On Web Culture

I am currently reading David Foster Wallace’s collection of essays ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again‘, a gift from a friend. It is so good, and so sad he is no longer alive. Reading his work I am struck by the same feeling I got reading about John Lennon’s life. A rare talent gone too soon.

This link will not be for everyone, David Foster Wallace writing about tennis is a select audience. But I do recommend it:

The String Theory [esquire.com] (even better with Readability)

BONUS

• Federer Reawakens My Inner Sportswriter [salon.com]
• Can Rafael Nadal Survive His Own Grueling Style of Tennis? [NYTimes.com]

Source: NZ On Screen

LINKS
SJD – Beautiful Haze [YouTube.com]

At different times in my life I have done jobs that have been hard to do. Thinking back now the hardest thing was having to do something I hated & being told that it wasn’t that bad and I would get used to it.

In retrospect those experiences were valuable. You learn a lot from that stuff. And I do think sometimes things are hard for a reason. But I remember then thinking that it would drive me mad if the rest of my life was going to be like that. It seemed to me then that work, what we do with our days work, would need to be meaningful. It would have to matter otherwise I would struggle with it.

I have my suspicions where that idea originates. It is interesting to me that from pretty young I was interested in what people did for a job, what they did with their lives & I hoped that I would do something fulfilling.

For me, the hardest times at the worst jobs are touchstones of sorts. When I see people losing it in the supermarket car park after work on Friday I wonder if their jobs are like those I suffered through. But they’ve been doing it for years & years. How much is it reasonable for a person to go through?

It seems to me that things shouldn’t have to be like that. That kind of awfulness is not fated or destined. It is like when they say on TV “…and the markets bounced back today after consumers embraced the long weekend”. That’s not consumers, that’s me, that’s you, that’s us! And when we buy stuff we make decisions, choices.

Recently I read something about how we can agonise & preach and be very vocal about the merits of a certain type of cellphone or mp3 player but we go strangely silent on the bigger topics. Well, that makes sense, how do you talk about those topics in everyday conversation? But I wish we would. Somehow I think if we were better connected to people around us, and talked to them, we would find it harder to shaft the people we don’t know or haven’t met.