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I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters.
Half of all metro Bostonians now work at home via some digital link. 50% of all public education disseminated through accredited encoded pulses, absorbable at home on couches.
DFW’s gonna shit himself when he discovers Zoom
Schacht is holding up a fork with crazy tines.
Wish I’d read this before today’s Mini Crossword
‘Troeltsch’s so dumb he thinks a manila folder’s a Filipino contortionist.’
Certain things not only can’t be taught but can be retarded by other stuff that can be taught.
Poor Tony Krause hunched forward in a stall in his ghastly suspenders and purloined cap, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, getting a whole new perspective on time and the various passages and personae of time.
it’s more invigorating to want than to have,
that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive.
tapering off the Clonidine
I hear you fella
Also the living room evening resembled an anthill which had been stirred with a stick;
Orin’d had no idea how banal and average his same-sex-parent-issues were; he’d felt they were some hideous exceptional thing.
Much of the stuff Orin said about his family was dull, gone stale from years of never daring to say it. He credited Joelle with some strange generosity for not screaming and fleeing the room when he revealed the banal stuff.
Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents.
Marathe felt himself missing his wife intensely, which always signalled his deep fatigue.
We’re all a lot more intuitive about our lovers’ families than we are about our own families,
‘Is this you passing through the neighborhood poking a head in to say hello? Or am I a subject, tonight?’ ‘You can be a subject, Moms.’ He moves the big head around in a weary circle. ‘I get tired from wearing this.’
Ew
She has an old mug with a cartoon of someone in a dress small and perspectivally distant in a knee-high field of wheat or rye, that says TO A WOMAN OUTSTANDING IN HER FIELD.
‘I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.’
You are in the chair even if you do not prefer it. So it is better to prefer, no?’
‘Well, Ray, far be it from far for me, but that’s not love: that’s low self-esteem and self-abuse and Settling For Less, choosing a coma over your comrades.
She’s needlepointing Gately some kind of GET BETTER A DAY AT A TIME ASSUMING THAT’S GOD’S WILL doily,
ACCIACCATURA and ALEMBIC, LATRODECTUS MACTANS and NEUTRAL DENSITY POINT, CHIAROSCURO and PROPRIOCEPTION and TESTUDO and ANNULATE and BRICOLAGE and CATALEPT and GERRYMANDER and SCOPOPHILIA and LAERTES
Of the firm belief that DFW had a list of 1000 crazy stupid vocabulary words which someone dared him to fit into one singular novel, and this paragraph is where he fit all those unused extras.
He was the sort of person who equated incredibly careful record-keeping with control.
Even when you get a chip for 14 days or 30 days, not to add them up.
No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering.
He made whoever he got high with feel lonely.
A conversing voice at the door laughed and told somebody else it was getting harder these days to tell the homosexuals from the people who beat up homosexuals.
somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings — as in the historical Beatles’s McCartney — taken and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine.
Found Drama I. Found Drama II. Found Drama III. … conceptual, conceptually unfilmable. UNRELEASED
Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency. Unfinished due to hospitalization.
the man who proved some infinities were bigger than other infinities,
Ummmm Augustus Waters??????
He lives for applause from exactly two hands.
The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy.
A grunting, crunching ballet of repressed homoeroticism, football, Ms. Steepley, on my view. The exaggerated breadth of the shoulders, the masked eradication of facial personality, the emphasis on contact-vs.-avoidance-of-contact. The gains in terms of penetration and resistance. The tight pants that accentuate the gluteals and hamstrings and what look for all the world like codpieces. The gradual slow shift of venue to “artificial surface,” “artificial turf.” Don’t the pants’ fronts look fitted with codpieces? And have a look at these men whacking each other’s asses after a play. It is like
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Football is pure homophobically repressed nancy-ism, and do not let O. tell you different.
there can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive.
It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported.
Defining yourself in opposition to something is still being anaclitic on that thing, isn’t it?
And men who believe they hate what they really fear they need are of limited interest, I find.
The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse.
For some reason now I am thinking of the sort of philanthropist who seems humanly repellent not in spite of his charity but because of it: on some level you can tell that he views the recipients of his charity not as persons so much as pieces of exercise equipment on which he can develop and demonstrate his own virtue. What’s creepy and repellent is that this sort of philanthropist clearly needs privation and suffering to continue, since it is his own virtue he prizes, instead of the ends to which the virtue is ostensibly directed.
congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren’t lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map’s assurance that somebody has been this way before them.
Struck tries to decide whether it’d be unrealistic or unself-consciously realistic to keep using his own name as a verb
intense romantic involvements offer a delusive analgesic for the pain of the hole,
