I am a HUNGRY MAN.
Woke up this morning with a hurting belly and a general sense of dis-ease (malaise), so after 40 minutes of trying to make myself feel better, i phoned it in and went back to bed. Not to wake up until 10:30 (by special request of S & W) (that request being of the "walk us" variety). Considering I surrendered at about 8:45 last night, that was a solid 13+ hours of sleep, and I woke up (again) still feeling crappy. So it goes. But I suffered the day evenly enough; even managed to go running at the gym (4.6 miles, to sweat out the germs, yeah), made my afternoon tutoring appointment and called a student's parents which went great (they, both the students and the parents, are awesome). All in 1/8th of a day's work.
I should mention that after my complaint about my stat class yesterday, my Alg. II class went awesomely. We talked about multiplying matrices and using them in graphs, and learned which matrices would spin different shapes in different directions. Fun stuff. I even got some serious laughs when I demonstrated rotation to the ESL kids (I pirouetted) and got even more laughs from the ballet types when I tried to go on pointe. That is probably not how you spell that. Anyways, physical comedy = not my strong suit, but even I cave to obvious opportunities. After that mayhem, we then talked about musical composition and how you can use matrices for patterned compositions (for example, with compositions that contain all 12 notes of the scale and place them in a mathematically determined order - I have no idea what this is called, though I've seen it before,a sort of numbering the notes 1-12 and then setting up a 12 by 12 matrix where no two rows are in the same order. Modern composition seems very cool, imho). All in all a very cool class, and one of my usual trouble makers was even *participating* and *volunteering.* Truly a disturbing universe.
So that's it; I'm going to huddle in the apartment and try to recover for tomorrow, may be read the end of my DFW book of essays, possibly watch Bushypoo deliver a modern rhetorical version of Country Joe's famous "(20,000 more troops are headed to Iraq and if I were one of them I might sing) I Feel Like I'm a Fixin' to Die (in an Unjust War) Rag."
That was, I fully admit, forced and awkward, but therein lies the satire.
Ah, satire - I just read the "E Unibus Pluram: Telvevision and American Fiction" essay from the aforementioned DFW book which discusses fiction writing in the televisual age. The basic point (if you can boil a dense 40 page and might I add brilliant - yes, I might - essay into one point) is that the age of irony and the age of television go hand in hand (seeing as television, with the implicit ability to juxtapose sound and image, at least has the potential to be an irony machine), television has co-opted the use of irony to a point where it is a borderline ineffective tool and more of a hipster fallback (if you're ironic, you don't have to be precise; the only thing you're saying for sure is not what you're saying, etc.), that a bool like My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, which takes irony / postmodernism in the televisual age to such an extreme that all sentiment is rendered invalid and the reader is "left with an empty feeling," and finally that the real next rebellion in literature would have to be one that would transcend this irony with sincerity that would somehow not come across as looking naive or old-fashioned nostalgic. Wow, that was a long "basic point." Anyways, i found it to be a really fascinating read and highly recommend it if you find yourself in the bookstore, that unholiest of unholy places.
It should be noted, por supuesto, that the "Essays" section of my local B&N is between "Romance Novels" and "Poetry." The dirty look that a salesperson gave me when I asked where a book on essays might be found should also be noted.
Back to the substance, the essay made a lot of points that I've had rebounding in my dome of late: how do you construct a parody of something like, say, Fox 25 News at Nine, when said F25N@N is absurd to such an extreme that to parody it would be simply to mimic it? Steve Colbert gets mistaken on a regular basis for an actual reporter, I would propose, because the newsmen he is satirizing are so absurd that there is real difference between what they are doing - the only real difference being the wink. So DFW's idea that the "next step" will somehow have to transcend this, get back to some kind of real argument as to why such and such is bad rather than a kind of fish-in-a-barrel too-cool "hey isn't that stupid?" is, I think, spot on. Dave Eggers has made similar arguments and his stabs at real emotion (HBWOSG) show where the post-irony age could potentially go (though, that too, gets mistaken for irony) (and note that the mistaking of something for irony is actually itself ironic, given the whole disconnect between what the author intended and what occurred). It's also good to note that the best postmodern art often bridges a sentimental / ironic gap = see, e.g., Simpsons episodes like Lisa On Ice which bite but also manage to soothe.
Anyways, if I consistently find myself interested by one thing, it's bridges between diametric opposites: irony v. sincerity, rationalism v. faith, East v. West, dream-chasing v. pragmatism; discord v. melody. I think some of the best work comes from the merging of these opposites - I humbly submit Daydream Nation and Zen Arcade as albums that exemplify some of the genius found in the merger - and I hope I can find some way to nail this out in some form at some point (said the left brain to the right, and vice versa).
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