>Robert F./Bob Death asks Gately if by any chance he’s heard

>>8422636
Is this an actual part of the Goodreads site?

>>8422654
Probably. I just googled an IJ pic for the fish joke. Then it's all serendipity. http://www.identitytheory.com/david-foster-wallace-velveteen-rabbit/

>>8422673
>“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

>“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

>“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

excerpt of DFW's favorite story.

>>8422700
same article

>The stylistic traits that some of Wallace’s readers find off-puttingly distancing are — another paradox –- designed to ensure that, when we do feel what Wallace is getting at, we’ll feel it for real. They are like sieves that at first glance might make Wallace’s prose seem cold, but which, by straining out schmaltz, guarantee the purity of whatever emotion does filter through. Such traits include his deliberately awkward syntax in the service of unnecessarily exact description, his narratorial insistence on twentieth-guessing himself, the metafictional digressions critiquing metafiction, the overdosing on academic jargon and generally pedagogical tone, the elaborate neuroses that, unsettlingly, take on plausibility in the act of reading about them – one character in Infinite Jest has a “crippling phobic fear of leaves,” one in The Pale King suffers from “fear of pretty much all spiral movements in liquid, across the board” — the remorseless polyphony, the precise chemical descriptions of mood-altering pharmaceuticals, the deadpan forays into ultra-technical lingo, some scenes that resemble Saturday Night Live sketches rewritten by Dostoevsky, and an alertness to signs of hypocrisy so extreme as sometimes to be counter-productive.

>>8422764
>Wallace can leave me feeling that anyone who’s genuinely trying to be genuine would be forced to communicate exclusively using distancing devices just to avoid getting a reaction they haven’t truly earned. When I watch on Youtube the interview he gave for German TV in 2003, Wallace’s sincerity is apparent not so much from his voice – which is deep and confident — as from his apologetic facial grimaces and blinks. He cannot deliver a soundbite without instantly starting to apologize for it, as when immediately after talking about the need for responsible citizenship he says, “I can hear in my head a voice making fun of this stuff as I’m saying it, and this is the kind of paradox I think of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKdZU9Db6fk
"Wittgenstein says the most serious questions can only be discussed in the form of a joke"

>>8422790
>itw
"Someone said irony is the song of a bird who came to love its cage"

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>>8422654
https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/396-the-hipster-lit-flow-chart

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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13528351-both-flesh-and-not
collection of DFW essays