Re: Not P but DFW: There’s nothing in the Yellow Pages under Flag.

[Mike Jing]

This becomes clearer as he describes his failure to find flags for sale in
various stores in the rest of the paragraph.


On Mon, Feb 9, 2026 at 11:44 PM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Well, this certainly wouldn't be the first time I was wrong, if it is
> indeed the case that Yellow Pages always include a set of predefined
> categories even if some of them contain no entries.
>
> But I don't think the reference is about saving one’s Fourth of July
> flags, since nobody would expect such information from the Yellow Pages. It
> seems that he was just looking for a place that sells flags in the YP but
> found none.
>
> On Sun, Feb 8, 2026 at 9:48 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> My wild guess is that Wallace might be saying that the YP CATEGORY
>> reference means that there is nothing under it about saving one’s Fourth of
>> July flags per previous sentence.
>>
>> On Sun, Feb 8, 2026 at 7:54 AM Mike Weaver via Pynchon-l <
>> pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
>>
>>> The Trials and Tolerance of a Translator by Mike Jing
>>> You are of course right Mike and your proofreader needs to loosen up a
>>> little. To say there's nothing under... on a list is a way of saying
>>> there's no such category on the list.
>>>
>>> On 08/02/2026 11:32, Mike Jing wrote:
>>> > The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's *The View from
>>> Mrs.
>>> > Thompson's*:
>>> >
>>> > The overall point being that on Wednesday here there’s a weird
>>> accretive
>>> > pressure to have a flag out. If the purpose of displaying a flag is to
>>> make
>>> > a statement, it seems like at a certain point of density of flags
>>> you’re
>>> > making more of a statement if you don’t have a flag out. It’s not
>>> totally
>>> > clear what statement this would be, though. What if you just don’t
>>> happen
>>> > to have a flag? Where has everyone gotten these flags, especially the
>>> > little ones you can fasten to your mailbox? Are they all from the
>>> Fourth of
>>> > July and people just save them, like Christmas ornaments? How do they
>>> know
>>> > to do this? There’s nothing in the Yellow Pages under Flag.
>>> >
>>> > I assume this means there isn't a category named "Flag" in the Yellow
>>> > Pages, is that correct? It seems pointless to have such a category and
>>> just
>>> > leave it empty, but that's just what one proofreader thinks is the
>>> case.
>>> > This person is taking everything way too literally and it's getting
>>> > tiresome.
>>> > --
>>> > Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>> --
>>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>>
>>