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[...] The enormous crowd J.D. hath wrought over thirty years of time purchased second by expensive second will come together, lose the supplicants' courtesy that atomizes crowds, and desire past all earthly care the rendition of fat, the sigh of oil, the sparkle of carbonation, the consumption of government-inspected flesh. [...]
nice sentence
D.L. is utterly silent throughout this exchange, watching the odometer begin slowly to lose its magic. There is a reason for her silence that is in a way parallel to the historical U.S. conflict in Vietnam. For her, Vietnam does not exist except as complicatedly cancelled letters and hissingly connected phone calls, a completely flat-eyed father whom she first met on a tarmac at nine. Who had a hook. Who dropped at automobile backfires (Datsuns never backfire--too little power), who gazed dully and accepting at the mosquito feeding at his one big bicep. Who's long gone, now. Who left a note.
hauntingly magical paragraph
[...] J.D. sometimes looks at DeHaven with this sort of objective horrified amazement: I made that?
Mark decides on maybe just one petal, to tide him over against arrival.
as D.L. is telling everyone about his writer's block
"These things are the violent end of American advertising, kid," J.D. grimaces critically at the dusty, well-traveled crud in the blurred Baggie. "Advertising embodied."
Sternbeg horrified for real: "What?"
the "Sternbeg" is a typo (I think?) in the book. the idea of him reacting so strongly to the word "embodied" that's brought up innocently by someone else is nice
[...] He represents the Product. Is Ronald McDonald. Professionally. This son, this sty on the cosmic eyelid, this SHRDLU in the cosmic ad copy, represents the world's community restaurant.
god I love this
[...] eyes yolked with a high blue film of heartfelt pain, open and staring at the bedroom's skylight through Duverger's narrow fingers [...]
this expression is so beautiful and reminds me of High Windows for some reason
“If the girl plays ball, then you, deMott, you start in on helping the kid shelter her income. Tell her we’ll give her shelter through MGE. Take her from the seventy bracket to something more like a twenty. Capisce? She’s got to play ball, with a carrot like that.”
lol
That first year, ratings slip a bit, as they always do. They level out at incredible. MGE stock splits three times in nine months. Alex buys a car so expensive he’s afraid to drive it. He takes the bus to work. Dee and the cue-card lady acquire property in the canyons. Faye explores IRA’s with the help of Muffy deMott. Julie moves to a bungalow in Burbank, continues to live on fruit and seeds, and sends everything after her minimal, post-shelter taxes to the Palo Verde Psychiatric Hospital in Tucson. She turns down a People cover. Faye explains to the People people that Julie is basically a private person.
lmao
This book is about the phenomenal growth of California’s state prison system since 1982 and grassroots opposition to the expanding use of prisons as catchall solutions to social problems. It asks how, why, where, and to what effect one of the planet’s richest and most diverse political economies has organized and executed a prison-building and -filling plan that government analysts have called “the biggest . . . in the history of the world” (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991: i). By providing answers to these questions, the book also charts changes in state structure, local and regional economies, and social identities. Golden Gulag is a tale of fractured collectivities—economies, governments, cities, communities, and households—and their fitful attempts to reconstruct themselves.