by
Zadie Smith
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[...] There are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of things stacked against the reader insurmountable: missing context, rhetorical complication, awful people, grotesque or absurd subject matter, language that is--at the same time!--childishly scatological and annoyingly obscure. And if one is used to the consolation of "character," well then Wallace is truly a dead end. His stories simply don't investigate character; they don't intend to. Instead they're turned outward, toward us. It's our character that's being investigated. [...]
this is referenced in note with pk 279
There is a weird ambient sameness to Wallace's work. He was always asking essentially the same question. How do I recognize that other people are real, as I am? And the strange, quasi-mystical answer was always the same, too. You may have to give up your attachment to the "self." [...]
[...] It's about as far from an autobiographical portrait of Wallace as one can imagine, but it's fueled with a disgust that feels somehow personal. Wallace was constitutionally hard on himself, apparently compelled to confess not only to who he was but to who he dreaded being or becoming. [...] he is truly selfhood expressed to its unbearable fullness. We get a meticulous description of his self, the exact spot in which he sits (in a lounge, by a pool, in a garden) as well as exact coordinates in relation to the sun (as if it revolved around him). [...] Wallace annihilates him. God help the man who has chosen to worship himself! Whose self really is no more than the awards he has won, the prestige he has earned, the wealth he has amassed. [...]
To Wallace, a gift truly was an accident; a chance, a fortuitous circumstance. Born intelligent, born with perfect pitch, with mathematical ability, with a talent for tennis--in what sense are we ever the proprietors of these blessings? What rights accrue to us because of them? How could we ever claim to truly own them?
It's very interesting to me that this attitude toward gifts should have within it a current that is strongly anti-American, being both contra "rights" and contra "ownership." I've always had the sense, philosophically speaking, that Wallace's ethical ideas were profoundly un-American: he had more in common with the philosophical current that runs from Kant's "realm of ends" through Simone Weil's "sacred humans" and on to John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" than the Hobbes/Smith/Locke waters from which the idea of America was drawn. Wallace's work rejects "goal-directed" philosophies of human happiness, both because they isolate the self (the pursuit of happiness is a pursuit we undertake alone) and because this Western obsession with happiness as a goal makes people childishly "pain-averse," allergic to the one quality that is, in Wallace's view, the true constant of human life [...] His stories repel the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-interested or egoistic individuals, or that it is one's personhood that guarantees one a bigger slice of the pie. (The fat poet's talents or personal merits can't make him more worthy than anyone else.)
(typo in the original: it reads "Simone Weils" without the apostrophe)
[...] Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going.
[...] An adjoining minikitchen, like so many that littered the campus, stocked plenty of lemon-lime Gatorade, Zuck's official beverage.
the idea of an official beverage being stocked everywhere - good detail for DFW story
[...] In one year in Facebook Ads, I had seen the famously micromanage-y founder and CEO in the Ads area precisely once: when he was walking around the building in a circle to get in his ten thousand daily steps. [...]
another nice touch for DFW story
Engineers can be so smart about code, and yet so dense about human motivations. They'd be better served by reading less Neal Stephenson and more Shakespeare and Patricia Highsmith.
lol
Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.
[...]
Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player--investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer--is complicit.
But hey, look at these shiny iPhones. Right?
At Harvard it's "Baker Scholar", at Stanford it's "Arjay Miller Scholar"; this is the added frosting on the MBA cake if you graduate within the top 10 percent gradeswise. It's the people who took their MBA classes seriously and thought that the content actually meant something rather than assuming that the entire point of an elite MBA was the curated network and the jump-starting of a new career direction [...]
idea for someone in DFW story