Thursday, July 30, 2009

where did i leave off...

so i've been trying to get a little more reading done in the past fewweeks, but i can't seem to get a good rhythm going. i finally made myway back to DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing, but i had to skip the essayon TV due to my inability to focus. the next essay, written for Harper's about the Illinois State Fair back in '92 or '93, is a vivid account of how America's three c's—capitalism, commercialism, and consumerism—really bumps and grinds against our cultural heritage or at least what we think of as our cultural heritage. possibly the most telling detail he recounts is from the first couple of pages when he notices, while bearing witness to some kind of PR event for a charity hosted in the McDonald's tent, that the grass he's standing on is fake, and when he looks under the green plastic fibers beneath him, he finds real grass. it's amusing and disturbing.

* * *
i've noticed recently that when typing in a purposely informal mostly-lowercase-with-the-exception-of-proper-nouns-and-other-things-that-feel-like-they-should-be-capitalized house-style, i find it difficult to keep consistent. it's easy to leave everything lowercase. it's fairly easy to keep things in the proper standardized form. but if i start without capitalization and then start capitalizing words (like names or book titles, for instance), i involuntarily start capitalizing sentences and first-person singular pronouns again. does anyone else have this problem? does anyone else purposefully capitalize in this (or another) bizarre manner?

2 comments:

Erica said...

but the tv essay is the best essay ever written on anything ever and i'm not even kidding or exaggerating or anything!

Flushy McBucketpants said...

it'll get read. DFW sometimes requires some false starts.