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- ...now widely accepted as the seminal American novel of the 1990s, the best attempt yet at capturing reality in an unreal world.
- ...Wallace the person, like Wallace the writer, was an unusual mixture of the cerebral & the hot-blooded.
- A Wallace sentence is immediately recognizable in its ambition, its length, and a syntax at times as new-seeming as a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem.
- ...for whom Wallace was not just a favorite writer but nearly their only writer?
- One woman has the dates she began & finished Infinite Jest on her arm.
- Wallace... was like an extreme caricature of many generational traits: polymathic, ironic, brilliant, damaged, and under intense pressure to perform." The comment made me realize how deeply people read their own lives in Wallace's. They identify with his genius, his depression, his anxiety, his loneliness, his frustrations, his early success, his amazement that the world isn't gentler, and his upset at how difficult it is to say what you mean. They know his inner struggles. They talk about how hard he worked to stay sane and happy in a difficult world.
- In Wallace I recognized a masterful stylist, a writer with the beguiling ability to make you see the world as he saw it.
- He now urged us to engage with the world, to work with him to find a sincere solution to the problem of how to live well in a fraught time. For Wallace, fiction, to be important, had to fill a need, like faith or love. "In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness," he told an interviewer in 1993. A moral project grew behind all those gorgeous sentences, those endlessly recursive thoughts, that tendency to annotate and caveat every utterance that become his signature.
- "Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think... because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
- You are responsible for making your own life meaningful. No one else can help you but you. Wallace knew how easy it is, in the modern age, to watch the world turn. In his episodes of depression and addition, that was him. It was a posture that came naturally to him, but also one he hated in himself. And it was his bravery in fighting to get out of that chair, to race the world as it spun, that draws us to him. In the end we identify with Wallace not because he came from the same place as we did but because he suggests a way to somewhere else. Not because he found answers but because he never doubted that the questions remained worth asking. This hopeful, hurtful, energetic, angry, despairing, optimistic, shy product of the American Midwest, for all the dark moments of his life, never stopped being a purer version of ourselves.
- ...he would later tell interviewers of his memory of his parents lying in bed, holding hands, reading Ulysses to each other.
- No one else listened to David as his mother did. She was smart and funny, easy to confide in, and included him in her love of words. Even in later years, and in the midst of his struggle with the legacy of his childhood, he would always speak with affection of the passion for words and grammar she had given him. If there was no word for a thing, Sally Wallace would invent it: "greebles" meant little bits of lint, especially those that feet brought into bed; "twanger" was the word for something whose name you didn't know or couldn't remember. She loved the word "fantods," meaning a feeling of deep fear or repulsion, and talked of "the howling fantods," this fear intensified. These words, like much of his childhood, would wind up in Wallace's work. (2)
- For Sally, grammar was more than just a tool. It gave membership in the club of educated persons. The intimation that so much was at stake in each utterance thrilled David, and added to the excitement of having a gifted mother.
- Wallace was attuned to the delicate drama of personality.
- He thought of himself as normal -- and was normal. But he was also identifiably from a talented family, one in love, not unlike Salinger's Glass family, with the ability to impose their notional world on the real one.
- ...Wallace liked to practice signing his name: Dave W. David W. "Hi," he introduced himself in a letter to his teacher when he was 9. "My name is David. W. But just call me Dave." (4)
- At night he would lie in bed and think of all the things that were wrong with his body. As he remembered in a later note: "Feet too thin and narrow and toes oddly shaped, ankles too thin, calves not muscular enough; thighs squnch out repulsively when you sit down; pecker too small or if not too small in terms of shortness too small in terms of circumference." (7)
- He was unusually good at assessing power dynamics. (7)
- There is another thread that weaves in and out of Wallace's childhood. He believed in later years that the mental disease that would in many ways define his life began at this time. "Summer, 71 or 72" -- Wallace was nine or ten -- "First occasion of 'Depressive, clinically anxious feelings,'" he wrote in a medical history summary toward the end of his life. He became excessively afraid of mosquitoes, especially of their buzzing. (8)
- Wallace made two important discoveries in his early teen years: tennis and marijuana. These were the twin helpers that carried him through high school. (8)
- But biology cannot be outrun forever.
- As a (tennis) instructor, Wallace let his pleasure in words play out. Noticing that in tennis manuals overheads were usually abbreviated OH, he started calling them "hydroxides." And he would name his teams after sections of Ulysses: the Wandering Rocks and Oxen of the Sun. Another year he ran drills and any player who botched one had to listen to a section of Wallace's life story (made up). (9)
- Marijuana - the other great find of his youth - helped Wallace with his self-consciousness and calmed a growing anxiety. Pot in the late 1970s was everywhere in the Midwest. Not quite legal, it was all the same barely hidden, a companion to beer as a recreational drug. (...) Pot also deepened the consciousness of beauty - or at least they thought so. (10)
- Wallace preferred to smoke standing on a chair in an upstairs bedroom blowing the smoke out with an exhaust fan so no one would notice it. He may have had himself in mind when he wrote of Hal in Infinite Jest, another pothead, that he was "as attached to the secrecy as he was to getting high." (10-11)
- Pot was what worked, allowing Wallace both calm and emotional privacy. But he also knew it could cause its own anxiety, marooning him in a private, claustrophobic consciousness. In such moments nothing was clear or stable and thoughts circled in on themselves in a way that called unassailable truths -- the meaning of words, the structure of reality -- into question. In a later essay, he would remember the problems with getting high, recalling how under the drug's influence... (11)
- ...the anxiety that had been shimmering just below the surface of his life grew into full-blown panic attacks. He was not sure what set them off, but he saw that they quickly became endless loops, where he worried that people would notice he was panicking, and that in turn would make him panic more. This was a crucial moment for Wallace's mental life and one he would never forget -- __he saw clearly the danger of a mind unhinged, of the danger of thinking responsive only to itself. From these experiences he would derive a lifelong fear of the consequences of mental and, eventually, emotional isolation._ (12)
- __"My chest bumps like a dryer with clothes in it. I compose what I project will be seen as a smile. I turn this way and that, slightly, sort of directing the expression to everyone in the room... I hold tight to the sides of my chair.__" (13)
- But anxiety and the fear of anxiety were woven into his behavior by now too, and even as he tried to open himself up to the range of college experiences, he also protectively narrowed his life. He was happiest when things were predictable, when his work was under control and the people around him familiar. In Stearns he quickly developed routines. (14)
- His roommates, without knowing precisely what, suspected him to be under some sort of unusual stress. Javit remembers being surprised when Wallace, whom he usually found cerebral & low-key, would once in a while open the window of their room in the morning & scream out into the quad, "I love it here!" There was a loneliness to him, too, in their eyes. The other two boys had visits from family; they had friends. Wallace gave off the impression of having neither; his mother had dropped him there & left. (17)
- There was a moment in many of his fellow students' lives when they realized Wallace was not just smart but stunningly smart, as smart as anyone they had ever met. (18)
- Wallace's fear of germs was typical of his phobic mind. It was at once real & exaggerated, with an overlay of self-deprecating comedy to both underscore and hide the hurt.
- Wallace, his friends noticed, looked different now. He no longer wore the generic clothes -- the corduroys & White Sox & Bears T-shirts of the Midwest -- choosing instead worn thrift-shop T-shirts & torn shorts, often with his beloved hoodie. He like untied Timberland boots & double socks. The sartorial change was representative of an interior one. He was beginning to distance himself from the culture of the Midwest that had formed him, where one could be radical but never rude. Adopting the "dirt bomb" look, as it was called, was one small way of saying he was done trying to be Joe College. (24-25)
- Wallace, in thrall to his galloping mind, could not write short. (26)
- Wallace was intense, with a brain that seemed to whirr faster than he could speak, and he was funny, shooting off clever comments & entertaining with his impressions. (27)
- (Charlie McLagan)'s two cats named Crime & Punishment. (30)
- While they tripped, Wallace & McLagan would listen over & over to "The Big Ship" by Brian Eno on McLagan's expensive stereo. McLagan heard birth in it; Wallace thought it captured the earth in the time of the dinosaurs.
- And he showed you that the tone & sensibility of mainstream culture -- Lot 49 drew its energy from pop songs, TV shows, and thrillers -- could sit alongside serious issues in fiction. (31)
- For McLagan, killing yourself could be the fitting -- maybe even necessary -- exit for the sensitive artist from the brutal world. (33)
- "You now see before you, indirectly at least, the real 'Waller': an obscurely defective commodity that has also been somewhat damaged in transit." (34)
- A literary sensibility is emerging too. The prose feels fraught & necessary. The writing conveys a sense that consciousness tricks & torments us, helps us build a wall to hide from who we are, yet at the same time the pleasure-giving power of words eases the despair of the story, along with a hope that love can rescue, a wispy hint that is quickly obliterated & will not appear in Wallace's work again for many years. (36)
- What is most original & distinctive in "Trillaphon," though, is the precision with which the narrator captures what it is like to be deeply depressed, his skillful evocation of a state of mind he wants us urgently to understand. (36)
- "...you are the sickness yourself... You realize this, here. And that, I guess, is... when you look at the black hole & it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed"; we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly." (37)
- He had relationships, avidly & with guilt. He began what he called his "body count." (42)
- When McLagan asked him how things were going, Wallace told him the book was coming so fast it was like a scroll unwinding in his head; he wasn't the author so much as the transcriber. (43)
- Wittgenstein: "The world is everything that is the case." Language -- and by extension thought -- only hold dominion over things of which we can have direct sensual knowledge. The Tractatus's preface begins, "This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it -- or similar thoughts." (44)
- Wallace's fictional manuscript & the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it & even altered it. Does our understanding of what we experience derive from objective reality or from cognitive limitations within us? Is language a window or a cage?"
- The overwhelming influence is Pynchon: from him come the names, the ambiance of low-level paranoia, and the sense of America as a toxic, media- and entertainment-saturated land. He took the flat, echoing tone of his dialogue from Don DeLillo, whose novels he had been reading while working on the book. (47)
- The farrago of forms -- stories within stories, transcripts of meetings, duty logs, rock medleys, and madcap set pieces -- comes from Pynchon too, as well as from other postmodernists like Barthelme & John Barth. (47)
- But he had also discovered something more important about himself -- he knew now what he wanted to do. Fiction held him as no other effort had; it took him out of time & released him from some of the pain of being himself. He told his roommates that when he was writing, "I can't feel my ass in the chair." (48-49)
- Wallace arrived in Tucson in mid-August. Arizona's beauty was revelatory to him. The light was different, the dunelike mountains "lunar." "They," he told his college friends in an audio letter they sent to one another that fall, "catch the sun in really pretty ways, really interesting ways." "Accidents in Tucson," he continued, "are basically people hypnotized by the sun, looking out through the screen." He thought he could be happy there, amid the browned-out lawns & the catcus-dotted foothills. (51)
- One story he focused on was "Forever Overhead," the tale of a 13-year-old boy who stands atop a high-dive board on his birthday & contemplates his imminent leap into maturity. The boy wants both to turn back & to get in the pool. Frozen atop the tower, he certainly experiences anxieties familiar to Wallace. "You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking," the narrator notes. Wallace uses the boy's moment of doubt to encapsulate the ambivalence he felt about his own passage from childhood to his teen years (or perhaps the perils of writing). In the end the boy will dive, as he must. "The board will nod & you will go," the narrator intones, "and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-botched sky that is forever, punctured light emptying behind sharp skin that is forever. Step into the skin & disappear." The story was not typical of the writing Wallace was becoming interested in -- it would soon seem to him sentimental & overblown -- but in his early days in Arizona he was happy with how easily everything came to him. (55)
- He knew where the levers of academic control were & how to work them. But he still had no gift when it came to human interactions. His default mode was to show off in a way that struck others as less than nice. (56)
- Yet his cockiness was always muted by politeness & even graciousness... His decorousness bordered at times on parody. (57)
- Wallace tried to make friends with them in his usual way by asking how they could call themselves fiction writers without having read Derrida, but they got past this. (57)
- He mined them for material, as he did everyone. (57)
- ...Gale Walden, a young poet. She came from the Chicago area & embodied everything his parents in their house of reason were skeptical of. Her thinking was elliptical & imaginative & seemed to hold the promise of a less anxious relationship to reality. She consulted the horoscope, owned tarot cards, and wore vintage beaded sweaters in the Arizona heat. (58)
- There was a mythopoeic, volatile quality to their relationship. (59)
- Trying to write in a new way was not a goal unique to Wallace; it is the exemplary act of each new literary generation. (59)
- As a writer, he was a folder-in & includer, a maximalist, someone who wanted to capture the everything of America. (60)
- He was interested in the way their simple narratives swept up & held the reader and, in the case of Ellis, how he used brand names as shorthand for cultural information like status & even to stand in for emotional states. "What should we be writing about?" he demanded to know, "Horses and buggies?" (61)
- But the last scene erupts into a Malamud-like moment of magic, a rapturous love-making in a cemetery as witnessed by Too Pretty, a pimp, high on heroin, who happens to drive by: "I be sittin up straight in my ride, & she be doin my man standin up, they be doin each other like children, too clean, too happy, my mans ass on marble, & theres no noise I can hear but by breathin & ... this high thin whine of the burnin gate & the stones that be flashin a fire of they own light in the sun." (63-64)
- ...Wallace, who sweated heavily even when he wasn't in the grip of anxiety, took to wearing his tennis bandana off the court. As the months passed at Arizona, he let his hair grow; the bandana became useful to hold it back. The look felt right -- part of his rejection of midwestern conformity, a light shock to the bourgeois that also kept the sweat of his face -- and he began trying out various headscarves to see others' reaction. (64)
- When the two first spoke by phone, Wallace called her "Ms. Nadell," until he found out she was only a year older than he. He had so little cash he asked her to make a copy of the manuscript for him. "I defy you to picture a boy living on Ritz crackers & grape Kool-Aid... and be unmoved." Nadell had no money either & instead got a friend at a publisher to photocopy it. (66)
- ...but Nadell remembers Wallace as happy w/ his new triple-barreled moniker. He had been experimenting w/ various names since he was a little boy & the homage to his literary mother was fitting. (66)
- ...(editor at Viking Penguin, Gerry Howard) had an affection for postmodernism & nostalgia for the literary culture it came out of. He loved words & word games & writing that exposed the artificiality of narrative. He was steeped in the works of Pynchon & had edited an anthology of prose from the 1960s as well. But he also thought Broom was different, that it used postmodernism in new ways. He remembers reading the manuscript & thinking he was reading something truly new, "a portent for the future of American fiction," as he remembered it: "It wasn't just a style but a feeling he was expressing, one of playful exuberance... tinged w/ a self-conscious self-consciousness." For him -- and for many others who would read the book -- Wallace held the hope for an alternative to minimalism & to Ellis-type fiction, a way out of the etiolated mind-set in its loneliness. Words tumbling over words might, it suggested, overwhelm the depressing anomie of American life. (66)
- Accusations that he was careless or meandered set Wallace on edge. It mattered enormously to him that the power of his mind be acknowledged. (68)
- The membrane theory was one of his favorite moments of the book. It was the unbalanced Dr. Jay's assertion that human relations could be entirely understood w/ regard to the struggle over the boundary between the self & the other. Physical limits were mental limits too: "Hygiene anxiety," the therapist points out, "is identity anxiety." The membrane around us kept us safe & clean but also carried the risk of isolating us. It sounded Freudian, came out of Wallace's reading of literary theory, & struck a cord w/ the hygiene-obsessed Wallace. (68-69)
- ...he wrote Howard that the idea of the physics of reading had "made an enormous, haunting impression on me." He assured him that he didn't want his novel to be like "Kafka's 'Investigations of a Dog' ... Ayn Rand or late Gunter Grass, or Pynchon at his rare worst." To him these were writings that gave pleasure only to their authors. (70)
- "I am young & confused & obsessed w/ certain problems that I think right now distill the experience of being human in a human community," he begged Howard. "Can you help me with this?" What he meant was he knew reality to be fragmented, oblique, unbalanced, & his book had to capture that fragmentation if that experience was to count for anything -- that was why he wrote the way he did.
- They had a routine together. "How'd you get to be so smart?" JT would ask. "'Cause I did the reading," Wallace would respond.
- When he & Gale finally got to Tucson -- "two broken limping cars across the desert," as Walden would remember it in a late poem, they found Amy hurt & bewildered, her feet bleeding from Heather's borrowed shoes. (74)
- On the trip, Wallace listened to the southwestern accents. He had long wanted to write a variation on William Gass's novel Omensetter's Luck. The laconic hillbilly voice of the story appealed to him. (...) "He was trying to get the cadence of the dialogue down." (...) There was, as ever, an element of parody in the homage. The goal was to push the original author out of sight. (74)
- He was still convinced that theory was what separated the serious novelist from the others, that without it writers were just entertainers. His interest in theory, like his fondness for stories with strong voices, also had a compensatory element. It served to satisfy energies that would have been frustrated had they gone into fiction writing he did not naturally excel at, like character development. It was a handy refuge for a writer who was still an odd combination of a mimic & engineer. (74)
- "Little Expressionless Animals" was Wallace's first attempt to treat seriously issues that had been mostly played for laughs in Broom. Its central preoccupation is the relationship between people & the images they appropriate from media to shape & infuse their thoughts. (75)
- Wallace was maturing as a writer. The preoccupation w/ media no went deeper than just a statement of purpose. The voice of the story was diffuse, hovering, omnipresent w/o being omniscient. (...) "Wallace does not, in fact, tell the story. Instead he inhabits for extended moments the airspace around the characters." This charged airspace is where the artistic activity of the story resides. (...) What is at stake for the main character? Everything, and also nothing, the story's tension residing, w/ the narrator, in the ether above her. (76)
- They wanted to standardize his prose, not understanding how thoroughly thought through were his departures from standard grammar. If he used a comma in an unusual place or chose to indicate direct speech w/ single quotes rather than the usual double ones, there was a reason. (77)
- The effort was an early example of the paradoxical approach that would come to dominate Wallace's later fiction: a passionate need for encounter telegraphed by sentences that seem ostentatiously to prohibit it, as if only by passing through all the stages of bureaucratic deformation can we touch each other as human beings. (78)
- More important, he was aware that the teacher-student relationship was one of performer & spectator. The teacher was under constant pressure to entertain if he wanted to be liked - and no one wanted to be liked more than Wallace did. The bind was not just that he did not think he could do it, but that if he did do it, was he actually doing something he would admire himself for having done? (79)
- But once he had decided to become good at something, Wallace usually succeeded. It was the decision to dive, not the entry into the water that was hard. Quickly, he became a top instructor, charismatic & popular. He scoured every piece of undergraduate writing striving to overwhelm the students w/ the volume & sincerity of his comments. (80)
- What he wrote of Julie Smith in "Little Expressionless Animals" applied equally to him: "This girl not only kicks facts in the ass. This girl informs trivia w/ import. She makes it human, something w/ the power to emote, evoke, induce, cathart." And as with Julie Smith, there was at once an out-of-proportion commitment & a hint of irony to his behavior. (80)
- Teaching taught him a hard lesson, though: he had only a limited amount of energy. If he taught, that drew down the tank with which he wrote. (80)
- ..."an ambitious, irreverent novel that speaks to the anxieties & concerns of a new generation..." (81)
- ...they at least tended to appreciate that a writer in his mid-20s was reviving some of the energies of postmodern fiction in the midst of the entropic wasteland of minimalism. (81)
- "As in those novels, the charm & flaws of DFW's book are due to its exuberance -- cartoonish characters, stories within stories, impossible coincidences, a hip but true fondness for pop culture & above all the spirit of playfulness that has slipped away from so much recent fiction." (81)
- "rich reserves of ambition & imagination" (82)
- ...the emergence of a new, youthful self-questioning sensibility (81)
- Wallace made evident his disdain for the workshop writing he had spent the past 2 years battling. "I'm not interested in fiction that's only worried about capturing reality in an artful way," he asserted. "What pisses me off about so much fiction these days is that it's just boring." (84)
- (about _Blue Velvet_): "It was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn't exempt you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it obligated, it upped them... That whatever the project of surrealism is works way better if 99.9% of it is absolutely real... I mean, most of the word surrealism is realism, you know? It's extra-realism, it's something on top of realism. It's that one thing in a Lynch frame that's off, that, if everything else weren't picture-perfect & totally structured, wouldn't it." (85)
- Wallace wanted again to show the way media colonized everything from history to our private thoughts. (85-86)
- ...about more than Letterman; it's about understanding that the definition of what is admirable or acceptable behavior has changed. We no longer esteem those who know or care; we esteem those who affect not to know or care. There is no arguing with this cultural change, of which Letterman is just a symptom. (...) explaining that irony has become the language of the elite. "I think being seen as being aware is the big thing here." (86)
- Instead he saw submitting stories as sort of a game, publishing-tennis... (87)
- Metafiction was the sort of technique that had first formed the bridge for him from philosophy to fiction when he was at Amherst. It contained that 2nd level of meaning that made Wallace confident that what he was reading was intellectually richer than just entertainment ("meatfiction," the narrator of his new story calls it), and it was clever & sardonic, just as Wallace was. (90)
- ...he had also come to feel that there was something irritating about "Lost in the Funhouse," condescending, and, if you were a recursive cast of mind, false about the way Barth kept breaking into the narrative to show readers falsity. Didn't such an intrusion, in the end, just create more of a performance? Wasn't it seduction pretending to be renunciation? How in the end did Barth really propose to challenge or reward the reader? (90)
- Wallace's quintessentially metafictional mind is searching for something to move on to--but nothing is yet present. In its absence the story careers along like the car its MFA students ride in, endlessly, fitfully, & compulsively, battling the readers' needs. But the story is also evidence of how readily at the time Wallace was seeing connections around him -- between love & addiction, & storytelling & advertising, for instance -- beginning to put together a worldview that would be fundamental when he turned his attention to Infinite Jest a few years later. Foremost is the idea he debuted in his Arizona stories that our passions are no longer our own. In the age of media, we are nothing but minds to be filled, emotions waiting to be manipulated. There is a sense -- again brought to full boil in Infinite Jest -- that our obsession with being entertained has deadened our affect, that we are not, as a character warns in that book, choosing carefully enough what to love. And "Westward" suggests for the first time in Wallace's fiction that not just he but his whole generation share this difficulty. He begins to take the key step of universalizing his neurosis. (...) "Westward" also represented how seriously Wallace had come to take fiction, how much he believed that in the wrong hands it could demoralize & passify the unwary. (94)
- In general, he gyrated between wanting to impress & disliking himself for having such impulses, between making his mark as the genius in the room & getting his work done. (95)
- His mind was stuck in a loop & he cried in anguish. He talked on & on. Howard was now getting a first glimpse of the "obscurely defective" Wallace, the one having so much trouble being "human in a human community." He talked the 25-year-old Wallace down, he remembers, as if he were on "a bad acid trip." (97)
- ...and for a moment he was able to summon some joy at the sight of a New England fall again... "The leaves are threatening to get pretty already." (101)
- Teaching brought focus & a sense of accomplishment & the knowledge that he was honoring his parents, & Wallace needed all that. The students were astonished at his intensity. (102)
- Depressed, he was still not without romantic appeal. (103)
- No one in his orbit guessed the intensity of Wallace's suffering -- the television he watched (6-8 hrs a day, he told one of his students), the drinking, drugs, & loneliness. It was not that he was not trying to write; it was that he was not succeeding. (104)
- He had no experience writing w/o inspiration -- creativity was tied in to the manic part of his personality. (104)
- Behind the snark there was also a germ of true confusion, of mystification. If you were exploring the nature of reality, esp. media reality, didn't you have to enfold that reality in your work? (108)
- What had he done besides what a writer must do? He had taken several entertainments most Americans were so familiar with that they could not see how important they were & showed why they mattered. He had pointed out toxins in the culture & warned readers against them. He had been enormously but not falsely entertaining. Far from trying to make money off Pat Sajak's or David Letterman's reputations, he had showed how they made money off of us, off of our flaccid idea of humor & our corrupted sense of self. (109)
- For Wallace, the great flaw of most fiction was that it was content to display the symptoms of the current malaise rather than to solve it. Wallace wasn't even sure exactly what fiction that surmounted television-mediated reality would look like, but he believed that any writer who figured it out would sound different from one who wouldn't. (111)
- "This stuff is no fun," he added, "but I absolutely ran out of rope last winter, & I simply have got to find a different way to live." (113)
- He looked haggard, withdrawn, with slumped "barstool shoulders"... (115)
- He had 6 courses of ECT, & afterward Wallace's mother remembers that he emerged as delicate as a child. "He would ask, 'How do you make small talk?' 'How can you know which frying pan to pick out of the cupboard?'" (117)
- The book narrates the thoughts of Kate, a woman who is either the last person on earth or else deluded that she is. The novel dramatizes the Wittgensteinian stance that the world is nothing but observed facts, a proposition that leads, as Wallace would write in "The Empty Plenum," his essay on the book, to the belief that "one's head is, in some sense, the whole world." Kate's affectless thoughts thus could be a record of Wallace's mind at its most depressed: "...So that any few speculations I may have made about the person at the window would therefore now appear to be rendered meaningless, obviously. - Unless of course I subsequently become convinced that there is somebody at the window all over again." (121)
- Wallace admired the energy in rap, its careless creativity while he felt so burdened. He found the way the singers played w/ their own fame in their lyrics intriguingly postmodernist. There was also the irony to be explored that rap musicians were able to lift from others w/o fear to create their own art, just the transgression for which Viking Penguin had punished him. Wallace's passion for rap was theoretical, verbal, abstract. (...) His interest had the quality of a very smart kid slumming it. But he was drawn to its defiance, its opposition to the authority & decorum by which he had lived his difficult life. There was an element of self-hatred to his stance. If his world had collapsed, let art collapse with it. (122)
- Always interested in how media changed the reality it was meant to record... (124)
- "Stay Fly, and Shit... DF Fresh W." (125)
- He believed he knew the limits on his audience & accepted them. "The thing I like about my own prison," he wrote Moore shortly before arriving, "is I have tenure in my prison." (126)
- "...could possibly represent the first flowering of post-postmodernism: visions of the world that re-imagine reality as more realistic than we can imagine." These words perfectly captured Wallace's hope for the book. (128)
- Wallace found his stunning energy collapsing in on itself again. It was, he later told an interviewer, "as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, & there was actually nothing, & you were nothing, & it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, & yet you were worse because you couldn't function." (133)
- ...he had really expected ("Westard") to be a phoenix. From the ashes to which he had reduced postmodernism a new sort of fiction was meant to arise... (135)
- It would be the next best thing to McLean, which Wallace was, Costello noted -- sorry to have to leave. He had gotten used to the routines -- the meetings, the therapy, the order, the prepared meals -- not entirely unlike home. (136)
- ...order, no matter how foreign the context, was always easier for him than the unstructured world. (139)
- "...sometimes I'm scared or feel superior or both." (139)
- He remembered his last failed attempt to get sober & how he was no longer writing & asked himself what he had to lose. He came to understand that the key this time was modesty. "My best thinking got me here" was a recovery adage that hit home, or, as he translated it in Infinite Jest, "logical validity is not a guarantee of truth." He knew it was imperative to abandon the sense of himself as the smartest person in the room, a person too smart to be like one of the people in the room, because he was one of the people in the room. (139)
- Required to do house chores, Wallace helped out in the office. This gave him access to a typewriter. Stunned as he was, he understood from the beginning that his fall from grace was a literary opportunity. He had been hypothesizing beforehand about a nation in thrall to its appetites, & here he was living among its casualties. So in the midst of his misery, he was alive to the new information he was getting. The communal house, he would later write, "reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging & palpable." (...) This was the sort of access to interior lives a novelist could not get elsewhere. (140-141)
- A new clarity was beginning to emerge in his attempt to wrest such central concerns as self-consciousness & loneliness into controllable form. The prose style that would later separate Wallace's nonfiction from that of his peers was taking form. The approach owed something to Cavell's plainspokenness & to Bangs's hipster idiom & yet it was distinctive. It combined informal diction -- "way" as an adjective, "weird" & "sort of" where most would write "strange" & "to some extent" -- w/ recondite polysyllabic nouns, a mixture that hinted at the way high & low culture were jumbled in his mind. "And but so" became a way to begin his sentences, an apt phrase to kick off his hurrying, zigzagging thoughts. Wallace was beginning to find the meeting place between a brain in overdrive & a language that had been invented for more leisurely use. (142)
- "When I discovered writing in 1983 I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) & near-genital pleasure I'd not dared hope for from anything." (144)
- "I have in the last 2 years been struck dumb... Not dumb actually, or even aphasic. It's more like, w/r/t things I used to believe & let inform me, my thoughts now have the urgent but impeded quality of speechlessness in dreams." (144)
- Wallace, though, like a cancer patient trying to explain himself to a headache sufferer, did not think their discomfort was equivalent. (144)
- "I think back w/ much saliva to times in 1984, 5, 6, 7 when I'd sit down & look up & it would be hours later & there'd be this mess of filled-up notebook paper & I just felt wrung out & well-fucked &, well, blessed." (144)
- "
iction for me is a conversation between me & something that May Not be Named -- God, the Cosmos, the Unified Field, my own psychoanalitic cathexes, Roqoq'oqu, whomever. I do not feel even the hint of an obligation to an entity called READER -- do not regard it as his favor, rather as his choice, that duly warned, he is expended capital/time/retinal energy on what I've done." (145)
- "I cannot sit still," he wrote Markson, "can barely read, & have thoughts that don't race so much as intertwine in a boily & clotted & altogether nauseous way." (146)
- ...he knew only one way to seduce: overwhelm. (147)
- She felt an affinity for him, considered him brilliant but also unsound. (147)
- "I'd forgotten how young college students are. They're infants, though: you can see the veins in their little eyelids, you almost have to cradle their heads to help their necks support the skull's weight." (148)
- Predictably, he found therapy both appealingly & apprehensively absorbing. But it gave him another tool to deal w/ moments of frustration such as this one. "There is absolutely nothing I can do except accept the situation as it is & wait patiently for some fullness-of-time-type change," he wrote Moore. "The alternative to patience is going back to the way I used to live, which Drs. & non-hysterics at the rehab told me would have killed me, & in a most gnarly & inglorious way, before I was 30." (149-150)
- "The Authors -- white, educated, middle class -- occupy a peculiar position, at once marginal & crucial to rap's us & them equations." (150)
- He wrote Nadell in the spring of 1991, as much to reassure himself as his agent, that things would change: "Please don't give up on me. I want to be a writer now way more than in 1985. I think I can be better than I was but it's going to take time -- and believe me, I know that quite a bit of time has elapsed already... Do not assume, please, that I am being slothful or distracted because I have not sent you any fiction to publish. Do not assume I've given up in despair, or that I've burned out. I haven't, I swear. It may be a couple more years before I finish anything both long & respectable, but I will. Please don't forget me, & please don't let Gerry forget me either... I write daily, on a schedule, am at least publishing hackwork & I will be a fiction writer or die trying. (154)
- "It seems like the big distinction between good art & so-so art lies... in being willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet." (155)
- Postmodern fiction's original ironists -- writers like Pynchon & sometimes Barth -- were telling important truths that could only be told obliquely, (Wallace) felt. But irony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman & alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." Then he continued: "This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical & destructive, a ground-clearing... Irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrises it debunks." That was it exactly -- irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, & so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say. (156)
- For Wallace to orchestrate his material was enormously complex, & as he rewrote scenes he must have had to work hard to keep straight the various voices he was using. He had always been good at mimicry, but the voices in the recovery house chapters are subtler & truer than in the other sections. They seem to descend from a caring narrator rather than be roused up as proof of his talent. Wallace created dozens of characters, many capturing aspects of how he saw himself. (161)
- Infinite Jest was filled w/ the languages Wallace had learned in Boston -- from drug addict lingo to Alcoholics Anonymous slogans. (163)
- Wallace & Franzen drove down to Swarthmore the next day, discussing the purpose of literature nearly the whole way. Wallace argued that it was to alleviate loneliness & give comfort, to break through what he characterized in Infinite Jest as each person's "excluded engagement in the self." (...) After he got home, he wrote Franzen that their chat had been "among the most nourishing for me in recent memory"... (164)
- Children had a quality Wallace would increasingly crave in those around him: they were drawn to him w/o crowding him . They were part of a group of people -- students, recovery friends, ordinary people unconnected to the fiction business -- whom he admitted to his circle because they left him room. Such people, he wrote to Franzen, "make me feel both unalone & unstressed." (165)
- Wallace's real religion was always language anyway. It alone could shape & hold multitudes; by comparison God's power was spindly. That was why he was obsessed w/ grammar; as he put it in a letter to Franzen, "If words are all we have as world & god, we must treat them w/ care & rigor: we must worship." (166)
- (to Mark Leyner): "Is it sufficient to entertain people as spectacularly as you have," he asked now, in his thin voice, "or should there be a further moral purpose to your work?" (168)
- ...he had blossomed into a committed therapand, as eager to ferret out the roots of his personal malaise as he'd once been to crack logical paradoxes. He went to group therapy & also he had a private therapist, whom he paid cash b/c he had no health insurance. His hope was that his background or upbringing might at least partly explain his depressions & addictions. Yes, he had a chemical imbalance, but why? What had happened to make him into this anxious, agitated, & needy 30-year-old? (169)
- He printed out in huge letters on a computer the words "MARRY ME" and added, "No shit, Mary Karr, do not doubt my seriousness on this. Or the fact that I'm a gila-jawed bulldog once I've finally made a commitment, a promise. My expectation is not that it would be easy, or all the time pleasant. My expectation is that it would be real, & illuminated." (170)
- "Brains & wit & technical tightrope-calisthenics are powerful tools in fiction, but I believe that when they're used primarily to keep the reader at arm's length they're being abused - they are functioning as defense mechanisms. Leyner is a hidden writer, as so many exhibitionists & actors & comedians & intellectuals are hidden. I do not wish to be a hidden person, or a hidden writer. It is lonely." (172)
- "I want to improve as a writer, & I want to author things that both restructure worlds & make living people feel stuff..." (173)
- ...he wrote Franzen in September, "Word on the streets is that fall here is beautiful but very brief: snows swirl by Halloween." (173)
- They found Wallace stunningly smart & committed. In "E Unibus Pluram," Wallace quoted Emerson that once or twice in a lifetime one met a man who "carries the holiday in his eye." (174)
- ...a writer with deeper goals & purer motivations, he continued: "Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself & illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, & this stuff turns out (paradoxially) to be precisely the stuff all writers & readers everywhere share & respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself & to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable." (175)
- That's what it meant to live under the new administration of fun: no more irony & distance, commitment not spectation (a favorite word of his), involvement. And even, where possible, the hope of redemption. "Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished(...) but it'd find a way both to depict this world & to illuminate the possibilities of being alive & human in it." The writer's job was to give "CPR to those elements of what's human & magical that still live & glow despite the times' darkness." He added, "Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being." Wallace had always preferred certainty to unclarity, passion to incrementalism, & now he was a full-fledged apostle of sincerity. (178)
- "The obvious fact that the kids don't Want to Write so much as Want to be Writers makes their letters so depessing." (...) he gave some unbending advice, "Take this time to learn to be your own toughest critic & best friend... I wish I had... Concentrate on the work, loving it & hating it & making it the best & truest expression of yourself it can be; the publishing stuff will come." He added, "I'm mostly saying this to myself at 22, 23." (178)
- Alone in the summer heat of the Illinois flatlands... (179)
- It came under the rubric of "pay it forward" that he had learned at Granada House: if you help someone, when you need help someone will be there for you too. (180)
- Familyless, he was adoptable... (180)
- These women filled an important gap in his life. They were the clock by which he noted time's passing & the mirror in which he examined his character. (180)
- "I'm having to countenance the fact that I just may be constitutionally unable to sustain an intimate connection w/ a girl, which means I'm either terribly shallow or mentally ill or both." (180)
- Kymberly was astonished at the intense way Wallace listened. (181)
- (about _Infinite Jest_): "It's a novel made up out of shards, almost as if the story were something broken that someone is picking up the pieces of. This fits w/ the broken lives the novel's about; also as a way of recreating 2 worlds, the halfway house & the tennis academy... Occasionally there surfaces through the stories an "I" who may be the one trying to put everything together." --> DFW? Hal? (182)
- ...the state fair was a subject w/ natural boundaries & one that invited a light style that moved to bigger, more serious questions: What made Americans so obsessed w/ entertainment? Could whatever void they were trying to plug ever be filled? (...) It was another chance to assert the thesis of Infinite Jest, to anatomize the unending American quest for distraction, the failure of his countryman (...) As Remy Marathe, the Quebecois terrorist agent, says in IJ, "Choose with care. You are what you love, no?" (186)
- The story was likely made up, but its exaggerated stance toward the traumas of childhood captured something readers began to want from him. They, too, this affluent & confused generation, had felt the large reverberations inherent in small events. That Wallace had a slightly more neurotic version of his reader helped forge a bond..." (186-87)
- No one could call themselves a writer, he added, until he or she had written at least 50 stories. (188)
- He read every story 3 times & marked it up w/ each pass -- one for first impressions, a 2nd time to evaluate how well it did as a work of fiction, & a 3rd time as if it were about to go to press. (188)
- ...his goals were traditional. The story should connect reader & writer. "Go somewhere it is difficult to get to. Try to tell about something you care about," he would say. Or, "What is at stake in this story?" he would ask, parroting just the question he'd found so irksome from the professors at Arizona almost a decade before. If a story shied away from emotional potential, Wallace would write on their papers, "This is a skater. See me." And to those who insisted on the intellect over the heart, he'd order, "Write about a kid whose bunny died." He was making a clear statement about the purpose of fiction. If the heart throbbed, who cared what the head did? (188)
- He understood that a dog was not a relationship w/ another person & yet he saw the advantages. Dogs didn't have acting careers; they didn't compete w/ you for grant money; & when you lavished love on them it made you feel good about yourself. (...) "It's just much easier having dogs. You don't get laid; but you also don't get the feeling you're hurting their feelings all the time." (189)
- He found himself unable to set limits. In some ways Jeeves was an avatar of him -- or of how he saw himself -- ungainly, honest, quick to give his love, a rebounder from constant disappointment. Any form of discipline for Jeeves just seemed to him cruelty; he felt keenly the least whimper of pain from the animal. It was easier for him to be mean to a person than a pet. (189)
- ...Gately was beginning to take the book over from Hal Incandenza. The change limned his own journey post-sobriety, from clever to mindful. (190)
- "I have never felt so much a failure, or so mute when it comes to articulating what I see as a way out of the ironic loop." (191)
- It captured the sense of terrified isolation that is key to the story, the worry that what we feel we can never express. And it held out a hope rarely signaled in Wallace's earlier work but dear to his recovery experiences: the possibility that telling a story can heal. (193)
- "...because everything in it's connected to everything else, at least in my head. The whole thing may be incoherent for all I know. At this point I have no idea. It's like not knowing what your family looks like: you live right up close to something so long & it blinds you. I just want it done." (196)
- "I am sad & empty, as I always am when I finish something long." (196)
- "In less narcotizing words, English 102 aims to show you some ways to read fiction more deeply, to come up w/ more interesting insights on how pieces of fiction work, to have informed intelligent reasons for liking or disliking a piece of fiction, & to write -- clearly, persuasively, & above all interestingly -- about stuff you've read." (198)
- (Wallace was) "an engineer of literature," pulling out the building blocks of stories -- voice, narrative structure, point of view. He often used writers of popular fiction -- Jackie Collins, Thomas Harris, & Tom Clancy among others -- for this purpose, because the components of their fiction were easy to identify & it also made the point that a story did not have to be hard to be worth reading. (198)
- "Gately's hitting bottom... is gorgeous & very very powerfully sad..." (199)
- (on buying a house) Wallace had never owned anything bigger than a car before & he approached his new possession as if everything to do w/ it were a cause of wonder, a stance that also served to reassure him that though he was now a homeowner he had not totally sold out. "I bought a house," he wrote to Don DeLillo in May (...) "and I am not keen on becoming a lawn-obsessed homeowner." (200-01)
- "I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am -- for just an example -- self-centered & careerist & not true to standards & values that transcend my own petty interests, & feel like I'm not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact that here at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, & I imagine that maybe people w/o any integrity at all don't notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself (I mean, at least this stuff is on my mind, at least I'm dissatisfied w/ my level of integrity & commitment); but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to (imagined) Others... It has to do w/ God & gods & a basic sense of trust in the universe v. fear that the universe must be held at bay & micromanaged into giving me some smidgeon of some gratification I feel I simply can't live without. It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest & candid, but I'm also proud of how honest & candid I am -- so where does that put me." (203)
- "The crux, for me, is how to love the reader w/o believing that my art or worth depends on his(her) loving me. It's just about that simple in the abstract. In practice it's a daily fucking war." (203)
- "...the mistaken American belief that pleasure can do anything other than stoke the need for more pleasure." (204)
- Wallace was vulnerable to being wanted... (208)
- Wasn't (Wallace's time in Grenada) comparable to Dostoevsky's exile in Siberia, where the Russian had first seen how much he had in common w/ the most desperate souls? (208-09)
- Here was a writer impossible in modern America, one earnestly & unapologetically moral. He wrote in a notebook around this time: "Hyperconsciousness makes like meaningless... but what of will to construct OWN meaning? Not the world that gives us meaning but vice versa? Dost embodies this--Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers--they do not. Their fictions reduce to complaints & self-pity. Dostoevski has BALLS." (209)
- (about IJ) It spoke of the imminence of collapse & the possibility that one can emerge stronger from that collapse. It offered faith apart from religion. Its multiple voices jibed w/ an America that no longer spoke as one, an America in which, as in James Incandenza's films, "you could bloody well hear every single performer's voice, no matter how far out on the... narrative periphery they were." It captured a new generation of young people -- esp. young ones, esp. male -- who in the midst of plenty felt misunderstood or ignored, who w/ each decade had less & less idea how to make their rich inner selves visible, who understood what Hal meant when he objected: "I'm not a machine. I feel & believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk & talk. Let's talk about anything." (214)
- ...the same concern: how to live meaningfully in the present. There is a generosity to the world created by this 1,079-page novel. A great intelligence hangs above it & seems not entirely uninterested in our survival. (215)
- IJ, for all its putative difficulty, cares about the reader, & if it denies him or her a conventional ending, it doesn't do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic story-telling can, because, just as in Ennett House, you have to work to get better. The book is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are (there is a reason Wallace had to reach back to Dostoevsky for a model). Gately abides, taking on, almost in a Christlike way, the sins of his flock, & Christ implies a God. Wallace never forgets his pledge, as he told McCaffery, that "all the attention & engagement & work you need to get from the reader can't be for your benefit; it's got to be for hers." (215)
- ...dubbed IJ "The Grunge American Novel," signaling the link between a fragmented novel of fragmented souls & a cultural movement led by singers like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana characterized by a similar affect. There was considerable truth to it; both proffered an awkward sincerity. They shared an allergy to facades, to disco-type slickness. IJ's jagged multiple-conjunction-opening sentences held the same promise of authenticity as the primitive musical arrangement & bad amping of Seattle garage bands. Both music & novel implied that communication had gotten harder & harder, hitting walls of isolation too high to scale, reducing us to diminished gestures, preferences, grunts. (221)
- "When I was younger," Wallace told an interviewer... "I saw my relationship w/ the reader as sort of a sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation w/ really good friends, when the bullshit stops & the masks come off." (221)
- "I think I made it a project not to look in the mirror during that party... because I knew that a whole lot of other people were looking at me, & if I thought about what I looked like, I was going to go crazy." (222)
- Pietsch wrote Wallace that readers were calling him at the office to try out theories about the ending. "It reminds me of the exhilaration I felt finishing Gravity's Rainbow for the first time & finding someone else who'd read it to knock brains with." (225)
- (Wallace_ was too self-aware not to see the paradox that his attempt to condemn seduction had proven so seductive. He had tried to write a splintered entertainment, to remind people of the dangers of spectation, & instead he had wound up prying open their wallets w/ Leyner-like adroitness. He had hoped readers would read his book twice, but whether they had read it at all was the question. Had IJ become another entertainment cruise ship, bright lights on an empty sea? (225)
- Being back was a relief. He felt again the "weird warm full excitement of coming home..." (227)
- There was something stunning about the experiential aspect of the essays in the book too, the ones whose technique Wallace described in an interview as "basically an enormous eyeball floating around something, reporting what it sees." Their very length spoke of commitment, discomfort, the importance of caring in a world urging you constantly to lighten up. It was like listening to your best friend in grad school, tirelessly willing to absorb, reason, confront, embrace but never accept. (228)
- "His contradictions are his strength..." (229)
- "I've spent all summer doing dozens of obscure ministories that seem neither comprehensible nor interesting to anyone else..." (...) he spent his days in his black room, writing "weird little 1-pagers" (...) - almost metaphysical apercus about the hazy intersection of cognition & the world, vignettes he grouped together under the heading "Another instance of the Porousness of Certain Borders." What had made the scope of his imagination contract so radically? (235)
- (For DeLillo) it was the act of writing that carried him forward: "I have fun when I find myself gliding on language & when the story seems to drive itself forward & when I'm able to give a character his or her most unexpected expression," he wrote. Still, novel writing, w/ its isolation & the uncertainty about what one had achieved, was never going to be a picnic. (236)
- (DeLillo) "But of course reader & writer are dealing from different perspectives. Where you see fun in my work, I remember doubt, confusion & indecision, & now experience considerable regret, particularly over the earlier books." (236-7)
- And (DeLillo) ended w/ a compliment, meant to give Wallace a sense of belonging to an elite for whom this sort of suffering was the price of membership: "When I saw the novel is a killer, I am reserving this designation for writers who are smart enough, sensitive enough & good enough to realize the dangers & consequently to respect the form. You have to be good before you even sense the danger, or before you can understand what it takes to succeed. Let the others complain about book tours." (237)
- ..."which I know is horseshit but still makes it hard to breathe." (238)
- He came to blame the fame that adhered to him since IJ. He came back to an image of celebrity that had absorbed him since he'd worked on that book. In those pages, an assistant coach lectures a reporter about why he feels the need to protect his players from the media: "For you it's about entertainment & personality, it's about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they'll never be slaves to the statue, they'll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a 3rd story window when they start getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade." (239-240)
- Now Wallace was wondering whether he hadn't become a literary statue, "the version of myself" as he wrote a friend at the time, "that I want others to mistake for the real me." The statue was "a Mask, a Public Self, False Self or Object-Cathect." What made the statue esp. deadly to Wallace was that it depended for its subsistence on the complicated interplay between writer & public. Not just: You are loved. But also: You love being loved. You are addicted to being loved. (240)
- He was now frozen by his own need to be the person others saw him as. (240)
- ...but in its intense distancing sentences one feels Wallace examining the shards of his childhood again & again, trying to construct a whole w/o bringing it so close it will hurt him again. (242)
- In all, the convention left him w/ much the same feeling as the Caribbean cruise had: how sad the world was when you opened your eyes, how much pain it contained. "Some of the starlets are so heavily made up," he wrote in the article, "they look embalmed. They have complexly coiffed hair that tends to look really good from 20 feet away but on closer inspection is totally dry & dead." (245)
- ...as he began organizing & revising the stories for a collection, he became more excited by how powerful they were as a group. They centered on fear, longing, anxiety, depression, & boundaries, the challenge of being human in an inhospitable time. Many of the stories examined courtship behavior -- his, of course, which was particularly nauseating to him at times -- but also the entire back-and-forth that he had witnessed between men & women, fortified by the many stories he'd heard in recovery & in relationships. (246)
- ...he wanted to write about the function of language more broadly, what it really meant to speak of a "common language." Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus. "Issues of language, looked at closely even for a moment... become issues of Everything -- from neurology to politics to Aristotelian pisteis to Jaussian Kritik to stuff like etiquette & clothing fashions." (250)
- ...75 channels. Wallace would sit & click through the stations, landing on one, then moving on to the next, always afraid he was missing something better & so really watching nothing. (251)
- Wallace, who never lost his hope that he could find faith, signed up for an ecumenical Christian program called cursillo: the goal "to bring God from the head to the heart." But his new attempts to join a formal religion did not get much father than the one w/ Karr. At the final ceremony, when the participants were meant to attest their belief in God, Wallace expressed his doubts instead. Faith was something he could admire in others but never quite countenance for himself.
- "I too have used outrage, abrasiveness, & irritation as a way to keep people at arm's length... So trust me: it is a bush-league defense, & painfully obvious in the terror it betrays."
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