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THERE WAS A LITTLE ALLEY IN SAN FRANCISCO back of the Southern Pacific station at Third and Townsend in redbrick of drowsy lazy afternoons with everybody at work in offices in the air you feel the impending rush of their commuter frenzy as soon they'll be charging en masse from Market and Sansome buildings on foot and in buses and all well-dressed thru workingman Frisco of Walkup ?! truck drivers and even the poor grime-bemarked Third Street of lost bums even Negroes so hopeless and long left East and meanings of responsibility and try that now all they do is stand there spitting in the broken glass sometimes fifty in one afternoon against one wall at Third and Howard and here's all these Millbrae and San Carlos neat-necktied producers and commuters of America and Steel civilization rushing by with San Francisco Chronicles and green Call-Bulletins not even enough time to be disdainful, they've got to catch 130, 132, 134, 136 all the way up to 146 till the time of evening supper in homes of the railroad earth when high in the sky the magic stars ride above the following hotshot freight trains-it's all in California, it's all a sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sun hot meditation in my jeans with head on handkerchief on brakeman's lantern or (if not working) on book, I look up at blue sky of perfect lostpurity and feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me and have insane conversations with Negroes in several-story windows above and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine calling our mountains.
I'D TAKE WALKS UP HARRISON and the boomcrash of truck traffic towards the glorious girders of the Oakland Bay Bridge that you could see atter climbing Harrison Hill a little like radar machine of eternity in the sky, huge, in the blue, by pure clouds crossed, gulls, idiot cars streaking to destinations on its undinal boom across shmoshwaters flocked up by winds and news of San Rafael storms and flash boats-there O always came and walked and negotiated whole Friscos in one afternoon from the overlooking hills of the high Fillmore where Orient-bound vessels you can see on drowsy Sunday mornings of poolhall goof like after a whole night playing drums in a jam session and a morn in the hall of cuesticks I went by the rich homes of old ladies supported by daughters or female secretaries with immense ugly gargoyle Frisco millions fronts of other days and way below is the blue passage of the Gate, the Alcatraz mad rock, the mouths of Tamalpals, San Pablo Bay, Sausalito sleepy hemming the rock and bush over yonder, and the sweet white ships cleanly cutting a path to Sasebo. - Over Harrison and down to the Embarcadero and around Telegraph Hill and up the back of Russian Hill and down to the play streets of and my wild-night neon twinkle fate there, ah, and then Chinatown and down Kearney back across Market to Third finally at dawn of a Sunday and they did call me, the immense girders of Oakland Bay still haunting me and all that eternity too much to swallow and not knowing who I am at all [...]
San Francisco has always been a good-time town. For periods it has been a wide-open town. And no matter how tight they close the lid and no matter the 2 A.M. closing mandatory in California, it is still a pretty wide-open town.
A high-price call girl, flush from the Republican convention and an automobile dealers conclave and happily looking forward to the influx of 20,000 doctors, 8,000 furniture dealers and divers other convention delegates, put it simply. "San Francisco is the town where everyone comes to ball, baby," she said.
This spirit of abandon goes hand in hand with a liking for jazz, because jazz is, no matter how serious you get about it, romantic music by and for romantics. What could be a better place for it to flourish than a town where everybody comes to ball, baby?
Because San Francisco is a small town with the charming lines of a big city, concentrated on the tip of a peninsula in a naturally air-conditioned dreamworld it never gets TOO hot, nor TOO cold) there is a perpetual springtime air about searching for jazz. The fog is friendly; the clubs-dirty, dingy, crowded, smoky and badly run like jazz clubs everywhere-somehow seem warmer. The audiences - Nob Hill slummers, bearded bohemians, crew-cut University of California sophomores and the casual tourist, gaping at the "big name" jazz stars— are friendly. They want to tell you why they like the city, why they like its music and what Stan Getz said to them. last time they heard him and do you remember the time Duke played the Fillmore Street ballroom and Al Hibbler sang "Trees"?
[...] In Sabrina, he wrote an advice column caled "Ask Bill," in which readers were invited to bring their questions to Professor Kennick. Bertrand Russell wrote in to reveal his crush on Alfred North Whitehead and ask what he should do. "Any relationship that depends for its security on the proposition that monistic atomism has any relevance to post-Enlightenment conceptions of phenomenological reality is not worth saving," the Sabrina Kennick sternly replied. Most stories were collaborations, but Wallace revived his childhood love of Hardy Boys mysteries to write "The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster" himself:
Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the Sabrina brothers!
Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.
"Crikey!" exclaimed Joe. "It's a good thing we're characters in a highly implausible children's book or we'd be goners!"
Wallace writing for the campus humour magazine, which he revived with Mark Costello
His anguish, he wrote, had multiple sources, from a fear of fame to a fear of failure. Behind the ordinary fears lurked the fear of being ordinary.
Wallace while working on IJ ... I can relate
"Sad" became the tocsin ringing through the piece, sadness as the consequence of too much plenty: sad waiters, sad cruise ship-goers taking pointless videos of other sad people pointing video cameras at them from their own cruise ships, and sad, senseless attempts by Americans to amuse themselves in the absence of any larger spiritual idea. "Choose with care," Marathe warns in Infinite Jest. "You are what you love. No?" Walace's cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.
On the cruise ship piece
[...] his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness. Scott also accused Wallace of fencing off all possible objections to his work by making sure every possible criticism was already embedded in the text. Brief Interviews, especially, the critic wrote, was not so much anti-ironic as "meta-ironic," driven much like the characters in its stories by the fear of being known. This sort of writing, he continued, was clearly connected to the self-centered self-absorbed culture of late twentieth-century America, but "does Wallace's work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it's both." Wallace was not pleased but he was impressed. In the margins of a draft of the story "Good Old Neon," which he began around this time, he noted (punningly), "AO Scott saw into my character."
idea for a fake review lol
[...] It was their Catcher in the Rye, a Catcher in the Rye for people who had read The Catcher in the Rye in school. [...]
In August, Stirling suffered an athletic injury, and Green wanted to be with him, so Wallace's parents stayed with Wallace for ten days. He was close to giving up hope.
intriguing because I wonder what it's like to be Stirling and to know that, however indirectly, he triggered that suicide
In Milwaukee's poorest black neighborhoods, eviction had become commonplace--especially for women. In those neighborhoods, 1 female renter in 17 was evicted through the court system each year, which was twice as often as men from those neighborhoods and nine times as often as women from the city's poorest white areas. Women from black neighborhoods made up 9 percent of Milwaukee's population and 30% of its evicted tenants.
If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were evicted.