Gentlemen here is a truth: enduring tedium over realtime in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is as it happens, the distillate of what in this world neither I nor you have made, of heroism.

If nothing else, this book makes the IRS and taxes pretty interesting, mainly because of the characters that Wallace brings to life. We need not go down this branch of "if nothing else," though, because this novel is a lot more than that. The absence of the density of vocabulary which was characteristic of Infinite Jest arguably makes both of these works more impressive. Wallace has insane range, yet unmistakable tone.

Wallace approaches several themes of loneliness and boredom, which is ironic, considering that it is unfinished, and also the personal notion that books can be primarily used as an escape. It's an exploration of industrial psychology in the effects of monotony on the human psyche, and high-stakes tedium.

I was ‘reading’ the book only to place certain tart, mordant, margin-comments next to each bromide, cliche, or cloying bait of inauthentic pap, which meant just about every paragraph. The idea was that I would mail the book back to this immediate relative a week or two hence, along with a voluble thank-you note filled with the gestures and tactics of the book recommended – such as e.g. using the person’s first name over and over again, emphasizing areas of agreement and shared enthusiasm & c. – the overwhelming sarcasm of which this relative would not detect until he then opened the book and saw the acerbic magnolia on every page

Sylvanshine know this aide's shoe size and total blood volume, but not his name. ... Sylvanshine, his eyes rolling up slightly white, received a whole slew of facts about the CTO that he did not wish to know, including the specs of her mitochondrial DNA and the fact that it was ever so slightly nonstandard due to her mother's having taken thalimode four days before it was abruptly yanked from the shelves. Training Offcer Pam Jensen had a .22 revolver in her purse–she had promised herself a bullet in the roof of her mouth after her 1,500th training presentation, which at current rates would be July 1986.

Cusk treating the beauty and viability of a woman behind him as equivalent to the threat that she poses to him and the incipience of a nervous breakdown because of his sweatiness is hilarious.

Another fun subsection about the delineation between phantoms which are mental interruptions and ghosts which are supernatural apparitions of those who have died in the examination office

Every Whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body

the pink room, and DFW’s horrors from the psych ward:

'The way he started talking to me was in the pink room, which was the isolation room, which is where they put you if you were on suicide watch and the law said you had to be legally observed twenty-four hours a day, or if you acted out in a disciplinary way where they said you presented a danger or disruptive influence—they could put you in there.’

‘Called the pink room because that was the room’s color?’ Drinion asks.

Meredith Rand smiles coolly. ‘Baker-Miller pink, to be exact, because there had been experiments showing that seeing pink soothed mental agitation, and soon every nut ward everywhere started painting their isolation room pink. He told me that, too. He explained the color of the room they put me in; it had a sloped floor and a drain in the middle like something out of the Middle Ages. I was never on suicide watch, if you’re wondering. I have no idea how tripped out you are by any of this, like uh-oh here’s this “crazy person, she was in Zeller when she was seventeen.’

‘I wasn’t thinking that.’

‘What I did was tell a doctor who wasn’t even my doctor, I mean the one my dad’s insurance was paying for, but this was a different doctor who’d come in and cover for the doctor’s cases when he couldn’t come in, they all covered for each other all the time this way, so in like five days you’d talk to three different doctors, and they had to spread your file and case notes or whatever out on the table to even remember who you were—and this doctor, who never even blinked, kept trying to get me to talk about being abused and neglected as a child, which I never was, and I ended up telling him he was a freaking idiot and that he could either believe me when I told him the truth or just stick it up his stupid fat butt. And then that night I’m in the pink room, he’d ordered it, which was bullshit. Not like they dragged me in there and threw me in and slammed the door—everybody was pretty nice about it. But you know, one of the weird things about being in a psych hospital is you gradually start to feel like you have permission to say whatever you’re thinking. You feel like it’s OK or maybe even in some way expected to act crazy or uninhibited, which at first feels kind of liberating and good; there’s this feeling like no more smiley masks, no more pretending, which feels good, except it gets kind of seductive and dangerous, and actually it can make people worse in there—some inhibitions are good, they’re normal, he said, and part of the syndrome they call some people eventually getting institutionalized is that they get put in a nut ward at a young age or a fragile time when their sense of themselves is not really very fixed or resilient, and they start acting the way they think people in nut wards are expected to act, and after a while they really are that way, and they get caught in the system, the mental-health system, and they never really get out.’

‘And he told you that. He warned you about using uninhibited insults with the psychiatrist.’Her eyes have changed; she puts her chin in her hand, which makes her seem even younger. ‘He told me a lot of things. A lot. We talked for like two hours the night I was in the pink room. We both laugh about it now—he talked way more than I did, which is not how it’s supposed to be done. After a while every night we were in there like clockwork, ta—’

‘You went to the isolation room?

'No, I was just in there that one night, and the regular case doctor, I have to admit it, he got the substitute one in some kind of disciplinary trouble for signing me in there; he said it was reactive.’ Rand stops and taps her fingers against the side of her cheek. ‘Shit, I forget what I was saying.’

Drinion looks slightly upward for an instant. ‘“Every night we were in there like clockwork.”'

Pale King is frustrating in part because of the subject and because it’s unfinished

It's still so so good if you like his style of writing, but very much not a complete book, nor do I think it would’ve been if he finished it - so in that sense it’s perfect at what it sets out to do, which is tragically poetic.

1. DFW publishes Infinite Jest in ‘96

2. Rolling Stones sends Lipsky to profile him (first ever non-rockstar to be covered by that mag, kinda cool)

3. Lipsky presses him on the addiction rumors and David snaps at him in this scene in the living room

4. DFW kills himself in 2008

5. Lipsky publishes his memoir Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself about DFW which "The End of Tour" (2015) is based on in 2010. Contains the account of David’s recollection of being put into a pink padded room in psych ward for SI

6. DFW’s unfinished novel The Pale King is published in 2011 about the bleak existence of working at the IRS. Something of a meditation on depression and boredom itself, in which one of the characters jokes about needing to be put into a 20x20 pink padded room with a drain in the middle of the floor

7. 2015 The End of the Tour movie depicts Lipsky’s 2010 account of real life verbal altercation over addiction which describes pink padded room

A subtle and harrowing explanation of "man how does this guy come up with this shit?"

'Guy who speaks latin, but not pig latin' is a good bit

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