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Good Old Neon

I promise I'm not (usually) so crazy as to have three David Foster Wallace-related entries in a row, but today on the busride home from work I finished the story in Oblivion entitled "Good Old Neon". As I got to the end I noticed an odd little thing at the bottom of the last page, some kind of notation, code or reference. This is what it says:

      [→NMN.80.418]

I paused at it, thinking at first briefly that it was some ornate page number since it occupies a space roughly akin to where a page number would be in the bottom right corner, but it wasn't a page number (those are in the upper right). I flipped the page over and sure enough the story was over, on the next page was the beginning of the next story.

I sat there on the bus thinking "Okay, so this cryptic little thing obviously means something, NMN.80.418. Something I can figure out, maybe." I love a good puzzle.

I stared at it some--"It looks somewhat like a reference, so maybe NMN=Naperville Morning News (I made a mental note to Google to see if there is such thing), okay maybe it's the news story about the crash, and year 1980, and issue 418...okay but no, there aren't likely 418 issues in a year, so that can't be right." But then I realized that 1991 was the year of the crash, not 1980. Then suddenly my eye noticed that .418 was the batting average of the narrator mentioned on the very same page and '80 the year we are to assume he graduated from high school. "Okay, I thought, so then NMN? Well isn't the narrator's name Neal?" *flip flip flip* "Yeah! Thought so. So can we assume that MN are his middle and last initials? And if so, then...well what does that mean? Are these what his life boils down to--initials, graduation and batting average? So then what about the arrow? And the brackets?"

So I don't know. Anyone else have ideas?

Posted by lld at August 13, 2004 08:13 PM

Comments

alex says:

it's like the da vinci code for hipsters!

August 19, 2004 11:09 AM

D de Thomas says:

I think it's his initials, the year he graduated and his batting average. I'd like to take credit for it, but I cannot. I used to belong to a Wallace forum (from the fansite Howling Fantods) and one of the guys there (I think Marcel) asked DFW about it and (if memory serves) this is indeed the case.

ddt/sf

August 21, 2004 12:33 PM

lalitree says:

It does seem the most likely answer; it's the only one I could come up with that made sense though I sort of hold out hope that there's some incredibly obscure other meaning, or at the very least, reason for the odd formatting.

August 22, 2004 12:11 AM