Further Thoughts On My 'Addiction'

Unfortunately, I’ve tabled ‘Saturday Songs’ this week for two reasons: firstly, the ominous fact that it’s Tuesday night and, secondly, because I didn’t listen to much music the past week…I’ve been traveling!

That said, I can offer some further thoughts on my (our?) addiction to entertainment. To be truthful, I was not entirely without ‘entertainment’ over the past week; that would be some kind of minor miracle. (I think I would need to go backpacking into the wilderness to actually escape the long reach of music, film, art, etc.) The crucial element of the past week was that I left my laptop at home. Recently, my laptop has begun to feel like an exploratory, experiential extension of self; I find new music, new films, and new artistic ideas through my laptop. (Also, rather obviously, I blog with my laptop…)

So I was without an extension of my seeming artistic self for nearly a week.

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The funny thing…art doesn’t just disappear. It’s everywhere, even when I thought that I left it behind. It coasts through the background of our conversations, popping up at odd moments—and that wasn’t just the case with my conversations, but with those of many of the people with whom I traveled—art was an inescapable force. It was a easy to grasp structure. Of course, there are always concurrent interests; I spoke briefly with an Italian woman about Latin American literature—she had, of course, a major in North and South American literature.

But even then, Tim, our tour guide up in the Highlands, structured the stories he told with artistic references; he used film and music references to color his stories about the Isle of Sky. Sometimes stories were even structured through their interactions with artistic forms. For example, the story about the road that Calum MacLeod built from his small crafting (farming) community of the island of Raasay (located off of the Isle of Skye) was explained partly through journalist Roger Hutchinson’s non-fiction book about MacLeod’s struggle and then also through the forthcoming filmic adaptation of the story.

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Tim, of course, was none too keen on the upcoming ‘Hollywood’ rendition of the story, but his distaste (and probably my distaste as well) for the story speaks to an interesting lens we apply to our experiences. We live and experience and, as we experience, we simultaneously cast a screen—or apply a lens, however you’d like to word it—over those experiences to view them in a ‘Hollywood’ way.

Maybe it’s not so much that we’re ‘addicted’ to entertainment, as David Foster Wallace argued in Infinite Jest, as the fact that we actively structure our existence through our relationship with entertainment. I don’t mean to say, “Oh, I’m going to watch a film at 4 p.m., listen to an album at 6 p.m., etc.” but rather offer that as we go through our day, we track our experience alongside a different kind of experience—maybe the kind of life that Hollywood would have us live—or the kind of life a pop song might ensconce.

Further thoughts are likely to follow…