Not P but DFW: a kind of brittlely tolerant homeostasis

[Mike Jing]

Thanks for the reply, Mark.


On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 5:36 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>