“IN talking about his selections for The Best American Essay 2007, David Foster Wallace — my own eternal beacon of literary illumination and incredulousness — goes at length about how his ‘decidering process’ as editor was more dictated not by the essays being the best-written or most beautiful of the year, but by how those essays literally sifted through the surfeit of data that contributed to what he called ‘Total Noise,’ how those essays served as “… models and guides for how large and complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways — ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the overall roar,” which are great words to live a reading and writing life by, especially here in our Postironic Early 21st Interweb Century of Wiki-talky, Photoshop-tinkery, and blog democracy where everything can be found, anything can be manufactured, and everyone has a say, so the demand for even more clarity and complexity for both writer and reader should ideally be at an all time high, now more than ever, so in the process of the oscillation of reading from reader to page to reader to page — the ideal it being an infinite process, a butterfly loop perpetual motion machine of renewal — the reader and the page neverendingly give up new processes and experience every time they interact…”
(Taken from Adam David’s “You Are A Joke. You Are Not A Joke [The oppressive obfuscations of shock-&-awe poetics in Angelo Suarez's Dissonant Umbrellas],” published in the January 24, 2009 issue of the Philippines Free Press.)
Posted by Martin Villanueva 