The second entry, Death is Not the End, is about three pages long (which sounds short, but at least is vastly longer than the 79 words of A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life). Indeed, at times Wallace’s writing has more the characteristics of poetry than prose, which puts me at a severe disadvantage since I almost never can make heads or tails out of poems. It’s something I find mildly interesting at times, but probably more often something I’m inclined to dismiss with a masturbatory gesture. A lot of reading Wallace is puzzling out why he does various weird things in his writing. Or maybe there’s something more significant to the numbering than I’m picking up on. An utterly innocuous such norm is chosen here to make it clear that it’s not being violated because it is somehow objectionable it is its conventionality-and optionality-that is being highlighted, not its objectionableness.

So it violates a norm in order to call our attention to it.

I take it this is just an instance of Wallace being “postmodern” in a playful sense, reminding us that much that we take for granted in books really is just convention, and that just because no one does otherwise doesn’t mean that one couldn’t or shouldn’t do otherwise. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, though, has its first “story”- A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life-on, on the right, making all the subsequent pages “off” in that the odd numbers are on the left and the even numbers on the right. It’s not always 1, since sometimes unnumbered title pages and such are implicitly counted so that the first explicitly number page is 7 or 11 or whatever, but it’s always an odd number, and then of course it follows that from that point on all the left hand pages will be numbered with an even number (if they are numbered at all) and all the right hand pages with an odd number. There is a convention that page numbers always start with an odd number on the right. Given the title, is the implication that people today-at least in the more advanced, “postindustrial” countries-are more strategic and inauthentic in their interactions than in the past?Īctually another way the book is unconventional in form is the page numbering. It’s two short paragraphs long, and identifies pragmatic reasons people do and say what they do. The book starts off unconventional in form with its first “story,” A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life, which I would say is more of an epigraph than anything. I’ll refer to them as “stories” or “chapters” or whatever below, with the understanding that no term really fully fits. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men I suppose can be considered a collection of short stories, but most of its contents are weird David Foster Wallace postmodern things that aren’t really “stories.” Short “writings” perhaps?

Hideous men book