{"id":13289,"date":"2020-05-24T10:42:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-24T14:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=13289"},"modified":"2020-05-24T10:42:55","modified_gmt":"2020-05-24T14:42:55","slug":"accountability-i-review-the-pale-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2020\/05\/accountability-i-review-the-pale-king.html","title":{"rendered":"Accountability: I review “The Pale King”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

at the University Bookman:<\/p>\n

At a certain point you realize that David Foster Wallace is as much a horror writer as Stephen King, and the monsters under his bed are twins: absorption and distraction. Infinite Jest<\/a><\/em>, Wallace\u2019s massive 1996 masterpiece, has as its ouroboros spine the story of a video so absorbing that it destroys the people who watch it. In Jest<\/em> characters are absorbed by addiction, depression, and the screen-mediated entertainment that is symptom, cause, and synecdoche of both. But they\u2019re also absorbed by tennis and its discipline; friendship and maybe love; and the process of twelve-step recovery, where you\u2019re swallowed up by the old-timer \u201cAlligators\u201d and spend the rest of your life, if you\u2019re lucky, nestled safely in their leathery guts. Jest<\/em> is about, among other things, how easy it is for our attention to become captured by the wrong things. And attention is the microcosm of the soul.<\/p>\n

In The Pale King<\/a><\/em> Wallace returned to this theme. King<\/em>, published posthumously in 2011, was left as a pile of notes and computer files at the author\u2019s death and arranged into a somewhat schematic but undeniably compelling order by Michael Pietsch, Wallace\u2019s longtime editor. It is about paying attention, the horror of paying attention to the wrong thing, and the search for some possible right thing to attend to\u2014the search for a good absorption. And it is also about a subject the normal person\u2019s attention slides right off of: the assessment principles and procedures of the Internal Revenue Service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

more<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

at the University Bookman: At a certain point you realize that David Foster Wallace is as much a horror writer as Stephen King, and the monsters under his bed are twins: absorption and distraction. Infinite Jest, Wallace\u2019s massive 1996 masterpiece, has as its ouroboros spine the story of a video so absorbing that it destroys […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[438,119],"class_list":["post-13289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-horror"],"yoast_head":"\nAccountability: I review "The Pale King"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"at the University Bookman: At a certain point you realize that David Foster Wallace is as much a horror writer as Stephen King, and the monsters under his\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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