Hal vs. Stice, Steeply and deLint in the crowd — "You, Moment, World Tennis, Self, InterLace…"

DeLint names the devouring apparatus by its parts — the magazines, the networks, the audiences, the crowds "in Italy fucking literally" — and calls it a machine the players are "all dying to throw themselves into." That last phrase is the theme's engine stated from the supply side: the appetite runs in both directions, the audience chewing the performers and the performers hurling themselves toward the chewing, because being consumed as spectacle is what they've been trained by "the culture" to want. It's the same death-wish grammar that the horizontal statement (170) will make explicit — everyone dying to give themselves away to something bigger, here the something being the crowd's stare, the statue-making machine that eats whatever it makes.