I read Consider the Lobster as a bit of a reprieve from the book guilt Infinite Jest still casts over my night stand and as a long overdue requiem to the literary colossus DFW is. Here’s the stuff I found noteworthy:
forked dorsally over the knee of a morbidly obese cellphone retailer
It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies
The impression is that of a very expensive thoroughbred being led onto the track under a silk blanket.
butane gas to be pumped via PVC into her lower colon and set afire on expulsion, resulting in a 3.5-foot anal blowtorch
wherein a starlet’s vagina and rectum are simultaneously accessed by two woodmen
a straight-on deep-focus view of a dilated and wood-ready orifice.
with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time
send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices
alliteration and anatomically mixed metaphor Schwartz’s
moments of near-Periclean eloquence
“I want to thank my mother, who spread her legs and made all this possible.”
the other famous phallocrats
the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.
seem less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.
It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.
the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.
That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.
Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?
somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it.
the bland condescension with which he performs the two occult keystrokes that unfreeze your screen is both elitist and situationally valid
a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users
The kids end up scared, both of me and for me.
way the beloved English of their youth is being trashed in the decadent present
can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.
Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition.”
it seems indisputable that we put some extra interpretive burden on the recipient when we fail to honor certain conventions.
People really do judge one another according to their use of language.
both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,”
like most dogmatists they’ve been extremely stupid about the rhetoric they used and the audience they were addressing.
This reviewer’s own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever really changing them.
Standard Written English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English” because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people.
PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact—in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself—of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo
censorship always serves the status quo.)
that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people’s sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.
it’s tempting to think AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.
which was indeed a rhetorical boner.
His argumentative strategy is totally brilliant and totally sneaky, and part of both qualities is that it usually doesn’t seem like there’s even an argument going on at all.
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.
that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel
the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality.
me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither.
the most complicated stuff also tended to be the most interesting
politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their truth or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability.
the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks—that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world.
So who wouldn’t yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt?
coffee that tastes like hot water with a brown crayon in it
By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thingas not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.
who knows she’s average and just wants a decent, noncynical life for herself and her family
But if you’re subjected to great salesmen and sales pitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn’t give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself
The answer depends on how gray-area-tolerant you are about sincerity vs. marketing, or sincerity plus marketing, or leadership plus the packaging and selling of same
whether he’s truly “for real” now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours.
but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.
There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other
