Word: jesting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...page novel that calls itself 'Infinite Jest' (Little, Brown; $29.95) is doubly intimidating. First there is its length. Second, the title itself hints that the joke may be on the reader. By definition, infinite means no punchline. Yet David Foster Wallace's send-up is worth the effort, says TIME's R.Z. Sheppard. "There is generous intelligence and authentic passion on every page, even the overwritten ones where the author seems to have had a fit of graphomania. Characters and events are propelled by a distinctive prose that frequently mixes teenage trash talk and intellectual abstraction, a Bevis-and-Egghead...
...sent out the letter proposing this idea to every campus publication. The response? Only a single reply, in jest, from The Crimson's arch-nemesis, the Lampoon...
...about using the foreign-aid budget to build a big fence around the country--but they back higher military spending. "They figure we ought to basically tell other countries what to do because we're the strongest, then come home," says a Republican congressional staff member only half in jest. European parliamentarians and ministers who go to Capitol Hill for long-scheduled meetings with groups of congressmen are finding that only one or two--sometimes none--show up. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has set up a foreign-policy breakfast series to educate his charges about the world, but attendance...
...recent portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, Norman Mailer quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "On Heroism," in an attempt to understand the mind of the killer. "[Heroism's] jest is the littleness of common life. Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good," Emerson wrote. "Now to no other man can wisdom appear as it does...
...that her piece was partly in jest, as is mine. But the bottom line remains: the equipment and facilities in the MAC can make an athlete out of the puniest of us. Demanding the latest machines and sterilizing technology is like refusing to wear last year's clothes because they're out of style or have a spot on them. This obsession with the "newest" and "best" is obscene in its own right, but her complaining also mistakes the MAC's purpose. It is not a fashion show nor the plush, sterilized health spa she so ardently desires...