Brief Interviews With Hideous Men Quotes

Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

And I was -- this is just how I was afraid you'd take it. I knew it, that you'd think this means you were right to be afraid all the time and never feel secure or trust me. I knew it'd be 'See, you're leaving after all when you promised you wouldn't.' I knew it but I'm trying to explain anyway, okay? And I know you probably won't understand this either, but --wait-- just try to listen and maybe absorb this, okay? Ready? Me leaving is not the confirmation of all your fears about me. It is not. It's because of them. Okay? Can you see that? It's your fear I can't take. It's your distrust and fear I've been trying to fight. And I can't anymore. I'm out of gas on it. If I loved you even a little less maybe I could take it. But this is killing me, this constant feeling that I am always scaring you and never making you feel secure. Can you see that?

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time.

The trick to this solution is that you’d have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked - more like unarmed. Defenseless. ‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’ - this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to “Do you like me? Please like me,” which you know quite well that 99% of all interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obsene. In fact one of the very last few interperonal taboos we have is kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else. It looks pathetic and desperate. That’s how it’ll look to the reader. And it will have to. There’s no way around it.

K--: 'When they say "I am my own person," "I do not need a man," "I am responsible for my own sexuality," they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.

The modern woman's a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to fuck around if you’re a feminist but it’s also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren’t feminists and won’t respect you and won’t call you again if you fuck around.

This is how I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?-- this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.

I pick up the list of Benji's five favorite books because we've got work to do: "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. He's a pretentious fuck and a liar. "Underworld" by Don DeLillo. He's a snob. "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. He's a spoiled passport-carrying fuck stunted in eighth grade. "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" by David Foster Wallace. Enough already. "The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane. He's got Mayflowers in his blood.

Rhythms are relations between what you believe and what you believed before.

In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness

This by the way is known as Werther’s Axiom, whereby quote The Intensity of a desire D is inversely proportional to the ease of D’s gratification. Known also as Romance.

...the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.

When they were introduced, he made a witicism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, overwhelming, powerful and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.

Okay, you know, is it weird to get so depressed watching a children’s Christmas special— Oh, wait, I shouldn’t say that. I mean, that’s not a good word. It’s not just “sadness,” the way one feels sad at a film or a funeral. It’s more of a plummeting quality. Or the way, you know, the way that light gets in winter just before dusk, or the way she is with me. All right, at the height of lovemaking, you know, the very height, when she’s starting to climax, and she’s really responding to you now, you know, her eyes widening in that way that’s both, you know, surprise and recognition, which not a woman alive could fake or feign if you really look intently at her, really see her. And I don’t know, this moment has this piercing sadness to it, of the loss of her in her eyes. And as her eyes, you know, widen to their widest point and as she begins to climax and arch her back, they close. You know, shut, the eyes do. And I can tell that she’s closed her eyes to shut me out. You know, I become like an intruder. And behind those closed lids, you know, her eyes are now rolled all the way around and staring intently inward into some void where l, who sent them, can’t follow.

And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.

This is what people call a view. And you knew that from below you wouldn't look nearly so high overhead. You see now how high overhead you are. You knew from down there no one could tell . . . There's been time this whole time. You can't kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria's Secret catalogue.

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain itself, the depressed person hoped at least to be able to express something of its context, its shape and texture, as it were-by recounting circumstances related to its etiology.

His eyes were holes in the world.

Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their positive aspects in the long run? … You have to be careful of taking a knee-jerk attitude. Having a knee-jerk attitude to anything is a mistake, especially in the case of women, where it adds up to this very limited and condescending thing of saying they’re fragile, breakable things that can be destroyed easily. Everybody gets hurt and violated and broken sometimes. Why are women so special? Not that anybody ought to be raped or abused, nobody’s saying that, but that’s what is going on. What about afterwards? All I’m saying is there are certain cases where it can enlarge you or make you more of a complete human being, like Viktor Frankl. Think about the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust a good thing? No way. Does anybody think it was good that it happened? No, of course not. But did you read Viktor Frankl? Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? It’s a great, great book, but it comes out of his experience. It’s about his experience in the human dark side. Now think about it, if there was no Holocaust, there’d be no Man’s Search for Meaning… . Think about it. Think about being degraded and brought within an inch of your life, for example. No one’s gonna say the sick bastards who did it shouldn’t be put in jail, but let’s put two things into perspective here. One is, afterwards she knows something about herself that she never knew before. What she knows is that the most totally terrible terrifying thing that she could ever have imagined happening to her has now happened, and she survived. She’s still here, and now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. Look, totally terrible things happen… . Existence in life breaks people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time, trust me I know. I’ve been there. And this is the big difference, you and me here, cause this isn’t about politics or feminism or whatever, for you this is just ideas, you’ve never been there. I’m not saying nothing bad has ever happened to you, you’re not bad looking, I’m sure there’s been some sort of degradation or whatever come your way in life, but I’m talking Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning type violation and terror and suffering here. The real dark side. I can tell from just looking at you, you never. You wouldn’t even wear what you’re wearing, trust me. What if I told you it was my own sister that was raped? What if I told you a little story about a sixteen-year-old girl who went to the wrong party with the wrong guy and four of his buddies that ended up doing to her just about everything four guys could do to you in terms of violation? But if you could ask her if she could go into her head and forget it or like erase the tape of it happening in her memory, what do you think she’d say? Are you so sure what she’d say? What if she said that even after that totally negative as what happened was, at least now she understood it was possible. People can. Can see you as a thing. That people can see you as a thing, do you know what that means? Because if you really can see someone as a thing you can do anything to him. What would it be like to be able to be like that? You see, you think you can imagine it but you can’t. But she can. And now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. This is what you wanted to hear, you wanted to hear about four drunk guys who knee-jerk you in the balls and make you bend over that you didn’t even know, that you never saw before, that you never did anything to, that don’t even know your name, they don’t even know your name to find out you have to choose to have a fucking name, you have no fucking idea, and what if I said that happened to ME? Would that make a difference?

This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what’s really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we’re all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and informed.

Or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimention and commenting on the fiasco itself. (p. 158)

One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

Alls—how it’s possible even the worst things that can happen to you can end up being positive factors in who you are.

Existence and life break people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time.

The depressed person’s therapist was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person for clinging to her defenses, or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously chosen or chosen to cling to a chronic depression whose agony made her (i.e., the depressed person’s) every waking hour feel like more than any person could possibly endure. This renunciation of judgment or imposed value was held by the therapeutic school in which the therapist’s philosophy of healing had evolved over almost fifteen years of clinical experience to be integral to the combination of unconditional support and complete honesty about feelings which composed the nurturing professionalism required for a productive therapeutic journey toward authenticity and intrapersonal wholeness. Defenses against intimacy, the depressed person’s therapist’s experiential theory held, were nearly always arrested or vestigial survival-mechanisms; i.e., they had, at one time, been environmentally appropriate and necessary and had very probably served to shield a defenseless childhood psyche against potentially unbearable trauma, but in nearly all cases they (i.e., the defense-mechanisms) had become inappropriately imprinted and arrested and were now, in adulthood, no longer environmentally appropriate and in fact now, paradoxically, actually caused a great deal more trauma and pain than they prevented. Nevertheless, the therapist had made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame, or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her arrested or vestigial defenses before she (i.e., the depressed person) felt ready and able to risk taking the leap of faith in her own internal resources and self-esteem and personal growth and healing to do so (i.e., to leave the nest of her defenses and freely and joyfully fly).

What if I told you she could because she’s had this happen and she totally knows it’s possible to be just a thing but just like Victor Frankl that every minute from then on minute by minute if you want you can choose to be more if you want, you can choose to be a human being and have it mean something? Then what would you say?

My first thought when I came here was that I understood why there are so many great Irish writers - because there is something mystical in the air. There's always this cloudy, moody sky and it's challenging.

I kept saying her name and she would ask What? and I’d say her name again. I’m not afraid of how this sounds to you. I’m not embarrassed now. But if you could understand, had I—can you see why there’s no way I could let her just go away after this? Why I felt this apical sadness and fear at the thought of her getting her bag and sandals and New Age blanket and leaving and laughing when I clutched her hem and begged her not to leave and said I loved her and closing the door gently and going off barefoot down the hall and never seeing her again? Why it didn’t matter if she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention. I’d fallen in love with her. I believed she could save me. I know how this sounds, trust me. I know your type and I know what you’re bound to ask. Ask it now. This is your chance. I felt she could save me I said. Ask me now. Say it. I stand here naked before you. Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, cunt, slut, gash. Happy now? All borne out? Be happy. I don’t care. I knew she could. I knew I loved. End of story.

rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes

Well it totally freaks them out, what do you think? And I just about die of the embarrassment. I don’t ever know what to say. What do you say if you just shouted “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” right when you came?

Drawn lids one screen of skin, dreampaintings move across Day's colored dark. Tonight, in a lapse unfluttered by time, he travels what seems to be back. Shrinking, smoother, loses his belly and faint acne scars. Bird-boned gangle; bowl haircut and cup-handle ears; skin sucks hair, nose recedes into face; he swaddles in his pants and then curls, pink and mute and smaller until he feels himself split into something that wriggles and something that spins. Nothing stretches tight across everything else. A black point rotates. The point breaks open, jagged. His soul sails toward one color.

Step into the skin and disappear.

You are the sort of auditor for whom the rhetoricians designed the exordium.

an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible

Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she’s telling the story, reliving it, she’s naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they’re full of additives and unsafe—unsafe as she’s sitting there chain-smoking, which was so patently irrational that I couldn’t even bring—yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she’s moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window—all I can tell you is she was lovely. The bottoms of her feet dirty, almost black. The moon so full it looks engorged.

(Ibid. on using the verb to be in this culturally envenomed way, too, as in ‘I’ll Be There For You,’ which has become the sort of empty spun-sugar shibboleth that communicates nothing except a certain unreflective sappiness in the speaker.

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

Between a cold kitchen window gone opaque with the stove’s wet heat and the breath of us, an open drawer, and the gilt ferrotype of identical boys flanking a blind vested father which hung in a square recession above the wireless’s stand, my Mum stood and cut off my long hair in the uneven heat.

Alls I’m—or think about the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust a good thing? No way. Does anybody think it was good it happened? No way. But did you ever read Victor Frankl? Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? It’s a great, great book. Frankl was in a camp in the Holocaust and the book comes out of that experience, it’s about his experience in the human Dark Side and preserving his human identity in the face of the camp’s degradation and violence and suffering total ripping away his identity. It’s a totally great book and now think about it, if there wasn’t a Holocaust there wouldn’t be a Man’s Search for Meaning.

when all the like props and stage-settings that let you just go around smugly assuming you’re not a thing are ripped away and broken because all of a sudden now the world understands you as a thing, everybody else thinks you’re a rat or a thing and now it’s up to you, you’re the only one that can decide if you’re more.

A menudo me veía obligado a apartar mi mirada de él, a mirar a otra parte. A esconderme. Descubrí por qué los padres sostienen el diario de la tarde de esa forma

Puede ser apropiado hacer algo temible sin pensarlo, pero no cuando lo temible es el propio hecho de no pensar

Me imitaba cuando yo estaba molesto -solamente el amor de la vida de uno puede hacer esto- y a mí se me pasaba el enfado

Y tomaba mi silencio por aprobación. La esencia del abismo era que ella creía que no existía ningún abismo

jodhpurs, and

The emotionally Hobbesian meat market of the "dating scene".

The lie is that it’s one or the other. A still, floating bee is moving faster than it can think. From overhead the sweetness drives it crazy.

What terms might be used to describe such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?

Their faces was different and their wife's faces in the truck, fine and showing teeth and him with a arm around the Mrs. and a wave at Daddy as they back out.

Over eighty-five percent of the time the subject accepts.

X secretly castigates himself and wonder where his basic decency and compassion are.

The trick to this solution is that you have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked - more like unarmed. Defenseless.

2d. J. (still gone 100% pale a la Dostoevsky's Nastasya F.) abruptly acquiesces w/r/t adulterous Holiday Inn interlude {tone flat = '"Mm, OK," she said.'}

Ndiawar is bent to an open drawer. 'Your new art therapy person,' he says to Yang. Yang looks Day in the eye. 'Look, man' he says. 'I rotate three-dimension objects. Mentally.

On one level my attention was intently focused on her voice and story. On another level I - it was if my mind was having a garage sale.

the mystic approaches the hot-dog stand and tells the vendor Make me one with everything.

I am a giant, a mountain, a planet. Everything else is far off below. My footsteps are countries, my shadow a time zone. I watch from high windows. I wash in high clouds.

started to see that maybe he had forgotten the whole incident.

...the result of an estimated 86.5% of 20C dates was a state of severe emotional dissonance between the date's participants, a dissonance attributed by most sources to basic psychosemantic miscodings,

the feeling that you’d do absolutely anything or say or trade anything to persuade him to simply settle for rape and let you go, or even torture, even willing to bring to the bargaining table a bit of nonlethal torture if only he’d settle for hurting you and choose to drive off and leave you hurt and breathing in the weeds and sobbing at the sky and traumatized beyond all recovery instead of as nothing

And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

The nameless anxiety of the dream is indescribably horrid - the wide, Jeni, feels she simply must (wiper) must (wiper) must catch the husband's car in order to avert some kind of crisis so horrible it has no name.

I am saying in order to masturbate successfully, the scene required rational logic by which copulation with this exercising woman is plausible in the public of the State Exercise Facility. I was responsible to this logic.

That her will and wishes had opposed my own just a little more. This by the way is known as Werther's Axiom, whereby quote the intensity of a desire D is inversely proportional to the ease of D's gratification. Known also as Romance.

She kept . . . using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or any evident awareness that the word has through tactical over-deployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least.

Bear with me a moment, now. Chicken-sexing. Since hens have a far greater commercial value than males, cocks, roosters, it is apparently vital to determine the sex of a newly hatched chick. In order to know whether to expend capital on raising it or not, you see. A cock is nearly worthless, apparently, on the open market. The sex characteristics of newly hatched chicks, however, are entirely internal, and it is impossible with the naked eye to tell whether a given chick is a hen or a cock. This is what I have been told, at any rate. A professional chicken-sexer, however, can nevertheless tell. The sex. He can go through a brood of freshly hatched chicks, examining each one entirely by eye, and tell the poultry farmer which chicks to keep and which are cocks. The cocks are to be allowed to perish. “Hen, hen, cock, cock, hen,” and so on and so forth. This is apparently in Australia. The profession. And they are nearly always right. Correct. The fowl determined to be hens do in fact grow up to be hens and return the poultry farmer’s investment. What the chicken-sexer cannot do, however, is explain how he knows. The sex. It’s apparently often a patrilineal profession, handed down from father to son. Australia, New Zealand. Have him hold up a new-hatched chick, a young cock shall we say, and ask him how he can tell that it is a cock, and the professional chicken-sexer will apparently shrug his shoulders and say “Looks like a cock to me.” Doubtless adding “mate,” much the way you or I would add “my friend” or “sir.

what words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be? How was she to decide and describe—even to herself, looking inward and facing herself—what all she’d so painfully learned said about her?

As everyone is well aware, ti is so difficult to do something nice for someone and not want them, desperately, to know that the identity of the individual who did it for them was you, and to feel grateful and approving towards you, and to tell myriads of other people what you 'did' for them, so that you can be widely acknowledged as a 'good' person.

As everyone is well aware, it is so difficult to do something nice for someone and not want them, desperately, to know that the identity of the individual who did it for them was you, and to feel grateful and approving towards you, and to tell myriads of other people what you 'did' for them, so that you can be widely acknowledged as a 'good' person.

K---: 'There I'd have to agree. What modern feminists-slash-postfeminists will say they want is mutuality and respect of their individual autonomy. If sex is going to happen, they'll say, it has to be by mutual consensus and desire between two autonomous equals who are each equally responsible for their own sexuality and its expression.' E---: 'That's almost word for word what I've heard them say,' K---: 'And it's total horseshit.

But at the end of the white board, the edge, where you'll come down with your weight to make it send you off, there are two areas of darkness. Two flat shadows in the broad light. Two vague black ovals. The end of the board has two dirty spots. They are from all the poeple who've gone before you. Your feet as you stand here are tender and dented, hurt by the rough wet surface, and you see that the two dark sports are from people's skin. They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight. More people than you could count without losing track. The weight and abrasion of their disappearance leaves little bits of soft tender feet behind, bits and shards and curls of skin that dirty and darken and tan as they lie tiny and smeared in the sun at the end of the board. They pile up and get smeared and mixed together. They darken in two circles.

Quando vennero presentati, lui fece una battuta, sperando di piacere. Lei rise a crepapelle, sperando di piacere. Poi se ne tornarono a casa in macchina, ognuno per conto suo, lo sguardo fisso davanti a sé, la stessa identica smorfia sul viso. A quello che li aveva presentati nessuno dei due piaceva troppo, anche se faceva finta di sí, visto che ci teneva tanto a mantenere sempre buoni rapporti con tutti. Sai, non si sa mai, in fondo, o invece sì, o invece sì.

It ascended by levels: Da's cameo recessed against the glow of the tuner's parade,the drawer of utensils withdrawn past its fulcrum, the disembodied face of my brother miming and distorting my desperate attempt by expression alone to make Mum look up from me and see him, I no longer feeling my features' movements so much as seeing them on that writhing white face against the pantry's black, the throttle-popped eyes and cheeks ballooning against the gag's restraint, Mum squatting chairside to even my ears, my face before us bother farther and farther from my own control as I saw in his twin face what all lolly-smeared hand-held brats must see in the fun-house mirror- the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges- as the mimicry ascended reflected levels to become finally the burlesque of a wet hysteria that plastered cut strands to a wet white brow, the strangled man's sobs blocked by cloth, storm's thrum and electric hiss and Da's mutter against the lalation of shears meant for lambs, an unseen fit that sent my eyes upward again and again into their own shocked white, knowing past sight that my twin's face would show the same, to mock it- until the last refuge was slackness, giving up the ghost completely for a blank sack gagged mask's mindless stare-un seen and seeing- into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. No not ever again.

HISTORIA RADICALMENTE CONCENTRADA DE LA ERA POSTINDUSTRIAL Cuando fueron presentados, él hizo un comentario ingenioso porque quería caer bien. Ella soltó una risotada estrepitosa porque quería caer bien. Luego los dos cogieron sus coches y se fueron solos a sus casas, mirando fijamente la carretera, con la misma mueca en la cara. Al hombre que los había presentado no le caía demasiado bien ninguno de los dos, pero fingía que sí porque le preocupaba mucho tener buenas relaciones con todo el mundo. Después de todo, nunca se sabe, ¿verdad que no? ¿Verdad? ¿Verdad?

The cleric appears tonight in monochrome and collar. Bless me Do you take this woman Sarah To be my How long For I have since your last confession to a body with the power to absolve. Confession need As I those who have swimmed against me not entail absolution, lay bare, confession in the absence of awareness of sin, Bless me father for there can be no awareness of sin without awareness of transgression without awareness of limit Full of Grace no such animal. Pray together for a revelation of limit Red clouds in Warhol's coffee arrange in yourself an awareness of.

The starting out so intense, in almost overdrive, and feeling as if everything depends on getting them to drop their defenses and plunge in and love me as totally as I love them, then the freaking-out thing kicks in and reverses thrust. I admit there’s a kind of dread at the idea of having a conscience in this area, as if it seems as if it’s going to take away all room to maneuver, somehow. Which is bizarre, I know, because at the beginning of the pattern I don’t want room to maneuver, the last thing I want is room to maneuver, what I want is to plunge in and get them to plunge in with me and believe in me and be together in it forever. I swear, I really almost every time seem to have believed that’s what I wanted. Which is why it doesn’t quite seem to me as if I was evil or anything, or as if I was actually lying to them or anything—even though at the end, when I seem to have reversed thrust and suddenly pulled totally out of it, they almost always all feel as if I’ve lied to them, as if if I meant what I said there’s no way I could be reversing thrust the way I’m doing now. Which I still, to be honest, don’t quite think I’ve ever done: lied. Unless I’m just rationalizing. Unless I’m some kind of psychopath who can rationalize anything and can’t even see the most obvious kinds of evil he’s perpetrating, or who doesn’t even care but wants to delude himself into believing he cares so that he can continue to see himself as a basically decent guy.

Her brassiere's snaps are in the front. His own forehead snaps clear. He thinks to kneel. But he knows what she might think if he kneels. What cleared his forehead's lines was a type of revelation. Her breasts have come free. He imagines his wife and son. Her breasts are unconfined now. The bed's comforter has a tulle hem, like a ballerina's little hem. This is the younger sister of his wife's college roommate. Everyone else has gone to the mall, some to shop, some to see a movie at the mall's multiplex. The sister with breasts by the bed has a level gaze and a slight smile, slight and smoky, media-taught. She sees his color heighten and forehead go smooth in a kind of revelation--why she'd begged off the mall, the meaning of certain comments, looks, distended moments over the weekend he'd thought were his vanity, imagination. We see these things a dozen times a day in entertainment but imagine we ourselves, our own imaginations, are mad. A different man might have said what he'd seen was: Her hand moved to her bra and freed her breasts. His legs might slightly tremble when she asks what he thinks. Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria's Secret catalogue. She is, he thinks, the sort of woman who'd keep her heels on if he asked her to. Even if she'd never kept heels on before she'd give him a knowing, smoky smile, Page 18. In quick profile as she turns to close the door her breast is a half-globe at the bottom, a ski-jump curve above. Figure skaters have a tulle hem, as well. The languid half-turn and push at the door are tumid with some kind of significance; he realizes suddenly she's replaying a scene from some movie she loves. In his imagination's tableau his wife's hand is on his small son's shoulder in an almost fatherly way.

Victor Frankl? Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning?

badlooking

dither

PHONE.VIP

Being There

their workplaces were elaborate, involved, vociferous, baroque, mercilessly self-critical, and very nearly constant,

Support System

emergence of the depressed person’s Inner Child and a cathartic tantrum

the depressed person was frightened for herself, for as it were “[her]self ”—i.e. for her own so-called “character” or “spirit” or as it were “soul

Whereas both Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Twenty-Seventh City explore the limitations of neoliberalism in the context of real political change, Wallace’s early work is conspicuously apolitical, and in this aspect he can also be seen to embody a uniquely Gen X ethos. In the context of our current hyperpartisan, thoroughly politicized era, it is easy to overlook the fact that Wallace’s ascent to the top ranks of the US literary establishment took place during a rare, brief, and, as these kinds of things always turn out to be, false period of relative historical complacency. The collapse of the Soviet Union occurred two years after the 1987 appearance of The Broom of the System; by September 11, 2001, Wallace had published Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). Beginning with his Rolling Stone essay on the 9/11 attacks, “The View from Mrs. Thompsons,’” and continuing through to his blistering portrait of right-wing radio host John Ziegler and, of course, his unfinished novel The Pale King (2011), Wallace’s work became more political, and more pointed, the political partisanship of the new century replacing pop-culture irony in his work as the source of our isolation and failure to find real meaning and purpose in our life.