/lit/ - Literature

what's with all the dfw worship

>42. To be honest, the example here has a special personal resonance for this reviewer
because in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking
somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with
social complexity that I’ll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible
ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of
blank out and do it totally straight — “I want to terminate the conversation and not have
you be in my apartment anymore” — which evidently makes me look either as if I’m very
rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation
gracefully. Somehow, in other words, my reducing the statement to its bare propositional
content “sends a message” that is itself scanned, sifted, interpreted, and judged
by my auditor, who then sometimes never comes back. I’ve actually lost friends this way.

Why did he do it? (you know what I mean)

Hello /lit/,

I just finished reading Mister Squishy by DFW and am having trouble understanding what happens in the story. The narrator seems to be all over the place even though the narrator places himself in the Targeted Focus Group when he says "I was one of the men in this room." Who is the man free climbing the building? I know the costume he is wearing is that of the Mister Squishy icon since everyone on the floor immediately recognized it but who sent him? I think it was Britton or Laleman but is there definitive proof as to which one is behind this ploy? Is the free climber a metaphor for employees climbing up the corporate ladder?

Hopefully some of you have read this story and can be of some help!

>mfw this thread is a referential metaphor for tao lin's marketing strategy

I thought he was smart...

"War does not determine who is right, only who is left." -Chesty Puller, War and Peace.

"Fiction is about what it means to be a fucking human being." - David Foster Wallace

"Fiction is about what it is to be a fucking human being" - David Foster Wallace

>>1225108
why post the shoop?