2010.04.15
One of the things I liked about the game "Braid" was the quaint and charming - if ever so slightly cornball - writing. This ending of this passage gets stuck in my head:
Tim needed to be non-manipulable. He needed a hope of transcendence. He needed, sometimes, to be immune to the Princess's caring touch.The thing was I was reading "Peterman Rides Again" -- a book by and about "the" J. Peterman -- and he gave this example of his catalog's oft-exalted copy:
Off in the distance, Tim saw a castle where the flags flutter even when the wind has expired, and the bread in the kitchen is always warm. A little bit of magic.
The cotton we have used in our uncompromising replica of Gatsby's shirt is so luminous, in and of itself, that even a person who notices nothing will notice something.I wonder if there's a name for the little trick these two clips share, of ending with a short, verbless fragment giving another name for what was just described.
Gatsby, of course, could afford stacks of these shirts; rooms of them. Never mind. All that matters is that you have one, just one. A piece of how things were.
One cannot change the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality.
David Foster Wallace's word list
Thanks to a recalcitrant laptop I spilled a big cup of bitter Au Bon Pain iced coffee on the rug at work-I know what I'll be smelling today!
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/7/ - Jeez, Jell-O isn't "powdered bone slime"... it's *wiggly* powdered bone slime!
Weird- the concept of synecdoche has shown up in three different, unrelated areas for me today, hadn't thought about it for years...