Sublime

His nonfiction persona was, as Wallace told an interviewer, “a little stupider and shmuckier than I am.”

lines—surefire lines like e.g. ‘You’re the second most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, the first most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen being former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,’ and ‘If you came home with me I’m unusually confident that I could achieve an erection,’ and said that if Kite wasn’t still cherry at twenty-three and a half it

I made this connection and though it was tenuous I was haunted by it. And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.

“Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising,

Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works.

But Wallace does something weirder, something more astounding: even when you’re not reading him, he trains you to study the real world through the lens of his prose.

William Gaddis’s The Recognitions,

Wallace spelunked the OED and fearlessly neologized, nouning verbs, verbing nouns, creating less a novel of language than a brand-new lexicographical reality.