17/03 – 02/04 – Something to Do with Paying Attention, David Foster Wallace

new york, februrary 2023

17/03 – 02/04 – Something to Do with Paying Attention, David Foster Wallace

So to the honorable men who stand to wrangle the coming tides of data, to ‘deal in facts‘, to slug through the necessary. I suppose that is me also. That is my life is it not?

Lately, I’ve been somewhat fixated on those relics and artifacts of the data we engage with. Where do old emails go? What happens to those pdfs and word documents and spreadsheets we arrange? The ones that slip through the cracks? It’s funny, I was walking in South Bank actually the other day and I came across that bookseller by the BFI and under the Waterloo Bridge; the one who lays all those ancient, orange Penguin paperbacks out on big tables. I had a quick look and outside of a few of the big names—Eliot anthologies, some Graham Greene, etc.—the vast majority were complete unknowns. These books were likely never to be read in full again. And I’m not sure why, but a bit like unread emails—it felt like there was something pure about these books, something uncompromised. They were purposeless now—functionally defunct—a bit like our main character, during his rotating-boot-sign watching days.

It’s a special skill to make this kind of stuff come to life. To write about tax and make people feel something. And I suppose I don’t share our main character’s saim disdain for the creative arts; but perhaps that is just what works for him: he’s a ‘cog not a spark plug‘.

I myself can admit to finding some freedom in order. In understanding the pieces of the world and how and why they work together. What legal and tax systems—like all other vaguely relational systems—tell us is usually more about ourselves than anything else. They contain (baked in) the petit choices and decisions that make the world the way it is. Even for me: a dreamer, someone who more than anything wants to create new ways of seeing the world, understanding these decisions is critical. How and why they operate; how and why they sustain themselves.

Increasingly I feel the coming of a new epoch: the architecture is profoundly changing, shaking, being enumbered. I hope to be help ‘slice the pie‘ too, in my own way.

And at least a thousand useful heuristics—the ones to return to whilst alone. To help remember that: “a work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity”.