Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

The third is wordplay. Wallace doesn't bend grammar, but he bends English. He loves Germanic compounds like "shingle-sized" (describing pizza slices), "Rice-Krispie-squarish" (describing Krakkles), and "pubic-hair-shaped" (describing Curly Fries). If no existing adjective can do exactly what he wants, he invents one--for instance, "Jetsonian" (describing DIPPIN DOTS). The students, ecumenical scholars of pop culture, all get the reference.

[...]

The fifth is multisensory description. We all have noses, ears, tongues, and skin, but most people write as if they had only eyes. Not Wallace. That's how he makes us feel we're at the fair, not just reading about it. I ask for examples of each sense. Everyone speaks at once. Sound-carpet of deep fryers! Air spicy with antiperspirant and Coppertone! Yummy Elephant Ears! The weird, abstract texture of DIPPIN DOTS! I ask how they'd characterize "the green reek of fried tomatoes" and "bright-yellow popcorn that stinks of salt". It's Yale. At least four students cry out, Synesthesia!

other aspects of the essay: the section about the fair's food offerings is super jumbled and disorganized to represent the actual fair; his maximalist sentence structure is still nevertheless highly meticulous and precise (his SNOOTitude shows); when he lists sweets, the items get longer/funnier near the end

—p.760 Afterword by Anne Fadiman (759) missing author 6 years, 6 months ago