More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
but did read the emergency laminated card, twice. It was mostly illustrations; for legal reasons, the airline had to presume illiteracy. Without being aware that he was doing so, Sylvanshine mentally repeated the word illiterate several dozen times until the word ceased to mean anything and became just a rhythmic sound,
The double-entry method invented by Italian Pacioli during the same period as C. Columbus
had a Trumanesque wooden plaque on it which read: WHAT BUCK?
confidence in the Service. No one threw forms away. Hid, yes, but not destroyed or discarded. Even in the midst of disastrous departmental psychosis no one could bring himself to burn, shred, or pack in Hefties and discard. That would have been a real disaster—that would have become public.
Over the window was a stern injunction against opening the emergency hatch accompanied by an iconic triptych explaining how to open just this hatch. As a system, in other words, it was poorly thought through.
Yaw was way in a mirror, it occurred for no reason.
Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.
He frequently had this feeling: What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn’t wrong with other people?
Reynolds’s dictum was that reality was a fact-pattern the bulk of which was entropic and random. The trick was homing in on which facts were important—Reynolds
Men whose soft faces fit their jobs like sausage in its meaty casing. Men who instruct pocket recorders to take a memo, men who look at their watches out of reflex, men with red foreheads all mashed standing in a metal chute as the props’ hum descends the tonal scale and ventilation ceases, this the type of commuter airplane whose stairs must be rolled up alongside before the door opens, for legal reasons. The glazed impatience of businessmen standing closer to strangers than they would ever choose to, chests and backs nearly touching, suit bags slung over shoulders, briefcases knocking
...more
carrying a little rhomboid carton of delivered Chinese for his wife,
principle—with the additional problem of securing any sort of substantive breakfast or return ride to the REC in the morning without a phone, or how without a phone one was supposed even to verify whether and when the apartment phone was going to be activated,
Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.
Let’s not even mention spelling bees.
Everyone hates the boy. It is a complex hatred,
A teacher in whose homeroom the boy suggests a charted reorganization of the coat hooks and boot boxes lining one wall so that the coat and galoshes of the student whose desk is nearest the door would themselves be nearest the door, and the second-nearest’s second-nearest, and so on, speeding the pupils’ egress to recess and reducing delays and possible quarrels and clots of half-bundled kids at the classroom door (which delays and clots the boy had taken the trouble this quarter to chart by statistical incidence, with relevant graphics and arrows but all names withheld), this tenured and
...more
Eventually even the marginal and infirm stop returning his calls. His mother has to be turned and her limbs manipulated twice a day.
and she always smelled very good and clean, like someone you could trust and deeply care about even if you weren’t in love. Lane Dean had liked the smell of her right away. His mother called her down to earth and liked her, thought she was good people, you could tell—she made this evident in little ways.
a real vision of hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor.
blank terminal sadness, not so much that of a pheasant in a dog’s jaws as of a person who’s about to transfer something he knows in advance he can never get sufficient return on.
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona. Granted, there sometimes is such a persona in The Pale King, but that’s mainly a pro forma statutory construct, an entity that exists just for legal and commercial purposes, rather like a corporation; it has no direct, provable connection to me as a person. But this right here is me as a real person, David Wallace,
is that you will regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities,
For as everyone knows, whether consciously or not, there’s always a kind of unspoken contract between a book’s author and its reader;
dreamed of becoming an ‘artist,’ i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.
Without anyone ever discussing it or even allowing themselves to be aware of it, the college was a veritable temple of Mammon. I’m not kidding.
Nor, even more incredibly, will he take the trouble to verify that none of his fraternity brothers is planning to plagiarize the same term paper for the same course. (6) The moral system of a college fraternity turns out to be classically tribal, i.e.,
If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine [his] whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.
abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy.
but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head.
spring to his step, his smile so wide it almost looked like it hurt.
Franklin Roosevelt was right, but it didn’t help—knowing it was the fear that was the problem was just a fact; it didn’t make the fear go away.
In February his mother made a breezy, half-joking comment about his love life and if there were any girls he especially liked this year, and he almost had to leave the room, he almost burst into tears. The idea now of ever asking a girl out, of taking a girl out and having her looking at him from right there close up, expecting him to be thinking about her instead of how primed he was and whether he was going to start sweating—this filled him with dread,
That they’re not hostile or machines.
Unavoidability—now that’s power, man. Either be a mortician or join the Service, if you want to line yourself up with the real power. Have the wind at your back. Tell them listen: Spit with the wind, it goes a whole lot further. You can trust me on that, my man.’
At first there was a clock behind him, but I cut the clock. He sits there longer and longer until the audience gets more and more bored and restless, and finally they start leaving,
By, say, two years in, though, it’s fair to say the results contradicted the theory. Revenues were down, and these were hard numbers that could not be fudged or massaged. There were also, I believe, very large increases in defense spending, and the federal budget deficit was the greatest in history. In adjusted dollars type of thing.
There’s a famous policy paper from a P&R group in the 1960s, type of thing, on the implementation of tax protocols following a nuclear exchange. Called “Fiscal Planning for Chaos,”
was that increasing the efficiency with which the Service enforced the extant tax code could provably increase net revenues to the US Treasury without any corresponding change in the code or a raising in marginal rates.
But the Service was also the only agency in the federal apparatus whose function was revenue. Income. Meaning whose mandate was to maximize the legal return on each dollar invested in its annual budget. Type of thing. More than any other, then, according to the resurrected Spackman, there was compelling reason to conceive, constitute, and operate the IRS as a business—a going, for-profit concern type of thing—rather than as an institutional bureaucracy.
This, after all, is an era of business deregulation.
Which returns are most profitable to audit, and how are those returns most efficiently to be found?’ 947676541 ‘I have an unusually high tolerance for pain.’
He’s a living example of how there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there’s going to be some ridiculous foul-up and someone’s going to be in a living hell. The episode was even called “Rules and Procedures,” and none of us ever forgot it.’
But now, this year, they can know, they know who is doing the job. It becomes true later, the difference. Because they now log your eventuated revenue instead of your throughput. This is the change for us.
An obscure but true piece of paranormal trivia: There is such a thing as a fact psychic. Sometimes in the literature also known as a data mystic, and the syndrome itself as RFI ( = Random-Fact Intuition).
One reason Sylvanshine’s gaze is always so intent and discomfiting is that he’s trying to filter out all sorts of psychically intuited and intrusive facts.
Impossible to predict what facts will intrude. Constant headaches. The data sometimes visual and queerly backlit, as by an infinitely bright light an infinite distance away.
It’s happened, just as the man said: Lane Dean no longer needs to look at his watch on breaks. There are now six minutes left.
‘Best of both worlds. A screen porch.’ ‘Unless it rains,’ the second man says. Both of them laugh ruefully.
‘I’d always from early on as a child I think somehow imagined Revenue men as like those certain kinds of other institutional heroes, bureaucratic, small-h heroes—like police, firemen, Social Service workers, Red Cross and VISTA people, the people who keep the records at SSI, even certain kinds of clergy and religious volunteers—trying to stitch or bandage the holes that all the more selfish, glitzy, uncaring, “Me-First” people are always making in the community.
‘And Desk Names are back. This is another plus under Glendenning. Nothing against the Pale King, but the consensus is that Mr. Glendenning is more agent-morale-oriented, and Desk Names are one example.’
