Eula Biss: There’s a paradox here—I feel uncharacteristically invulnerable when I write, but my writerly persona is full of vulnerability. This is not incidental. Yes, a certain unstaved vulnerability is characteristic of who I am as a person, but in my writing I consider vulnerability a tool. A vulnerable persona can be instrumental in an essay, particularly an essay that is working to avoid the pitfalls of righteousness. —“To Know is not Enough,” Carrie Oeding interviews Eula Biss, Gulf Coast
The mix of registers here is typical of Wallace: intensifiers and qualifiers that ordinarily suggest sloppy writing and thinking (“unbelievably”; “really” used three times in the space of a dozen words; “something like that”) coexisting with the correct use of the subjunctive mood (“as though the driver were”). The precision of the subjunctive—which literate people bother with less and less, the simple past tense increasingly and diminishingly employed in its place—is never arbitrary, and its presence suggests that if attention is being paid to a matter of higher-order usage, similar intention lurks behind the clutter of qualifiers. For although one could edit them out of the passage above to the end of producing leaner prose, the edit removes more than “flab”: it discards the furniture of real speech, which includes the routine repetitions and qualifications that cushion conversation. Wallace was seeking to write prose that had all the features of common speech. —“Smarter than You Think,” Wyatt Mason, The New York Review of Books
Has Tommaso Debenedetti interviewed you? Would you know if he had?
boogie boarding with Kim Jong-Il;
this is your ocean on Alka-Seltzer
A familiar pattern has begun to emerge in public discussions of the social impact of technology, one in which two bipolar exaggerations accompany the arrival of major new developments: the party of techno-optimism heralds the arrival of a revolutionary new device or service that will unlock heretofore unknown heights of human potential; the party of techno-pessimism begins with mockery (“This is for teenagers!”), proceeds to assertions of insignificance (“This fad will never last!”) and finally resigns itself to mournful laments for what’s been lost (“Nobody reads books now!”). Twitter is only the latest of these, and the latest to achieve the appearance of a kind of permanence: a significant new means for broadcasting and consuming information that has, at least for me, become a new “front page” for the rest of the internet. —“The importance of Tweet cred,” Jonathan Shainin, The National
