by
David Hering
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[...] he birthing of postmodernity in late capitalism, the central argument of Jameson's theory, is clearly suggested here. He argues that postmodern suspicion of all cultural truth as mere elaborations of ideology makes it a perfect partner for capitalism (Postmodernism xxi), and in making Collision the birthplace for McDonald's, long the icon of multinational capitalism, Wallace evidently agrees with this position.
on Westward
[...] sincerity as a concept has from the beginning been wracked by this kind of difficutly, has never, in fact, evaded its theatrical connection to a notion of performance. "In a traditional sense," van Alphen and Bal tell us, "sincerity indicates the performance of an inner state on one's outer surface so that others can witness it. But the very distinction between inner self and outer manifestation implies a split that assaults the traditional integration that marks sincerity" [...]
[...] Wallace, who recognized that Derrida had "successfully debunked the idea that speech is language's primary instantiation" (Lobster 84), agreed that the effect advertising had of highlighting the complexity and impurity of all discourse could only be responded to by acknowledging one's own implication within this "system of general writing." One must begin by recognizing the lack of any transcendent, absolute, Archimedean point from which to judge the authentic from the inauthentic, the sincere from the manipulative, truth from ideology, and so on.
footnote explains that E Unibus Pluram is not a lament against TV/advertising, but an attempt to understand their power
In a pithy formulation, Steven Connor has quipped that "[b]eing modernist always meant not quite realizing that you were so," whereas "[b]eing postmodernist always involved the awareness that you were so" [...] I would suggest, being a "post-postmodernist" of Wallace's generation means never quite being sure whether you are one, whether you have really managed to escape narcissism, solipsism, irony, and insincerity. Again, this uncertainty is structural, allowing as it does for a genuine futurity that only the reader can provide. Hence Zadie Smith, in her introduction to a recent collection of stories by Wallace and his contemporaries, is right when she claims that their texts are primarily "attempting to make something happen off the page, outside words, a curious thing for a piece of writing to want to do" (Introduction xx). It is only by invoking this future off the page that dialogue can be engaged, and that both reader and writer can be challenged by the dialogic dimension of the reader experience. This call for a two-way conversation characterizes not only Wallace's work, but all the fiction of the New Sincerity. [...]
The second example is footnote 119, a brief comment on the clause "guys in the Guy division have to slide out on a plastic telephone pole slathered with Vaseline (336-7). The footnote inserts a laconic "(the pole)", which combines rhetorical distance with a boundless "drive for disambiguation" to maximize a humorous effect: it is the note itself that sparks the question who or what was slathered with Vaseline.
on Supposedly
[...] What's so terrifying about the narrator's nightmares of adult life, over and above the supernatural horrors of The Exorcist, consists in the grim fact that there can be no maternal reassurance that there exists "nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world" (106).
on Smithy
journalism can lead to a moment of real human connection between the reader and a world that they would not otherwise know
quoted from Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism
X works for General Motors. All day long he performs a single repetitive task. The things he helps to make are not under his control. And yet he feels good. He is proud of the bustling capitalist economy; he may even be convinced that the capability to perform simple repetitive tasks is the only capability he possesses, that he could not handle a larger demand. Does his inner sense of worth count as genuine self-respect, and is GM therefore a successful distributor, in his case, of that primary good?
comparing a passage from Octet to this passage from a philosophical piece by Nussbaum ("Shame, Separateness, and Political Unity")
By comparison, last year there were approximately 375 films eligible for the Academy Awards that these voters [sic — meaning different voters from the AVN voters, presumably] were required to see.
presumably
But Las Vegas as most of us see it, Vegas qua Vegas, comprises the
dozen or so hotels that flank the Strip’s middle. [...]
idk just a nice expression