Infinite Summer

_________________
"It is easy to put on a show & be cocky. . . Or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself. . . now that, my friend, is very hard to do." --Bruce Lee

One of those moments that I laughed at, doubted my own reference, checked, and then laughed again after making sure (moments that happen often) was when the narrator was describing Orin's roach invasion and dead-bird-coronary-victim-in-the-hottub-which-is-definitely-a-bad-sign:

"Orin had inherited none of the Moms's phobias about disorder, hygeine. (Not crazy about bugs though - roaches)" (44)

but then 2 paragraphs later, when discussing his strategy of deroachifying his apartment:

"After a couple of days the glass is all steamed up and the roach has asphyxiated messlessly and Orin discards both the roachand the tumblers in separate sealed Ziplocs in the dumpster complex by the golf course up the street." (45)

None of the phobias? "Not crazy?"

I cannot recommend A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again highly enough. The great thing about Wallace’s non-fiction, aside from its sheer brilliance and humor, is that many of the themes explored in IJ are touched upon, and in some cases, fleshed out a bit.

_________________
...the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. - Cormac McCarthy

Still haunted by "The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell." in the section on Orin.

Fav: DFW's expressions like "batshit-sounding" (p. 123)
"own-perceptions-doubting" (p. 125)
and "freeze his low-profile balls off " (p. 132)

My favorites tend to be things that I want to ape, to slip into my own vocabulary now and then.