That’s what it really comes down to: companies extracting value not just from your consumption, but from the raw materials of your life, the informationalized version of yourself.
I wanted my reviews to be like legal opinions, well-founded, well-reasoned, and as fair as I could make them without donning black robes and buying a gavel.
It’s not going to be a Manson Family memoir; it’s going to be funny and weird and a little bit gross or shocking, but also with a lot of beauty and affection in it too.
I’m interested in that murky zone where the truth is so outrageous as to be unbelievable, and in tackling the challenge of translating that sense of barely real truth into fiction without sacrificing its impact.
The World War II generation gets held up as a model for when people were in agreement about what democracy was. What I hope this book can get at is that people meant all kinds of things by democracy then.
The pressure of meeting the expectations, his own and from others, of “genius” created personal stress that no doubt was a factor in Wolfe’s early death.
Can you get your reader to say, OK, I’m in a dreaming mind at the moment, and this is what the mind is dreaming? If you can do that then a photograph can work and have no evidentiary function.
Wallace has been transformed from a writer people were reluctant to take seriously, and who was deemed profoundly derivative of Pynchon, to a writer people fall over themselves to namecheck.
The metaphor of war works from the assumption that there is no consensus, that there never was agreement to begin with.
I trust the reader to be able to understand the horror and tenderness innate in a situation. My job is to write it down as clearly as I can, and without judgment. There’s a difference between voyeurism and witness.