Fourth-class Wallace

[Jhildt at aol.com]

Something just jumped out at me from page 418 of INFINITE JEST, and while I
hate to raise any kind of flag, red or otherwise, about a book I am (mostly,
except for those damn footnotes - it either belongs in the book or it
doesn't) enjoying, I have to point out a bit of factual underpinning that Mr.
Wallace gets wrong in hopes that others won't add to this chart of accounts
similar examples and, in the process, cast further doubt on the
knowledge-base upon which many of the details of this quite incredible book
rest, like, for instance, all that drug stuff.  (And by the way, I've never
found an unsupported purported fact in Pynchon that didn't rely on a
construct of his own invention.  I'm overdue posting some tantalizing, to me,
info I've found on the Kurghiz Light.  Somebody kick me on that one.  Still
not a complete answer, but it leads, as always, to the comforting conclusion
that Pynchon knows a lot more than most of his readers.)

In describing (on p. 418) the shift in advertising expenditures to other
media in the wake of the demise of ad-supported network and cable TV at the
hands of ad-free Interlace Entertainment, the author says:

"Magazines . . . got so full of those infuriating little fall-out ad cards
that Fourth-Class postal rates ballooned,"

Well, I don't mean to be picky, but I've been in the magazine business for
going on 30 years and I can tell you that those little cards, called "blow-in
cards," are restricted by postal regulation to advertising for the
publisher's own publications, i.e. they are always for subscriptions and
always either for the magazine they're falling out of, or another title
published by the same company.  You've never seen a blow-in card in a
second-class (all periodicals) publication advertising anything else.  Bound
in yes; blown-in (loose) no.  So if ad dollars migrated from TV to other
media it wouldn't cause the number of those "infuriating little fall-out ad
cards" to increase.  And even if it did (which it couldn't) it wouldn't have
any effect on Fourth-Class postal rates.  Magazines, as stated above, mail
second-class and blow-in cards, should they find their way back into the mail
stream, would come back to the publisher third-class.  Fourth-Class is book
rate and doesn't, as I can see, have any implication here at all.

Forgive me for poking a hole, albeit tiny, in Mr. Wallace's intellectual
armor (this is hardly the stuff of intellect, actually, just mundane fact),
but if our TP can stand the scrutiny, well . . .  

Let's just say that I'm still enjoying hefting INFINITE JEST enormously.  And
as a former tennis junkie I can attest that he's got that scene nailed.

Jeff Hildt