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"Look at the current offerings," Vanya said, diagramming her sentences with her hands. "Disability forums tend to devolve into group therapy. Sufferers bursting to swap sympathy and pain management tips. It's not fun. It's a conversation able-bodied people can't participate in, and the biggest threat to mainstream penetration. Sable will fight negativity with automated content filtering, crowd moderation, and aggressive brand management."
the character of Vanya is prob the most repelling one in the whole book, and this paragraph takes the cake
Will finished his scotch, took up his keys, and drove downtown, returning three hours later with a $20,000 engagement ring. [...]
the saddest thing
(inspiration for the Max character)
Without explicitly telling him, she moved in the next day, and found that he was a born lavisher: of back rubs and pharmaceuticals and his freezerful of weed. By day he was some Silicon Valley wanker, clearly grasping for purchased cool. It was embarrassing to date a boy who bought clothes at the same boutiques she shoplifted from, and he had an annoying hard-on for novelty accessories [...]
the Baptist character that Linda "dates", briefly
good phrase and also inspiration for Max
[...] For her first grad seminar in American modernism [...] building a thesis from her marginalia in As I Lay Dying ("SUFFOCATING IN PERSPECTIVE"). Contemporary writers were so shit-scared of moralizing that they delegated to their poor characters the responsibility for conveying their philosophies through indirect discourse, the indeterminate ironies of narrative distance, constraining writers from delivering the grand true-eyed pronouncements of Tolstoy or Proust. Writers had capitulated to the camera lens. Postmodern author-surrogates and clairvoyant first-persons were just Band-Aids on a fault line. We needed a return to omniscience.
THIS DROVE ME CRAZY
Linda was angry that they could settle so easily into prescribed social roles, down to the smallest exchange--arguments over buying single-ply toilet paper or refilling the Brita pitcher, then collapsing together to watch reality TV in silence, too exhausted to even make fun of it.
on Eve and Jared. sad
[...] Penetration went ... okay, with some mistargeting, but then he began the missionary's lonely ordeal in the savage jungle. [...]
this is kinda funny
[...] All of this disqualified him as a good person and a feminist, but he wasn't antifeminist either, more of a solipsist--and if solipsism was theory, then masturbation was practice.
Will's porn montage
"The Internet is a vile, omnivorous privatization machine. A technological vector of capitalist domination. Heidegger."
"Yo, you don't win arguments by saying, 'Heidegger'."
lol cus it reminded me of the Heidegger argument at DFWConf
(also I don't know Heidegger very well so maybe I missed the joke here, but there's no way he fucking said that right)
[...] She turned to enter a stall, lowered to her knees, and made the familiar pattern of motions hair pushed back and three fingers snaked into her mouth, repeating nothing in her head as she sang out her stomach. As it splashed and clouded out below her, she remembered how virtuous and light it felt to have done this. Though not while you did it. Then you were alone and it always hurt.
the physical descriptions are meh but the last line is surprisingly poignant
At Yale, promise became indistinguishable from purpose. [...] Whenever he doubted the utility of learning the behavior of light around massive bodies, he reminded himself that it was keeping him alive. [...]
I feel ya Henrik