DFW

Happy summer everyone!

It’s good to be back.

I spent the past 2 weeks traveling with my family and in-laws. 9 adults and 8 kids from ages 10 to 16. We spent the first week in Florence and Rome and the second week on a cruise that stopped in Santorini, Mykonos, Ephesus (an ancient Roman city in Turkey), and Naples. 20k steps a day was still no match for the 5 lbs I was destined to gain.

I like being in new places. I don’t especially love getting to them. But if we could teleport I wouldn’t be forced to sit and read. I’ll be sharing links and thoughts to the stuff that stood out. As books go, I read Dan Abram’s Sharp Money and re-read Brave New World (twitter thread).

The best single thing I read was also a re-read I chose since I was on a Royal Caribbean ship — David Foster Wallace’s long-form article originally published in the January 1996 Harper’s titled Shipping Out (pdf)

DFW’s x-ray mind is on full display here. His penetrating power of observation would leave you frustrated in your own blindness if he didn’t distract you by relaying the barrage of comedy that reality generously furnishes but to which we are dulled if it’s not accompanied by a laugh-track. His writing resensitizes your humor follicles.

Noticing, of course, cuts in all directions. And one particular passage shows where we are today by relief. What we accept as normal wasn’t always, but since this article is from 1996, the acceleration of a certain enshitification is more apparent. Wallace is describing the copy in the cruise brochure that the celebrated author Frank Conroy was paid to write:

Conroy’s essay is graceful and lapidary and persuasive. I submit that it is also completely insidious and bad. Its badness does not consist so much in its constant and mesmeric references to fantasy and alternate realities and the palliative powers of professional pampering—

I’d come on board after two months of intense and moderately stressful work, but now it seemed a distant memory. I realized it had been a week since I’d washed a dish, cooked a meal, gone to the market, done an errand or, in fact, anything at all requiring a minimum of thought and effort. My toughest decisions had been whether to catch the afternoon showing of Mrs. Doubtfire or play bingo.

—nor in the surfeit of happy adjectives and the tone of breathless approval throughout—

Bright sun, warm still air, the brilliant blue-green of the Caribbean under the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky… For all of us, our fantasies and expectations were to be exceeded, to say the least. When it comes to service, Celebrity Cruises seems ready and able to deal with anything.

Rather, part of the essay’s real badness can be found in the way it reveals once again the Megaline’s sale-to-sail agenda of micro-managing not only one’s perceptions of a 7NC but even one’s own interpretation and articulation of those perceptions. In other words, Celebrity’s P.R. people go and get a respected writer to pre-articulate and endorse the 7NC experience, and to do it with a professional eloquence and authority that few lay perceivers and articulators could hope to equal. But the really major badness is that the project and placement of “My Celebrity Cruise” are sneaky and duplicitous and well beyond whatever eroded pales still exist in terms of literary ethics. Conroy’s “essay” appears as an inset, on skinnier pages and with different margins than the rest of the brochure, creating the impression that it has been excerpted from some large and objective thing Conroy wrote. But it hasn’t been. The truth is that Celebrity Cruises paid Frank Conroy up-front to write it, even though nowhere in or around the essay is there anything acknowledging that it’s a paid endorsement, not even one of the little “So-and-so has been compensated for his services” that flashes at your TV screen’s lower right during celebrity-hosted infomercials. Instead, inset on this weird essaymercial’s first page is a photo of Conroy brooding in a black turtleneck, and below the photo an author bio with a list of Conroy’s books that includes the 1967 classic Stop-Time, which is arguably the best literary memoir of the twentieth century and is one of the books that first made poor old humble yours truly want to try to learn how to be a writer.

In the case of Frank Conroy’s “essay,” Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.¹⁵

But for this particular 7NC consumer, Conroy’s ad-as-essay ends up having a truthfulness about it that I’m sure is unintentional. As my week on the Nadir wears on, I begin to see this essaymercial as a perfectly ironic reflection of the mass-market cruise experience itself. The essay is polished, powerful, impressive, clearly the best that money can buy. It presents itself as being for my benefit. It manages my experiences and my interpretation of those experiences and takes care of them for me in advance. It seems to care about me. But it doesn’t, not really, because first and foremost it wants something from me. So does the cruise itself. The pretty setting and glittering ship and sedulous staff and solicitous fun-managers all want something from me, and it’s not just the price of my ticket—they’ve already got that. Just what it is that they want is hard to pin down, but by early in the week I can feel it building: it circles the ship like a fin.

Here’s that footnote 15:

This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a pandemic in the service industry, and no place in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I was on the Nadir—maître d’s, chief stewards, hotel managers’ minions, cruise director… their P.S.’s all come on like switches at my approach. But also back on land: at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, and on and on. You know this smile—the one that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which normal-looking people open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?

Note to the next person who goes to heaven: please don’t tell Wallace that The Professional Smile is most innocent persuasion tactic in AD 2026. Let him RIP.

I urged Yinh to read the essay. She didn’t know about DFW, but after the essay she was texting some friends about it. One of her girlfriends admitted she regularly revisits this interview:

One of the comments said it best. It’s a palette cleanser.

It’s also very fun if you enjoy watching others geek out about art they love (in this case it’s DFW discussing David Lynch). It’s this marvelous thing where people cannot hold back their love for another’s work but can also articulate why. It takes me back to early teen years. Hearing an older cousin present their case for how every track on Dirt is about a different way to die. Down in a Hole is about death by…sex? It’s not important now. But then, you’re young and impressionable. You remember how fun it is to be impressionable. When the risk-reward was different. When being misled was a hazard of optimism instead of a salesman’s bullseye.

Anyway, I hadn’t really watched DFW before, so I was unaware of his mannerisms. You can tell that Jason Segal would have studied this interview to portray DFW in End of the Tour.

Years ago, I was walking out of a Trader Joe’s parking lot. The moment led to this tweet:

I never really thought about why I thought of that moment the way I did. After I recently listened to DFW’s speech below I think I know why. It’s a choice that protects my attention. I didn’t realize that until DFW pointed it. You’ll understand from the excerpt below.

Emphasis mine:

…Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

📺The full “This is water” commencement address

In other news…

I relented. I scooped a copy of Infinite Jest while being a dutiful Prime Day consumer. I predict I won’t finish it until summer vacation 2029.