Astral Codex Ten

WALLACE

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WALLACE

Article

WALLACE is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 19, 2021 and September 06, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “WALLACE: Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists”; “Wallace and Biden,”; “Wallace was one of the few suggesting something new. In Wallace’s world, postmodernism and consumer culture form a wicked duo”. It most often appears alongside MeToo, Resistance, 1/2019 government shut down.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 19, 2021
  • Last seen: September 06, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
WALLACE: Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups?
WALLACE: And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha, and as we’ve seen in Portland
WALLACE: Then do it, sir.
Your Book Review: The Pale King
September 06, 2024 · Original source
David Foster Wallace died in 2008, a year before I encountered his work; but I didn’t know it at the time. I was nineteen, with a broken wrist that forced me to drop all of my courses and left me homebound and bored. I decided to revenge myself on these irritating circumstances by spending four months lying in bed, stoned, reading fiction and eating snacks.2 And I happened to have a copy of Infinite Jest.
Inline links: 2
No such tirades materialized. Infinite Jest overcame my ideological fervor, a rare feat at the time. I cared too much about the characters, many of whom spoke to internal experiences I recognized but had never put into words. The themes gestured at a worldview beyond my radical leftist ideology, one I wouldn’t fully articulate for many more years. Reading David Foster Wallace felt itchy, somehow, like his message was sideways to everyone else’s, like he was missing some important point, or else I was.
No such tirades materialized. Infinite Jest overcame my ideological fervor, a rare feat at the time. I cared too much about the characters, many of whom spoke to internal experiences I recognized but had never put into words. The themes gestured at a worldview beyond my radical leftist ideology, one I wouldn’t fully articulate for many more years. Reading David Foster Wallace felt itchy, somehow, like his message was sideways to everyone else’s, like he was missing some important point, or else I was. The Project of David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest made Wallace a star. The book was both a literary sensation and cultural phenomenon, described by one commentator as “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." Nonetheless, Wallace wasn’t totally satisfied. “I don’t think it’s very good,” he wrote, “some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way toward describing the experience of writing the thing.” He grew determined to surpass Infinite Jest with something new.