David Foster Wallace Quote
Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.
Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.
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She might not have read many books. But when she reads a book, she swallows the very words. If you open the books on her shelves, you will find that the front and back covers encase white pages.
About David Foster Wallace
Wallace grew up in Illinois. He graduated from Amherst College and the University of Arizona. His honors thesis at Amherst, about modal logic, was adapted into his debut novel The Broom of the System (1987). In his writing, Wallace intentionally avoided tropes of postmodern art such as irony or forms of metafiction, saying in 1990 that they were "agents of a great despair and stasis" in contemporary American culture. Infinite Jest, his second novel, is known for its unconventional narrative structure and extensive use of endnotes.
Wallace published three short story collections: Girl with Curious Hair (1989); Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), which was adapted into a 2009 film; and Oblivion: Stories (2004). His short stories and essays were published in outlets like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone magazines, and three collections of his essays were published as books: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997); Consider the Lobster (2005); and Both Flesh and Not (2012). Wallace also taught English and creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College.
In 2008, after struggling with depression for many years, Wallace died by suicide at age 46. His unfinished novel The Pale King was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.