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Rick's R.V. initials [...] translate to random variable in mathematical parlance, whereas Lenore often has the qualities of a constant.
two questions. 1) did DFW intend this and 2) does it even MATTER (i.e., does it add to the extraction of meaning from the text in any way or is it all BS)
The Stonecipheco minion Neil Obstat Jr., meanwhile, is named for the phrase of papal censorship, nihil obstat ("nothing hinders"), in a corollary to legalistic control over language.
ok this is why I read lit crit shit like this. i wouldn't have caught this reference myself
N.R.K., Keller's initials, together sound like "anarchy", and this order that philosophy might bring to this nervous boy should allow him to grow up, or somehow rise (keller is German for basement).
I think this whole sentence is utter BS
[...] the open-ended, state-run lottery is a salutary vision: in losing week after week, Lenore is actually paying into a civic fund that is not unlike taxes, a fund of commonwealth that the young Wallace tentatively steps toward here. Many U.S. lotteries have historically been legally set up to support states' public-education systems, another sign of Lenore's involvement with learning (though increasingly such claims about state lotteries are truthless advertising).
1) taxes are at least supposed to be a lot more progressive than lottery systems
2) this is so irrelevant and thus BS it's not even funny
[...] when the American winning streak had met another of its periodic, catastrophic ends--busts for a culture that seemed not so much expectant of constant boom as utterly dependent on it. [...]
just thought this was a nice line
Wallace had an unerring sense that winners, examined from the oblique angles of his fition, were really losers--not schadenfreude, but a claim that any struggle other than that Kafkaesque one to "establish a human self" was utimately an illusory imposition of games' numbering and geometry on the flux of interpersonal experience and its essential lottery effects [...]
[...] But "Crash of '69," the final title, suggests the theme is the crash of balance itself--note that the 6 and 9, unhinged from reference to a year, denote yin and yang, one's head chasing the other's tail. Wallace thus projects 1929 forward and expands it into a general crash of the American psyche and language.
also BS
[...] Yes, it's great, this voice says, but might another product be greater? In this way Wallace expands the problem of use value and taste Karrier encountered: pursuing exhange value, especially as financial instruments grow more "advanced," almost inevitably leaves the body and feelings behind. On the personal level, "It's great" is the voice of a depressive denying his condition, but allowed to dictate the entire nation's conception of value, the forces of "It's great" are what produce the mania of pricing and stock-market crashes and widespread unhappiness. Wallace is preparing for Infinite Jest, where depression and a consumer culture of limitless, greater-and-greater choices will prove mutually reinforcing and utterly disastrous.
about a character saying "It's great" in "Crash of '69" (and bizarrely contrasting it with God seeing that it was good) ... seems like BS to me
[...] Watching an episode of Hawaii Five-0 leads J.D. to posit that the popular TV story of "white guys flying around in helicopters restoring order to his oriental island" reflects American anxiety over the Vietnam War (GCH 318). That is Wallace's invitation to read his novella--and its awkward inclusion of stereotyped "Orientals" at the Collision airport (GCH 302)--as an allegory of 1980s east/west competition: DeHaven, wearing the Ronald McDonald suit, represents a burger-flipping service economy but also, with his broken-down, homemade car, beleagured American auto manufacturing in the process of being overtaken, Wallace implies, by Japan. Hence the car full of Japanese people that speeds past the stranded, oilless main characters, leading to a racist rant from J.D. [...]
interesting theory
[...] For Wallace, his 1980s generation may have inherited plenty of spending power from their parents, but again, in the realm of moral values, the children have been left with "an inheritance of absolutely nothing," with useless credit. [...] "Westward" places "credit," a term of finance, in the plane of human relationships. The pedantic D.L., confronting the Avis agent, gets the point across: "'Though the credit is unlimited,' [D.L.] says slowly, 'it's not ours, you're saying. It's unlimited, but it's not about responsibility, and so in some deep car-rental agency sense" (and, Wallace suggests, deep moral-philosophical "agency" sense) "isn't really credit at all?" (GCH 274). As with the farmer's grain evoking the Depression's devaluation of currency, Wallace ingeniously strips money away, laying bare the questions of honoring not the credit card but the credibility of the persons themselves. In this context, we should regard Mark himself as living currency: his name plays on the German mark (famous for 1920s hyperinflation), and his climactic realizations center on ideas about the "self's coin" (GCH 369), seemingly the medium honored in the "living transaction" of Wallace's fiction.