LOST AND HOSED

Now whaaat? Some kind of anxiety or bone-deep consadfusion, scundfosion. What is the word for sad confusion? I know, what's wrong with those two? I'll bet some language like German or Urdu has a better phrase. Désespoir is not quite it. Franklin's beloved kitty, Hookah, died last week. Brenna and Nate have to say goodbye to kitty Missy today. I am worried about Miep. But there is more.

The tractor parade and what I saw in Callicoon continue to affect me. As I was discussing with S today, the wrinkles, pain, pleasure, and everything else, written into those faces were hard won. Their expressions felt hyper-real to me. No smoothed and botoxed beauty. No complacency. There was weltzschmerz.



Later that same evening with a tabby clawing my thigh ...
whenever I go away, Cooder is particularly happy to have me around again for the first day or two. She wants lots of cuddles and attention. Makes me think I should go away for a night or two every week.

K posits that sad + confusion = lost.

Continuing to dip into All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in A Secular Age. This is from a talk that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005.

"The cliché that Wallace attempts to revivify in the Kenyon speech is the old pedagogical cliché that a liberal arts education teaches you how to think.

"Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that [this] cliché . . . is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

A HUNGER TO CONNECT?

The sky was a pale lemonade yellow this morning. I had never seen anything like it. It was as if there was too much white mixed into the sky, or nearly an absence of color. When I opened my eyes again, a while later, it was the same intensity of hue, but blue, milky blue. And by the time I actually got up, the sky was grey and the rain was here.

As I was dashing out the door to head into an appointment in Manhattan this afternoon, I noticed that both my New Yorker and New York Magazine had arrived on a Tuesday. Something must be up. At any rate, I grabbed the New York as it is easier to read and I always like to check out The Approval Matrix.

I flipped to a review of David Foster Wallace's posthumously-released, The Pale King. I had no real plan to try to read Infinite Jest as I had failed to get through anything remotely like it (no Gravity's Rainbow, no The Recognitions, no Underworld). The review, written by Garth Risk Hallberg, caused me to at least consider putting The Pale King on the (quite long) to-read list.

Wallace seems to have been concerned with some subjects I natter about.

"As Wallace writes at one point, though, in what amounts to an ars poetica, “almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting..."


A comment not entirely unrelated to some of the Jane Hirschfield comments I quote early on in this blog. (11/17/10). 

Even wastoids, it seems, are hungry to connect.

I’d like to advance the idea that the true heart of Wallace’s enduring appeal is that we share that hunger ...

Much to my surprise, the half of a sleeping pill I took a little while ago has kicked in fully force, so I will have to end this one here.