Lenore Beadsman on David Foster Wallace and the living and the dead:

When I start talking about how disgusted I feel by Franzen’s habit of bringing Wallace up all the time to say nasty things I’m not intending to defend or protect Wallace’s memory; I simply mean that it is vile behavior to pick the bones of the dead for personal gain and it is even more repugnant to do it while claiming to have been friends with the departed. It’s about the sad spectacle of a thoughtful, talented person’s seeming inability to give an interview without saying something bad about a more thoughtful, more talented person who is not around to respond—all the while claiming or being given privileged status to say these things because “did you know they were actually really good friends?” That’s all. It’s not that I am a weeping, shrinking flower who can’t bear to hear the name “Wallace” without collapsing in a fit of emotion.

Bethlehem Shoals on Nazi symbolism and people of the Jewish faith:

I don’t care if you think collective memory is a crock. Jews make use of it the best we can, even when, as I said, some people don’t need to resort to linguistic mumbo-jumbo to find their place in it. Part of that is growing up with Nazis on the brain. As mass-slaughter, the Holocaust is unfathomable, pure evil. But it wasn’t just that. Somehow, one of the worst human undertakings of the modern era was attached to an ideology, and extended fan club, that was chock full of silliness and outright aestheticism. The significance of Germany, or the Germanic ideal, was buried long ago; what remains, as both a magnet for present-day racists in search of a look, and an object of fascination for those who can’t help but confront them as historical fact.

Flavia Dzodan on intersectionality:

I play “connecting the dots” even though sometimes I might not get a properly outlined landscape but the equivalent of what my 1 year old niece playing with a bunch of sharpies on the coffee table would produce. Which is to say, sometimes, the pictures I draw when I connect dots might not make sense or might be inaccurate or might have missed a few dots to be totally accurate. But I am willing to pay the price of not making sense sometimes if I do eventually get it right. I would rather sometimes come across as far fetched than miss the landscape that the shit puff pastry provides. And these past few days I’ve been playing connect the dots more often than usual. Hence my anger.