almost fallen by the wayside

 

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No doubt there should be some kind of "post op for the workshop." If I was more prolific there would surely be something of consequence to say. Since that's not the case, and not much has transpired photographically, perhaps it's time to write about other media.

Without meaning to pile on the bandwagon, I've still got to comment on some recent reading. It's been both non-fiction and fiction, by the same writer: David Foster Wallace. The man is scary he's so good. Two weeks ago I was reading Consider the Lobster, a collection of pieces that originally appeared in periodicals such as Atlantic, Gourmet, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and others. Despite his tendency to run-on and lose the reader in the convolutions of his asides & footnotes within footnotes, he has a remarkably democratic outlook that never fails to illuminate. Whether he's writing about Porn star awards, dictionary wars, Rabid Right Wing talk show hosts, the McCain2000 campaign trail, or lobsters, his sympathetic outlook inevitably expresses some universal thought, but in a much more eloquent and clearly defined manner than anyone else is able to put it.

Now I'm into a more recent collection of D.F. Wallace fiction in the book Oblivion. His language tends towards jargonese, but only that used by the characters he's writing about. The opening piece "Mister Squishy" is a fascinating and damning deconstruction of advertising and the use of focus groups and statistics to "give consumers what they want." In the midst of his instructions to the latest focus group giving feedback on some snack cakes called Felonies, the facilitator manages to range through a vast internal commentary that might be best expressed thus:

...no no all that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud... what was going on or what it meant or what the simple truth was. That it made no difference. None of it...

In the end, Wallace's revelations are ones we've considered ourselves - albeit in abbreviated form - whereas his mind and imagination fully details them for our edification. He's a master at telling us what we already think for ourselves.