“The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unboreable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” – p. 438 […]

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It’s Bloomsday. Literary New Year’s Eve for some of us in the macronovel fan community. (Yes, I know, certainly only some.) Season’s greetings from the Dept. of Great Minds Thinking Alike: “Although of course you end up becoming yourself.” — David Foster Wallace (see Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip […]

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Q: What on Earth do you do to follow up when somebody hits it out of the park? A: You play small-ball. Genno Kane seems to have taken a cue from her new interest and our national pastime and drilled one over the left-field fence with her post ‘The Antidote To Infinite Jest?‘*. People are […]

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Didn’t anybody in your school have names like Joe or Bill? One of the things that makes me happiest is when DFW let his hair down wrote some super-gross, scatological stuff. Shit chapter (or Section 29, as the more formal amongst you may refer to it), ftw! I don’t really have anything constructive or insightful […]

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“Every love story is a ghost story.” I’m not into ghost stories. I’ve never had the reputed pleasure of being freaked out by tales of psychotic spirits, or spirited psychotics, who are about to lop my head off with a power tool as soon as I drift off to sleep at this backwoods campsite right […]

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Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience…. Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. — The Pale King, p. 229 I’m sure everyone else has already mined this irony: We’re reading a book about the extremes of boredom because we loved a book about […]

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…on one side and the other a huge colored outline of a human foot. (p. 163, §22). 3668 = FOOT I just realized this today.  

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Skipping briefly ahead to the novella-length §22, we spend time with a first-person narrator who is suddenly struck by his ability to “double”; that is, to not only perceive the world around him, but to be aware of his own participation in that activity, of his choosing to do so. We’ll save deeper discussion of […]

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Take everything ever written, thought or felt about the relationship between work and personal identity. Condense it into a page. That page is Section 18. ‘And Desk Names are back…. Instead of your name. There’s a plate on your desk with your Desk Name. Your Name de Gear as they say…. If you’re smart, you’ll […]

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  I think it’s probably best if I go ahead and tell you, right up front here, that the title of this post is a little misleading. I do not know the average molecular weight of peat. It’s not like I didn’t try to look it up. I did. I spent over an hour on-line […]

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The editor of ‘The Pale King’, Michael Pietsch – “Would you agree to revisit that scene in the elevator and help us understand who those people are and why they’re there, and, for God’s sake, cut some of the civics? There’s a reason people didn’t enjoy civics class in high school.” http://bit.ly/mAYR6B From a 2003 ZDF […]

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What gets me about David Foster Wallace is how he gets into your head: “That’s what I was thinking! Only better. OK, that’s what I thought about thinking. Make that ‘had a thought that could have led to, given a very generous estimation of my intellectual horsepower.’ ” A concept that seems to be crying […]

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If we are what we eat, then we are also what we read (or devour, in the case of David Foster Wallace), and so it is that §1, which only seems to be a simple (but rich) list of descriptions, dictates what we can expect of The Pale King, and what we can expect The […]

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It goes without saying the difficulty in discussing a book that the author had not the opportunity to edit, or finish. Reading §9 was harrowing – he seems so optimistic, over-explaining what he considers a finished text, on the shelves, bought (he hopes) and enjoyed. But what a joy it was to read this chapter […]

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I won’t be breaking any news here–meteorological, agricultural, or metaphorical–in saying that spring is a time of rebirth. I know that. I also know that choosing such a potentially trite and banal subject like The Seasons to begin a blog post about one of the greatest writers of our time might be grounds for, as […]

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[spoilers thru §8] You’re moving. Look around you. The book opens: Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust This feels immediately like gliding over a vast cinematic expanse, like the opening of a film where we’re suddenly flying fast and low over a flat, gridlike landscape, the horizon stretching thinly and […]

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