Breakfast theory

I write like...

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

...and John Steinbeck writes like Kurt Vonnegut, I guess.

--
1. I Write Like

4chan philosophizin'

I was really bored tonight and decided to check out 4chan's /lit/ board. Here's what ensued. (Checked posts are mine.)

"..." 32

The life of mankind could very well be conceived as a speech in which different men represented the various parts of speech (that might also be applied to the nations in the relations to one another). How many people are merely adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs; and how few are substantives, verbs, etc.; how many are copula?
    In relation to each other men are like irregular verbs in different languages; nearly all verbs are slightly irregular.
    There are people whose position in life is like that of the interjection, without influence on the sentence— There are the hermits of life, and at the very most take a case, e.g., O me miserum.
    Our politicians are like Greek reciprocals (alleeloin) which are wanting in the nominative singular and all subjective cases. They can only be thought of in the plural and possessive cases.
    The sad thing about me is that my life (the condition of my soul) changes according to declensions where not only the endings change but the whole word is altered.

—Søren Kierkegaard

"..." 31

[Marshall] McLuhan wrote that our tools end up "numbing" whatever part of our body they "amplify." When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part of its natural functions. When the power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth during the course of a workday than they'd been able to make by hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to mention some of their "feel" for fabric. Their fingers, in McLuhan's terms, became numb. Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows. Today's industrial farm worker, sitting in his air-conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all—though in a single day he can till a field that his hoe-wielding forebear could not have turned in a month. When we're behind the wheel of our car, we can go a far greater distance than we could cover on foot, but we lose the walker's intimate connection to the land.
[...]
    The price we pay to assume technology's power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, and emotion. The mechanical clock, for all the blessings it bestowed, removed us from the natural flow of time. When Lewis Mumford described how modern clocks helped "create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences," he also stressed that, as a consequence, clocks "disassociated time from human events." [...] In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to wake up, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock. We became a lot more scientific, but we became a bit more mechanical as well.
[...]
    In explaining how technologies numb the very faculties they amplify [...] McLuhan was not trying to romanticize society as it existed before the invention of maps or clocks or power looms. Alienation, he understood, is an inevitable by-product of the use of technology. Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control over the outside world, we change our relationship with that world. Control can be wielded only from a psychological distance.

From: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, 2010, pp. 210-212.

"The Unknown Citizen"1

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he
      was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were
      normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was
      fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but
      left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the
      Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when
      there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a
      parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered
      with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

1: By W. H. Auden (1940)