Sentimentality
Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?
-David Foster Wallace, (9/29/08 New Yorker)
![](http://www.commonplacejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/view-1.jpeg")
I do not have a distaste/fear of sentimentality, BUT id do agree that a distaste for it can turn everything too ironic.
Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace is sitting on top of an old Macintosh, just an arms length away, because a friend of mine who LOVES his writing took the trouble to send me the book, and mark where I should start reading in order to bask in his full genius. She did this after I started reading the Infinite Jest, with its pages and pages of footnotes, which struck me as sneering, and too ironic.
Comment by MM — February 2, 2009 @ 11:52 am