Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays  

(Source: goodreads.com)

A little evening reading: The Awl’s 46 Things to Read on David Foster Wallace’s Birthday.

Today would have been David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday, and if you’d like to mark it, here are some things that might interest you to read (or watch) and revisit. The list isn’t intended to be comprehensive; for that there’s the Howling Fantods, not to mention this, this and that. This is more like an old trunk, some favorite things that got packed away and today’s maybe a nice day to take them out and rummage around a little: Remember when Frank Bruni peeped inside DFW’s medicine cabinet? etc.

(book cover via unfortunatehabits)

From a 2003 interview with a German public television station. Links to the entire 84-minute interview can be found towards the bottom of this blog post.

Definitive Jest

A word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

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-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who’s dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish 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 on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

David Foster Wallace on Life and Work

The Uncollected Essays

tetw:

The ultimate David Foster Wallace resource. A complete list of his uncollected fiction and essays (links to everything that’s online).

The site also hosts a full list of published essays from his books (also has links where available).

But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The workers’ obligations are to the executives, and the executives’ obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO’s obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board’s obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders-slash-cusomters they’ve been [expletive] over in their own name. It’s like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

David Foster Wallace

Five Things Worth Knowing

tetw:

From The Typewriter’s Closet

To Have is To Owe by David Graeber
Does anyone know what the green stuff really is? David Graeber cuts through centuries of monetary mythology to give an unusually credible answer.

Bystanders to Genocide by Samantha Power
Never again? Maybe not. This standout piece of in-depth reporting asks why the US goverment refused to intervene during the Rwandan genocide despite knowing about the unfolding atrocities.

Tense Present by David Foster Wallace
A review of an English Usage Dictionary that tackles language, relativism and hegemony and leaves most philosophers for dust. Electric prose and not a metaphysical dead-end in sight.

The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool by Gary Wolf
Believe the hype… Marshall McLuhan is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the information age. Here a brief but insightful introduction to his work.

What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes
Is fat our enemy, or is it a lie dreamt up by the processed food industry so they can sell us branded carbs? Gary Taubes takes a look at the evidence.

First page of my book. what do you think?

In which someone puts the first page of David Foster Wallace’s Pale King on Yahoo! Answers.

The Uncollected Essays

tetw:

By David Foster Wallace

The ultimate David Foster Wallace resource. A complete list of his uncollected fiction and essays (links to everything that’s online).

The site also hosts a full list of published essays from his books (also has links where available).

thisrecording:

Inside the archives of David Roster Wallace

Inside David Foster Wallace's Self-Help Library

All his life Wallace was praised and admired for being exceptional, but in order to accept treatment he had to first accept and then embrace the idea that he was a regular person who could be helped by “ordinary” means. Then he went to rehab and learned a ton of valuable things from “ordinary” people whom he would never have imagined would be in a position to teach him anything. Furthermore, these people obviously had inner lives and problems and ideas that were every bit as complex and vital as those of the most “sophisticated” and “exceptional.

Ticket to the Fair

tetw:

by David Foster Wallace

(via Wadcity)

Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, trades unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows.

(Link a PDF)