Wallace's own taste for anesthetic television — Baywatch and The Love Boat as "soothing, like a narcotic" — is the…
echoes
From: The Grunge American Novel (Frank Bruni, The New York Times Magazine, Mar 24 1996)
- Early text: n/a (interview) — "it was soothing, like a narcotic. You knew
all problems would be resolved in 15 minutes and many lush platitudes would be
exchanged." [on why he watched The Love Boat]
- IJ echo: the samizdat's fatal comfort and the E Unibus Pluram diagnosis of
television as sedation; Wallace confessing the pull of resolution-in-15-minutes
TV is the felt, first-person basis for the novel's lethal cartridge and its
vision of entertainment as narcotic.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation