David Foster Wallace: Wiggle Room
Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk’s row in the rotes group’s wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once, except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays, where the cart boys could get them when they came by. After just an hour the beach was a winter beach, cold and gray and the dead kelp like the hair of the drowned, and it stayed that way despite all attempts.
Stylistically breathtaking, I think: to use language to express (and not just describe) tedium. The paragraphs! You need to be a genius to control paragraphs like that.
Joyous boredom
Jennifer Schuessler, an editor at the Book Review, tackles David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King, and attempts to explain, most interestingly, the importance of being bored.
A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.