Dissecting American society. Point one.
Taking it apart, putting it under formaldehyde. Point two.
Point three. Letting people pass through and take a good look at how internally the most intricate (in)civil society in the world is made.
David Foster Wallace, like a Damien Hirst of the human system.
You pass by, you watch, you can't rearrange anything, and he before you has not done so. He takes his specimens and observes them carefully. Some exist/have existed. Others could have existed/exist/will exist, for Wallace, it is irrelevant, they are all part of the same slab of formaldehyde divided in half, to be discovered, to be dug into and described in his own way.
Anomalous stories, anomalous words, wonderful phrases, images that carve into your eyes. David opens his hand, revealing, in perfect sections, the studio of Jeopardy! (American TV quiz), the mirror of the new humanity that wants money and the screen and fame and stories that are plausibly false, a microverse that envelopes an anomalous champion in her ways and pure in her sexuality who favors her likes and presses her lips on the heart of a program assistant, manipulated by producers, beloved by hosts, who encloses in a frightening fragility a view of the world that...
Wallace closes one hand and opens the other, and here Keith Jarrett makes dyslexic Republicans dance who burn punk arms whose mouths skillfully suck the torturer, and here President Lyndon B. Johnson opens the office door to his right hand, who shares with the quiz champion his purity in homo love, and again from the palm of the hand rise towards the sky whirls of sand full of sad omens, which take shape in words that confuse and bring back to the straight path, Carverianism pushed to the extreme consequences, in epochs of plastic and metal lacquered in glass and hate, while it's unclear if David Letterman is being serious or not.
In a few words:
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