I am in here.

“

If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.

What’s weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature’s current marginalization is the reader’s fault. The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.

—	David Foster Wallace

theghostofpoetryfuture:

“Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There’s a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol’ “The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we’re marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah.” You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it’s because it’s not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it’s speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.”

~ David Foster Wallace

Fun fact of the day: a winged, three-story tall, rocket-powered car made entirely of shock absorbers is a terrible idea for a car.

greatleapingocelots:

Ryan and Colin throughout the years.

“

Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

—	David Foster Wallace; The Pale King (via hope-robber)

“

The third non-aristotelian premise states a view of maps as self-reflexive. This reflects the notion that we can make maps of our maps; we can talk about our talking, ‘think’ about our ‘thinking’, react to our reactions. It also reflects the notion that our maps serve as pictures of our nervous systems as much as they serve as pictures of what we’re mapping. In other words, we map our nervous systems along with anything else, so whatever we say says something about ourselves as well as the topic we’re talking about.

Thus, we question the common sense question, “What does that word ‘mean’?” The uncommon sense of general semantics suggests that we use the more appropriate question, “What do you ‘mean’ when you use that word?” Because the word ‘mean’ may imply that ‘meaning’ exists apart from a ‘meaning’-maker, we put it in quotes.

These aspect of self-reflexiveness leads to multiplicity in our abstracting and evaluating. Words involve multiple ‘meanings’ and ‘meanings’ change according to context, differently for each of us. We can call words ‘meaningless’ until we know the context in which they are used; hence the importance of the “What do you ‘mean’?” question.

—	Susan Presby Kodish, Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics (2010), Ch. 11 - Self-Reflexive Mapping, P. 146-147 (via mymindtank)

Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library »

psyphi-noetics:

hope-robber:

“Humility—the acceptance that being human is good enough—is the embrace of ordinariness.”—underlined by David Foster Wallace in his copy of Ernest Kurtz’s The Spirituality of Imperfection.

This is making me sob and chain-smoke.

The palmistry master told me I had a John Bradshaw type of hand. Strange overlap…

Untitled: You Are A Kai Queen, Tumblr Edition »

noxes:

dazegoneby:

kaiqueen:

The last Queen, in fact. You are the Queen and Hivemind, the one remaining pregnant female of your species left in the entire universe. A great war against many species brought Our race down, and all that remains of Your home system is a spinning cooling sun-mass that is giving off more radiation…

Guys, a friendly reminder that I am starting a suggestion game on Tumblr. Anyone can make an input on what occurs in the game. You don’t have to be following, but it helps.

This is a parallel game to the one running on Bay12 Forums, located here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=126089

Oi, I know a few of you might find this entertaining; the more the merrier!

shikajika:

“Kids can’t learn about sexuality and gender because it’s too scary or confusing for them” yeah because YOU told them they there are ONLY straight men and straight women from the age of three and then used that limited scope an an excuse to carry on dodging the subject.

I found the seven times table scary and confusing but I still had to do about 20 exams about it

homevvrecker:

i feel like i annoy 99% of you i am sorry

adriofthedead:

ＴＨＥ　ＲＩＴＵＡＬ　ＩＳ　ＣＯＭＰＬＥＴＥ