Excerpts from The Pale King

On corporations and civic responsibility:

p. 136
We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries - we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie? .... Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.

I don't think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit - that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations.

But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The works' obligations are to the executives, and the executives' obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO's obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board's obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders-slash0customers they've been f---ing over in their own name. It;'s alike a fugue of evaded responsibility.

On consumerism:

There'll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out- use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It'll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.

On boredom:

I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.

But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. .... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Enjoy the Silence

Excerpt from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King:

"For me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like `deadly dull' or `excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly . . . but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarket checkouts, airports' gates, SUV's backseats. Walkmen, iPods. BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called `information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

The memoir-relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. Learned about it extensively, exquisitely, in my interrupted year. And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull. Or those parts of life that are and must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull . . . only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it . . . as in vastly more, right before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."

''Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is....'' a character says at one point. ''Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.''

Chia's Spa experience

Went to a day spa today and it was almost as rejuvenating as a trip to the mountains to see Nature. What is it about spas that is so refreshing? Now I don't mean simply relaxing, because the massage was merely mediocre - my beefy friend usually does a better job. I mean soul-cleansing, escapist, transporting-you-to-faraway places kind of relaxing. I found the serene setting and peace and quiet (evocative of nature) to be the best part. What is it about the slowing of one's breath, the quieting of one's mind, and the connection to one's creator and terra firma that is so calming? Not only are we taken away from the hustle of industrial life, we are reminded of that which nourishes us. We are reminded that we are God's children, that we are loved.

The trick about these places is that they evoke "home," if for a short time, at a premium. Now if I'll just fix up my home the same way - darkness, good lightning, sound of water, flowers, candles, relaxing music, good feng shui - I wouldn't need to visit these fancy places.

July is here

Here are some things that I've found interesting lately:



Solar-powered LED lantern kit.


Despite her reclusivity and elusiveness, Princess Masako of Japan has always been my favorite royal.

Organic Chocolate Milk, and season 1 of The Good Wife.