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[...] Wallace gave his characters new names "constantly," writes Pietsch (PK xiii), but other REC names--the forest (sylvan) in Sylvanshine, the land and river valleys (glen) in Glendenning, the bloom in Blumquist, the fish in Fisher, the deer (hind) in Hindle, the bus in Bussy, and the bond (to pay for public works) in Bondurant--suggest that a finished Pale King might have had much to say about many different public resources, natural and infrastructural. [...]
idk if I agree with the intrepretations of all these names but it's an interesting theory
[...] Consider David Cusk, the compulsively sweaty accountant: as he seeks release from self-obsession through what is essentially an inner thermostat to regulate his temperature, he replies to all those solipsistic hoarders of energy who have preceded him, from Lenore Sr. (who lacks such an inner thermostat) to Fogle (who keeps an external one on high). Cusk knows that paying attention to things outside him, things other than his fear of an "attack," can stem his sweat's flow but also that such outward attention is heavy lifting: "Paying attention to anything but the fear was like hoisting something heavy with a pulley and rope--you could do it, but it took effort, and you got tired, and the minute you slipped you were back paying attention to the last thing you wanted to" (PK 320). Cusk is learning here the concluding lesson of This Is Water: the willed choice to pay attention is the "job of a lifetime, and it commences--now," taking up every minute of every day, the call to real American work (TW 136).
[...] Neither is Wallace exceedingly interested in commodities' production, the class structure that leads to them, and all the elements of the Marxist critique underlying so much of U.S. postmodernism. His bounty is different.
good to know
[...] some of the attractiveness of Wallace's difficult works to an Occupy generation should be attributed to his understanding of the dire emotional consequences of a cultural environment in which value has been emptied out and financialization made ascendant, a world in which the most plentiful riches ever somehow produce dissatisfaction and perceived scarcity, not to mention unconscionable class stratification. Has Bernie Sander's presidential candidacy marked a resurgence of New Deal values for a new generation of liberalism? Wallace might have shown us the answer.
alas
[...] In the first of the unpublished scenes for TPK, we can read: "The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths" (551)
[...]
In Wallace's work, the antagonism of the man who suffers and the mind which creates becomes the one of the man who is suffering of the feeling of the absence of feelings. I believe that all of David Foster Wallace's prose is about the pain of not feeling to avoid suffering. Or the pain of not feeling to avoid feeling pain. At worst--and this could be a line that Wallace was unable to cross or blur or overcome--it's about the feeling of feeling nothing but for one's self (in other words: narcissism, solipsism). This is what is ultimately at stake in the prose of Wallace.
[...] Literature is a kind of conversation about loneliness. It creates flashes where I--the reader/the writer?--feel human and less alone. Where I feel alone and human. Where I feel inhuman. Feel that I do not feel. Feel the pain of not feeling anything to avoid feeling pain. Fiction is an illusion of a conversation about loneliness that's set up through art by the man who suffers and the mind which creates. The writer, the artist of the self-conscious man. If David Foster Wallace was not the writer who addressed this suffering, if all his work, his skull open on the page, this extraordinary conversation about the loneliness of being in the world and about the difficulty of being human, was not at stake in his work, then Wallace would not have had such an impact on me, I wouldn't have had the feeling that this man was talking into my ear.
[...] For Watts, the chief value of Zen is that it presents the inability to control one's thoughts as proof of the fundamentally untenable distinction between intentional and unintentional acts--a recognition that gives way to a nondualistic vision of the self as fundamentally empty and interdependent with the world. By this reading, if Neal could only question his responsibility for the thoughts that bubble up inside him, the opposition he creates between "fraudulence" and "genuineness" would dissolve of its own accord, exposing the self as a "genuine fake." [...]
[...] For the reader, the significance of Neal's relationship with Master Gurpreet lies in how it anticipates the end of the story. Despite Neal's repeated promises to explain what happens after death, "Good Old Neon" concludes with the revelation that his entire monologue is the fantasy of a "David Wallace" who has imagined, in the literal blink of an eye, Neal's life and death while scanning photos in his high school yearbook. In place of the cosmic language of oneness employed by Neal throughout, the final lines of the story depict Wallace trying to defend these imaginative efforts against his own mocking awareness that "you can't ever truly know what's going on inside somebody else" (181).
Wittgenstein often compares the arbitrariness of the rules of a language to that of the rules of a game, for example, chess: "the purpose of the rules of chess is not to correspond to the essence of chess but to the purpose of the game of chess" [...] We can of course decide, while playing chess, to ignore the existing rules and make up new ones, but then we are not playing chess anymore, and there is a good chance that our opponent does not understand what we are doing (as in the Eschaton game, which ends in a massive fight). [...]