I hope you all enjoy it! And Gerard, want to share some reflections to get us going sometime this week?
Monday, March 11, 2013
Next Selection: Gerard..and it's an essay!
I'm slowing getting back in the swing of things here, thanks for bearing with me! Gerard has sent me his selection for the next reading, it's an essay "Host" by David Foster Wallace. He's sent me (and I've shared it here below) the link to it, but wants you all to know that the longer version is well worth reading if you can dig up the collection "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace.
I hope you all enjoy it! And Gerard, want to share some reflections to get us going sometime this week?
I hope you all enjoy it! And Gerard, want to share some reflections to get us going sometime this week?
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Will do!
ReplyDeleteOkay, some introductory thoughts:
DeleteHaven’t reread this in full yet, but let me see if I can explain why I picked it, aside from it being by my most favoritest writer’s ever, DFWs.
When I first read this maybe four years ago, I remember thinking back to a whole lot of rides to and from school throughout my non-driving years of life. And as it may have been for you, many of these involved the radio, and much of this was talk radio, and a lot of talk radio was Rush Limbaugh, or someone similar. There was a time when I can remember largely agreeing with Rush and enjoying his incredulous throat clears and paper-rustling, and there was later a time when I decided he was the biggest oaf in the world, who was spreading lies and half-truths in a massive national propaganda campaign no-doubt directly financed by the Republican party.
Regardless of what side of Rush I was on, he was nothing if not affecting. Into middle school through early high school, Rush and his ilk were responsible for many heated arguments with my ride mates and parents. He stirred people up.
What “Host” points out is maybe a little obvious, but I still found it surprising: namely, that Rush and his ilk aren’t employed by some massive Republican conspiracy, so much as they’re employed by very large companies who are interested in creating affecting and entertaining radio. It’s about profits, not politics. And if liberal talk radio were nearly as entertaining, the same corporations would run those shows too. “Host” gets around the typical fruitless back-and-forth between maligners of conservative talk radio and defenders, and instead explores the underlying frameworks of that conversation, in particular the economics that make the talk shows themselves not just possible, but a major industry force. What comes out of this exploration changed my perspective on political intentionality in media, and while it sort of demands some redress of the national political discourse, it simultaneously demonstrates how antithetical to the medium’s nature that would be.
Hope you enjoy.
Oh, hey, I remember that guy! Looking forward to reading this.
ReplyDeleteThanks Gerard! I'm hoping to get it read tonight ~ We're in town all day today charging the computer and celebrating the new Pope! But it does sound fascinating!
ReplyDeleteJust finished reading it -- have some mixed feelings. Will come back in here to talk soon.
ReplyDeleteRead it last night, and, like Laura, I have some mixed feelings (probably not the same mixture, though).
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, the glimpse into the world of talk radio was fascinating and definitely put a new perspective on the whole thing. I loved the way he brought home how difficult being a talk radio host is with the example of talking alone into a tape recorder for half an hour. I also found his description of talk radio as an entertainment insightful (though, while I don't disagree with him on that, I wonder whether that might be presented as an excuse to simply disregard it entirely, which it really shouldn't be).
But on the other, it felt to me like the essay devolved as it went on into simply a description of how sad and obsessive the lead character was. I don't know whether DFW was trying to imply that this guy was typical of conservative talk show hosts (which would be both dubious and petty of him) or whether he just found this particular guy fascinating. I didn't, and I didn't think it was necessary to quite huge excerpts from the guy's autobiography to drive home the idea that he's an obsessive loser.
I guess it felt to me like the essay got more vindictive as it went on, like he really wanted to show what a nutjob he thought this guy was, and I thought that took away from the more interesting and salient points he was making earlier.
hah, I, too have A History with Mr. Limbaugh. . . but since this essay is not about Mr. Limbaugh, I am going to fight the temptation to talk about it. FOR NOW.
ReplyDeleteI didn't get vindictive from the portrait of Zig. I think DFW's fascination and his sympathy are pretty much genuine here, though wobbly for other reasons. I have some other issues with Dubs' language and approach, but I'll set them aside for now. What's interesting to me is how he foregrounds the talk-radio machine and Zig's place in it and pushes the often pretty awful content of the show to the corners of the frame -- so that I was actually surprised when I read the essay again, having remembered less of the misogyny and racism than is actually present in the essay.
And while I agree with G. that this essay is doing something important with that framework, I'm not sure how I feel about that, entirely. More on this later, I think . . .
So here's something (possibly related) that stuck in my craw -- there's a throwaway moment (I don't know if it's in the shorter version) where Dubs quotes someone saying that "talk radio is the WWF with ideas" and he makes an aside about "considering the kind of people who enjoy pro wrestling. . . " I kind of went hey. . .
Not just because I enjoy pro wrestling, but because I think the comparison is a missed opportunity, because once it turned up I realized that they are similar in a lot of ways, but pro wrestling seems in some ways obviously more benign (and more fun) than the kind of news-shout-stimulation show DFWs is profiling.
Not that pro wrestling is the world's least problematic art form by any stretch of the imagination -- but at least, structurally speaking, everyone involved in the fight is in on it. Stephanie McMahon and Chris Jericho are both playing a role for the sake of being "more stimulating." It seems to me like there's a big and actual ethical difference between deliberate outrageousness / offensiveness in a staged carnival fight between semi-fictional characters, and the kind of relentless trolling of real people and real events that stimulating talk radio often trades on.
And Dubs misses this entirely because this comparison was given to him and he's completely ignored it in favor of a quick chuckle at those rednecks with their cultural degradation or whatever it is people at MIT think pro wrestling is about.
And G., I like DFWs a lot, too, but he does seem to make this mistake like once per essay at a minimum.
(He's still better than Joan Didion, though).
(Most of the time).
MORE SOON.
@ Laura: Fair point (and may I be the last person to say Dubs can never be unfortunately elitist even in midst of his endless game of wack-a-mole he plays with his elitist tendencies). It is a missed opportunity, and one that I'd agree, on second reading, to share bemoaning for, in that Dubs does seem to pay scant attention to the appropriating of real people / events, often tragic, for the sake of processing them into monetized entertainment. Part of me wants to say he does this okay, maybe elliptically such that we the readers will complete the conversation (just watch us as we do this), while another part of me thinks the focus just never really quite came together.
ReplyDelete@ David: I also didn't find Dubs overly nasty to Z., esp. considering all the info volunteered to him, I mean there were places Dubs could've gone but was pretty charitable about, I think. In the longer version the Z. bio stuff might feel a little more proportional, as well.
Re: Z. being a "nut job," I don't know if I’d go that far, but I think what DFW was more interested in was the way the talk radio industry passed around this guy like a hot potato whenever he got into trouble, and how it seemed to me almost like it was his fire-able behavior has built his resume, that he started at the bottom of the industry and despite being fired from every(?) position he's held in it, seems to have made a steady professional climb.
I'm still in the process of reading it, but since I'm doing so in print, I just wanted to throw out a quick question while I'm still in the midst of the text -- how many of y'all are reading this online and how many in the print version? Because there is at least one major difference in the reading experience between the two, and one of the questions that's swirling around for me a lot as I read the essay is why Wallace made a particular decision about the style and the visual form of the essay, which is really prominent and in-your-face when reading it in print, but not at all prominent when reading it online.
ReplyDeleteSo, partly I'm curious because I'd be interested to see how reactions to the essay do or don't vary with the version of it that you saw. But also because if any of y'all don't have any access to the print version, I can (& would like to) provide a couple of quick page scans to give an idea of what it looks like to read it in print, before I get into my questions about that.
@ G -- that's an interesting point about being fired as resume-building. Of course one of the central . . .realizations? of the essay is that he was fired and hired by two branches of the same massive radio entity -- so his firing is really more like a promotion.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it comes together. I don't know if it's meant to or if it needs to. . . this is one of those essays that tends to create a lot of potential-but-nonexistent related essays in my head, and I want to be careful not to just be criticizing DFW for the essay he didn't write.
@ Charles -- and everyone else -- I read it in the print version.
Well, I got part way through it. Not because it's not a good essay, but because I'm not keen on the topic (also, short on time at the moment). Some time back, I soured big-time on outrage culture, regardless of form or outlet or political leaning.
ReplyDeleteThe history is interesting, though. And, in some ways, enlightening. Rush was a part of my teens--I used to look forward to his show. Didn't catch back then that it was entertainment, but of course it was. So is pretty much everything that comes to us via any form of media. But if I get started on the RITA SKEETER IS RUNNING THE NEWS rant, I'll never stop, so: restraint. It's Lent, after all. :)
So, thoughts on the footnotes in the book version? I think G. and I liked them and Charles -- did not? Or is whether you like them or not contingent on whether or not DFW can be demonstrated to be doing something interesting with them?
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I liked them just because they were mimetic -- that is, they resembled what it sounds like sometimes when I try to talk about something with a lot of side-streets of opinion and explanation. There may or may not be something more complex going on. Thoughts?
Yes, I think the footnotes (in the book version particularly) are doing something more than just being more stuff on the page. That is, I see them as a performance of complexity, of the difficulty of coming at any topic as just BAM: thesis argument, here we go, point one, point two, point three, conclusion. That what Host is trying to do is not only describe some of the reasons why talk radio looks/sounds like it does, but then it (the essay) refuses to do likewise, but fashions its examination of talk radio in such a manner that illustrates how complex even seemingly simple issues / events / etc. are if you want to grant respect to their complexity. If you so choose, you can follow that little windy-arrow (that's what the footnotes look like in the book version) to wherever it might lead, and that arrow, by it's very nature (being windy) does not accommodate whatever straight-arrow monologue you might've planned to deliver. Talk radio thrives on uniterrupted rants, it does not allow for dead space, for reconsideration, for pockets of reassessment and confusion and that moment when we sometimes realize how stupid we sound as we're speaking and just have to stop and admit we don't know what we're talking about. It's made, it seems, for the inverse of that, for a blustery certitude, which I feel we are all guilty of from time to time.
ReplyDelete