[...] they, were not sulking, that they had shut their mouths, it was take it or leave it, and that anger and impotence sometimes caused such pain you couldn't even cry out. They were men, that's all, and they were not about to go around smiling and simpering.
Garlands of stars were falling from the black sky above the palm tree and the houses. She ran along the short avenue, now empty, that led the fort. The cold, no longer needing to struggle against the sun, had invaded the night; the icy air burned her lungs. But she ran, half blind, in the darkness.…
[...] Yes, it's great, this voice says, but might another product be greater? In this way Wallace expands the problem of use value and taste Karrier encountered: pursuing exhange value, especially as financial instruments grow more "advanced," almost inevitably leaves the body and feelings behind. …
[...] But "Crash of '69," the final title, suggests the theme is the crash of balance itself--note that the 6 and 9, unhinged from reference to a year, denote yin and yang, one's head chasing the other's tail. Wallace thus projects 1929 forward and expands it into a general crash of the American ps…
Wallace had an unerring sense that winners, examined from the oblique angles of his fition, were really losers--not schadenfreude, but a claim that any struggle other than that Kafkaesque one to "establish a human self" was utimately an illusory imposition of games' numbering and geometry on the fl…
