Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace, r. Oct. 2014

p. 59 [minutia that a creative writing teacher must be sensitive to beyond straight-up quality of fiction]…straightforward mechanics of traditional fiction production like fidelity to point-of-view, consistency of tense and tone, development of character, verisimilitude of setting, etc. Faults or virtues that cannot quickly be identified or discussed between bells – little thing like interestingness, depth of vision, originality, political assumptions and agendas, the question whether deviation from norm is in some cases OK – must, for sound Program-pedagogical reason, be ignored or discouraged.

p. 61 A sheepheaded willingness to toe any line just because it’s the most comfortable way to survive is contemptible in any student.

p. 111 Wittgenstein by life’s end conceived meaningful human brain-activity (i.e., philosophy) as exactly & nothing more than “…a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

p. 211 “Vocational Travelogue” is a very shorthand way of acknowledging that for a long time one reason people used to read fiction was for a kind of imaginative tourism to places and cultures they’d never get to really see; that modernity’s jetliners, TV, etc. have pretty well obsoleted this function; but that modern tech has also created such extreme vocational specialization that few people anymore are in a position to know much about any professional field but their own; and thus that a certain amount of fiction’s “touristic” function now consists in giving readers dramatized access to the nuts and bolts of different professional disciplines and specialties.

p. 261 … “formal writing” does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clean, clear, maximally considerate writing.

p. 269 Unique: This is one of a class of adjectives, sometimes called “uncomparables,” that can be a little tricky. Among other incomparables are precise, exact, correct, entire, accurate, preferable, inevitable, possible, false; there are probably two dozen in all. These adjectives all describe absolute, non-negotiable states: something is either false or it’s not; something is either inevitable or it’s not.

p. 288 But Borges’s stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments; the are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness – “to be incorporated,” as Borges puts it, “like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.”

p. 293 Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one for whom reading is essentially – consciously – a creative act.