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Steeply's name also suggests the steeply sloped yield curve of returns on investments, which are often rendered in terms of mathematical function as Y(t), or yield over time--hence a "steep Y" (= Steeply?). [...]
this actually kind of makes sense tho it sounds crazy at first
While Infinite Jest obviously develops around analogies between addict and consumer, less obvious is the role played by slavery in defining the interface between the two. Wallace portrays the addict as one who lacks true economic agency to the point of being a slave--to being, in my terms, one who receives no value at all in return for his work. [...]
Initials continue generating meaning for Wallace here. The joke meaning of Hal's HI initials is that he is high all the time, but there is also a sacred meaning available to him, an eastern variation on his incandescence: in Japanese Buddhism, the character transliterated as "ka" or "hi" means fire, one of five elements and associated physically with body heat and mentally with passion. Gately's DG has sacred possibilities as well, for the letters point to his most important coin association, an abbreviation seen, among other places, on the obverse of the British pound: along the edge it reads, "ELIZABETH II DG REG FD." [...]
do they generate meaning for Wallace or do they just generate meaning for Jeffrey Severs
[...] this collection refocuses Wallace's interest in accumulation by pointing to the intimate consequences of a phase of capitalist expansion dominated by financialization, a development begun in the 1980s that Giovanni Arrighi identified in 1994 not as a sign of robust value creation but as the "signal crisis of the US regime[] of accumulation" [...]
[...] While the title "Octet" seems to refer to the projected number of quizzes, Wallace, always seeing microscopic heat transfers as the ultimate arbiter of connection, also points to the Octet Rule of chemistry. [...] More concretely, the Octet Rule is the basis for the body heat one addict offers to another in the opening Quiz, possibly giving up his own life in the process. [...]
what on earth
[...] Fr how can the interviewee reconcile the support of his upbringing those coins represented with the seeming total evacuation of dignity in the work, that sense the speaker has that the job compromised his father's personhood, that "he brought his work home," in "the fact he wore in the men's room," which his "skull conformed to fit" (BI 90)? Is this work that exacts more human cost from a person than can ever be balanced by money? [...]
about the bathroom attendant in Brief Interviews
[...] Many times, to Kafkaesque comic effect, the story adds "(i.e., the depressed person)" after pronouns that already clearly identify her (i.e., the depressed person--you get the gag) (BI 50, e.g.). [...]
[...] In "(I)" a reader can get away with disdain for Jeni and her shallowness, but "(II)" makes palpable what Smith observes: "If one is used to the consolation of 'character,' ... Wallace is truly a dead end. His stories [are] turned outward, toward us. It's our character that's being investigated (Changing My Mind, 273).
about the unusual two-part structure of Adult World, and Zadie Smith's thoughts on it
Why does work often feel futile in a postmodern and neoliberal society? Why do even many highly rewarding jobs seem dehumanizing and attenuating amid superabundant wealth and leisure? Philip Mirowski argues, "Not only does neoliberalism deconstruct any special status for human labor, but"--in terms resonstant with my readings throughout--"it lays waste to older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in the labor theory of value, and reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of 'investments,' skill sets, temporary alliances." These are some of the areas of a fully ascendant neoliberal culture that Wallace probes in Oblivion. "Probably all jobs are ... filled wth horrible boredom and despair and quiet little bits of fulfillment that are very hard to tell anybody else about," Wallace said in an interview about Oblivion in 2004 (CW 129). As he read the post-9/11 American economy, Wallace was willing to extrapolate his own work conditions into another of his hoped-for universalisms, the notion that all jobs led to the despair that increasingly characterized the position in the office of literary art he had decided to take in 1985.
[...] Wallace did not sign the story initially, using the pseudonym Eliabeth Klemm, his new attempt to write as a "NOBODY". [...]
The pen name DFW used for the original McSweeney's publication of Mister Squishy (and possibly other works too). Hilarious because anyone who reads Mister Squishy knows right away who the actual author must be