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Graham W. Jenkins
@grahamj.bsky.social
Defense, space, intel | Trains, cities, pugs, warhammer, | 6' 8" Twitter: grahamwjenkins & lowheadways about.me/grahamjenkins LA via DC via Boston
550 followers1.3k following1.3k posts
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Now *that's* how you start a film review defector.com/folie-a-poo-...

David Foster Wallace had a thing for boredom. He had such a thing for it that he turned it into a kind of last legacy. According to a lengthy (and pretty great) piece in The New Yorker by D.T. Max published a year after Wallace died by suicide in 2008, he left behind a third of his final novel, The Pale King, for which he had spent countless hours researching boredom. A typed note he also left behind laid out the book’s central intention: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”
This interest of Wallace’s has been closely connected to mindfulness, but the two things are a little different. Mindfulness is an awareness of things as they come, it is a kind of riding out, but that’s not exactly bliss you find through it so much as a kind of acceptance—which, to a person in constant distress, can no doubt, relatively speaking, feel like bliss. “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find.” I didn’t realize this would be Joker: Folie à Deux.
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Graham W. Jenkins
@grahamj.bsky.social
Defense, space, intel | Trains, cities, pugs, warhammer, | 6' 8" Twitter: grahamwjenkins & lowheadways about.me/grahamjenkins LA via DC via Boston
550 followers1.3k following1.3k posts
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