#david foster wallace was a piece of shit and i should stop reading him

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

A passage of breathless intensity, from the new David Foster Wallace notes:

Though many of its consequences have been written about at length, the key to this is the enormous Kegan restructuring of "the unknown unknowns," the effect upon the American national psyche of not really knowing, of not fully understanding, that we didn't know, the blindspot of the collective American unconscious, in the new era of having to live with and cope with and adjust to being a species whose consciousness has progressed into an unexamined, kind of slyly fucked-up middle ground, of things like reality TV shows, and corporate ads that are so totally self-consciously fake and ironic and trivial and schlocky and in-your-face about being so totally fake and ironic and trivial and schlocky, as though a kitschily artificialized version of our pop culture itself were now doing commercials for the kitschily artificialized versions of the things that it itself is, and here this is all free-floating in 3D cyberspace, where for a time it is common to see glowing digital screens of moving video floating in the air, in the central, most publicly-trafficked areas of the mediascape, depicting simultaneously (and in this case, literalistically) both really, real people existing in the real world being attacked by awesome monsters which they totally cannot see but which we see and we know about and it's totally awesome, and the kids are totally cool with it and it's totally awesome, and everything is totally awesome

Just . . . weird