It’s the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest, and it’s legal to write about David Foster Wallace again, meaning, chiefly, that gender’s back on the table, and we genderheads are eating: I fact checked a few of the essays about how women know how to read, just to make sure I still could, and then I decided, ah what the hell, what is nostalgia but a cruise ship sailing through the past, anyhow . . . pass me those Wallace essays, brother.

Well, turns out it’s a good thing I opted for formal address, because they’re not so happy about being called the word bro, in part because, unlike “the concept of the female bro,” which Brooks tells us “is tenable in theory,” the lit bros are tenable in practice, which is to say, tenable concretely, and sometimes the women that have held them one way decide they need a change in their lives and maybe holding these bros a new way — viz., accountable — might help, so, they do what anyone trying to hold someone accountable would do: they write something that doesn’t specifically name the bro in question or give majorly identifying details about their specific life that they specifically live and is otherwise so abstract as to be totally meaningless, then they take that, they say it online — whether directly in a post or in a middleman magazine that’ll post it for them — and then they see which sorts of hit dogs start hollering. Not really my style, but if it’s yours, doing an abstract AoE attack seems to be good for boosting engagement KPIs, and I mean if you want to sit at the table of success, making your haters your waiters is a mildly swagful idea . . .

Anyhow, Brooks, for whom “[r]esenting strangers has been a lifelong hobby,” is more upset that these other strangerhaters are bad at it, and he implores us to

think clearly and specifically about why we resent these bros, given their documented tendency to go to the same places and do the same things as us. So much merits our contempt, out there and probably in ourselves, too. The bro distracts us by turning our minds to whom we condemn—when really, the question should be what, and why.

And how! That’s really the main thing about being a bro: it’s not about liking Bernie or Wallace or IPAs or whatever, since those things are all liked by various lesbians and straight women and bisexuals and gay men and nonbinary people and straight men who are nice with it and even others besides, it’s more just that someone who’s getting called a bro like that probably just isn’t very nice with it? Another way of looking at this might be that fandom is, in the parlance of our times, a sort of “entry-level” way to relate to artists and their art, and presumably an extended engagement with a work of art, its artist, or the tradition it’s/they’re a part of might enable different, more ambivalent ways of relating to art, artists, and artistic traditions, in part because so much of artmaking seems to be about how relating different things together can create meaning that extends beyond that which is created by simple aggregation of said things on account of simply aggregating a bunch of things is a sort of generally absurd thing to do on account of that is sort of what the universe is like prior to the meaningmaking relationing of things that is sort of the substance of humanity writ large, i.e., absurd? I think? I’m pretty sure that’s what the novel The Stranger, alluded to in this piece, was kind of about, and what Jean-Paul Sartre, a writer known, in part, for his enthusiasm for relationships, was getting at when he said

Each sentence is a present instant, but not an indecisive one that spreads like a stain to the following one. The sentence is sharp, distinct, and self-contained. It is separated by a void from the following one, just as Descartes’s instant is separated from the one that follows it. The world is destroyed and reborn from sentence to sentence. When the word makes its appearance it is a creation ex nihilo. The sentences in The Stranger are islands.

I think this is the last island in The Stranger, actually:

For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Kind of a cool mentality to have when people whose opinions you don’t respect are being mean to you, #TipsFromADiva, not that I’d know . . .

Well, what’s left to say but my opinion about all this? And here it is! If you want to hold someone accountable for something, reducing them to an abstraction tends not to be a good way to do that, whether you are an actually existing and deeply punitive criminal justice system, or perhaps just a woman trying to get a man to let her get a few more words in edgewise, as reducing someone to an abstract category, though doubtless efficient, is sadly not always very effective from the perspective of getting someone to change their behavior, and, in the sense that politics is about doing things to change things, likewise bad politics: oh, thinks this bro who was just told he was “mansplaining,” I’m talking too much in too annoying a way about David Foster Wallace because I’m a man, a thing about myself I perceive to be totally static and forever that way, man, what a shame, I was totally going to change, but alas, what can I do . . . I’ve got the chromosomes . . . the chromosomes that make me talk more . . .

Just call him a cunt! That’s concrete, and if it’s not your style, maybe just be kind and reasonably patient? For everyone else, no need to holler; there’s other ways to volunteer for strays.