Zora, that’s convincing and in the last paragraph you’ve accurately sussed the sources of my preference.

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SN:
1) US excels in pizza delivery and software
2) mini-nationalities
3) floating refugee camp
4) Gibsonian virtual world
5) implausible linguistic McGuffin

Cryto:
1) all-purpose business plan
2) vulnerability of net to cable-cutting nations
3) cryptography
4) history with Nazis
5) how to eat Cap’n Crunch
6) how to divide household equipment equitably

SN, while charming and revelatory, particularly on counts 1, 2, and 3, doesn’t work on counts 4 and 5. SOD (suspension of disbelief) fails.

Crypto, however, is plausible, as is the net it depicts. All-purpose business plan tells you all you need to know about the dotcom bubble. 3 is informative, 4 is an intriguing mixture of historical fact and invention. 5 and 6 are amusing, inconsequential, and immediately plausible. SOD is not violated.

Verdict: Crypto over SN.

However, if you’re interested in SN 2 and 3, nationalism and its failures, then you might pick SN. (Nationalism, idea of “a” culture, same roots, hence of interest to anthropologists.)

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I was the friend who quickly tired of your drama thinly packaged as ennui, but hung around because of the undeniable intelligence and the undertone of frantic comedy. In my cohort the dramatists’ text was Kerouac’s On the Road, with a side-helping of Steal This Book, both of them years after the fact and neither of which to this day I am sure anyone had actually read.

Thus imagining myself inoculated with a certain irony toward the pose inherent in the form, when later I came across Gravity’s Rainbow its headlong, non-linear, paranoid dash through a transparently manipulative series of preposterous gross-out moments for suburban sensibilities just seemed like a logical way to play fools for fools. Not that the fools keep reading, so of course my hip cred gets a big bump here from my colleagues in the English Dept. who can’t believe I finished it, let alone rereading it, and are forced to take my word for it that it’s a brilliant meditation on the psychosis of social collapse. Hip cred being the payoff, which even I must admit is a degeneracy compared to obsession.

And along those lines I am soooo way ahead of you because although I haven’t read DFW, nothing you say convinces me he’s anything but a genre derivative of the Beats or Pynchon; which he may well be; but isn’t that what the hipster Tristram Shandy groupies would think about my generation’s batch of prolix rebels?

By now you know I’m teasing you, right?

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/me nods

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