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A recurrent situationist theme: the idea of 'the vacation' as a sort of loop of alienation and domination, a symbol of the false promises of modern life, a notion that as CLUB MED--A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE'S MISERY would become graffiti in Paris in May 1968, and then, it seemed, turned into 'Holidays in the Sun' (21).
from Lipstick Traces. Holidays in the Sun is a Sex Pistols song (the first line is the subject)
[...] In Malle's black-and-white world, animated by the haunting strains of Erik Satie's score, Ronet's Alain Leroy is a lost cause, a narcissist with no hope of growing up. Malle claims,
It wasn't really the suicide that interested me, but how a man reflects on his youth and realizes, in the end, that the beautiful and important part of his life was his youth. From the end of youth until death, we're in constant decline. . . . It's not putting a bullet through our heart or head that matters, but that we have the clarity to realize that something's gone that will never return.
Louis Malle's Le feu follet
[...] By offering her sexual betrayal of men as possible explanation of her condition, Markson--Wallace is right--converts profound universal suffering into the particularity and niggardliness of secular sin. But by reading her struggle to create self out of language as inherently masculine, Wallace obfuscates for the female narrator all revelation and atonement.
on Wittgenstein's Mistress
[...] by using a feminist criticism of Markson's Kate to contemplate problems of the masculine self that exclude (or absorb) the feminine, Wallace appropriates Kate for a meditation on masculinity just as he accuses Markson of appropriating her for his meditation on solipsism. Both acts of appropriation are inflected by the dynamics of desire and power between selves and others, whether male and female or author and character/reader, in the context of language systems. Thus this early essay establishes a set of overlapping concerns that will occupy Wallace's work for his entire writing life: anxiety about heterosexual male assertions of power against women in physical and linguistic male acts of self-definition; and inquiry into language's capacity to communicate ontology of and between men and women, to connect them to each other and to the world, both through and despite sexual desire.
[...] Frequently Wallace depicts that anxiety about sincerity as bound up in problems of language and communication, and often from the point of view of the author himself: how does an author convince a reader he is being authentic ("Octet"), or create a persona for himself that seems real to the reader (The Pale King)? How does he avoid manipulating a reader with narrative devices ("Adult World II")? How does a speaker convey timeless truth when limited by linear language ("Good old Neon")? How does anyone perform identity in mediated situations without becoming an actor ("My Appearance")? [...]
[...] Thus women's misandry and misanthropy become the products of misogynistic male attempts to escape the despair that is the human condition. [...]
examples: Toni Ware, Faye, Granola Cruncher
[...] By eliminating the distance between symbols and meaning, Bruce eliminates the entire structure of signification made possible by a post-structuralist understanding of language, and enlisted by Wallace in all of his fiction. By eliminating the dependence of language on context and association, Bruce makes impossible exactly the connections among the distant points of text, author, reader, and world that language is meant to travel.
Bruce's solipsistic fantasy of a world in which physical and emotional connection are impossible because both we and language are closed loops, sufficient in ourselves (the story ends with Bruce ensconced in a stove) demonstrates the need for distance in the mechanisms of language in order to allow the kinds of translations between people that Julie's vision of love relies on. [...]
on Here and There
[...] "Brief Interview #28" features two male students using 90s grad-school jargon (citing Foucault and Lacan) combined with pop-culture logic (citing The Rules) to explain their "postfeminist," "postmodern" sense of women as caught in a "double bind" in which they have no access to agency, fulfillment, or men's respect. By describing women's desire "to be irresponsible" as "a Lacanian cry in the infantile unconscious" (231), the students demonstrate not the dangers of Lacan's concept of gender--which they totally misrepresent--but the danger of misreading, and the enormous potential for enlisting intellectual argument to defend one's own oppressive desires. Thus the story criticizes male piggishness, not Lacan, and brilliantly parodies not academic feminism but the chauvinism that so often finds a way to cloak itself with it.
“Everything we do in life matters,” said the tech billionaire to the famous portrait photographer. The photographer chose an angle to make the man’s head and hands look disproportionately gigantic. A leader. A genius. He was already a very large man. He stared off into the distance, making a pensive expression. The photographer asked him to elaborate. “How we communicate and interact with society matters,” the billionaire continued. “How we travel on this very planet Earth matters. We have to realize that no matter how small or large our actions, everything we do matters. The moment you forget that, the moment you put that aside, your life becomes erratic, chaotic.”
Weeks later, the photographer gave a short talk about his experience working with the titans of tech, in which he drew attention to this particular man as the one who rose above the rest. Exceptional, the photographer said with a quiver in his voice. The most authentic and soulful person he had ever met.
lmao fuck you
I start talking to other writers about how much Kevin got paid versus how much I got paid versus hey do you want to tell me what you get paid? Some of them happily do and some do not. One woman tells me she thinks contractors tend to have higher salaries than full-time employees to make up for the lack of benefits. When I tell her that Kevin was FTE and I am a contractor, all she says is, Oh, I see. Are you FTE? I ask. She avoids eye contact. She fusses with her hair. I can tell she is deeply uncomfortable with my questions. I don’t care. I feel like I’ve shed a layer of tact and social sensitivity, and underneath is all rough, abrasive matter. I ask again. She says things like, she doesn’t know who makes these rules. It doesn’t make sense. She’s sorry. Was there anything she could do to help? Could she take me out to lunch?
oof