And I still don't know what to do with this thing. Hmm...let's try this:
David Foster Wallace's opening essay (via Bookslut) is a sadly funny essay, a little bewildering to read at times. It seems to be a person who is confronted by Total Noise on a daily basis and is slowly resigned over how to deal with it. In many ways, I sympathize with Wallace. Here is someone who is almost twice as old as me and has spent 1/4 of his life with the Internet. I am almost a quarter century old and have spent almost half my life with the Internet (the first time our family connected was 1996/1997 with AOL before it became a megalith and then a slumbering giant). The amount of information available now is just unprecedented. Yet I wonder how much older stores of information is lost or shed from the physical world while new, virtual information comes into existence.
How do we cope with these worlds? How should we cope with these worlds? If we were to describe our current worlds to someone in the past, would it be any different than a shaman or elder describing their people's own cosmology to a curious tribe member? Taking religion, the spiritual, and the metaphysical out of the mix and dealing primarily with the secular, physical, scientific, technological, virtual matrices (worldspheres?) that we find ourselves enmeshed in, would the stories and descriptions we provide to others be any different?
I guess such questions are what draw me to a lot of writing that attempts to grapple with how to live in our strange, distressing, often beautiful world. Such questions have haunted me since I started having a conscious recollection of experiences (about 3 or 4 years old) and will continue to haunt me until I am finished with this life.
Currents:
The Habermas Reader edited by William Outhwaite
Nutritional science texts
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel, Faith D'Aluisio
Graduation - Kanye West
Imagine Our Love - Lavender Diamond
We Are The Pipettes - The Pipettes
The Two EPs - Smokey & Miho
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