The Sockdolager

Feb 28

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. The treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.” David Foster Wallace, in David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, pp. 292-293

From "Becoming Yourself," pp. 216 - 217

Lipsky: You acting like someone who's about thirty-one or thirty-two, who's playing in the kid's softball game, and is trying to hold back his power hitting, to check his swing at the plate, more or less.
Wallace: You mean in the book?
Lipsky: No, I mean in your social persona. And you're someone who's really trying—
Wallace: You're a tough room.
Lipsky: You make a point of holding back—there's a point, there's something obvious about you somehow in a gentle way holding back what you're aware of as your intelligence to be with people who are somehow younger or...
Wallace: Boy, that would make me a real asshole, wouldn't it?
Lipsky: No it wouldn't: It would make you a reformed person.
Wallace: The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

“I have this—here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do.” David Foster Wallace, in David Lipsky’s book-length interview with him, entitled Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

“An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, 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.” David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, p. 289

Feb 21

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nut-grass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butchergrass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four or more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. 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, p. 3.

“It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, p. 438

Wallace

Today would’ve been David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday. Expect The Sockdolager’s content to be adjusted appropriately for the rest of the day.

Aug 26

“Nor could it always have been dusk at 5:42, though that is what I recall its being, and the inrush of outside air he brought with him as cold, and scented with burnt leaves and the sad way the street smelled at twilight, when all of the houses became the same color and all of their porch lights came on like bulwarks against something without name.” David Foster Wallace, “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” Oblivion

The Sockdolager

A “sockdolager” is a final, decisive blow.

From "Becoming Yourself," pp. 216 - 217

Wallace