Dispatch #35 - Whitney Pocket
On David Foster Wallace’s “build up some machinery,” and other stories (with holiday wishes)
My all-time favorite work of nonfiction is the late David Foster Wallace’s essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a piece I return to again and again. It chronicles his participation on a Celebrity Cruise in the Caribbean in the mid-1990s. I’ve read most of Wallace’s essays by now, but I keep returning to that seven-night voyage for the same reason I come back to Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and Life After God.
The prose, for one, is devastatingly good. Both writers were brimming with originality and experimenting with new forms, cutting their teeth on a rapidly shifting cultural landscape.
And then there’s the social commentary. The 90s were a turbulent, revolutionary moment, as cable television and the early internet began to fracture our attention spans, advertise their way into our pocketbooks, and slowly turn a nation of doers and makers and talkers into a nation of watchers and consumers — fed on stimulation that mimicked connection while quietly starving us of the nourishment that comes from sharing a room with another human.
They asked different questions, but circled the same deep-seated anxiety…
Wallace: How do we escape this?
Coupland: What does it look like while we’re stuck here?
In many ways, the writing of Jenny Odell and Jedidiah Jenkins feels like a continuation of this lineage — an evolved response to the same cultural unease.
In 1996, the writer David Lipsky traveled with Wallace during his book tour for Infinite Jest. At one point in the long, five-day conversation, Wallace waxed prophetically about the internet and disconnectedness:
At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.
DFW was both 1000% right and yet could not have imagined the scale or saturation of the technology and social media distraction we’d be living with thirty years later.
In the closely adapted movie version of this conversation between DFW and Lipsky, Wallace adds…
“I’m gonna have to leave the planet.”
Ultimately, Wallace left the planet — by suicide — in 2008.
Coupland, meanwhile, is still trucking along. I’ve found myself returning to his work thanks to a recent appearance in a New York Times piece, Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation? — a framing Wallace would no doubt have found objectionable and, when inevitably asked to participate, would have likely answered with a middle finger.
I say all of that to say this:
We need to build up some machinery.
The kind Wallace warned we’d need deep in our guts — something sturdy enough to fend off the ease, convenience, and deceptive pleasure of screens and everything they represent.
The working parts of my own machinery are built from acts of defiance, though unevenly practiced and constantly rebuilt:
Ditching the motherf’ing phone at every conceivable chance. Leaving it at home when going out with friends. Putting it in my desk drawer for three-hour writing sessions. Exercising without it — without music, without podcasts.
Phone-less walks in my neighborhood, long enough for the quiet to turn into noticing, into the long-lost art of daydreaming.
READING.READING.READING.READING.
Long games around the table with my family. Monopoly. Rummikub. Up and down the river. Gin rummy.
And, of course, camping. Far enough from town for dark skies, quiet, and the recalibration that comes with a weekend without reception ⬇️
The road to Whitney Pocket, the unofficial gateway to the Gold Butte National Monument, is paved all the way from Interstate 15.
There are potholes, gravel bars, and undulations that resemble the final scenes in One Battle After Another, but any vehicle could manage just fine.
We arrived at a circular gravel turnout at dark, a few hours past sunset. No one else around.
Temperature: 41 degrees.
Reaching into my pack, I take out and then put on every single piece of clothing I brought. The bitter Michigan cold of my childhood and youth - a chill I once proudly believed made me a tough Michigander - has all but evaporated after twenty-two years living in annual warmth. 41 degrees feels like minus twenty.
A full moon hangs in the sky, so bright I don’t need a headlamp to set up my tent.
There’s a loud, branch-crunching sound coming from a nearby wash. I walk toward it and find a large black cow staring back at me. Probably one of the famous Bundy stock — which means this big old slab of beef is foraging and dropping patties illegally in what I’ll come to see in the morning as a landscape brimming with biodiversity.
I walk over to it with a can of spray paint and spray
GO HOME
in big red letters on its ribs.
I did not do this.
It’s not your fault, I mutter, and then wander back to our temporary camp for the night.
There are things to be done:
Arranging sleeping gear, making food, building a fire, and organizing camera gear for the morning.
I’m here with my pal Mason Voehl, thoughtful leader of the Amargosa Conservancy, who soon walks off into the night with his own camera and tripod.
My favorite shot of his, used with permission and further proof that even a full moon sky can tell a damn good story:
Eventually, we are both sitting by the fire, doing nothing but watching the flames flicker and hiss on a windless night, the temperature dropping with each passing hour.
Doing our best to build up some machinery.
See you at sunrise, we say, as the cold pushes us toward our sleeping bags.
I’ll be back in your inbox next week for one final 2025 dispatch — my first annual YEAR IN REVIEW. A roundup of my favorite things: books, pods, essays, substacks, photos, films, trips, and humans.
From my crew to yours, wishing all of you a very merry holiday season.
With love,
Josh
Thank you for that DFW quote. He was right.
"READING.READING.READING.READING."