Word: hideously
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...riff on his 12-year relationship with Hurley, the often scantily clad Valkyrie to whom he seems content to play the hapless chorus boy. "Elizabeth made me buy a house," he confesses, "and we spent two years having idiot, pretentious, criminal bozos decorate it. It's now completely hideous, and I'm quarreling with her because I don't want to live there. The shower smells of dead people; I hate it." Instead, he hangs out in their old flat around the corner. "I go there and watch the football and drink beer. But I think that's healthy...
David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Little, Brown; 274 pages; $24) is a mixed bag of 23 essays and short stories that display a range of intellect and talent that is unseemly for any one writer to have, let alone show off. Like the author's earlier work, this collection is designed to keep readers from getting too comfortable. You know the feeling if you had trouble keeping up with the plot lines, arcana and footnotes that spread like kudzu through the 1,000 pages of Wallace's 1996 novel, Infinite Jest...
Wallace is not what is now sneeringly called an elitist. But he is a bit of a pedagogue. Under the dazzle, his writing is often instructional. The hideous men and a few frightful women in the new book exemplify what can go wrong in a society when the romance of individualism turns inward--and loosens restraints. In one story a father exposes his penis to his son as if it were a threatening club. Elsewhere a man exploits his deformed arm to seduce women. "Inside my head," he says, "I don't call it the arm I call...
...been unleashed; like Stravinsky, they aspire to create a magnum opus of the season's rituals. With ardor, with bags of dirt, they have already begun to transform the Yard from a relatively pleasant, serene meadow into a confusion of cordons, chemical grass simulacra and bare patches of earth hideous to behold. Harvard subsists on tradition: the Yard is made repellent each spring and this one is no different. Why bother, one is compelled to wonder. Why go to all the time and expense for a lawn destined for a life so nasty, brutish and short...
...been unleashed; like Stravinsky, they aspire to create a magnum opus of the season's rituals. With ardor, with bags of dirt, they have already begun to transform the Yard from a relatively pleasant, serene meadow into a confusion of cordons, chemical grass simulacra and bare patches of earth hideous to behold. Harvard subsists on tradition: the Yard is made repellent each spring and this one is no different. Why bother, one is compelled to wonder. Why go to all the time and expense for a lawn destined for a life so nasty, brutish and short...