But what dominated the map was a fist of red over the Great Lakes: Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. Set aside the hype and whimsy of Trump’s plan to conquer California, and this was the news: Trump will be running a Midwestern campaign.
.. And yet in Michigan—in most of the Midwest, really—the economy is doing O.K. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa all have unemployment rates well below the national average of five per cent, and Ohio and Indiana are just a touch higher than average, at 5.2 per cent. Among Midwestern states, only Illinois’s unemployment is significantly higher than the national average, and when people talk about the decline of the Rust Belt no one really means Illinois.
.. It’s hard to know exactly how to get beyond the top-line statistics to understand how shaken people are by a recession, but one way is to examine economic instability. When Yale’s Jacob Hacker led a study that did so, no Midwestern state ranked among the places where instability was most acute. (Those were mostly in the South.) In Michigan especially, Hacker found, overall levels of economic instability were remarkably low.
.. A 2016 race between Clinton and Trump could devolve principally into a pitched battle for the Rust Belt,” the Washington Post’s Dan Balz predicted in March.
.. (those with family incomes between thirty thousand and seventy thousand dollars) in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They found that Trump does not even have the support among these voters that Mitt Romney had. The poll had him trailing Hillary Clinton by nine per cent.
.. Just after 9/11 David Foster Wallace presented the view of the world among churchgoers in Bloomington, Indiana: “There is what would strike many Americans as a bizarre absence of cynicism in the room.” It is exactly this long tradition of seeing the Midwest as decent and innocent—and therefore as moral—that supplies the Rust Belt story with its force.
How the Best Commencement Speech of All Time Was Bad for Literature
if not exactly a novelty book pedaled at $15 a pop (250 words per dollar).
.. This is definitely tedious, and Wallace’s triumph in This is Water is to let us know that he knows it’s tedious—that this “deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories,” as he says in the next sentence, is the “standard requirement of US commencement speeches.”
.. This is Water is the best commencement speech of all time not because it has transcended the formula, flattery, and platitudes that a graduation speech trades in, but precisely because it has mastered them. Wallace does not conceal this.
.. Tell your audiences that they’re too smart to want a certain thing and give it to them anyway. Remind everyone that they’re too hip for corny dad sermonizing and then double down on the corny dad sermonizing. This is a great way to write a commencement speech—not by avoiding platitudes, but by drawing an enchanted circle around yourself where the things we thought were platitudes can be revealed as dazzling truths.
.. that to be sincere is to be banal; and that banality is truth.
.. In 2005, David Foster Wallace stood at a lectern at an elite liberal arts college and explained that the “real value of a real education has nothing to do with knowledge” and everything to do with “simple awareness.” In 2016, the real value of my education is rapidly accumulating interest that no amount of simple awareness is likely to likely to pay off
.. Praising a person for their sincerity too often means praising a person for having feelings, and feelings, for some reason, seem to count less when women have them. It’s hard not to notice that the New Sincerity authors—Franzen, Wallace, Safran Foer—are men; everyone has noticed that David Foster Wallace die-hards are disproportionately men
.. That sincerity has always enfolded an impotent politics. In the speech’s most memorable passage, one exercises their “choice of what not to think” in the supermarket by choosing, despite the tedium and frustration of “adult existence,” to think patient, hospitable thoughts about the other customers:
.. The nice thoughts that we think about people are worth nothing to anyone unless they are meaningfully voiced in the public sphere, unless they’re given an active civic expression. But in Wallace’s vision, one’s obligation to other people begins and ends in the privacy of one’s own mind.
.. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels,
.. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different.
.. Wallace’s idea of a literary rebel risks nothing except ridicule, another way of saying a rebel who risks nothing at all.
.. There is, moreover, a blind arrogance in the belief that what you primarily owe the world is your sincerity: the gift of your outspoken, unmediated self, your willingness to be the most you that you can be.
.. It’s a belief in which simply existing becomes an act of bravery—which in a private, harrowing way, it was for Wallace. We know that now. But the truth remains that for most people like him—white, male, preternaturally talented—being in the world is not a matter of moral courage. To be male, gifted and white is to be as safe on Earth as any mortal can expect to be, to live in the ambivalent knowledge that the greatest violence you’re likely to encounter is the violence that you do to yourself.
.. Irony has nearly died this election cycle, with Donald Trump turning the sincerity fetish into orange-haired flesh, disabling irony by embodying satire. He has made sexism, racism, and Mussolini quotations brave simply by making them sincere. Donald Trump speaks truth to power—“power” in this case being women, immigrants, and “the establishment” ..
.. But I don’t know what literature is about. I’m not sure that it’s about what it feels like to be a human being. I’m not sure that it makes us kinder, more empathetic, more humane.
Putting Grit in Its Place
Success is about being passionately good at one or two things, but students who want to get close to that 4.0 have to be prudentially balanced about every subject. In life we want independent thinking and risk-taking, but the G.P.A. system encourages students to be deferential and risk averse, giving their teachers what they want.
Creative people are good at asking new questions, but the G.P.A. rewards those who can answer other people’s questions.
.. Most important, she notes that the quality of our longing matters. Gritty people are resilient and hard working, sure. But they also, she writes, know in a very, very deep way what it is they want.
The G.P.A. mentality is based on the supposition that we are thinking creatures. Young minds have to be taught self-discipline so they can acquire knowledge. That’s partly true, but as James K. A. Smith notes in his own book “You Are What You Love,” human beings are primarily defined by what we desire, not what we know. Our wants are at the core of our identity, the wellspring whence our actions flow.
.. As David Foster Wallace put it in his Kenyon commencement address, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships.” Some worship money, or power or popularity or nursing or art, but everybody’s life is organized around some longing.
.. In such a school you might even de-emphasize the G.P.A. mentality, which puts a tether on passionate interests and substitutes other people’s longings for the student’s own.
Everything About Everything: David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ at 20
To fully understand what Wallace was up to, the book bears being read, and reread, with Talmudic focus and devotion. For many Wallace readers this is asking too much. For many Wallace fans this is asking too much. And thus the Wallace factions have formed — the Nonfictionites versus the Jestians versus the Short Storyists — even though every faction recognizes the centrality of “Infinite Jest” to his body of work.
.. “Infinite Jest” is a genuinely groundbreaking novel of language. Not even the masters of the high/low rhetorical register go higher more panoramically or lower more exuberantly than Wallace — not Joyce, not Bellow, not Amis. Aphonia, erumpent, Eliotical, Nuckslaughter,phalluctomy! Made-up words, hot-wired words, words found only in the footnotes of medical dictionaries, words usable only within the context of classical rhetoric, home-chemistry words, mathematician words, philosopher words — Wallace spelunked the O.E.D. and fearlessly neologized, nouning verbs, verbing nouns, creating less a novel of language than a brand-new lexicographic reality.
.. It has been eight years since Wallace left us, and no one is refilling the coffers of the David Foster Wallace Federal Sentence Reserve.
.. While I have never been able to get a handle on Wallace’s notion of spirituality, I think it is a mistake to view him as anything other than a religious writer. His religion, like many, was a religion of language. Whereas most religions deify only certain words, Wallace exalted all of them.
.. Throughout the book, Wallace’s flat, minor, one-note characters walk as tall as anyone, peacocks of diverse idiosyncrasy.
.. In this very specific sense, Wallace may be the closest thing to a method actor in American literature, which I cannot imagine was without its subtle traumas.
.. Several writers’ names have become adjectivized — Kafkaesque, Orwellian, Dickensian — but these are designators of mood, of situation, of civic decay. The Wallaceian is not a description of something external; it describes something that happens ecstatically within, a state of apprehension (in both senses) and understanding. He didn’t name a condition, in other words. He created one.