Take Hannah Shirley, a 23-year-old tech worker who recently went viral for pointing out that her job was “like a full-time acting gig.” She tik-toked one consequence of this: feeling “drained — especially mentally, sometimes even physically — from the character that …we play at work.”...
A Taylor Swift lyric is quoted: “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism? Like some kind of congressman?”
Forbes goes on:
What happens during an Eras event that makes it so engaging? There is realness, empathy, kindness, listening, a narrative (or journey-like) space big enough for all to partake and feel whole with oneself and others. The whole experience is devoid of pretension. Take this recipe and break it into three precepts – avoid alienation, increase authentic living and balance external pressure – and you have a roadmap for creating an Eras-like workplace culture....
I don't see how merger with a huge crowd is a feeling that you could — or would want — to take into the workplace. Even if I did, I wouldn't think of it as "authenticity."
***
I've written about the word "authentic" many times on this blog. A few examples.... (and the first thing I see, strangely enough, has Taylor Swift in it):
On March 20, 2010, I quoted John Hinderaker saying "Much as Bob Dylan was the most authentic spokesman for his generation, Taylor Swift is the most authentic spokesman for hers." I say: "that's a trick assertion, since Bob Dylan was never about authenticity." I quoted Sean Wilentz:
During the first half of the concert, after singing "Gates of Eden," Dylan got into a little riff about how the song shouldn't scare anybody, that it was only Halloween, and that he had his Bob Dylan mask on. "I'm masquerading!" he joked, elongating the second word into a laugh. The joke was serious. Bob Dylan, né Zimmerman, brilliantly cultivated his celebrity, but he was really an artist and entertainer, a man behind a mask, a great entertainer, maybe, but basically just that—someone who threw words together, astounding as they were. The burden of being something else — a guru, a political theorist, "the voice of a generation," as he facetiously put it in an interview a few years ago — was too much to ask of anyone.
On June 17, 2015, I talked about a Slate writer's advice to Hillary Clinton that she should "offer voters her authentic, geeky self. I said "We've been seeing the word 'authentic' a lot lately — what with Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal. There's this idea we seem to like that everyone has a real identity inside and that if we've got an inconsistent outward presentation of ourselves it would be wonderful for the inner being to cast off that phony shell. But 'authenticity' can be another phony shell...."
On December 19, 2017, I wrote about Facebook's purported goal of "authentic engagement." I said:
Facebook wants you to engage... with Facebook. They want the direct interface with the authentic person, not for some other operation to leverage itself through Facebook. And it makes sense to say that the exclusion of these interposers makes the experience better for the authentic people who use Facebook....
On a more metaphysical level: What is authentic anymore? What is the authentic/artificial distinction that Facebook claims — authentically/artificially — to be the police of? Is there an authentic authentic/artificial distinction or is the authentic/artificial distinction artificial?
AND: I'm reading a book that I think has a lot to say about the authentic/artificial distinction. You can tell by the title: "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" (Subtitle: "A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"). But the word "authentic" never appears in the book, and the word "artificial" only appears in the context of "artificial spit" ("it’s called Zero-Lube. It’s an actual pharmaceutical product").
On March 9, 2018, I blogged about something Nancy Pelosi said about "RuPaul's Drag Race." According to The Hollywood Reporter, she "suggested that politicians could learn a thing or two from Ru's girls: 'Authenticity. Taking pride in who you are. Knowing your power....'" Reading the comments on my post, I added:
Everyone jumps on that word "authenticity." "I mean, I'm all for people doing what they want -- except for misusing words like 'authenticity'" (fivewheels); "Authenticity? A man dressed as an over-the-top woman is authentic?" (Annie C); and the inevitable "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means" (Ignorance is Bliss). Yeah? Well, when a person putting on a show is in costume and makeup, you could say he's an authentic showperson. And, anyway, what makes you think you're so authentic?
My mind drifted back to this 1967 song by Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life":
chameleons changing colors while a crocodile cries
people rubbing elbows but never touching eyes
taking off their masks revealing still another guise
genuine imitation life
people buying happiness and manufactured fun
everybody doing everybody done
people count on people who can only count to one
genuine imitation life
I set out to skim the White House press release, "The White House Announces Guest List for the First Lady’s Box for the 2023 State of the Union Address," but couldn't even skim to the bottom... though I did skim to the Bono. I don't have time for this.
I do have time to write out that I remember when David Foster Wallace observed the foolishness of press releases that announce that a press release announces something.* That is, it's silly to have an announcement phrased as if it's pointing to something else, when it is the very thing it is announcing.
Here, we've got "The White House Announces Guest List...." when it really means "Here Is The White House Guest List."
__________________
* In "Big Red Son," Wallace quoted a press release from Adult Video News that said "The nominations for the 15th Annual AVN Awards were announced today," then dropped a footnote: "The passive mood here’s a bit disingenuous — the release itself is announcing them." A bit disingenuous... ha ha.
I wanted to tell you to help you. I'm prompted by "We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking. 'They’re more like friends than objects,’ one passionate bookseller says. What are we to do with our flooded shelves?" by Karen Heller (WaPo).
Book lovers are known to practice semi-hoardish and anthropomorphic tendencies. They keep too many books for too long despite dust, dirt, mold, cracked spines, torn dust jackets, warped pages, coffee stains and the daunting reality that most will never be reread. Age rarely enriches a book.
Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf:
— Jess McHugh (@MchughJess) August 24, 2020
1. A Dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest
2. Too Much Hemingway
3. Any amount of Bukowski
4. AYN. RAND.
5. Goethe
6. "Lolita is my favorite book."
7. "'Fathers and Sons' Is my favorite book."
“I have had the cartoon ‘Male Anorexia’ on my bathroom mirror for seven months. I cannot floss, shave, or pimple-scan without it. I am it; he is me. Kreider rules, and also has a simply mammoth penis–you’d (almost) have to see it to believe it.”AND: The cartoon "Male Anorexia" is cited at the beginning of an article by Jennifer Finn Boylan, "What It Was Like to Be a Transgender Woman in 2003" (2015):
Impossibly This is one of those adverbs that’s formed from an adjective and can modify only adjectives, never verbs. Modifying adjectives with these sorts of adverbs—impossibly fast, extraordinarily yummy, irreducibly complex, unbelievably obnoxious—is a hypereducated speech tic that translates well to writing. Not only can the adverbs be as colorful/funny/snarky as you like, but the device is a quick way to up the formality of your prose without sacrificing personality—it makes whoever’s narrating sound like an actual person, albeit a classy one. The big caveat is that you can’t use these special-adv.-with-adj. constructions more than once every few sentences or your prose starts to look like it’s trying too hard.Anyway... I was naturally and bizarrely wondering if "hideous" was getting inappropriately and tediously overworked in the press in the last few days. There's "I do have values, I swear, I just can’t recall what they are" by Alexandra Petri (WaPo):
I value the family, a theoretical entity against which people are making hideous strides all the time, mainly by being themselves in public or in private but on occasion by the throwing of unwanted parades.There's "More and more people loathe Renoir. Is it time for a revival?" by Sebastian Smee (again, in WaPo):
Can a great exhibition redeem a less than great artist? I ask this knowing it is the wrong question. It is wrong not just because huge numbers of people think Renoir is, in fact, great, as well as adorable, joyous and life-affirming. But also because, for many of the rest of us, Renoir is not “less than great.” He is awful. Hideous. Beyond the pale. Asked for her take on Renoir, a discerning friend replied that his works provoked “visceral disgust.” His canvases, she said, were “like a painted version of Sweet’N Low.”From "A Step-by-Step Guide to Detoxing from Your Winter Burrito Diet/Weaning off the winter is not an easy journey. We've got your back" by Kade Krichko (Powder):
Like most things, burritos are healthy in moderation. However, when your food pyramid is actually a cylinder wrapped in tin foil and you just purchased an infomercial blanket that looks like a tortilla, it might be time to face the facts.... In addition to burning that hideous tortilla blanket, take all of your burrito punch cards out of your wallet and put them into a lockbox....From "Congress flails after Trump’s deportation ultimatum" (Politico):
“This is a response to the most hideous thing we have seen in our country — that people are dying, that children are dying right now at our hands, in our name,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said leaving the roughly 90-minute meeting, visibly upset by the discussion. “There may be changes going into it but the message is we will not tolerate this kind of child abuse that's going on right now.”From "The Ugliest/Best Chrysler LeBaron of All Time Could Be Yours" (Automobile):
The car has honestly always struck us as being so bad, it’s good, and this re-creation strikes just the right balance of hideous and unique.From "Starting an Instagram Clique Fixed My Fear of Group Friendships/My friendships with other women were hard-earned, closely guarded one-on-ones, until I accidentally started a thriving Instagram community" by Lauren Menchling (Vice):
I'd been interrogating new acquaintances to wildly mixed results for decades until I finally stumbled upon the real conversational secret to instantaneous platonic intimacy. The magic word is clogs. Bring up clogs, and watch what happens to the person you’ve been struggling to make chit-chat with. Her shoulders will ease, she’ll laugh, and she’ll tell you about the hideous shoes that her great aunt Rose used to stomp around in—or she’ll show you a picture of the exorbitantly priced Rachel Comey pair that she's close to buying. She’ll tell you that her husband hates clogs, but she doesn’t care, or that she refuses to become one of those depressing clog-and–sack dress ladies. Love them or hate them, everybody has feelings about clogs.From "China forcibly harvesting organs from religions detainees killing many" (The Independent):
Part of the programme is to transform China’s organ transplant as a tourist spot, “where people needing organ transplants will pay huge sums to receive an organ. China has never adequately explained where it is getting these organs from.” The alleged victims include those practicing the spiritual meditative practice known as Falun Gong in addition to Uyghur Muslims, some Tibetan Buddhists and House Church Christians.I can't tell if "hideous" has become unusably trite, but I do see that it's deployed in 2 different ways — sometimes to describe something truly horrible (such as murderous organ harvesting) but most commonly in the comically dramatic aversion to relatively trivial ugliness (like clogs, that Chrysler LeBaron, paintings by Renoir, and random Biden gaffes).
“The conclusion shows that very many people (detainees) have died indescribably hideous deaths for no reason, that more may suffer in similar ways and that all of us live on a planet where extreme wickedness may be found in the power of those, for the time being, running a country with one of the oldest civilisations known to modern man,” Sir Geoffrey Nice QC says.
Wallace taught at ISU for nearly a decade; he wrote almost all his major works there, including the 1996 behemoth Infinite Jest. He also liked to sleep with his students, was abusive to his girlfriend at the time, the writer Mary Karr (whom he’d tried to push from a moving car not long before moving to Illinois in the summer of 1993, and also once hurled a coffee table at), committed statutory rape while away on book tour (or at least told a friend he did), and wrote to his friend Jonathan Franzen to say that he sometimes thought he was “put on earth to put his penis in as many vaginas as possible.”The essay title "Academics Explain David Foster Wallace to Me" is a play on the famous essay by Deirdre Coyle, "Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me."
Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The term was promulgated in 1967 by Edward de Bono. He cites as an example the Judgment of Solomon, where King Solomon resolves a dispute over the parentage of a child by calling for the child to be cut in half, and making his judgment according to the reactions that this order receives....It's possible that lateral thinking could be especially appealing to black people, at least that's what occurs to me after reading this piece by Katherine Timpf in National Review about a college course that teaches that supposedly teaches that "objectivity" is a "white mythology." The course — according to its official description — looks at "systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race." The National Review calls that "crazy."
To understand lateral thinking, it is necessary to compare lateral thinking and critical thinking. Critical thinking is primarily concerned with judging the true value of statements and seeking errors. Lateral thinking is more concerned with the "movement value" of statements and ideas. A person uses lateral thinking to move from one known idea to creating new ideas....
The idea that objectivity is somehow a myth, or that it has anything even remotely to do with “whiteness,” is so absolutely stupid that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why.Well, ironically, that's an emotional reaction to a misreading of a text. The course description doesn't really mean that objectivity is a myth, but that people in power use claims of their own objectivity to solidify and extend their power. I'd say that's so obvious that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. Timpf goes on to snark that "water is objectively wet," which must feel comfortable and cleansing but says little about how the human mind works and how some human beings gain and keep power over others.
Water isn’t wet Wet is what you would use to describe the feeling of water, not what it is. Things become wet after it’s been “touched” by water not while it is being “touched”. Water makes things wet but it is not wet itself. I get when you say “water is wet” but your not stating something, you’re just describing water.And:
Just going to give you words from a scientist's pen. Back in the old days, when water was where we needed to spend our time, touch was a lot more important than it is now. We as beings had to be immediately aware if we were going in or out of water. Therefore, the feeling of wet is a primal sensory reminder.This makes me think about the famous David Foster Wallace essay, "This is Water," which begins:
However, thereafter once we ascended onto the land and trees, the feeling of wet became a sensory reminder of something out of the ordinary; it is raining - get shelter, you fell in a creek - start swimming.
The reason it feels as it feels when water touches the skin is actually a complex electro-chemical reaction which works at amazing speeds. The sensory inputs are a combination of:
1. Your body's pH at that moment
2. The water's pH
3. Your body's temperature at that moment
4. The water's temperature
5. The atmospheric pressure
6. Molecular polarity
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”I'm thinking of other dialogue for Wallace's fish, like:
"You know how you feel wet?"
"Wet?! What are you talking about? I feel... the same... all the time!"
Five constructors will take turns crafting the puzzles; they are crossword experts whose answers and clues exhibit the same qualities we aim for in all of our writing: wit, intelligence, a wide-ranging interest in the world, and a love of language....Oh! He's giving us the go-ahead to look up words. Well, I did the puzzle, and I didn't look anything up to complete it, though I'd have to look up 42 down to know what it referred to. I'm not doing any spoilers here, but having looked it up, I see why I couldn't read what I had.
The great Richard Wilbur, who died last fall, once published a poem in The New Yorker about doing a crossword—“a ghostly grille / Through which, as often, we begin to see / The confluence of the Oka and the Aare”—on a train. “It is a rite / Of finitude,” he wrote, “a picture in whose frame / Roc, oast, and Inca decompose at once / Into the ABCs of every day.” Even if you find that you have to look up a few words (oast: “a usually conical kiln used for drying hops, malt, or tobacco”), we hope that the ritual provides you with some pleasurable procrastination.
Atwater, however, was, since the end of a serious involvement some years prior, also all but celibate, and tended to be extremely keyed up and ambivalent in any type of sexually charged situation, which unless he was off base this increasingly was—which in retrospect was partly why, in the stormy enclosure of the rental car with the pulverizingly attractive Amber Moltke, he had committed one of the fundamental errors in soft news journalism: asking a centrally important question before he was certain just what answer would advance the interests of the piece.
Sometimes it appears that we're reaching a period when our senses and our minds will no longer respond to moderate stimulation. We seem to be reaching an age of the gross, persuasion through speeches and books is too often discarded for disruptive demonstrations aimed at bludgeoning the unconvinced into action. The young--and by this I'd don't mean any stretch of the imagination all the young, but I'm talking about those who claim to speak for the young--at the zenith of physical power and sensitivity, overwhelm themselves with drugs and artificial stimulants. Subtlety is lost, and fine distinctions based on acute reasoning are carelessly ignored in a headlong jump to a predetermined conclusion. Life is visceral rather than intellectual. And the most visceral practitioners of life are those who characterize themselves as intellectuals. Truth is to them revealed rather than logically proved. And the principal infatuations of today revolve around the social sciences, those subjects which can accommodate any opinion, and about which the most reckless conjecture cannot be discredited. Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim, rather than to learn. The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated, and a contemporary antagonism known as "The Generation Gap." A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.ALSO: I cut and pasted that text from The Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley Social Activism Sound Recording Project, where "corps" was transcribed as "core," perhaps under the misimpression (recently displayed by President Obama) that "corps" is pronounced "corpse."
Effete — Here’s a word on which some dictionaries and usage authorities haven’t quite caught up with the realities of literate usage. Yes, the traditional meaning of effete is “depleted of vitality, washed out, exhausted”— and in a college paper for an older prof. you’d probably want to use it in only that way. But a great many educated people accept effete now also as a pejorative synonym for elite or elitist, one with an added suggestion of effeminacy, over-refinement, pretension, and/ or decadence; and in this writer’s opinion it is not a boner to use effete this way, since no other word has quite its connotative flavor. Traditionalists who see the extended definition as an error often blame Spiro Agnew’s characterization of some liberal group or other as an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” but there are deeper reasons for the extension, such as that effete derives from the Latin effetus, which meant “worn out from bearing children” and thus had an obvious feminine connotation. Or that historically effete was often used to describe artistic movements that had exhausted their vitality, and one of the main characteristics of a kind of art’s exhaustion was its descent into excessive refinement or foppery or decadence.
There’s this idea that hierarchical structures are a sociological construct of the Western patriarchy. And that is so untrue that it’s almost unbelievable. I use the lobster as an example: We diverged from lobsters evolutionarily history about 350 million years ago. And lobsters exist in hierarchies. They have a nervous system attuned to the hierarchy. And that nervous system runs on serotonin just like ours. The nervous system of the lobster and the human being is so similar that anti-depressants work on lobsters. And it’s part of my attempt to demonstrate that the idea of hierarchy has absolutely nothing to do with sociocultural construction, which it doesn’t.Lots more quotes from the interview and analysis of what's going on at the link. I just want to quote something from the movie "The Lobster":
HOTEL MANAGER — The fact that you'll turn into an animal if you don't manage to fall in love with another person during your stay here is not something that should upset you... Have you decided what animal you would like to be if you end up alone?And here's the great David Foster Wallace essay "Consider the Lobster." Excerpt:
DAVID — A lobster.
HOTEL MANAGER — Why a lobster?
DAVID — Because a lobster lives to be over 100 years old, has blue blood just like an aristocrat and stays fertile all its life. And I like the sea very much. I water-ski and swim quite well, ever since I was a teenager.
HOTEL MANAGER — I must congratulate you. Usually the first thing people think of is a dog and that’s why the world is full of dogs.* Very few choose to become unusual animals, which is why they are endangered. Rarely does someone choose to be a tuna fish, due to the dangers it faces, or a polar bear, due to its adverse living conditions. A lobster is an excellent choice.
Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. The logic of this (preference p suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign that the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half.______________
Second: David Foster Wallace (initially referred to by Scalia as "this man"):
I can tell by the Lipsky interview that Wallace put much less effort into those essays than he put into his fictions, but the fiction doesn't work on me the way it's supposed to, which is — Wallace says this in the long interview — that it's supposed to be great fun....Lipsky emailed me and challenged my resistance to reading Wallace's fiction. I've tried to get into "Infinite Jest," and I can see how much fun it's supposed to be, but it's just not fun for me.
Debating over who’s the bigger jerk in this [story about a short male-female relationship], or any, work of fiction misses the point.... And yet because so many people came to the story through social media, as opposed to having the print issue delivered to their mail boxes, they clicked through and read without seeing its “fiction” designation. This no doubt encouraged some people to read the story not only as nonfiction but also as something that was up for debate, something they should or should not agree with....And now we have the turnaround, a nonfiction account of a date with the charming young comedian Aziz Ansari that people are reading and comparing to "Cat Person." But Aziz Ansari is a real person, and the story told by the pseudonymous "Grace" is exposing him to devastating contempt. He's not a fictional character, like "Robert," the "cat person" Roupenian created for us to loathe. Grace's story is presented as true, which of course doesn't make it true, and for all we know, "Cat Person" squares up more accurately to something that happened in real life, but "Cat Person" is called fiction.
... drew me in for hours. "Emil Cioran (8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French." The corporate motto from the David Foster Wallace story — "Consciousness is nature's nightmare" — began as an aphorism in Cioran's "Tears and Saints" (1937).
I love trying to read a book in Kindle — after hours of reading this and that on the web — and arriving at a word — in this case “squunched” — clicking on it and, via Google, escaping back onto the web, going here and there, liberated by “squunched,” defying the order of things once again, not reading a book, unless you call that reading a book. But I will squunch myself back in there, in that Kindle book, just playing at trying to read until I see the sign for the next off ramp.What I was reading was — as mentioned yesterday — "The Suffering Channel" (found in this collection):
They often liked to get two large tables squunched up together near the door, so that those who smoked could take turns darting out front to do so in the striped awning’s shade.When you take the off ramp marked Squunch, you get to a discussion of another sentence by the same author, and I have that other book in Kindle too and can tell you "squunch" comes up in 3 sentences. Taking a gander at the first of the 3 sentences should give you a feeling for why I read fiction looking for off ramps.
The lone time that Atwater had believed he was seeing his own father smile, it turned out to have been a grimace which presaged the massive infarction that had sent the man forward to lie prone in the sand of the horseshoe pit as the shoe itself sailed over the stake, the half finished apiary, a section of the simulation combat target range, a tire swing’s supporting limb, and the backyard’s pineboard fence, never to be recovered or even ever seen again, while Virgil and his twin brother had stood there wide eyed and red eared, looking back and forth from the sprawled form to the kitchen window’s screen, their inability to move or cry out feeling, in later recall, much like the paralysis of bad dreams.That's from the story "The Suffering Channel" (which you can find in the collection "Oblivion").
This is just for color; so the fact that you’ve gotten the readership that you might have wanted in your midtwenties … quote from Self-Consciousness: photograph Updike sees of himself in his mother’s house, as a five-year-old boy, which now looks kind of sinister. "I’m what you wanted me to be,” you know what I mean? “You got me into this: now what do I do? I await his instructions.” I mean, in a sense, you fulfilled the ambitions that twenty-five-year-old had in terms of the kind of impact you wanted to make …I didn't really mean to be so labyrinthine, but I'm fascinated by the idea of an old man confronted by a photograph of his younger self, seeing that boy as sinister, and sort of chewing him out and demanding to know what to do now.
You know, it may be that those ambitions are what get you to do the work, to get the exposure, to realize that the original ambitions were misguided. Right? So that it’s a weird paradoxical link. If you didn’t have the ambitions, you’d never find out that they were sort of deluded. But there is, you’re right, once you’ve decided those delusions are empty, you’ve got a big problem, because... you can’t kill off parts of yourself. You have to start building machinery that can incorporate that part.I wish Wallace had done more with that wonderful prompt, but I don't think he liked Updike too much. Earlier in the Lipsky transcript, he'd said:
Because Updike, I think, has never had an unpublished thought. And that he’s got an ability to put it in very lapidary prose. But that Updike presents one with a compressed Internet problem, is there’s 80 percent absolute dreck, and 20 percent priceless stuff. And you just have to wade through so much purple gorgeous empty writing to get to anything that’s got any kind of heartbeat in it. Plus, I think he’s mentally ill.Here's hoping this post — being on the internet — is no more than 80% absolute dreck.
What is his version of the Updike-like conversation? I’m what you wanted me to be. You got me into this: now what do I do? I await your instructions....
I rub my face. My forehead, full of actinic damage from all those years of seeking the healing sun, hurts. My public, marketable self—the self put on display in interviews and slightly “off” caricatures in provincial book-review sections, the book-autographing, anxious-to-please me—feels like another skin and hurts also. I look over at my younger self on the wall: a photograph taken in Earl Snyder’s studio on Penn Street when I was five, wearing a kind of sailor collar, the edges blurred away—“vignetted”—in old-fashioned studio style, an image cherished by my mother, nicely framed the workmanlike way they do things in Reading, and always hanging here, in this spot, for me to admire and remember: little Johnny, his tentatively smiling mouth, his dark and ardent and hopeful eyes. For a second he looks evil. He has got me into this.I like Updike's version and I like the extra spin Lipsky put on it. I also think it's very cool that Lipsky wrote to me, and his explanation of the confusion makes good sense: The book is a transcription of audio tapes, and the transcription included whatever mistakes DFW made (and was no longer in a position to correct), so it seemed "only fair" for Lipsky to refrain from correcting his own mistakes.
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