A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life

Death Is Not the End: 7/10

A description of a wildly successful poet enjoying a very mundane afternoon, reading a magazine by a pool which catalogs all of his accolades from the omniscient third person –not some aloof point of view of reflection within– to bring attention to how all of those things don't mean a shit when you're just trying to chillax behind your pool

Forever Overhead: 7/10

You have grown into a new fragility.

Though, admittedly, this is being narrated by DFW, and I can't tell whether the text says "fertility" or "fragility" as it's describing the pubescent maturation of a young boy, either way nicely done.

cold is just a kind of hard, a kind of blind

synesthesia surrounding a birthday boy psyching himself up to use the diving board

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: 10/10

Taken individually, some of these are hit or miss, but together they're so uniquely fun, harrowing, and insightful (in a bad way).

14: 10/10

guy who has to yell VICTORY FOR THE FORCES OF DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM when he busts. He gets diagnosed and everything

15: 9/10

guy who has “proclivities” for tying ppl up because his father would tie himself up lest he hit his children domestically

have my proclivities all tied up nice and tight and tidy

11: 10/10

you can’t stand ebb

needing to constantly reassure someone that your distance is not indicative of wanting to leave someone. lmao immediately followed by “so yeah, that’s why my bags are at the door, but I knew you would take it this way.”

leaving not as a confirmation of the fear, but because of it – followed by lingering insinuations that the narrator cheated.

3: 8/10

dudes at an airport demonstrating how men ain’t shit, discussing some poor rube of a woman waiting for her man to come back from breaking things off with his fiancé after proclaiming his love for her. The man def didn’t break things off and these 2 observers share at laugh at her expense/naivete

30: 8/10

single paragraph of a guy confessing his attraction to his now-wife because she remained attractive after giving birth to his step-son and he finds reassurance in knowing that the person he’s signed on to having sex with for the rest of his life won’t become all “veiny and blown out” with only the most superficial concern that this might be a gross thought, wondering if it’s just the kind of thing no one says out loud

36: 8.5/10

interview with someone at a DV treatment center who takes some pride in his acquired ability for forgiveness so he doesn’t have to rely on her to quit playing the victim.

Q:

who?

powerfully ambiguous question for which his monosyllabic answer affirms the suspicion that this guy’s ego is violently large

31: 8/10

taxonomy of men who don’t know how to pleasure women. presumably from a man who knows how to please a woman, while coaching the interviewer through smoking one of his "fags"

let her think she’s the best you’ve ever had

40: 10/10

Guy who uses his prosthetic arm to get laid by making it seem as gross as possible to milk sympathy

Which he refers to as "the asset"

42: 9.5/10

This interview seems to be a meditation on public restrooms, half motivated by the interviewee's father being like a butler or somebody who worked in the bathroom. Here, I think Wallace does a good job of using the ambiguous questions as good segues allowing him to continue his trains of thought, which sort of just Peter out.

Averting his eyes to protect their dignity, but his own? His own five senses.

Interview he ties it back into his father who did this unpleasant job in order to support him and his family

Interview her begs the question of whether or not the interviewee despises those men, given his perspective on them through his father.

10: 10/10

This one, like #11, models a certain sort of gaslighting conversation/break up wherein the paternalist guy decides that he needs to break up with her in order to protect her feelings

Because I care, I care about you, sweetie, that's why we're going to do this conversation [the way that I want to is the implied subtext]

40, 45? Possibly more, as in a lot more.

It's such a great way to describe somebody downplay how ran through they are.

Perfectly captures the false economy, where if she gets hurt, then it means that she misunderstood him, because he's and then this part would be in an italic so well meeting and the last thing that he wants is to hurt her absolute blast

And then we get the juicer, "I know I should've told you some of this sooner, like before you moved out here"

I hope that my explaining to you how this unfolds is some sort of proof of how badly I don't want it to happen with you,

when he's already copped to the fact that he's telling her so that she gets upset enough to leave him

Maybe deep down I'm such a cowardly shit that I don't wanna make the commitment to pull away myself and instead make you pull away

51: 8/10

Single paragraph anger management:

I wouldn't even be mad at it if he didn't bring it up,

19: 8/10

Man convincing a woman that she's so smart. That's the cutest thing about her, she wouldn't have even noticed his ploy if she wasn't so smart.

46: 10/10

Twisted argument, victim blaming, not even blaming so much as arguing that something good could come out of the rape or incest or abuse or whatever it is that women are so reactionary upset about.

Gross misuse(?) of Man's Search for Meaning

Argues in a perverse way that only once you've been subjected to a thing and utterly degraded, then and only then minute by minute, can one elect to be larger than just a thing which is an enlarged life that's only possible after the kind of horrific shit that Viktor Frankl is talking about holocaust scale degradation

I'm not saying it happened, but what if it did what if I did it to you right here.

Insane trauma imagery.

Yeah, another example of the coarseness of certain orders

???: 9/10

Transcript of people arguing about a double wide versus a truck, and only as an afterthought the custody of their son who is overhearing the end of his parents marriage. They flip a coin for him, and it is intentionally ambiguous who wants him or who's getting stuck with him

59: 10/10

Guy describes his power fantasy/rape fantasy that he jerked off to as a teenager where he was at a gym and time froze, and he had his way with everybody that he wanted to, often times imagining them as various characters from the television program that aired in the late 90s called Bewitched.

Chronological inconsistencies introduced by the hand that the boy uses in order to stop time to copulate with people inside the gym breaks the total power fantasy, and thus begins this cat and mouse game of expanding or enhancing the abilities of the magical mechanism by which he's able to stop time which kind of distracts from the erotic element.

Most of the narrators time ends up being spent in his bedroom was spent laboring under or in order to imagine an a temporal world wearing his masturbation fantasy would become plausible.

This, in turn, required the narrator to start to research the orbits and rotations of various celestial bodies around the sun in order to also spend them which got in the way of masturbating.

Properties of the sun itself are often times defined in terms of other nearby stars such as Ceres, which brings it under the hegemony of the hand, which is the magical mechanism by which the narrator stops time, so the scope of his masturbatory fantasy is ever increasing until what he becomes like an astronomical researcher?

72: 7/10

Oh no, not again look out.

Abruptly ends, what in the world could have happened?

98: 7/10

"women want to be saved"

20: 10/10

sadly a 10/10, this is a horrific story which reminded me of one of the novellas in Full Dark, No Stars

Imagine consoling someone as he weeps over you for what you're consoling him for

Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XI): 9/10

Story about a boy being made fun of by his twin brother who copies his faces which he hates, while he's getting a haircut in the kitchen. It's implied that he hates this so much and it agitates him so, that he has a seizure with his eyes rolling into the back of his head his only solace from his brother who he know was making the same face

The Depressed Person: 10

holy shit

a profile of a chronically depressed person acutely aware of the burden she perceives to place upon her close friends which the therapist urges her to rely on more. twists subtly at the end after therapist kills herself, and the depressed person experiences simultaneously: guilt for not ever asking about the therapist against which she had principled resentment for needing to pay out the ass to talk to in the way that she was being coached to talk to her friends, and 2) transfers immediately the role of therapist to one of her terminally-ill close friends who she starts to interrogate about whether or not she (the depressed person) is annoying rather than doing anything in the way of the guilt from (1) or the guilt about being a burden, by making this conversation about herself and her faults rather than terminally ill friend.

Think: 8/10

man who is struck by the nude form of his wife’s college roommate’s sisters. Assumes a prayerful pose. his wife and son are out shopping and he’s adultering idolatariously

Signifying Nothing: 8.5/10

guy maybe hallucinates a memory of being sexually abused by his father which his father seemingly has no recollection of (but the recounting of memory issues is not immediate, instead it’s a sort of psychological cope that unfolds) and causes a strain on the family after the narrator moves out. Not until narrator convinces himself that maybe father too forgot the incident and reacted so strangely when confronted by such a weird description of his admittedly unprecedented behavior. Smooth it over by going to a family fav restaurant and laughing it off bc “how could you forget I hate chicken”

refusal to use the pronoun “it” when describing narrator’s father’s dick, instead usually enriching the description with some hitherto unmentioned vein or discoloration

Datum Centurio: 7/10

one of those stories that cannot be described. A dictionary from a future (akin to that of IJ) wherein human sexuality is reduced via commercialization

Octet: 10/10

ten –and I cannot stress this enough– out of ten.

This book captures the je ne sais quoi of what makes IJ great, which -till I read this- I thought was only achievable via the maximalist form. The interviews with hideous men are just that, the standalone short stories are hit or miss, but the hits are par excellence (octet in particular)

super contrived (but not really) set of quandries. Very entertaining and thought provoking. like several paragraphs of Wallacean idiosyncratic prose followed by a gut shot a la “Q: Is she a good mother?”

Q(B): … The crux: X now finds himself, behind his conservative expression and solicitous gestures, secretly angry at his wife over an ignorance he has made every effort to cultivate in her, and sustain. Evacuate

hilariously detailed and specific “hypothetical” begging the question about whether or not DFW wants validation for some real world situation

PQ9 fully ACKs the problem of PQ6 in a delightful meta discourse and manages to still sneak in one of the “failed” octets into a footnote

Another footnote describing the proper latinate quantifier for “duo plus dual attempts at the third” for which he’s been using “quartet” to footnote quartet again later on to say “or whatever” parenthetically god I miss him so much

If limn doesn’t end up seeming just off-the-charts pretentious I’d probably go with limn

this story captures the joy of IJ in brief - pitch this at your friends to convince them of IJ’s insightfulness, god and the whole structure of this octet is ingenious because the first PQ seems simultaneously like filler but may well be the only one DFW actually gives a shit about

Adult World (I): 10/10

When he arose in the night she believed it was to check the status of the yen.

amidst very personal descriptions of their intimate life, this story provides a deep dive on insecurity from the female POV of a man who is probably cheating on her using “international markets” as the patsy for his inexplicable nighttime escapes and the soreness of his thingie

Adult World (II): 10/10

schematic instructions for how to edit/parse the subsequent scene wherein Jeni confronts the now-engaged previous lover about whether or not he fantasized abt other women while they were together to approximate her husband’s behavior prompting him to trauma dump/profess lingering love for her despite present engagement of his own all whilst Jeni realizes husband is a secret compulsive masturbator for she sees his car enter AW parking lot out the window

just an outline but it’s excellent. Wonder if it’s what his actual outlines were like.

demonstrative range - writing it out, and ability to capture all the subtleties in just outline fmt. Even more humorously, bc it allows for his notes to himself about how heavy handed to be & the intended interp of symbols etc

The Devil Is a Busy Man: 9/10

Devil is a Busy man: guy helps someone with their debt, writes about the importance of maintaining secrecy, then receives a call from recipient, denies responsibility for the windfall but in a way that compromises him/insinuates responsibility in a way that was more htt than just coming out and saying it. Also he’s telling us this all so nobly in the story which defeats the purpose

Church Not Made with Hands: 7/10

“look, man” he says. “I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally”

otherwise just confusing, apparently written when he himself was deeply depressed because of a lackluster teaching schedule.

Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko: 7

Similar to Amalgamemnon, but futurified

On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon

Suicide as a Sort of Present: 8

Like many Wallace asides, he'll be going on and on about these abstract emotional relationships between two people like a mother and her son and then he'll drop in such a visceral real and violent example of what it is that he's talking about that it snaps you back to the reality of oh this isn't a philosophy treat us. He's talking about somebody that he probably knew in real life.

=AVG(7, 7, 10, 9, 8.5, 10, 7, 10, 10, 10,9, 7, 7, 9, 9)

link to all in the timing

link to man's search for meaning by referenced

link to vile

link to Amalgamemnon

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