
since DFW is dead, it falls on me to defend him. DFW looks like an ass intentionally, and using fianchetto twice in one sentence is a part of that intentional effort to portray the mindset of a non-expert. while the hook shot analogy was funny, the difference is that familiarity with the terminology of basketball has a low correlation with actual skill because a)almost everybody knows what a hook shot is and b)you can learn what a hook shot is without ever playing basketball. if someone knows what a fianchetto is, they've read about chess or had chess lessons, either of which directly leads to skill at chess (at least beyond the skill level of one who hasn't had any training). even if your contention is that knowing the word doesn't really suggest skill, the relevant thing is that to a non-expert it would suggest skill for the reasons above. DFW's repeated use of the word evokes his feeling of futilely trying to convince himself that its usage means nothing. this 9 year old used the word, but anyone can use the word, it's just a regular word, i can use the word too, i have nothing to worry about. but of course to DFW and most people other than you, it's not really a regular word. seeing it used so often brings its irregularity (and DFW's inferiority logically implied by its irregularity) into focus. a real basketball analogy would be if you were playing a team game and the opposing point guard started holding up fingers and calling plays. then on your possession you hold up fingers and call plays as well (i.e. repeat the word fianchetto), only it's meaningless when you do it. (granted, this analogy has nothing to do with terminology and it's your opponent actually doing something instead of remarking on what you're doing, but i couldn't think of a sports analogy that would avoid those pitfalls because of the lack of correlation between skill and terminology familiarity in sports. i think it still maps to the meaning of DFW's story pretty well though.)
i take back a lot of what i said. all i want to keep is that chess terminology familiarity is directly linked to skill up to a point.
you were right about klosterman, he sorta sucks. i read farinheight 451 for the first time yesterday. That was pretty worthwile.
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