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Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light.
** only a genius would make a connection like that
aural glitter
It is billiards with balls that won’t hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition.
I had gotten so prescient at using stats, surface, sun, gusts, and a kind of stoic cheer that I was regarded as a physical savant, a medicine boy of wind and heat, and could play just forever, sending back moonballs baroque with spin.
recalcitrant glabrous little body,
But so
* He starts using this expression early in his writing. It feels very mid-west and like an apology.
but a real unpleasant zotting and frying sound of bugs being decommissioned just overhead;
"decomissioned", not "killed", because DFW waltzes through the coffee shop
a bronze Aztec sunburst hanging with guillotinic mass
conferva
He uses this word instead of "Green Algae"
Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages next door bought it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them.
but we were both in the fugue-state that exhaustion through repetition brings on, a fugue-state I’ve decided that my whole time playing tennis was spent chasing, a fugue-state I associated too with plowing and seeding and detasseling and spreading herbicides back and forth in sentry duty along perfect lines, up and back, or military marching on flat blacktop, hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush, numbing and yet exquisitely felt.
The Zone
belletristic
The pronounciation and forms of this word are not what you'd think
Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. And, fiction-wise, desire is the sugar in human food.
* sugar like a drug...what would the protein be?
For Emerson, only a certain very rare species of person is fit to stand this gaze of millions. It is not your normal, hardworking, quietly desperate species of American. The man who can stand the megagaze is a walking imago, a certain type of transcendent semihuman who, in Emerson’s phrase, “carries the holiday in his eye.” The Emersonian holiday that television actors’ eyes carry is the promise of a vacation from human self-consciousness.
* I thought this is what Meditation does
The persons we young fiction writers and assorted shut-ins study, feel for, feel through most intently are, by virtue of a genius for feigned unself-consciousness, fit to stand people’s gazes. And we, trying desperately to be nonchalant, perspire creepily on the subway.
It's More interesting go cross generations when contemplating the nature of not being watched. What about gazing at yourself forward or backward?
The best TV of the last five years has been about ironic self-reference like no previous species of postmodern art could ever have dreamed of.
What explains the pointlessness of most published TV criticism is that television has become immune to charges that it lacks any meaningful connection to the world outside it. It’s not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue but that they’ve become deeply irrelevant. It’s that any such connection has become otiose. Television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in, say, the ’60s were trained by television to look where it pointed, usually at versions of “real life” made prettier, sweeter, livelier by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today’s mega-Audience is way better
...more
It will take a while, but I’m going to prove to you that the nexus where television and fiction converse and consort is self-conscious irony.
*
Critics like Samuel Huntington and Barbara Tuchman who try to claim that TV’s lowering of our aesthetic standards is responsible for a “contemporary culture taken over by commercialism directed to the mass market and necessarily to mass taste” 8 can be refuted by observing that their Propter Hoc isn’t even Post Hoc: by 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment, “spectacles vehement and untutored and rude” that aimed “to stir the passions more than to gratify the taste.”
Actually, it's always been about the money...tv corrupts because of the cost and process to distribute. Books have a different economics altogether.
Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests. It’s all about syncretic diversity: neither medium nor Audience is faultable for quality.
Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving.
On the surface of the problem, television is responsible for our rate of its consumption only in that it’s become so terribly successful at its acknowledged job of ensuring prodigious amounts of watching. Its social accountability seems sort of like that of designers of military weapons: unculpable right up until they get a little too good at their job.
Precursor to social media
This time Harper’s has shelled out over $3000 U.S. before seeing pithy sensuous description one. They keep saying—on the phone, Ship-to-Shore, very patiently—not to fret about it. They are sort of disingenuous, I believe, these magazine people. They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard—go, plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you’ve seen.
They need content
Temperatures were uterine. The very sun itself seemed preset for our comfort.
*
But it’s also still a bona fide product—it’s supposed to be produced in you, this feeling: a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under configurations of the verb “to pamper.”
and the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep
It makes your existence seem noncontingent.
Dante this isn’t,
Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.
Apparently Ft. Laud. Airport is always just your average sleepy midsize airport six days a week and then every Saturday resembles the fall of Saigon.
A second Celebrity crowd-control lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List.
Ft. Laud. proper looks like one extremely large golf course, but the cruise lines’ Piers are in something called Port Everglades, an industrial area, pretty clearly, zoned for Blight,
the whole three-hour pre-cruise gestalt of shame and explanation and Why Are You Here is transposed utterly, because at intervals on every wall are elaborate cross-sectioned maps and diagrams, each with a big and reassuringly jolly red dot with YOU ARE HERE, which assertion preempts all inquiry and signals that explanations and doubt and guilt are now left back there with all else we’re leaving behind, handing over to pros.
lay perceivers and articulators
sedulous servants and solicitous fun-managers
narcoleptically comfortable,
with methamphetaminic speed,
As a kind of semi-agoraphobe who spends massive amounts of time in my cabin, I come to have a really complex dependency/shame relationship with Cabin Service.
gourmet eating-ops
belletristic material
the diaphanous and epicanthically doe-eyed Petra.
somebody materializing and deslobbing your room and then dematerializing—like
a deep accretive uneasiness,
in delicto,
expression and appurtenances
this is one bitchingly nice bathroom.
And so but
the showerhead’s force pins you helplessly to the stall’s opposite wall, and at 98.6° the head’s MASSAGE setting makes your eyes roll up and your sphincter just about give.
and of course towels you want to propose to.
The toilet’s flush produces a brief but traumatizing sound, a kind of held high-B gargle, as of some gastric disturbance on a cosmic scale. Along with this sound comes a concussive suction so awesomely powerful that it’s both scary and strangely comforting—your waste seems less removed than hurled from you, and hurled with a velocity that lets you feel as though the waste is going to end up someplace so far away from you that it will have become an abstraction… a kind of existential-level sewage treatment.
**
