ich hab’ jetzt keine Lust, über Schlitzer-TV und seine moralischen Macher zu reden, oder über Kunst und populäre Medien, über Duchamps Urinal und das gesunde Volksempfinden, über Fettleibigkeit in den USA, über christliche und sonstige Erziehungsformen, über Monstrosität und Verbrechen, über das Wetter in Indiana — und schon gar nicht über die Deutungswut, die schon in der Wahrnehmung von kontingenten Extremereignissen steckt (s. Zitat). Nur soviel: dies ist der beste 9-11-Text, den ich bislang gelesen habe.
David Foster Wallace: “The Suffering Channel”. In ders.: Oblivion. Stories. 2004, S. 238-329 in der Abacus-Ausgabe. Gibt’s jetzt auch übersetzt (und — pointiert und gut und richtig — rezensiert von Herrn Thomas Blum in literaturkritik.de: tolle, lege).
“Mrs. Amber Moltke, the artist’s young spouse, wore a great billowing pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. Eastern Indiana was not short on big pretty girls, but this was less a person than a vista, a quarter ton of sheer Midwest pulchritude, and Atwater had already filled several narrow pages of his notebook with descriptions and analogies and abstract encomia to Mrs. Moltke, none of which could be used in the compressed piece he was even then conceiving how to pitch and submit. Some of the allure was atavistic, he acknowledged. Some was simply contrast, a relief from the sucking cheeks and starved eyes of Manhattan’s women. He had personally seen Style interns weighing their food on small pharmaceutical scales before they consumed it. In one of the more abstract notebook entries, Atwater had theorized that Mrs. Moltke’s was perhaps a sort of negative beauty that consisted mainly in her failure to be repellent”.
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