Author Topic: POST BURNING SITE (Read 1651541 times)

Maow · « **Reply #9300 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:01:32 AM »

The Zenith is one of a number of similar “big white ships that blot out most of the sky”,

Maow · « **Reply #9301 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:02:30 AM »

its vastness such that Wallace “cannot convey the … surreal scale of everything”,

Maow · « **Reply #9302 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:03:09 AM »

whose passengers are welcomed aboard with all things “Gucci, Waterford and Wedgwood, Rolex and Raymond Weil”.

Maow · « **Reply #9303 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:05:12 AM »

Every whim of each passenger is tended to by smiling staff so that they want for nothing,

Maow · « **Reply #9304 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:12:21 AM »

and Wallace reflects that the last time this was so,

Maow · « **Reply #9305 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:12:35 AM »

he was in the womb.

Maow · « **Reply #9306 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:13:11 AM »

This idyllic “experience is being not described [by the ship's brochures] but evoked”;

Maow · « **Reply #9307 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:13:29 AM »

a corporate construction of reality beamed straight from the brochures onto the outer world.

Maow · « **Reply #9308 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:13:49 AM »

Luxury and escapism are not positive attributes,

Maow · « **Reply #9309 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:14:07 AM »

however.

Maow · « **Reply #9310 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:14:28 AM »

The cruise ship is for Wallace “like a kind of floating palace, majestic and terrible”;

Maow · « **Reply #9311 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:14:57 AM »

the extravagance is undermined by a sense of the sinister and dreadful.

Maow · « **Reply #9312 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:15:23 AM »

The corporate nature of the Zenith is perhaps best captured in the Frank Conroy essay in the ship's brochure;

Maow · « **Reply #9313 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:16:01 AM »

an “alternate reality” of “smiles [and] handshakes” in which stressful realities are “a distant memory”.

Maow · « **Reply #9314 on:** October 28, 2014, 08:16:42 AM »

Conroy's earlier writing had,