u/Extension_Carrot_628

https://preview.redd.it/p4bx9kmd3yah1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=c79117de213c861ad628bc5f59890c678d39a7fc

scrolled on this on my lunch break today and had a hearty ol laugh

Just finished reading Infinite Jest, and have been listening to a ton of Elliott Smith lately, and it's uncanny, how related these artists seem.

Obviously one's a maximalist and comes from an avant-garde literary tradition, whereas the other writes these Beatles-inspired pop songs, but then both write about addiction, family dysfunction, perfectionism, self-consciousness, alienation. There's a woundedness and also a self-lacerating irony. A song like 'Figure 8' -- Smith's cover of a Schoolhouse Rock song -- with its haunting instrumentation and imagery, its sadness, feels like something DFW would've enjoyed.

this is pure rant, but can i just say how fcking irritating it is that boomers own so much of the wealth in this country and control so much of what's left of the political system, and use their power again and again to enrich themselves at the expense of the young?

my apartment's last owner was a guy in his mid-30s whose family had a shingle at one of the local real estate companies. he'd inherited the apartment and leased it out to me for four years at a reasonable rate. not cheap -- this is boston -- but also not absurdly expensive. then his wife got sick, and because health insurance in this country is completely fucked, he was forced to sell the apartment in order to pay for her treatment.

my apartment was bought last fall by a guy in his mid 70s, whose email address is a type of mercedes, and who lives in and owns an oceanside mansion in myrtle beach, south carolina.

a week ago, after not hearing anything from this new boomer owner, I reached out to him, because my lease is coming up, and I asked if he knew what his plans were. he wrote back one line - have no plans to rerent, plan to come up soon and redo the place. so now i'm scrambling.

which, to be sure, is kid stuff compared to what my former owner and his wife are dealing with. i wanna be aware of self-pity and woe is me shit. i am lucky in many ways.

but also fuck this guy, fuck his generation, fuck this system

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

On my first tour of my most recent apartment search, I went to a place in Brighton whose images in the listing had been very convicingly doctored by AI. The pictures made it appear significantly brighter, cleaner, more welcoming than it actually was. I regret not calling the broker out on it -- didn't occur to me that the images were fake until I got back home, and looked up the listing. As if the rents in Boston weren't extortionary enough.

Magnolia is the closest analogue for me. millennial angst, interconnected characters, drug addiction, sexual abuse. po-mo pyrotechnics with deeply felt stuff. Frank TJ Mackey feels like a character (and character name) DFW might have written.

i could see also arguments made for Synecdoche NY, Royal Tenenbaums, Southland Tales. Also maybe something like Bresson or Flowers of St. Francis, something deeply spiritual. It's very hard to find a movie that captures the blend of tones that the book is able to do so well.

for me, it's a tossup between son of sam (acoustic), oh well okay, i didn't understand, everybody cares everybody understands, angeles, coast to coast

i'm partial to otis p. lord, eschaton weenie

it's funny to see where Wallace sticks to facts and where his imagination leads him. It's something more than just a writer being a writer.

Like that area of Commonwealth Ave., for example, that passes both Ennet and ETA -- in reality it's way more boring and drab than anything else. But in DFW's hands, it becomes this kind of crime-ridden cesspit, which feels of a piece with him showing the enshittification of America in the near-future. "Enfield" would in reality be a few miles away from the river and the highway, but in the Ennet and ETA sections, it's a dramatic, expressionistic landscape, full of hills, a gaping ravine, the Charles, the Mass Pike. He'll mash together facets of actual neighborhoods in order to emphasize differences of class that are less obvious in person. Like for example when Gately's cruising through BU-land up over the river toward Inman Square. In the book, BU kids are almost uniformly soft and pampered to highlight Gately's difference. Whereas BU has a reputation for being scrappier compared to BC, Tufts, Harvard, Emerson, and other nearby colleges.

No complaints about any of this btw. it's just a window into his process.

And as someone who's spent time in Boston 12-step programs -- there is very, very little obvious fictionalization. He nails it.

the Eschaton section, after a close second read, may be the high-point for me of the novel, and also DFW's career

I wish I had a brother and I wish he were Mario

Strong Ulysses vibes with the litany of real and doctored headlines on I-day

Sooo many Steeply/Marathe interludes.....

The class on double binds of psychology and the increasingly vile tv network ads pre-Interlace made me laugh so hard my neighbors could hear me

I completely skimmed that stuff about the brothers Antitoi and their demise because truly who cares...hoping it doesn't come to bite back me in the ass

The continuum between the surrender of recovery and Schtitt's tennis-related fascism is fascinating

Am a little apprehensive that there is more than half of the novel left to go....tho I guess we haven't really dug deep into Avril, Tavis, the mechanics of Hal's breakdown, the dissemination of infinite jest

really not interested in the FLQ stuff. anytime we stray too far from ennet or eta I get antsy