View all notes
[...] One resonance of Gately's DG initials is the decigram, a common measure for drug sales, the "tenth of a gram" cocaine customers beg for [...]
really??
Thus when Hal says in the book's stark, one-line second paragraph, "I am in here" (IJ 3), rather than a statement of location, it is the cry "I EXIST," familiar from Wallace's Markson review (BF 83). I hear in this remark "I ... in-here" or "I inhere", meaning there is a substantialness to Hal's valueless self [...]
where does he get "I inhere" from
As the analogies betwen tennis and capitaist striving mount, we imagine the E.T.A players as young workers who have difficulties--and who are systematically kept from--balancing their massive physical exertions with mental labor on the question of what all this body-work is for, the "question[] of why" (IJ 900). [...]
NAFTA, negotiated throughout the late 1980s and ratified in December 1992, is widely seen as a signature extension of the logic of neoliberalism from the Reagan-Bush years into the Clinton era. As James McCarthy writes regarding the deregulatory and antistate logic behind such agreements, "These common neoliberal prescriptions [are] contributions to an overarching goal of increasing the flexibility and profitability of capital." McCarthy also notes the dire effects of such agreements for environment regulation and health, which Wallace toys with in depicting the Great Concavity. [...]
I didn't actually know that
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