after page 146

 we now understand the drawing on the cover is of Mr Bloemker's plastic doll companion, Brenda.

why does Rami Kaminski recommend this book?  Makes me wonder if DFW left a suicide note.  Is this one of the best portraits we have of mani-depressive existence?  If I ask this of chatgpt the answer is sure to be ridiculous.  

waiting for news of the car from Kirk's.  Assuming we will keep the rental one more day and use it to go to VT for lunch.  Get the cars swapped tomorrow.  Just chill.  Phil says he got scammed out of 10k over the weekend, so what's money any how?  He's to five million or six, on paper, still feel bad for him, his confusion and helplessness.  He needs to get himself into a care facility sooner rather than later but that is not going to happen.  Millions like him, like us.  Better to wander into the catastrophe head first.  

149 Has she done the thing with the broom with you? No? 

151 peudo-Wittgensteinian mafia 

ok  Cliff's Notes for today  --- interesting that Wallace knew all about Derrida  ---that's how far behind I was, still am  

Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) and David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System (1986) both center on the existential dread of meaninglessness, but approach it through vastly different literary traditions. While Nausea uses a French phenomenological lens to explore isolation, Broom applies American postmodernism and the philosophy of language to dissect identity. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

Philosophical Focus

• Nausea: Heavily rooted in Existentialism, the novel explores the idea that "existence precedes essence". The protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, experiences a sickening physical and psychological revulsion when he realizes the world has no inherent purpose and that humans are terrifyingly, absolutely free. [1, 2, 3, 4]
• The Broom of the System: Heavily influenced by Wittgensteinian philosophy, the novel explores the boundaries of language and whether reality is entirely coextensive with what we can say about it. Wallace famously described the book as "a conversation between [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Derrida]".[1, 2, 3]