Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

In Caesars Palace is America conceived as a new kind of Rome: conqueror of its own people. An empire of Self.

AIDS has been cured, the Midwest is depopulated, and parts of Boston are bombed out and (presumably?) irradiated.

Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader.

Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively—via “freewriting,” “brainstorming,” “journaling”—a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology.

The truth is that structural linguists like Gove and Fries are not scientists at all; they’re pollsters who misconstrue the importance of the “facts” they are recording.

This is PCE’s core fallacy—that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes

Winter here is a pitiless bitch, but in the warm months Bloomington is a lot like a seaside community except here the ocean is corn, which grows steroidically and stretches to the earth’s curve in all directions.

The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.