Not P but DFW: a kind of brittlely tolerant homeostasis

[Mark Kohut]

The tolerance can break---is brittle--at any moment...

On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 4:12 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's essay *Consider the
> Lobster*:
>
> More concrete is the oral testimony of Dick, our florid and extremely
> gregarious rental-car liaison,11 to the effect that PETA’s been around so
> much during recent years that a kind of brittlely tolerant homeostasis now
> obtains between the activists and the festival’s locals, e.g.: “We had some
> incidents a couple years ago. One lady took most of her clothes off and
> painted herself like a lobster, almost got herself arrested. But for the
> most part they’re let alone. [Rapid series of small ambiguous laughs, which
> with Dick happens a lot.] They do their thing and we do our thing.”
>
> What does "brittlely tolerant" mean here, especially the "brittlely" part?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>