Page 144:
"...he explained to Franzen, he was no longer an artist:
The problem's details are at once shameful to me and boring to anyone else. I always had great contempt for people who bitched and moaned about how 'hard' writing was, and how 'blockage' was a constant and looming threat. When I discovered writing in 1983, I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I'd not dared hope for from anything.
"He added, "I have in the last two years been struck dumb. . . . Not dumb, actually, or even aphasic. It's more like, w/r/t things I used to believe and let inform me, my thoughts now have the urgent but impeded quality of speechlessness in dreams."
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Page 156:
"America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied."
...
"Irony, as Wallace defined it, was not in and of itself bad. Indeed, irony was the traditional stance of the weak against the strong; there was power in implying what was too dangerous to say.... But irony got dangerous when it became a habit... He continued:
This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing... [I]rony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.
"That was it exactly--irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say. For Wallace, perhaps irony's most frightening implication was that it was user-neutral: with viewers everywhere conditioned by media to expect it, anyone could employ it to any end. What really upset him was when Burger King used irony to sell hamburgers, or Joe Isuzu, cars."
[My note: See again the essay "The Joke's on You" by Steve Almond, to which I linked on 7/23; this reminds me of it.]
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