[UA] Telemancy

[Mark Fender]

> >There's also a passage in David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" dealing
> >with this very topic. After the invention of the videophone, people began
> to
> >be very uncomfortable talking on the phone because they _had_ to start
> >paying attention. So, elaborate masks were invented so that people could
> >pretend to be interested in what you had to say again. There's much more
> >detail than that, and it touches upon several other theories of the how's
> >and whys, as well.
> 
> Yeah, that's what put me in mind of it too.  Despite that, (and the
> admittedly cool "Wheelchair Assassins") I must strongly warn AGAINST
> reading IJ.  Just don't freakin' do it.  You have better things to do with
> two weeks.
> 
Agreed. Never have I read a finer novel that interested me so much in the
characters which was never finished. And while this certainly was an
"Infinite Jest" it wasn't a very funny one (which I'm also pretty sure was
the point). It's all a bad joke that Mr. Wallace apparently felt would make
a fine novel. He is wrong. I was more recommending just that section on
telephony. Although the Wheelchair Assassins are also good. And the story of
the paranoid schizophrenic who believed that scientists were stalking him
and injecting hideous chemicals in his system was also good (because, as
part of their studies into paranoid schizophrenia, scientists were stalking
him and injecting him with hideous chemicals).

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