Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: Stories by David Foster Wallace
Q.
‘I’m calm, don’t worry about me. It’s like Frankl’s thing of learning it’s not automatic, how it’s a matter of choice to be a human being with sacred rights instead of a thing or a rat and most people are so smug and knee-jerk and walking around asleep they don’t even know it’s something you have to actually choose for yourself that only has meaning when all the like props and stage-settings that let you just go around smugly assuming you’re not a thing are ripped away and broken because all of a sudden now the world understands you as a thing, everybody else thinks you’re a rat or a thing and now it’s up to you, you’re the only one that can decide if you’re more. What if I said I wasn’t even married? Then what? Then it’s showtime, believe you me baby, which believe me everybody that’s never had that kind of total attack and violation happen where everything they thought they were just automatically born with that smugly lets them walk around assuming they’re automatically more than a thing gets skinned off and folded up and put in a Jack Daniel’s bottle and shoved up your ass by four drunk guys who your suffering and violation was just their idea of fun, a way to kill a couple hours, no big deal, none of them probably even remember it, that nobody that hasn’t had that kind of thing really happen to them ever gets to be this broad afterwards, to always deep-down know it’s always a choice, that it’s you that is making yourself up second by second every second from now on, that the only one that thinks you’re even a person every second is you and you could stop anytime you wanted and whenever you want go back to just being a thing that eats fucks shits tries to sleep goes for dialysis and gets square bottles shoved so far up their ass it breaks by four guys that knee-jerked you in the balls to make you bend over that you didn’t even know or ever saw before and never did anything to to make it make any sense for them to want to knee you or rape you or ever ask for that kind of total degradation. That don’t even know your name, that do this to you and don’t even know your name, you don’t even have a name. You don’t automatically have a name, it’s not something you just have, you know. To get to find out you even have to choose to even have a name or to be more than just a machine programmed with different reactions when they do different things to you when they think of them to pass the time until they get bored and that it’s all up to you every second afterwards and what if I said it happened to me? Would that make a difference? You that are all full of knee-jerk politics about your ideas about victims? Does it have to be a woman? You think, maybe you think you can imagine it better if it was a woman because her external props look more like yours so it’s easier to see her as a human being that’s being violated so if it was somebody with a dick and no tits it wouldn’t be as real to you? Like if it wasn’t Jewish people in the Holocaust if it was just me in the Holocaust? Who do you think would care then? Do you think anybody cared about Victor Frankl or admired his humanity until he gave them Man’s Search for Meaning? I’m not saying it happened to me or him or my wife or even if it happened but what if it did? What if I did it to you? Right here? Raped you with a bottle? Do you think it’d make any difference? Why? What are you? How do you know? You don’t know shit.’
DATUM CENTURIO
From Leckie & Webster’s Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage, a 600gb DVD3 Product with 1.6gb of Hyperavailable Hot Text Keyed to 11.2gb of Contextual, Etymological, Historical, Usage, and Gender-Specific Connotational Notes, Available Also with Lavish Illustrative Support in All 5 Major Sense-Media*, ©2096 by R. Leckie DataFest Unltd. (NYPHDC/US/4Grid).
* (compatible hardware required)
date3 (dt) n. [20C English, from Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin data, feminine past participle of dare, to give.] 1 Informal. (see also soft date) a. Consequent to the successful application for a License to Parent (KEY at PROCREATIVITY; at BREED/(v.); at PARENT/(v.); at OFFSPRING, SOFT), the process of voluntarily submitting one’s nucleotide configurations and other Procreativity Designators to an agency empowered by law to identify an optimal female neurogenetic complement for the purposes of Procreative Genital Interface (KEY at PROCREATIVITY; at COMPLEMENTARITY, OPTIMAL NEUROGENETIC; at P.G.I.; at NEUROGENETICS, STATISTICAL). b. A living female P.G.I.-complement identified via the procedures denoted by date31.a.
____________
date31.a USAGE/CONTEXTUAL NOTE: “You are too old by far to be the type of man who checks his replicase levels before breakfast and has high-baud macros for places like Fruitful Union P.G.I. Coding or SoftSci Deoxyribonucleic Intercode Systems in his Mo.SyS deck, and yet here you are, parking the heads on your V.F.S.A. telediddler and checking your replicase levels and padding your gen-résumé like a randy freshman, preparing for what appears for all the world to be an attempt at a soft date” (McInerney et seq. [via OmniLit TRF Matrix], 2068).
____________
2.Vulgar.‡ (see also hard date) a. The creation and/or use of a Virtual Female Sensory Array (KEY at V.F.S.A.; at Historical Note for REALITY, VIRTUAL; at TELEDIDDLER; at COITUS, DIGITAL; at POLIOEROTIC; at OBJECTIFICATION, LITERAL) for the purposes of Simulated Genital Interface (KEY at S.G.I.). b. A drive-captured and reusable V.F.S.A., to which proper names and various sexual and/or personality characteristics are sometimes applied by overwrought male users (KEY at MESH, DFX; at BABE, CYBER-; at FEMALE, HARD; at SYNDROME, V.F.S.A.- PERSONALIZATION).
____________
date32. USAGE/HISTORICAL NOTE: R. and F. Leckie, eds., DFX Lattice of the Monochromosomatic Psyche, and other authorities hold standard definition 2 of date3 to be connotationally descended from the (n.)/(v.) use of date by 20C prostitutes to solicit genital-financial interface without exposing themselves to statutory prosecution. The same authorities hold the euphemym hard date to be derived from the c. 2020 idiomatic/vulgar hardware-dating(arch.), a compound gerund denoting (with the 20s’ characteristic lack of subtlety) “sex with a machine”/“machine-assisted sex” (Webster’s IX, 2027, DVD/ROM/print). Soft date is held to have evolved as a natural antonym by at least 2030. Some authorities argue that soft date’s idiomatic longevity is also due to its apparently coincidental ability to connote the tender sentiments often associated with P.G.I. and soft offspring (see below; KEY at SENTIMENTS, TENDER).
____________
____________
date3 USAGE/HISTORICAL NOTE: Definitions 1 and 2 supra are both the connotational descendants of the univocal 20C definition of date3: “(a) social engagement(s) with (a) member(s) of the opposite sex” (Webster’s V, 1999, ROM/print). Nash & Leckie’s Condensed DVD2 History of Male Sexuality notes that for 20C males, date as intergender “social engagement” could connote either of two highly distinct endeavors: (A) the mutual exploration of possibilities for long-term neurogenetic compatibility (KEY at Historical Note (5) for RELATIONSHIP), leading to legally codified intergender union and P.G.I. and soft offspring; or (B) the unilateral pursuit of an immediate, vigorous, and uncodified episode of genital interface without regard to neurogenetic compatibility or soft offspring or even a telephone call the next day. Because—according to R. and F. Leckie, eds., DFX Lattice of the Monochromosomatic Psyche—the connotational range of date3 as “social engagement” for 20C females was almost exclusively (A), whereas an implicit but often unspoken and just as often fraudulent interest in connotation (A) was often employed by 20C males for purposes related exclusively to connotation (B) (KEY at LOTHARIONISM; at SPORTFUCKING‡; at MISOGAMY; at LIZARDRY, LOUNGE-‡; at OEDIPAL, PRE-), the result of an estimated 86.5% of 20C dates was a state of severe emotional dissonance between the date’s participants, a dissonance attributed by most sources to basic psychosemantic miscodings (KEY at MISCODINGS, INTERGENDER; Secondary KEYS at Historical Notes for MISOGYNY, OSTENSIBLE PROJECTED FORMS OF; for VICTIMIZATION, CULTURE OF; for FEMINISM, MALEVOLENT SEPARATIST OF EARLY U.S. 21C; for SEXUAL REVOLUTION OF LATE 20C, PATHETIC DELUSIONS OF).
The A.D. 2006 patent and 2008 commercial introduction of Digitally Manipulable Video (KEY at D.M.V.2; at MICROSOFT-VCA D.M.V. VEN
____________
date3GENDER-SPECIFIC CONNOTATIONAL NOTE: Most contemporary-usage authorities observe a marked shift, for 21C males, in the “romantic” or “emotional” connotations of date3 (KEY at SENTIMENTS, TENDER), affective connotations which, for most males, have now been removed altogether from “hard” or S.G.I.-dating (KEY at DYSPHORIA, HYPERORGASMIC; at N.G.O.S.; at SYNDROME, NARCISSISTIC GRATIFICATION OVERLOAD; at SOLIPSISM, TECHNOSEXUAL) and, in “soft” or P.G.I.-dating, have now been transferred almost entirely to the procreative function and the gratification associated with having one’s Procreativity Designators affirmed by both culture and complement as neurogenetically desirable (KEY at PARADOXES, TECHNOSEXUAL; at DOGMA, PERVERSE VINDICATION OF CATHOLIC).
____________
OCTET
POP QUIZ 4
Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley’s wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal drug addicts’ teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill. He smelled very bad. He sat up against the wall with his head on his knees. This took place in Cambridge MA in an alley behind the Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the early hours of 12 January 1993. The terminal drug addict with the coat took off the coat and scooted over up close to the gravely ill terminal drug addict and took and spread the coat as far as it would go over the both of them and then scooted over some more and got himself pressed right up against him and put his arm around him and let him be sick on his arm, and they stayed like that up against the wall together all through the night.
Q: Which one lived.
POP QUIZ 6
Two men, X and Y, are close friends, but then Y does something to hurt, alienate, and/or infuriate X. They had been very close. In fact X’s family had almost sort of adopted Y when Y arrived in town alone and had no family or friends yet and got a position in the same department of the same firm X worked for, and X and Y work side by side and become close compadres, and before long Y is usually over at X’s house hanging out with the X family just about every night after work, and this goes on for quite some time. But then Y does X some kind of injury, like maybe writing an accurate but negative Peer Evaluation of X at their firm, or refusing to cover for X when X makes a serious error in judgment and gets himself in trouble and needs Y to lie to cover for him somehow. The point is that Y’s done some honorable/upright thing that X sees as a disloyal and/or hurtful thing, and X is now totally furious at Y, and now when Y comes over to X’s family’s house every night to hang out as usual X is extremely frosty to him, or witheringly snide, or sometimes even yells at Y in front of the X family’s wife and kids. In response to all which, however, Y simply continues to come over to X’s family’s house and to hang around and take all the abuse X dishes out, nodding sort of studiously in response but not saying anything or in any other way responding to X’s hostility. On one particular occasion X actually screams at Y to ‘get the hell out of’ his family’s house and kind of half-hits-half-slaps Y, right in front of one of the family’s kids, hard enough to make Y’s glasses fall off, and all Y does by way of response is hold his cheek and nod sort of studiously at the floor while he picks his glasses up and repairs a bent arm-hinge as best he can by hand, and even after this he still continues to come around and hang out at X’s house like an adopted member of the family, and to just stand there and take whatever X dishes out in retaliation for whatever it is Y apparently did to him. Just why Y does this (i.e., continues to come around and to hang out at the Xes’) is unclear. Maybe Y is basically spineless and pathetic and has noplace else to go and nobody else to hang out with. Or maybe Y’s one of those quietly iron-spined people who are internally strong enough not to let any kind of abuse or humiliation get to them, and can see (Y can) through X’s present pique to the generous and trusted friend he’d always been to Y before, and has decided (Y has, maybe) that he’s just going to hang in there and stick it out and keep coming around and stoically allow X to vent whatever spleen he needs to vent, and that eventually X will probably get over being pissed off so long as Y doesn’t respond or retaliate or do anything to aggravate the situation further. In other words, it’s not clear whether Y is pathetic and spineless or incredibly strong and compassionate and wise. On only one specific further occasion, when X actually jumps up on an end table in front of the whole X family and screams at Y to ‘take [his] ass and hat and get the fuck out of [his, i.e., X’s] family’s house and stay out,’ does Y actually leave because of anything X says, but even after this further episode Y’s still right back over there hanging out at the Xes’ the very next night after work. Maybe Y just really likes X’s wife and kids a lot, and that’s what makes it worth it to him to keep coming around and enduring X’s vitriole. Maybe Y is somehow both pathetic and strong… though it’s hard to reconcile Y’s being pathetic or weak with the obvious backbone it must have required to write a negatively truthful Peer Evaluation or to refuse to lie or whatever it was that X hasn’t forgiven him for doing. Plus it’s unclear how the whole thing plays out—i.e., whether Y’s passive persistence pays off in the form of X finally getting over being furious and ‘forgiving’ Y and being his compadre again, or whether Y finally can’t take the hostility anymore and eventually stops hanging around X’s house… or whether the whole incredibly tense and unclear situation simply continues indefinitely. What made it a half-slap is that X had had a partly open hand when he hit Y that one time. There’s also the factor of how X’s overt unfriendliness to Y and Y’s passive reaction to it affect certain intramural dynamics within the X family, like whether X’s wife and kids are horrified by X’s treatment of Y or whether they agree with X that Y dicked him over somehow and so are basically sympathetic to X. This would affect how they feel about Y continuing to come around and hang out at their house every night even though X is making it crystal clear he’s no longer welcome, like whether they admire Y’s stoic fortitude or find it creepy and pathetic and wish he’d finally just get the message and quit acting like he’s still an honorary part of the family, or what. In fact the whole mise en scène here seems too shot through with ambiguity to make a very good Pop Quiz, it turns out.
POP QUIZ 7
A lady marries a man from a very wealthy family and they have a baby together and they both love the baby a lot, although as time goes by they become less and less keen on each other, until eventually the lady files divorce papers on the man. The lady and the man both want primary custody of the baby, but the lady assumes she’ll ultimately be the one to get primary custody because that’s how things usually shake out in divorce law. But the man really wants primary cu
Q: (A) Is she a good mother. 1
POP QUIZ 6(A)
Try it again. Same guy X as in PQ6. X’s wife’s elderly father is diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. X’s wife’s whole huge family is really close and intermeshed, and they all live right there in the same town as X and his wife and the father-in-law and his own wife, and since the diagnosis came down there’s been a veritable Wagner opera of alarm and distress and grief going on in the family; and, closer to home as it were, X’s wife and children are also terrifically distraught over the old man’s inoperable brain cancer because X’s wife has always been so close to her father and X’s children love their Grampappy to distraction and are shamelessly spoiled and their affection purchased by him in return; and now X’s wife’s father is progressively enfeebled and suffering and dying of brain cancer, and X’s whole family and family-in-law seem like they’re getting a head start on grieving the old man’s actual death and are all incredibly shattered and hysterical and sad all the time.