Activity

That was five years ago; we have been separated since then and I can say that not a single day has passed during those long years (so brief, so dazzlingly swift fr you!) without my remembering your remark. "You don't love your country!" When I think of your words today, I feel a choking sensation. …

In using the IRS as representative of neoliberalism in general, The Pale King is able to connect neoliberalism back to boredom in an illuminating way. This becomes evident when David Wallace remarks that "[t]he real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes, and stakes i…

An even more damning comment on this older existential discourse occurs in the middle of Chris Fogle's story of personal conversion from “wastoid" to IRS devotee and wiggler. Fogle describes taking, ironically enough, a "Literature of Alienation" course during his "nihilistic" years at Fogle's fail…

Among Wallace's notes for The Pale King are scattered references to Walker Percy's nonfiction, specifically to his volume The Message in the Bottle [...] the essay from Percy's book that most directly engages with The Pale King is "The Man on the Train" [...]

Percy begins the essay by iden…

[...] there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what it's like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that's just the first level, because the idea of menta…