the busy signal: devoted or impish?

Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer, 1979, Chapter 1. Maestro

"Only when a little of the coveted bounty was finally his for the asking - only when it became altogether clear just how stupefyingly unsuited he was to have and to hold anything other than his art - was he inspired to write that brilliant cycle of comic parables (the stories "Revenge," "Lice," "Indiana," "Eppes Essen," and "Adman") in which the tantalized hero does not move to act at all—the tiniest impulse toward amplitude or self-surrender, let alone intrigue or adventure, peremptorily extinguished by the ruling triumvirate of Sanity, Responsibility, and Self-Respect, assisted handily by their devoted underlings: the timetable, the rainstorm, the headache, the busy signal, the traffic jam, and, most loyal of all, the last-minute doubt."


James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, 2011, Prologue

"As the role of information grows beyond anyone's reckoning, it grows to be too much.  "TMI," people now say.  We have information fatigue, anxiety, and glut.  We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.  All this, too, is due in its roundabout way to Shannon.  Everything changed so quickly."


The Underling: A Parallel? A Homage? A Meme?

Whatever it is, I like it.

blazing

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers, 2013, Chapter 2. Spiritual America

"Only a killjoy would claim neon wasn't beautiful.  It jumped and danced, chasing its own afterimage."

the contrarian's proxy argument

Renata Adler, Speedboat, 1971, Chapter 7.  The Agency

"You are no longer expounding a proposition.  You are having a tantrum.  Simon's psychiatrist and I pursued our tantrum, in duet, all evening long.  The horse might have two natural gaits, the Charleston and the entrechat, for all it mattered.  I meant, I didn't like the man and I thought that, within twenty years, his profession would have vanished, leaving no artifacts of any interest except a dazed memory of fifty years of ineffective and remunerative peculation in the work of a single artist, Freud.  I also meant I didn't like his flowered shirt.  He meant, I think, he didn't like me either."

peculate |ˈpekyəˌlāt|verb [ with obj. ] formalembezzle or steal (money, esp. public funds): the people accused them of having peculated the public money.DERIVATIVESpeculation |ˌpekyəˈlāSHən|noun,peculator |-ˌlātər|nounORIGIN mid 18th cent.: from Latin peculat- ‘embezzled,’ from the verbpeculari (related to peculium ‘property’).

recurrent dream

Renata Adler, Speedboat, 1971, Chapter 1. Castling

"I don’t know how many people have ever seen or passed through Broadway Junction. It seems to me one of the world’s true wonders: nine crisscrossing, overlapping elevated tracks, high in the air, with subway cars screeching, despite uncanny slowness, over thick rusted girders, to distant, sordid places. It might have been created by an architect with an Erector Set and recurrent amnesia, and city ordinances and graft, this senseless ruined monster of all subways, in the air."