> Summer Read with Beth
> Amazing right from the start....
> Stream of consciousness of young man flying to Peoria, transferring to an IRS office there, needing to pass the CPA exam,and random observations of people around him
> Epigraph: "We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."...Frank Bidart, "Borges and I"
> Opening line: "Past the flannel plains and backtop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: .........(list of plants) all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother;s soft hand on your cheek."
> p.11..."...like some type of omen of death or crushing failure on the CPA exam, which two things had collapsed in Sylvanshine's psyche to a single image of his silently, expressionlessly pushing a wide industrial mop down a corridor lined with frosted-glass doors bearing other men's names.
> p.12..."Sylvanshine viewed himself as weak or defective in the area of will. Most of what others esteemed or valued in him was unwilled, simply given, like a person's height or facial symmetry."
> p.14..."What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?"......was this how Foster Wallace felt?
> p.15..."Surely fear is a type of stress. Tedium is like stress but its own Category of Woe."
> p.17..."He doesn't realize something's ALWAYS wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing."
>p.24...Thought Stopping: on the tarmac...."trying to merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista, which except for airport-related items was uniformly featureless and old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited onlty by the horizon, wh......an oceanic impresison so literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cas or propelled back in on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and Disqualification pass over him, the knowledge of his being surely and direly ill-suited for whatever lay ahead, and of its being only a matter of time before this fact emerged and was made manifest to all those present in the moment that Sylvanshine finally, and forever, lost it."...........Autobiographical?
Vocabulary: 1) lemniscate: a figure-eight shaped curve whose equation in polar coordinates is ρ2=a2 cos 2θ or ρ2=a2 sin 2θ 2)rodential: interesting word, can guess it means rodent-like 3)anfractuous:full of windings and intricate turnings : tortuous 4) prolixly: unduly prolonged or drawn out, too long 5) imbrication: an overlapping of edges (as of tiles or scales) 6) semions: ? 7)parenchyma: the essential and distinctive tissue of an organ or an abnormal growth as distinguished from its supportive framework 8)hortation: urge or yearning 9)peplum: a short skirtlike section usually attached to the waistline of a blouse, jacket, dress, and made usually with a flared, pleated, or ruffled design 10) inedia: couldn't find definition 11)algesia: sensitiveness to pain 12) defilade: to arrange (fortifications) so as to protect the lines from frontal or enfilading fire and the interior of the works from plunging or reverse fire 13) trilby:a soft felt hat with indented crown
> Laughed out loud at the IRS worker found dead at his desk after four days. His supervisor said, "Frederick was always the first guy in each morning and the last to leave at night. He was very focused and diligent, so no one found it unusual that he was in the same position all that time and didn't say anything. He was always absorbed in his work, and kept to himself."
> Leonard Stecyk: obsessively politically correct child.....hysterically funny chapter...#5
> p.41..."..a real vision of hell. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing eachc other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle...the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therin something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other's speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way."
> p.52..."...he was no more to be blamed for it than an ant was to be blamed for crawling on your potato salad at a picnic...creatures just did what they did." - I like this
> p.55.."After Houston her favorite doll had been the mere head of a doll, its hair prolixly done and the head's hople threaded to meet a neck's own thread; she had been eight when the body was lost and it lay now forever supine and unknowing in weeds while its head lived on." - classic projective art symbol of being a victim of sexual abuse is to draw a self portrait only of a head without a body....
> p.70..." 'The Pale King'is, in other words, a kind of vocational memoir. It is also supposed to function as a portrait of a bureaucracy.....".
> p.73..."Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b)....protective legal devises."
> The foreword was fascinating in terms of content as well as placement in the novel...
> p.75.....he was trying to anticipate "debilitating post-grad debt" when he conducted his business of writing papers for other students, only discovered because other students plagiarized his papers....followed by tirade on the elite schools and their priorities
> the college was "a veritable temple of Mammon"...god of wealth and greed
> p.81..."One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either."
> ..."The moral system of a college fraternity turns out to be classically tribal, i.e., characterized by a deeply felt sense of honor, discretion, and loyalty to one's so-call 'brothers', coupled with a complete, sociopathic lack of regard for the interests or even humanity of anyone outside that fraternal set."
>p. 82.."If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can determine his whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of human life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity."
> p.83..."Distilled to its essence, the question was whether and to what extent the IRS should be operated like a for-profit business."
> p. 83....He first introduces the notion that the government does not need to lie about what it does.....easier just to be "massively, spectacularly dull."
> p.85..."This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down."
p. 85..."The memoir relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes.
> Why don't people discuss the dull? "Maybe it's because the subject is, in and of itself, dull...only then we're again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it...as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size."
> p.86..."....characterization of a government bureaucracy as 'the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists',' the truth is that such a bureaucracy is really much more a parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause."
....the crucial part of the analogy is that the elaborate system'[s operator is not himself uncaused. The bureaucracy is not a closed system; it is this that makes it a world instead of a thing."
> p.93...Leonard's sweat problems..."For there were, by this time, degrees and gradations of public sweating, from a light varnish all the way up to a shattering, uncontrollable, and totally visible and creepy sweat."...not unlike hot flashes
> p.96..."That what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird."
> p.96..."Similarly, 'primed' became his inner code word for the state of hair-trigger fear and dread that could cause him to have an attack at almost any time in public".
> I like that he points out that "there has to be some slack or play in the rules and procedures for certain cases, or else sometimes there's going to be some ridiculous four-up and someone's going to be in a living hell." ---kind of like my view of fundamentalist religion
> p.116..."being in a stare"....trancelike.....I know exactly how this feels....staring but really being miles away in your mind
> p.118..."fact psychic" or "data mystic"....is this real?
> p.aa9...like the notion of irrelevant intuitions or foresights....this is why I am hesitant to ever see a psychic
> desk names? never heard of this
> p.130..."As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, but if we the government take away the citizens' freedom to cede their autonomy we're now taking away their autonomy. It's a paradox. Citizens are constitutionally empowered to choose to default and leave the decisions to corporations and to a government we expect to control them." - Powerful notion
> p.134 - "But it's something very odd. That they could have been so prescient and farsighted about erecting checks against the accumulation of power in any one branch of government, their healthy fear of government, and yet their naive belief in the civic virtue of the common people.".....depressing
> p.136..."Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites." --I hope this is not completely true!
> p.136.."I don't think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit; that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations." - Unfortunately, I agree
> p.141..."...so attitudes about paying taxes seem like one of the places where a man's civic sense gets revealed in the starkest sorts of terms."
> p.141....from de Tocqueville...."he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen's sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes its citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up as solipsists, navel-gazers."
> p.143..."Maybe it's existential. I'm talking about the individual US citizen's deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose........Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly......."---how true!
> p.144..."The post-production capitalist has something to do with the death of civics. But so does fear of smallness and death and everything being on fire."
> p.144..."...the fulcrum was the moment in the sixties when rebellion against conformity became fashionable, a pose, a way to look cool to the others in your generations.......Because the minute it became not just an attitude but a fashionable one, that's when the corporations and their advertisers can step in and start reinforcing it and seducing people with it into buying the things the corporations are producing."
> p.147..."...I don't think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent--that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony."
> Reagan set up the IRS to be the Big Brother everyone hates
> p.149..."A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified......and whose terror opf not really ever even existing makes them that much more susceptible to the ontological siren song of the corporate buy-to-stand-out-and-so-exist gestalt."....not sure I buy this....do you, Beth?
> p.183..."doubling"...the ability to feel something and also be aware of feeling something
> p.193..."Real freedom is the freedom to obey the law."....?????
> p.193....definition of a tax.....the amount of tax is equal to the product of the tax base and tax rate (T=B x R)
> progressive v. flat tax....progressive taxes consumption, trying to to put undue hardship on the poor
> p.209...It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God." I laughed out loud when I read this
> p.229 - "Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested." -----interesting!
> p.231 - "Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui--these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real."
> p.238...His mother's mental health issues....bird gazing, etc.....
> p.240..."I think part of what was so galvanizing was the substitute's diagnosis of the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world's constituent info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info."
> p.253.."Dream: I saw rows of foreshortened faces over which faint emotions played like the light of distant fire. The placid hopelessness of adulthood."....Wallace's own experience?
> p.293..."Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread--and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.".....Saw this repeatedly in my private practice over the years
> Entire chapter of people in library turning pages.....very funny
> The notion that "Phantom" visits...a "particular kind of hallucination that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom"...loved it!
> What about the boy who was obsessed with his lips touching every inch of his body?
> Stecyk's lifesaving in Home Ec when teacher cut off thumb.....
> p. 417..."...the distinctions between one's essential character and value and people's perceptions of that character/value are fuzzy and hard to delineate, especially in adolescence."
> A good administrator is genuinely liked, without trying to be or appearing to try
> p.437..."....life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump."
> p.438.."The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. 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, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life., if you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."...quite a concept!
LibraryThing Review: I think David Foster Wallace was absolutely brilliant. You might wonder how I could possibly give 5 stars to a work which was unfinished at the time of the author's suicide. Well.....read it. In some ways, as the editor says at the beginning, it is almost a collection of character studies....and what characters! Or, it is a treatise on the ability to immerse oneself in a boring set of repetitive tasks and to emerge successful and sane! Or, it is a commentary on the manner in which the American people have abdicated their responsibility to take responsibility for the running of their country! It is partially all of the above. The writing is witty, insightful, dark....who could ask for more? I cannot imagine what the novel would have been in its completed form. What a tragedy that Wallace suffered so that ending his life became a viable option! A loss to his family, the world of literature and humanity in general!
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