a supposedly fun thing,,, PTII DFW
Nov. 8th, 2025 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mcbratHere are some additional quotes from the book past the first 46 pages that captivated me, that i underlined and some (with emphasis) were so impactful that i dog eared the page (yes i do that to all my books if the content is good enough…. i have met some people who believe this is sacriliege… idk im not giving my books away or selling them or entering myself in the “Worlds Most In Tact Undamaged Well Read Book Competition” so whatevs)
pg 67 (a long passage on irreverence as a social, communication and artistic tool)
“Irony only has emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.' This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”
same page:
“All US irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I'm saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That its impossible to mean what you say?”
pg 79 (on masturbatory surrealism as an illusion of escape and novelty)
"And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.”
pg 80 (this just reminded me of Kerouac and that it is a great description and so accurate :)
“…witty, erudite, extremely high-quailty prose television.”
pg 81 (i personally identified with this lol)
“… born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.”
“Too sincere. Clearly repressed.”
“To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.”
pg 82 (what a whopping ending)
“Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.”
LET ME BE CLEAR- THIS WAS MY FAVORITE ESSAY OF THE WHOLE BOOK, ITS A SEPARATE WORK OF ITS OWN OF COURSE CALLED: E Unibus Pluram AND YOU CAN FIND IT HERE https://tayiabr.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/e-unibus-pluram-david-foster-wallace-1990/
pg 89 (on the phenomeno of childhood uniqueness of self centred identity)
"One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory) is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the responsibility it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open?” “…regally innocent solipsism”
pg 90 (poetry)
“Noon will be a kiln.”
pg 91 (truthful statement)
“…you can always trust a man with multiple pens.”
pg 132 (hit a dry spell in the book… one of many) (on sensitivity)
“One of my basic life goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify.”
pg 192 (DS-Dry Spell) (on David Lynch)
“…the films are, like a fantasy-prone little kid, self-involved to an extent thats pretty much solipsistic. Hence their coldness…His loyalties are fierce and passionate and almost entirely to himself.”
pg 201 (on the impactfullness artistically of David Lynches body of work)
“…The very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn't verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern of Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.”
This is not all of the quotes but my eyes are closing :)) sweet dreams to myself, love you self, thank you self, night night self
pg 67 (a long passage on irreverence as a social, communication and artistic tool)
“Irony only has emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.' This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”
same page:
“All US irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I'm saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That its impossible to mean what you say?”
pg 79 (on masturbatory surrealism as an illusion of escape and novelty)
"And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.”
pg 80 (this just reminded me of Kerouac and that it is a great description and so accurate :)
“…witty, erudite, extremely high-quailty prose television.”
pg 81 (i personally identified with this lol)
“… born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.”
“Too sincere. Clearly repressed.”
“To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.”
pg 82 (what a whopping ending)
“Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.”
LET ME BE CLEAR- THIS WAS MY FAVORITE ESSAY OF THE WHOLE BOOK, ITS A SEPARATE WORK OF ITS OWN OF COURSE CALLED: E Unibus Pluram AND YOU CAN FIND IT HERE https://tayiabr.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/e-unibus-pluram-david-foster-wallace-1990/
pg 89 (on the phenomeno of childhood uniqueness of self centred identity)
"One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory) is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the responsibility it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open?” “…regally innocent solipsism”
pg 90 (poetry)
“Noon will be a kiln.”
pg 91 (truthful statement)
“…you can always trust a man with multiple pens.”
pg 132 (hit a dry spell in the book… one of many) (on sensitivity)
“One of my basic life goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify.”
pg 192 (DS-Dry Spell) (on David Lynch)
“…the films are, like a fantasy-prone little kid, self-involved to an extent thats pretty much solipsistic. Hence their coldness…His loyalties are fierce and passionate and almost entirely to himself.”
pg 201 (on the impactfullness artistically of David Lynches body of work)
“…The very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn't verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern of Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.”
This is not all of the quotes but my eyes are closing :)) sweet dreams to myself, love you self, thank you self, night night self
