On Sunday I found out that David Foster Wallace had killed himself while I was eating stuffed peppers and watching professional football at Jon’s house. I was upset by this, but I tried not to let it bother me. I was in a social setting after all, and the aforementioned peppers were really good, and it was easy to focus on the brighter side of things, though I will say I think I was noticeably grumpier for the rest of the afternoon. To say someone's death made me "grumpy" sounds horrible, but there it is. It's not like I knew the man.
A couple of hours and several beers later we were watching the post-game show on CBS, and I was re-expressing my oft-expressed wish that the cast of CBS’s NFL Sunday would get sucked into a black hole. They were all slapping each other on their backs, and smirking, and pretending to have just the best time anyone ever had, and I hated them for it. I always hate them for it. And I expressed that angry wish, and I guess I’d been expressing a lot of angry wishes that afternoon, because Jon said something along the lines of “I wish you wouldn’t get so angry all the time about what is really nothing at all.” And I didn’t know what to say, because I knew that on a level he was right, but I also knew that on another level I was right. I just didn’t know how to express why it is that the CBS NFL Sunday cast makes me so angry. So I conceded the point and tried to cheer up.
Today I was looking at Slate.com, as is my wont, and reading their obituary of Mr. Wallace, and I came across a quote from the first book I ever read by him, on an airplane to LA in 2003, and it perfectly expressed what I should have said about Boomer Esiason, Shannon Sharpe, et al. I went home and looked it up-- in the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again,”-- a passage about what Mr. Wallace referred to as “the Professional Smile,” which I think most football fans would have to agree runs rampant most Sunday afternoons on CBS and Fox.
“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.”
I wish I could write something that good.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
5 comments:
hmmm...well, you know, i hadn't really connected the dots there, so now i feel a little bit like an ass for scolding you on sunday. i can imagine if someone casually told me that robert pollard was dead at a social gathering: it'd ruin the rest of my day, for sure. so, i'm sorry about that. i will still say, though, that you have much more control over what you choose to let upset you than you either realize or care to admit. c'mon, man- life's too short, & already filled with so much genuine swill, unpleasantness & futile gesturing, why let some ex-pro football player's etched & (we assume) false smile arrest your day at all? there was beer & food, you were beating me in fantasy football, there was even a baby hanging around & drooling on the furniture...i just worry about you making yourself more unhappy than you need to be, that's all, & now i'll shut my yapper.
Man you don't need to apologize for anything. I do get way too angry way too often, frequently when beer is involved.
And my appreciation of David Foster Wallace isn't really in the same league as your desperate man-love for Robert Pollard. If something happened to him we would have all had to leave, and I doubt if I'd see you again for at least a week.
Maybe I should be the one apologizing. I mean, I was the one who disrupted a fine afternoon of football-watching and gorging to say, "hey, David Foster Wallace died this weekend" out of the blue. Talk about Debbie Downer. Next time, I'm going to not mention any current events unless it's about something like a baby duck befriending a walrus or something lighthearted like that.
andy, you got me into david foster wallace. he was the shit. and that quote is amazing. i often bitch about commercial art. somebody asked me how i was doing today because they had heard he died. which is interesting.
Oh come now Frank, how could you know I liked that particular writer? And how do you know I didn't have a pet duckling get eaten by a walrus? No topic is safe, so you might as well charge ahead and hope for the best.
Post a Comment