When people ask me about it

Style

Postmodern

• Satirical, absurd humour
• Hyperrealist
• Dense and detailed
• • Wallace's "encyclopedic display of knowledge" is insane incorporates media theory, addiction, and issues of national identity.

Contemporaty themes

Melancholy

• It's melancholy is so postmodern

Loneliness

• Tennis
• • Kate Gompert

Addiction

Frequently cited as one of the most diffcult books to read of the 20st century

Characters

Hal

• Genius, isolated, problematic, autistic

Philosophy

Exagerate (or not) the consequences of hedonism

• • The Entertainement

Davi's comments

• I like this book, because Crime and Punishment is a book that is very strong game in terms of philosophy, but this book's main highlights are actually its literature techniques.

Basics

What this book is about

• I think this book is about anything. This book is about the question of why? Why am I watching all this shit? This book is why am I doing this? And what's so American about it?
• Cause the tecnology is going to get better and better, and it's going to get easier and easier, and more and more pleasurable to sit on a screen, given to us by people who do not love but want our money
• “I think that if there is a sort of sadness for people under 45, it has something to do with pleasure, and achievement, and entertainment

My interpretation of the big picture of the book

Literary overdose

• For me reading this book, I feel like everything is so perfectly written, every canonical aspect of the contemporary life is quintenssentially epitommized. For me this book feels like a literary overdose. I personally feel like reading this book is a bit like using drugs. I consider this book irritantement perfeito

Infinite

• I think it's interesting because infinite from a mathemtical perspective is a very serious topic, in fact that 10^10^10^10^10 is in fact nothing compared to infinite, there is no quantity in the world that is comparable to infinite. But through the hyper realistic approach, he is able to make you feel infinite, as if the world has infinite information.

Hyper realism

Gives an insane amount of details about something to the point that it conveys perfectly how it feels like. A great tool for epitomization

• (End of parties) Você pode estar em certas festas e não estar lá de verdade. Você pode ouvir como certas festas têm os seus próprios fins implicados já embutidos na coreografia da própria festa. Um dos momentos mais tristes que Joelle van Dyne sente em qualquer lugar é aquele eixo invisível onde uma festa acaba — até uma festa ruim —, aquele instante de tácita aquiescência em que todo mundo começa a juntar isqueiros e namorados, jaqueta ou casacão, aquela última cerveja presa ao plástico que viu outras cinco saírem, diz certas coisas perfunctórias para a anfitriã de uma maneira que ela reconhece essa perfunctoriedade sem parecer insincera, e sai normalmente fechando a porta. Quando a voz de todo mundo vai sumindo no corredor. Quando a anfitriã se vira depois de fechar a porta e vê a bagunça e o V de silêncio total se expandindo na esteira da festa.

Gives an insane amount of details about something that is completely unrelated to the story

• TO BE WRITTEN

Humour

The main guideline of the humour of the book is he talks about the problems of contemporary society, and show cases it in the most absurd way, but in a way that feels real.

Metamodernism

• The book has a lot footnotes in order to mimic a tennis match

Terrorists

• The philosophers in this society are the terrorists
• The terrorists groups are in wheel chair
• • A very funny scene where is when they kill in quebec an owner of a cartridge shop, and it describes how scary it is to hear the sounds of the squeaking of the wheelchair, which creates a contradiction, because the when you read it seem scary, but you think rationally about it seems innofensive.
• There is a mimic of plato's dialogues with a trans triple agent, and a wheelchair assassin quadruple agent while they watch catapults throw garbage to the northwest.

Addiction

• The author multiple times gives very terrible stories of addiction, and as a follow up it shows people getting addicted to drugs
• The AA meetings are very interested because they are a bunch of people that in fact are bad ass, most of them thought about killing themselves, hearing a bunch of politically correct bullshit

Trouble conecting with other people

• Orin talking with Hal about when their father killed himself by putting his head in the microwave, meanwhile Hal is cutting his nails
• The fact that his own father needs to dress as therapist in order for Hal to talk to him. Hal realizes there is something in the wardrobe in common with his had and stops talking immediately becoming mute.
• This book is about people that are desparetely hungry for connection and are really bad at it, which is kinda of the book is about.

Chronology

• The fact that the first chapter of the book is chrnologically the last one
• • You spend the whole book trying to reach to see the ending, when in reality there wasn't any point in it, because the beginning is the end.
• The character introduced at the second chapter never shows up at the novel

American culture critique

• Canada and Mexico have been joined to form an organization called ONAN (which is an old name for masturbation, therefore they are the country of self pleasure)
• US creates so much garbage, that it hires it elects a president saying that it will literally clean america, and then it dumps all of shit in Canada, and constructs ventiladores to put the smell away from US. This place is called the great concavity.
• The years have been sold to american corporations

Philosophy

Marathe critizes hedonism

• Then in such a case your temple is self sentiment. THen in such an instance you are fanatico of desire, a slave to your individual sentiment"

Illusion of freedom

• Marathe estava disposto a que a sua voz não se elevasse. 'Pois esta escolha determina todo o resto. Não? Todas as outras escolhas que vocês dizem que são livres decorrem disto: qual é o nosso templo. Qual é o templo, portanto, para os EUA? O que acontece, quando você teme ter que protegê-los de si mesmos, se os perversos quebequenses conspiram para trazer o entretenimento para seus lares acolhedores?'
• If the big corporations, or even society as a whole chooses our temple, then are we really free?

Genealogy of American Values

• The American philosophy is the British one according to their own culture
• There was some silence

for thinking until Marathe finally said, looking up and off to think: 'This U.S.A. type of person and desires appears to me like almost the classic, how do you say, uti-litaire.

• The American genius,

our good fortune is that someplace along the line back there in American history them realizing that each American seeking to pursue his maximum good results together in maximizing everyone's good.’

Criticism to American philosophy

• What if someone's hapiness matter more than others
• 'Good. This is well. Delayed gratification. How is my U.S.A. type able in my mind to calculate my long-term overall

pleasure, then decide to sacrifice this intense soup-craving of this moment to the long term and overall?’

Philsophical value of the Entertainement

• It's kind of a thought experiment, kinda of similar to the experience machine from Robert Nozick.
• 'Are you understanding? I am asking between only us.

How could it be that A.F.R. malice could hurt all of the U.S.A. culture by making available something as momentary and free as the choice to view only this one Entertainment? You know there can be no forcing to watch a thing. If we disseminate the samizdat, the choice will be free, no? Free from force, no? Yes? Freely chosen?’

Psychology

Que "aceitaccao" normalmente eh mais questao de fadiga que de qualquer outra coisa.

Que transar com alguem com quem voce nao se importa te deixa depois mais sozinho do que nao ter transado

Drugs

Addiction

What is addiction?

• David Foster Wallace he extends my definition of addiction, to something more broad, is anything you need to make time past

What is the key problem of us at a society of handling addiction

• A maneira como ela balançou a cabeça de repente foi veemente, exasperada. 'O sentimento é o motivo

pelo qual eu quero. O sentimento é a razão pela qual quero morrer. Estou aqui porque quero morrer. Por isso estou num quarto sem janelas e com gaiolas sobre as lâmpadas e sem fechadura na porta do banheiro. Por que levaram meus cadarços e meu cinto. Mas noto que eles não tiram o sentimento, não é?

What people do in a society of overstimulation

• Kate is now the third character in the book with a serious marijuana addiction, which is strange considering that (as Kate herself points out) marijuana is not considered to be a highly addictive or debilitating drug. The fact that so many characters are addicted to weed suggests that something about the world of the novel compels people to seek out a calming, numbing effect more than a stimulating one.

The control of the addiction over us

• (Joel is in a party bathroom using drugs) Chega de apertar o coração toda noite. O que parece ser a saída da jaula é na verdade as barras da jaula. As malhas do entardecer. A entrada diz SAÍDA. Não há saída. A fusão anular final: entre animal exibido e jaula. O próprio Jaula III: Espetáculo gratuito. Foi a jaula que entrou nela, de alguma maneira. A engenhosidade da coisa toda está além da compreensão dela. A Diversão faz tempo abandonou o Demais. Ela perdeu a capacidade de mentir a si própria sobre a sua capacidade de parar ou até de gostar daquilo, ainda. Ela não delimita e preenche o buraco mais. Ela não delimita mais o buraco. Há um certo cheiro que têm os véus molhados de chuva. Alguma coisa de um telefonema e da lua, dizendo que a lua nunca virava a cara. Em revolução mas ainda assim não. Ela tinha saído correndo no último T da noite e ido para casa e pelo menos finalmente não tinha desviado o rosto da situação, da questão de que ela não amava mais aquilo, mas odiava e queria parar e também não conseguia parar ou imaginar parar ou viver sem aquilo. Ela tinha de certa forma feito como tinham feito o Jim fazer perto do fim e admitido a sua impotência diante dessa jaula, desse espetáculo ingratuito, chorando, literalmente apertando o coração, fumando primeiro os restos de esponja de aço que tinha usado para prender os vapores e formar uma resina fumável, depois pedacinhos de carpete e a calcinha de acetato com que tinha filtrado a solução horas antes, chorando, desvelada e descabelada, como um palhaço grotesco, em todos os quatro espelhos das paredes do seu quartinho.
• (Joel is in a party bathroom using drugs) Foi quando as mãos dela começaram a tremer durante essa parte do procedimento de preparo que ela percebeu pela primeira vez que gostava disso mais do que alguém pode gostar de alguma coisa e ainda continuar vivo. Ela não é boba
• Chapter 44 the story of the girl that would carry the dead infant around, those scenes are pretty wild
• Ela pega a vareta negra de arame do cabide e

começa a mexer e amassar o conteúdo recém-borbulhado do tubo, sentindo ele se espessar rapidamente e crescer sua resistência aos minúsculos círculos do arame. Foi quando as mãos dela começaram a tremer durante essa parte do procedimento de preparo que ela percebeu pela primeira vez que gostava disso mais do que alguém pode gostar de alguma coisa e ainda continuar vivo. Ela não é boba.

• aí mais Perdas, com a Substância parecendo ser o único consolo para a dor das Perdas

que se acumulam, e claro que você fecha os olhos para o fato de que é a Substância que está causando essas mesmas Perdas de que ela te consola

• “Quando eu estava bêbado eu queria ficar sóbrio e quando eu estava sóbrio eu queria ficar

bêbado”, John L. diz; “Eu vivi desse jeito durante anos, e eu digo a vocês que isso não é vida, isso é uma porra de uma morte-em-vida.”

• aí ultimatos vocacionais, inempregabilidade, ruína financeira, pancreatite, uma culpa

atordoante, vômito com sangue, neuralgia cirrótica, incontinência, neuropatia, nefrite, depressões profundas, uma dor lacerante, com a Substância concedendo períodos cada vez menores de alívio;

• aí você está ferrado, bem ferrado, e sabe, finalmente, totalmente ferrado, porque essa

Substância que você achava que era o seu único amigo, pela qual você desistiu de tudo, feliz, que por tanto tempo te propiciou um alívio da dor das Perdas que o seu amor por esse alívio causou, a sua mãe, a sua amante e o seu deus e camarada, finalmente retirou sua máscara de smiley pra revelar olhos sem centro e uma bocona faminta, e caninos até aqui ó, é o Rosto no Chão, a sorridente face lívida dos seus piores pesadelos, e o rosto é o seu próprio rosto no espelho, agora, é você, a Substância devorou ou substituiu e virou você, e a camiseta encrustada de vômito, baba e Substância

Rehab

What do you need in rehab

• Pat told Gately that grim

honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also, she said.

God

• His sole experience so far is that he takes

one of AA's very rare specific suggestions and hits the knees in the a.m. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he's talking to Anything/body or not, and he somehow gets through that day clean. This, after ten months of ear-smoking concentration and reflection, is still all he feels like he 'understands' about the 'God angle.' Publicly, in front of a very tough and hard-ass-looking AA crowd, he sort of simultaneously confesses and complains that he feels like a rat that's learned one route in the maze to the cheese and travels that route in a ratty-type fashion and whatnot. W/ the God thing being the cheese in the metaphor. Gately still feels like he has no access to the Big spiritual Picture. He feels about the ritualistic daily Please and Thank You prayers rather like like a hitter that's on a hitting streak and doesn't change his jock or socks or pre-game routine for as long as he's on the streak. W/ sobriety being the hitting streak and whatnot, he explains. The whole church basement is literally blue with smoke. Gately says he feels like this is a pretty limp and lame understanding of a Higher Power: a cheese-easement or unwashed athletic supporter. He says but when he tries to go beyond the very basic rote automatic get-me-through-this-day-please stuff, when he kneels at other times and prays or meditates or tries to achieve a Big-Picture spiritual understanding of a God as he can understand Him, he feels Nothing — not nothing but Nothing, an edgeless blankness that somehow feels worse than the sort of unconsidered atheism he Came In with. H

• It was the first time he'd been out of this kind of mental cage since he was maybe ten. He couldn't believe it.

He wasn't Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal. How could some kind of Higher Power he didn't even believe in magically let him out of the cage when Gately had been a total hypocrite in even asking something he didn't believe in to let him out of a cage he had like zero hope of ever being let out of? When he could only get himself on his knees for the prayers in the first place by pretending to look for his shoes? He couldn't for the goddamn life of him understand how this thing worked, this thing that was working. It drove him bats.

• That was months ago. Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or not. He does the knee-and-ceiling thing

twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens to dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet House residents, and tries to help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help. And when Ferocious Francis G. and the White Flaggers presented him, on the September Sunday that marked his first year sober, with a faultlessly baked and heavily frosted one-candle cake, Don Gately had cried in front of nonrelatives for

Tennis

Tennis as a metaphor for life in capitalism

• It seems that the kids in E.T.A are actually rich, because apparently someone mentioned except Pemus and Wayne, the other kids can be sent to any college. If that's the case why are they doing this?
• • Which is a metaphor why people keep climbing the ladder
• The choice of Tennis is very smart, because it shows what capitalism does to people. It basically separates us from all the other people, it individualizes us, and put us on separate competitions, where we are all on our own, and we are put to compete with people that we don't even know or wouldn't like to face them.

Success as a need

• This is exagerated through Clipperton
• Clipper-ton climbs up the rungs of the lifeguardish chair the umpire in his blue blazer158148

sits in and uses the umpire's mike to make public his intention of blowing his personal brains out all over the court with the hideous Clock, should he lose.

Psychological burdens due to succes

• Clipperton places to his

right — not left — temple, as in with his good right stick-hand, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and blows his legitimated brains out for real and all time, eradicates his map and then some; and there's just an ungodly subsequent mess in there, and the Incandenzas respectively stagger and totter from the room all green-gilled and red-mist-stained

• • This is ironic and funny because everyone thought that he would end up killing other people, when in fact he killed himself
• Tennis player that killed that suicided
• • With a ghastly mouthful of lethal Quik, and apparently his dad hears the thump

of the kid keeling over and rushes into the kitchen in his bathrobe and leather slippers and tries to give the kid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and but gets the odd bit of NaCN-laced Quik in his own mouth, from the kid, and also keels over and turns bright blue, and dies, and then the mom rushes in in a mud-mask and fluffy slippers and sees them both lying there bright blue and stiffening, and she tries giving the architect dad mouth-to-mouth and is of course in short order also lying there keeled over and blue, wherever she's not mud-colored, from the mask, and but anyway dead as a rivet. And since the family has six more variousaged kids who as the night wears on come in from dates or patter down the stairs in little pajamas with adorable little pajama-feet attached to them, drawn by the noise of all the cumulative keeling over, plus I should mention the odd agonized gurgle-sound, and but since all six kids had gone through a four-hour Rotary-sponsored CPR course at Fresno's YMCA, by the end of the night the whole family's lying there blue-hued and stiff as posts, with incrementally tinier amounts of lethal Quik smeared around their rictus-grimaced mouths; and in sum this whole instance of unprepared-goal-attaintment-trauma is unbelievably gruesome and sad, and it's one historical reason why all accredited tennis academies have to have a Ph.D.-level counselor on full-time staff, to screen student athletes

Competition

Capitalism and competition

• One thing that you can really see in this book, is how much suffering and emontional effort goes into capitalism entertainement, in order for Federer to exist, there has been so many young tennis players that were trained exaustively, it's like you are espremend a 10000 oranges, until one of them actually becomes good, and you discard all of the other ones.

Potential

Lost Potential

• Jim's father: O talento eh a expectativa do proprio talento, Jim: ou voce vive o talento ou ele te acena de lencinho, pra sempre se afastando. Eh teu ou adues, ele dizia por cima do jornal. Eu... eu so tenho medo de ter uma lapide que diga aqui jaz um velho promissor. Eh.... potencial pode ser pior que falta, Jim.
• • This is a very strong learning, and very sad, as marshall sad there is a sort of sadness related to achievement, and I completely understand that because of the IMO, this quote really has a lot to do with me
• Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever. Use it or lose it, he say over the newspaper. I’m…I’m just afraid of having a tombstone that says HERE LIES A PROMISING OLD MAN. Potential maybe worse than none, Jim. Than no talent to fritter in the first place, lying around guzzling because I haven’t the balls to…God I’m I’m so sorry Jim. You don’t deserve to see me like this. I’m so scared, Jim. I’m so scared of dying without ever really being seen. Can you understand? Are you enough of a big thin prematurely stooped young bespectacled man, even with your whole life still ahead of you, to understand? Can you see I was giving it all I had?

Failure

• It is very emblematic and epic, that the moment where Jim's cold grand father sad "Eh, mas ele nunca vai ser grande" is the exact moment where he fails because he tropecou on something, as Jim's father sad: "Num minuto eu estava numa desbalada e linda carreira rumo a bola, no minuto segunite havia maos nas minhas costas e nada embaixo dos pes como um empurrao numa escadaria"

American Culture

Loneliness

• it is very wise that the chosen sport was Tennis, because that's how the modern world feels like, a race between everyone to accumulate capital, that's it. The only thing that makes us feel together as community is the problems we all face such as rent price, health costs, and so many and so forth. There is a suggestion in the book that this design to create problems so we feel connected is planned, but I am skeptical about that.

Ad Campaign

• The NoCoat campaign had three major consequences. The first was that horrible year Hal vaguely recalls when a nation

became obsessed with the state of its tongue, when people would no sooner leave home without a tongue-scraper and an emergency backup tongue-scraper than they'd fail to wash and brush and spray. The year when the sink-and-mirror areas of public restrooms were such grim places to be.

American Culture

• Did not both Irag and Iran call U.S.A the Very Large Satan
• Marathe fazia pequenos círculos enfáticos e cortes no ar enquanto falava: “Esses fatos da

situação, que dizem com tanta clareza o medo do seu Bureau desse samizdat: agora é o que aconteceu quando um povo não escolhe nada mais para amar além de si próprio, cada um. Um EUA que morreria — e deixaria seus filhos morrerem, cada um — pelo suposto perfeito Entretenimento, por esse filme. Que morreria por essa chance de receber de bandeja essa morte de prazer, em seus lares quentinhos, sozinhos, imóveis: Hugh Steeply, com completa seriosidade como cidadão de seu vizinho eu te digo: esqueça por um só momento o Entretenimento e pense em vez disso em EUA onde uma tal coisa pode ser possível a ponto de seu Escritório ter medo: será que tal EUA pode ter esperança de sobreviver muito tempo? De sobreviver como uma nação de povos? De menos ainda exercer um domínio sobre outras nações de outros povos? Se esses são outros povos que ainda sabem o que é escolher? que aceitam morrer por algo maior? Que sacrificam o lar quentinho, a mulher amada em casa, as pernas, até a vida, por uma coisa maior que os próprios desejos de sentimento deles? que escolheriam não morrer de prazer, sozinhos?”.

• Para manter vocês juntos, o ódio de um outro. Gentle é louco dentro da cabeça, mas nessa ‘culpa de alguém’ ele estava correto em dizer. Un ennemi commun. Mas não alguém fora de você, esse inimigo. Alguém ou algum povo dentro de sua própria história um dia matou já sua nação EUA, Hugh. Alguém que tinha autoridade, ou devia ter tido autoridade, e não exercitou autoridade. Eu não sei. Mas alguém em algum momento deixou vocês esquecerem como escolher, e o quê. Alguém deixou seus povos esquecerem que era a única coisa de importância, escolher. Tão completamente esquecendo que quando eu digo escolher para você você faz expressões com o rosto como que ‘Láááá se vamos nós’. Alguém ensinou que templos são para fanáticos só, tirou os templos e jurou que não havia necessidade de templos. E agora não há abrigo. E não há mapa para achar o abrigo de um templo. E vocês todos andam tateando no escuro, nessa confusão de permissões. A sem-fim busca da felicidade da qual alguém deixou vocês esquecerem as velhas coisas que

possibilitam a felicidade. Como é que vocês dizem: ‘Está valendo tudo’?”

• “Não existem escolhas sem liberdade pessoal, rapá. Não somos nós que estamos mortos por

dentro. Essas coisas que vocês acham tão fracas e desprezíveis em nós — elas são só os riscos da liberdade.”

Politics

Prediction of global need for anti establishment

• Jonny Gentle has a campaign model that says he is an outsider and that is neither left or right, and the problem is the current politicians, and he will come with a completely different solution. Johnny Gentle in fact is a tv personality just like trump.

Statistics

60% of the people that are arrested for crimes realtead to drug and alcohol mentioned that they sufered domestic abuse

That some prostitutes addicted to drugs have more trouble leaving the prostitution than leaving the drugs

50% of the people with addiction to substances suffer also from some othe type of recognizable psychiatric problem

Some prostitutes use enemas so much that they can't poop without one anymore

It is statistically easier for someone with low QI to stop a vice than some with a hjigher QI

Ainda que dos alcoólicos e drogados que compõem mais de setenta por cento dos suicidas