(1) Curiosity killed the cat.
(2) The World's Largest Ball of Twine is a curiosity.
(3) Therefore the World's Largest Ball of Twine killed the cat.

—David Foster Wallace, from Everything and More

Unicorns!

Apropos the whole business of abstractness and nouns' denotations, there is a syndrome that's either a high-level abstraction or some type of strange nominal mutation. 'Horse can mean this one horse right here, or it can mean the abstract concept, as in 'Horse = hoofed mammal of family Equidae'. Same with the word 'horn'; same with 'forehead'. All these can be abstracted from particulars, but we still know they came from particulars. Except what about a unicorn, which seems to result from the combination of the concepts 'horse', 'horn', and 'forehead' and thus has its whole origin in the concatenation of abstractions? Meaning we can conjoin and manipulate abstractions to form entities whose nouns have no particular denotations at all. Here the big problem becomes: In what way can we say a unicorn exists that is fundamentally different, less real, than the way abstractions like humanity or horn or integer exist?

—David Foster Wallace, from Everything & More

[David Foster Wallace] rejects criticism that his work is unnecessarily complicated: "I don't have any strong feelings about that, unless if somebody says, 'You know Dave, I read your book and it seems like it required all this hard work just basically for the sake of saying, "Hey fuck you reader, I can make you work hard."' Then I know with that reader I have failed. Then I really feel that they think I'm a putz. And I hate books where, you know, those books where you get halfway through and you get the sense that the author is so stupid that he thinks he can fool you into thinking that the book is really sophisticated and profound just because it's difficult. It's an epidemic in academic writing. And it happens about half the time in avant-garde writing. And it's the thing I most fear as a writer because it's the thing I most hate as a reader. And I'm sure I'm guilty of it sometimes."

—from an interview of DFW by Patrick Arden

heroines part the fifth

A small break from DFW quotes. I know I've shared these Jane Austen quotes before, but they always recur to me at different moments. This summer it was this one that I kept thinking about:

The mere habit of learning to love is the thing.

Yesterday I was flipping through my notebook, and stumbled upon this one, and it seemed quite apt:

When a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

What "quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the the vicissitudes of [your] eventful lives" are you thinking about these days?

organism

Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he'd be nothing more than an ism of his organs.

—David Foster Wallace, from "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" in Girl with Curious Hair

Crazy-Eyed

You should be aware that I am going to be talking about David Foster Wallace, or at least quoting him, a good amount in the following posts. You see, right now I live in Wallacelandia. It is all David Foster Wallace all the time. I'm in a class dedicated to him, and everyone in the class is getting a little crazy-eyed. DFW is in our heads. Last night, for instance, while spending time with a gentleman friend. I couldn't stop thinking about DFW, and allusions to him kept slipping out. Imagine me grabbing a young man by the lapels and shouting, "Are you being sham-honest with me? Are you being sham-honest?!"

To give you an idea, here is one of the interviews from David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

B.I. #19 10-96
Newport OR

'Why? Why. Well, it's not just that you're beautiful. Even though you are. It's that you're so darn smart. There. That's why. Beautiful girls are a dime a dozen, but not—hey, let's face it, genuinely smart people are rare. Of either sex. You know that. I think for me, it's your smartness more than anything else.'

Q.

'Ha. That's possible, I suppose, from your point of view. I suppose it could be. Except think about it a minute: would that possibility have even occurred to a girl who wasn't so darn smart? Would a dumb girl have had the sense to suspect that?'

Q.

'So in a way you've proved my point. So you can believe I mean it and not dismiss it as just some kind of come-on. Right?'

Q....

'So c'mere.'