I just got my copy of 'the pale king' I can't wait to read it. He is such an interesting man and it always impresses me how deeply he thinks about the world around him. The implicit cultural tides that not only effect his own writing but everything we never question as we think of these thoughts as are own. In my mind I often link him with Foucault.

"As far as I can tell, from my generation and maybe the kids younger than us, there are different things that we’re afraid of. We’re afraid of being trite; we’re afraid of being sentimental; we’re afraid of being mawkish; we’re afraid of being stale and formulaic unless we are stale and formulaic in a way that pokes fun at its stale, formulaic quality. I mean, we have been taught so much both by the lessons of television and the saturation of television—what are the things to be afraid of? And one of the big reasons why irony, you know it’s been the kind of mode of discourse in the culture for the last thirty years, has really ceased to be palliative or helpful, is that irony is this marvelous carapace that I can use to shield myself from seeming to you to be naive or sentimental, or to buy the lush banalities that television gives, right? If I show you that I believe that we’re both bastards and that there’s no point to anything and that I was last naive at about age six, then I protect myself from your judgment of the worst possible flaw in me, sentimentality and naivete—the way of proper appearance of decorum would shield me from your judgment of me as deviant or offensive thirty or forty years ago. And there—I can’t quite figure it out, but TV and popular culture have I think everything to do with that shift. Of what’s the fundamental stuff that we’re scared of, not just as people and as writers, and what techniques do we use to shield one another from judgment."

David Foster Wallace (via valerie2776)