David Foster Wallace's stream of consciousness writing sounds a lot more like David Foster Wallace than it sounds like this guy yeah. It starts to seem like he just projected his own neuroses onto this guy who he barely knew 20 years ago or 25 years agoYeah, I 100 agree with you that the only thing that David Wallace the character in this story can do is project his own Neuroses on Neil and figure out what would make me if I were him take my own life um but you can't really do thatlike he can't the only thing you can really do is try are try and project your own thoughts on to what somebody else would have been thinking in those moments even though they're different
Our whole lives we’ve been frauds. We’re not exaggerating. Pretty much all we’ve ever done is try to create a certain impression of us in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. This episode is a perfect example, Tamler pretending to be a cinephile (check out his four favorite pieces of 2019 “pop culture” in the first segment), David trying to connect with the people (Baby Yoda, Keanu Reeves etc.) – and of course what could be more fraudulent than a deep dive into a David Foster Wallace story, rhapsodizing over the endless sentences, the logical paradoxes, the seven-layer bean-dip of metacommentary (Jesus Christ I’m surprised there aren’t like eight footnotes in this episode description), and meanwhile the Partially Examined Life dudes refresh their overcast feeds and wonder through the tiny keyhole of themselves how David and Tamler have sunk so low that they’d ramble on about “Good Old Neon” like a couple of first year Comp-Lit grad students trying to impress that girl who works at the Cajun bakery.
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