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Why doesn't anyone talk about Broom of the System? I'm 200 pages in and it's really good. There's some good plot wackiness, including some scenes that are downright cartoonish, little nods to philosophy, and several funny synopses of fictitious books throughout. Not to mention the characters are already enjoyable 
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Jul 27, 2010 19:29
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PRI Caulk posted:I got between 150-200 pages into Infinite Jest before dropping it. I didn't like any of the characters (didn't quite dislike them either, just had no attachment), the plot didn't seem to be going anywhere, and while the writing was pretty clever, I kept getting pissed off at DFW for appearing to really enjoy his own cleverness at the expense of something I would want to bother reading. Nothing seemed genuine. It was a bit like having a high-functioning but severely distracted autist tell you about his friends but screwing up all the stories and finishing them off with a nervous laugh and a 'welp.' David Foster Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest on page 12 posted:'I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect.
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Jul 27, 2010 19:50
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ProperCoochie posted:I have heard similar entreaties from the mouths of capricious self-absorbed twats who were afraid that people were beginning to dislike them (their emphatic pleas lacked the same educated preface, but who cares?). I'm not sure why you posted that quote, but it reminds me a little of the difference between authors who write characters by telling you about them and authors who write characters by showing them to you. I'm being needlessly harsh now, but the point remains that repeating a passage I had already read hasn't helped endear me to DFW.
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Jul 27, 2010 20:02
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PRI Caulk posted:I have heard similar entreaties from the mouths of capricious self-absorbed twats who were afraid that people were beginning to dislike them (their emphatic pleas lacked the same educated preface, but who cares?). I'm not sure why you posted that quote, but it reminds me a little of the difference between authors who write characters by telling you about them and authors who write characters by showing them to you. Look at you not getting it and being foolish. I still am honestly interested in what you mean by DFW enjoying his own cleverness at the expense of the book though.
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Jul 27, 2010 20:20
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aricoarena posted:Look at you not getting it and being foolish. I still am honestly interested in what you mean by DFW enjoying his own cleverness at the expense of the book though. If you got a point, pal, make it. As for not getting a much more explicit statement of mine - what part of it confuses you? He's so wrapped up in being clever and interesting that I'm totally bored by the narrative that I (perhaps naively) expect him to get around to exploring.
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Jul 27, 2010 20:45
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PRI Caulk posted:If you got a point, pal, make it. As for not getting a much more explicit statement of mine - what part of it confuses you? He's so wrapped up in being clever and interesting that I'm totally bored by the narrative that I (perhaps naively) expect him to get around to exploring. I think his point is that most authors inject a little of their personality into their writing style. DFW happens to be a manic clever self-righteous genius so maybe you picked a bad book. It's too bad you can't connect, your superficial complaints about being 'clever' or 'interesting' pretty much stop the mania from gathering any significant emotional momentum. Most people i know were sold within the first 20 pages. Edit: I get pissed at postmodern literature that abandons narrative for style because trade off isn't always satisfying. Gravitys Rainbow was a nightmare but i trusted pynchon to stick to his guns and deliver me a story and he did. meanolmrcloud fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jul 27, 2010 |
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Jul 27, 2010 21:14
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PRI Caulk posted:If you got a point, pal, make it. As for not getting a much more explicit statement of mine - what part of it confuses you? He's so wrapped up in being clever and interesting that I'm totally bored by the narrative that I (perhaps naively) expect him to get around to exploring. Basically, in between the cleverness (that DFW mocked about himself and his protagonists) he filled hundreds of pages with heartbreaking stories and characters. If you can't feel for Poor Tony or Kate Gompert or Mario Incandenza then I don't know what to say. I guess not finishing the book and experiencing all of the pathos entitles you to comment on the writing style, but not the book, is what I mean.
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Jul 27, 2010 21:20
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meanolmrcloud posted:Edit: I get pissed at postmodern literature that abandons narrative for style because trade off isn't always satisfying. Gravitys Rainbow was a nightmare but i trusted pynchon to stick to his guns and deliver me a story and he did. I did the same thing with GR and was also happy, so I'm willing to (at some point) give IJ the same repeat shot. But I was especially annoyed that nothing 'stuck' after 150-200 pages and wasn't in the mood to give it any more time. JustFrakkingDoIt posted:Basically, in between the cleverness (that DFW mocked about himself and his protagonists) he filled hundreds of pages with heartbreaking stories and characters. If you can't feel for Poor Tony or Kate Gompert or Mario Incandenza then I don't know what to say. I guess not finishing the book and experiencing all of the pathos entitles you to comment on the writing style, but not the book, is what I mean. That's part of it, though. I remember a passage where a younger brother was having a bed-time conversation with his older brother about how their mother never really grieved, and his older brother offered a cute flag analogy and said that different people grieve differently. And it was OK, that was kind of nice. But I remember asking why it took so much to get out a little gem like that. PRI Caulk fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Jul 27, 2010 |
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Jul 27, 2010 21:21
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PRI Caulk posted:If you got a point, pal, make it. As for not getting a much more explicit statement of mine - what part of it confuses you? He's so wrapped up in being clever and interesting that I'm totally bored by the narrative that I (perhaps naively) expect him to get around to exploring. If you want a strong central narrative then you're going want another book. I think what confuses me is that things were both clever and interesting but still boring. Or that people see the parts of the book that arnt driving the plot as DFW just trying to clever and not as important parts of the book, if thats what you meant. If you had just said there is too much extraneous filler that would make more sense to me. aricoarena fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Jul 27, 2010 |
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Jul 27, 2010 21:36
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PRI Caulk posted:I did the same thing with GR and was also happy, so I'm willing to (at some point) give IJ the same repeat shot. But I was especially annoyed that nothing 'stuck' after 150-200 pages and wasn't in the mood to give it any more time. If you are giving so little an effort to not even recall names after 200 pages i really don't think this is the book for you. How you got through GR is beyond me.
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Jul 27, 2010 21:46
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I just finished Infinite Jest today and personally loved it, but frankly going by what you've said you've hated about it, PRI Caulk, I would be rather tempted to suggest that you not bother trying again. The tone rarely drops away from what you seem to see as literary grandstanding* and what I tend to see more or less the same way other posters have already said they see it. (For what it's worth, Hal's "I read" bit is the most egregious it gets that I can recall.) At least not when it's in Hal's perspective, or the authorial voice; parts written from other characters' perspectives are incredibly well-adapted to their voices (mistaken words shuffled in seamlessly, etc.). It doesn't sound like you'll get much out of it without either a huge perspective shift or a long slog through something you seem hell bent on not enjoying. * Even I'd admit that a pretty good drinking game could be made of taking a shot every time Wallace reminds you that he knows the words "postprandial," "bradykinetic" and "fantods." EDIT: Don't really know why you'd swagger into an author-specific thread to call him "the suicide-depresso" and bitch about his "rear end in a top hat Tome" though, that's kind of a prick thing to do. MORE EDIT: JustFrakkingDoIt posted:Basically, in between the cleverness (that DFW mocked about himself and his protagonists) he filled hundreds of pages with heartbreaking stories and characters. If you can't feel for Poor Tony or Kate Gompert or Mario Incandenza then I don't know what to say. I guess not finishing the book and experiencing all of the pathos entitles you to comment on the writing style, but not the book, is what I mean. I think you've hit on a big thing, here. Wallace builds up, as the novel's premise, a very interesting and multi-threaded madcap plot, then spends the entire time telling the reader, "No, sit down, look at what's going on with these characters and their problems." Sometimes those problems tie in with the wacky hi-fi druggo Quebecois intrigue plot and often times they don't, but they're always very real problems, facing some of the most real, lovable and pitiful characters I've read in ages. Johnny Landmine fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Jul 28, 2010 |
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Jul 28, 2010 14:56
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Dust Man posted:EDIT: Don't really know why you'd swagger into an author-specific thread to call him "the suicide-depresso" and bitch about his "rear end in a top hat Tome" though, that's kind of a prick thing to do. It is sort of rude in light of how he died, but I doubt the remark and mark of death were intentionally related; he probably just wanted to expressively get someone's attention to get some actual discussion going beyond panegyrics and examples. And I sort of agree with what he's saying, as I've said a few pages ago. I love certain essays he has done, but a lot of his stories fall flat for me, and I'm not entirely sure why. I get the impression that he's talking about more of the idea of certain situations, certain people, than of the people themselves, if this makes any sense what-so-ever. In fact, I'm sort of reminded of something unrelated that I read a while ago, an author picking apart that guy who wrote A Million Little Pieces, if any of you remember that whole fiasco. The author of the piece claimed to have spotted AMLP as a fictionalized memoir (it was sold as being the real deal) when it first came out, simply because of the way certain ideas and characters and contexts were framed. Apparently, the 'sequel' to AMLP followed some heroin junky for a bit and the author of the piece broke that book down too, citing another work by an actual junky, scenes and descriptions from which got lifted for the AMLP sequel. The difference between the Junky's account and the fictionalized one? The Junky's left so much of the horrible stuff he witness understated, because to him it wasnt poetic, it was just life for him. The fictionalized account played into American ideas of a Junky's life, the 'romance' behind it I guess. Bringing this back to DFW: he is incredibly talented and well read and perhaps it's just the style of so many of his stories that I find fault with, their decided lack of style save for an incredibly thorough technical aspect to them, their descriptions of things from every conceivable angle until, finally, one of them hits home incredibly hard. His strength is sort of the issue some people find fault with, as mentioned a few posts above--it's all an exercise until you find that gem (and what a gem it is, right?)--but until then (and it can take a while), but, until then, that glutting of style, sentences formed with words spewing from an educated hose feels at times like you're reading someone's homework assignment. A very well done assignment, sure, but an exercise none the less, something you can see being painstakingly built, as if he's trying to understand it (the emotions) himself. Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on DFW, not at all, and I'll drop the entire thing if this sort of talk upsets people; I just don't think the sometimes-criticism of 'a robot/autisitc kid approximating an Idea of life/characters/emotions' should be brushed off, because a lot of the times it's true. It just has to be a large part of the reason you show up to the party in the first place. Le Sean fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jul 28, 2010 |
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Jul 28, 2010 23:35
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The thing about criticising DFW is literally every problem someone can find in his work he's already identified, acknowledged, taken apart and put back together again and not only that done the whole thing in a meta-fiction style basically completely open and upfront about what he's doing. His work is so ironic, so dominated by authorial interruptions and self-referential to the point that trying to say why you had a problem with it can seem like looking at your reflection in a fun house mirror and saying you don't like it because it's not reflecting reality like a mirror "should". Something like Octet in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is essentially impossible to criticise imo, he's already done it within the text itself and done it better than anyone else possibly can because a) he wrote it and can never be caught up in a web of "that doesn't work but maybe the author intended it not to work for reason X" and b) he can bend the criticim back into the work in a way which adds to both. aricoarena posted:I honestly would like to know what you mean by this because I've heard other people and critics talk about it and don't know what they mean. I get that you probably are after specific examples of stuff from IJ and I can't really speak for PRI Caulk but if you're reading critics say stuff like that and don't get what they mean you are reading bad critics. If you want a good analysis of what people tend to mean (at least in my experience) when they talk about things like the excessive "cleverness" of DFW or how his work seems ungenuine in some way then you should check out some stuff by James Wood, particuarly from his first two collections. Although he never goes after DFW directly he addresses him in his stuff on hysterical realism and tangentially in his essays on guys like Pynchon and DeLillo. Not sure how much of this is online, here's his review of Smith's White Teeth which will give you a taste of the kind of arguments he makes: http://www.powells.com/review/2001_08_30.html flavaaDAAAAAVE posted:Why doesn't anyone talk about Broom of the System? I'm 200 pages in and it's really good. There's some good plot wackiness, including some scenes that are downright cartoonish, little nods to philosophy, and several funny synopses of fictitious books throughout. Not to mention the characters are already enjoyable Hard to talk about without spoiling the book for you but I found the ending of BOTS a huge disappointment in a way which kind of undercut a lot of the really promising build-up, I'd be interested if you would post your thoughts once you've finished it.
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Jul 29, 2010 10:47
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Maybe I just have odd taste, but I'm a little surprised to not see any mention of my favorite section in Infinite Jest. It's about a quarter of the way into the book (pg. 242 in my copy), when Orin calls Hal to ask about their father's death. The whole section is gruesome and macabre and surreal and hysterically funny. It's also the point in the book when you realize that Hal's a really profoundly hosed-up kid. When I read that section the first time I had to put the book down and stare at the ceiling for about forty minutes just to process the whole thing. Which is why it's probably my favorite thing he ever wrote.
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Jul 31, 2010 06:18
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Lot 49 posted:Hard to talk about without spoiling the book for you but I found the ending of BOTS a huge disappointment in a way which kind of undercut a lot of the really promising build-up, I'd be interested if you would post your thoughts once you've finished it. OK, I'm going to type this up really quickly since whenever I finish a book I always run to wiki to see what I missed, so you're going to get my unadulterated opinion of the book. I really liked it. I'm still deciding how much, but if we go by the Netflix rating system (I do, with everything) I'm going to give it a tentative 5. A couple of things that might make this book better for me than someone else, 1)I love a no-ending ending and 2)I've read a bit about DFW (i.e. his penchant for being very careful about phrasing and having studied modal logic). I wasn't absolutely sure of the point of the book until I got to the very last word. Honestly I was looking for some resolution to the philosophical aspect of the text based on the main characters' existential crises. "Words" obviously being a motif, I expected that that would enhance the rest of the story, not the other way around. That said, I'm happy with the surprise.
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Aug 3, 2010 19:50
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i just picked up The Broom of the System and I'm going to start it momentarily - can't wait!
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Aug 7, 2010 16:25
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Guitarchitect posted:i just picked up The Broom of the System and I'm going to start it momentarily - can't wait! The Penguin Ink edition of BOTS surprised me last week in the bookstore, and it was one of those surprises where even though I already have a perfectly good paperback copy, I had to buy the damned thing because I was just so surprised. At least it got me to read it again!
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Aug 7, 2010 19:06
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mdemone posted:The Penguin Ink edition of BOTS surprised me last week in the bookstore, and it was one of those surprises where even though I already have a perfectly good paperback copy, I had to buy the damned thing because I was just so surprised. At least it got me to read it again! that's the one I got too... I had another copy, but the friendly girl in the bookstore was like "ohhh, did you see the other one? it has a nicer cover and a better font for reading". she took me to it and showed me... after my heart skipped a beat, I realized it was true (better paper also), so I spent the extra $2.50 for the Ink edition
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Aug 8, 2010 04:57
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HisFlyingFingers posted:Maybe I just have odd taste, but I'm a little surprised to not see any mention of my favorite section in Infinite Jest. It's about a quarter of the way into the book (pg. 242 in my copy), when Orin calls Hal to ask about their father's death. Yes
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Aug 9, 2010 05:39
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You're not really supposed to like Hal anyway, I don't think. I mean you can feel sympathy for him, but he's not the kind of guy you want to hang around with. Look at Joelle Van D.'s impression of him at the Incandenza thanksgiving, or the impression the Ennett house resident (is it Treat? I can't remember) gets when he comes around asking for meetings. So the fact that much of the book is basically written in a "Hal" type tone is sort of deliberately tiresome and annoying, if that makes sense. Excessive cleverness is addict-Hal's whole schtick.
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Aug 9, 2010 15:26
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The weird thing about Hal's excessive cleverness is, even though he has a great deal of the narrative voice, we hear about how smart he is a lot more often than we see it. It starts with the (admittedly overwrought) "I read" bits and kind of goes throughout; we're constantly told how smart Hal is supposed to be but as far as I recall, we never see him apply it (constant parroting of the dictionary notwithstanding). Pemulis comes across as much, much smarter, honestly. (Note that I think this is deliberate or, if nothing else, contributes to my understanding of Hal and the people around him - I don't mean to harp on Wallace for "telling, not showing.")
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Aug 9, 2010 15:38
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J Miracle posted:You're not really supposed to like Hal anyway, I don't think. I mean you can feel sympathy for him, but he's not the kind of guy you want to hang around with. Look at Joelle Van D.'s impression of him at the Incandenza thanksgiving, or the impression the Ennett house resident (is it Treat? I can't remember) gets when he comes around asking for meetings. Both of those characters meet him once, very briefly, and in Joelle's case it when Hal was a few years younger plus neither of them are like some authority on whether you as a reader can like a character or not. Lots of other characters like Hal, he's portrayed as popular with the little buddies, Mario loves him, he's the only member of his family Orin will talk to, Pemulis etc. As a reader I personally liked Hal, being cocky as gently caress is hardly the worst trait we see from a character in IJ.
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Aug 9, 2010 15:46
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Lot 49 posted:Both of those characters meet him once, very briefly, and in Joelle's case it when Hal was a few years younger plus neither of them are like some authority on whether you as a reader can like a character or not. Little kids, his self-absorbed sex-addict older brother, the guy who likes basically everyone (also a family member), and Pemulis. All of these people are weak on vocabulary/written word type stuff. Hal seems like kind of a paper tiger of intellectual prowess to me. Although I did like his Hill Street Blues paper.
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Aug 9, 2010 16:51
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Dust Man posted:The weird thing about Hal's excessive cleverness is, even though he has a great deal of the narrative voice, we hear about how smart he is a lot more often than we see it. It starts with the (admittedly overwrought) "I read" bits and kind of goes throughout; we're constantly told how smart Hal is supposed to be but as far as I recall, we never see him apply it (constant parroting of the dictionary notwithstanding). Pemulis comes across as much, much smarter, honestly. Pemulis is a maths wizz and incredibly smart practically but Hal is on a whole other intellectual plane. I'm not going to write a bloody lit. essay but if you want to appreciate Hal you need to have a good understanding of the themes in Hamlet (in fact if you don't have this then I honestly don't think you'll get anything out of Hal at all plus whole chunks of IJ itself). You need to read, pretty closely, Hal's thoughts in the last section of the book when he's just lying around in rooms thinking and compare them to Hamlet soliloquies, specifically the sections around the points when other characters notice Hal behaving oddly and how they compare to the sections in Hamlet when Hamlet himself is considered mad by other characters. Even more specifically the point around when it's made clear Dr. Incandenza is attempting to communicate with Stice and when Hal starts thinking about the character of Hamlet itself and the whole "why doesn't Hamlet the ultimate questioner question the idea of his dad coming back as a ghost". There's whole reams of stuff in those Hal inner monologues that are so reminiscent of DFW's own thought processes in his essays that I would have no bones about considering Hal to be the character in his fiction that comes closest to having the weight of intellect of DFW himself. Which if you can consider Hal's fate, is pretty drat sad.
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Aug 9, 2010 16:52
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J Miracle posted:Little kids, his self-absorbed sex-addict older brother, the guy who likes basically everyone (also a family member), and Pemulis. All of these people are weak on vocabulary/written word type stuff. Hal seems like kind of a paper tiger of intellectual prowess to me. Although I did like his Hill Street Blues paper. I chose those people because they were the people that were around Hal the most and would best know him, to contrast with the two characters you chose who literally exchange a handful of sentences with him in the entire book. All the characters in IJ have flaws, you think Joelle is a good judge of character? She had a pretty serious relationship herself with that "self-absorbed sex-addict" if you recall. Plus I'm not saying those characters liking Hal proves anything, just using them as counter-examples to the flimsy argument that because characters A and B have a poor impression of Hal the reader isn't supposed to like him either. Hal is anything but an intellectual paper tiger and it depresses me that people seem to think that. DFW goes to extraordinary lengths to give Hal intellectual depth and he hammers it home again and again. Why do so many characters in the book consider Hal so intelligent? Why does DFW give him so many inner monologues at critical points in the book that expound on key themes? Why is he capable of ridiculous mental feats such as when he plays the psychologist he is forced to attend after his father's suicide like a violin? Even his loving tennis game is described as intellectual and there are frequent references to his out-thinking opponents as opposed to the power game of Wayne, an intellectual non-identity, while Pemulis, a genius in specific fields like Maths and Science gets given corresponding tennis abilities like awesome lobs and volleys but not the overall depth to be a top player. Lot 49 fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Aug 9, 2010 |
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Aug 9, 2010 17:13
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Guitarchitect posted:i just picked up The Broom of the System and I'm going to start it momentarily - can't wait! Please post some of your thoughts on it. The only discussion of it that I can find is always someone mentioning it within a thread on IJ so I'd love to see how other people feel about it. That goes for anyone else who has read BOTS as well. Fact: The Ink edition is cooler than the non.
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Aug 9, 2010 20:42
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flavaaDAAAAAVE posted:Please post some of your thoughts on it. The only discussion of it that I can find is always someone mentioning it within a thread on IJ so I'd love to see how other people feel about it. That goes for anyone else who has read BOTS as well. It's been a while since I read it and apparently it's a lot deeper than I realised, but I loved it. I particularly liked the short stories that are told to Lenore throughout. The one about the guy obsessed with women and the frog that lives in the girl's neck was amazing and strange and sad. I feel like I need to re-read it now. What's the difference in versions? I have the one the girl's head on the cover like some kind of diagram.
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Aug 10, 2010 10:38
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If Hal is weak intellectually, then what's the point of his transformation? An intellectual paper tiger struggling within a body that won't communicate isn't particularly compelling.
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Aug 10, 2010 13:07
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gregarious Ted posted:It's been a while since I read it and apparently it's a lot deeper than I realised, but I loved it. A prettier cover that's a bit thicker and has the interior flap, jagged page edges and I've heard the font is different, but don't have the other to compare. http://www.amazon.com/Broom-System-Novel-Penguin-Ink/dp/0143116932
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Aug 10, 2010 13:45
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The cover with the girls head made out of suburban housing streets is better. And jagged edge pages can suck a dick - really(I hate them so much). No, I still havn't read it. Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way is taking longer than expected. 
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Aug 10, 2010 14:21
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I think in the new Lipsky book Wallace says something about being asked to change the ending by his publishers, to whom he drafted a 20+ page essay defending the arc of the book and explaining the entire book as a dialogue between Wittgenstein and Derrida that necessitates that particular ending. Though he then says he would go back and change it in a second to make the book better and not be such a huge dick about it.
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Aug 11, 2010 04:07
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His essay on English and politics of usage is probably one of the best pieces on English itself. I'd put it up there with Orwell's Politics and the English Language.
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Aug 13, 2010 23:23
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Modern Life Is War posted:
Sorry, I guess I totally missed out on this as well. Is this the general consensus, and if so, could someone expound a bit?
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Aug 15, 2010 04:21
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Plickmann posted:Sorry, I guess I totally missed out on this as well. Is this the general consensus, and if so, could someone expound a bit? I always thought it was buried in the Stork's head somehow, hence the need to go grave robbing at the beginning of the book.
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Aug 15, 2010 04:37
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ArgaWarga posted:I always thought it was buried in the Stork's head somehow, hence the need to go grave robbing at the beginning of the book. Yeah, that's more or less what I thought too. It seemed like various sources throughout the book had said that as far as they knew, all of the original masters (or at least all of the unreleased masters) were buried with JOI.
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Aug 15, 2010 09:11
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Plickmann posted:Yeah, that's more or less what I thought too. It seemed like various sources throughout the book had said that as far as they knew, all of the original masters (or at least all of the unreleased masters) were buried with JOI. This is also what I believe. However, wasn't the Middle-Eastern medical attache's copy of IJ sent to him from somewhere in Phoenix (very early in the novel)? I seem to remember that being the most obvious hint that Orin was at least involved with the dissemination.
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Aug 15, 2010 14:16
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The smoking gun posted the autopsy report: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/david-foster-wallace-autopsy e: oh nevermind this is old
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Aug 15, 2010 18:08
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inferis posted:The smoking gun posted the autopsy report: Well that was depressing as all gently caress.
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Aug 15, 2010 21:03
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inferis posted:The smoking gun posted the autopsy report: New to me. Christ. 
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Aug 16, 2010 04:20
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I'm nearly done with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and, no surprise here, I love it. I know i was bitching above about pomo being too loose structurally at times, but the vignettes all reach the same emotional tone of absurd, hilarious, devastatingly sad and uniquely revelatory. The 'octet' part almost exactly half way is one of my favorite things he has written and I'm convinced no one could execute such a bizarre narrative so flawlessly. Near the end there is a fantastic story about a sexual predator that really cements my awe of his ability to just go and go and go with no characters, no dialogue, several richly layered stories with a cohesive theme that is both a permutation of the emotional resonance throughout the book and the cathartic resolution of the story at hand. Just wow. I love how he states (either in one of the interviews or the lipsky book) that he understands he is saying the same things over and over again but can bring such wildly different color and insight each iteration.
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Aug 16, 2010 21:48
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