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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
Then you're deriving your satisfaction from talking about your work, by acting like a writer, as opposed to by writing, so paradoxically you'd probably get less done.
[...] And there's nothing more grotesque than somebody who's going around, "I'm a writer, I'm a writer, I'm a writer." It's a very fine line. I don't mind appearing in Rolling Stone, but I don't want to appear in Rolling Stone as somebody who wants to be in Rolling Stone.
It's the whole pomo dance, that whole kind of thing. So my worry--I don't really have much integrity. Because what I'm really worried is, looking like the sort of person who would appear at these parties. Now, the difference between that, and sort of being the person who doesn't want them is unclear to me.
What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit--to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. [...] It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop ... and just, and think real hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.
But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.
so agree with this
Educated Republicans: the racism here is very quiet, very systematic.
just thought this was a funny quote
[...] And then you get, like, you start being able to make a living. So you get all that affirmation from the exterior, that when you're a young person you think will make everything all right. [...] But to realize--like you say, when it happens to you, when you realize, "Holy shit, this doesn't make everything all right." Um, for me, it fucked with my sort of "metaphysics of living" in an incredibly deep way.
And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something. [...]
But what I really remember is the times when working on that book was really hard. And I just gutted it out, you know? And I finished something. And I did it for the book, not trying to imagine whether David Lipsky would like it, or Michael Pietsch would like it. And that I feel like I've built some muscles inside me that I can now use for the rest of my life. And I feel like, "All right, like I'm a writer now." Whether I'm a successful writer or not, I don't know. But like, like this is who I am, this is what I do. And I know now how to live in such a way that I'm doing it for the work itself. Which I'm aware can come off sounding very pretentious. And it's also, it's what everybody says: "Ah, that other stuff doesn't matter."
DFW on the external trappings of success after IJ