David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King"

i recognize the writer of the awl article from the wallace mailing list. she was always a great contributor & im sure still is.

i think the archives are open to all

mine came yesterday and im abt 40 pages in

I am enormously, everlastingly grateful to my parents for not ever acting like I was some kind of hot shit gifted child whose genius must be recognized and nurtured above all other things, just cuz I scored very high on all the standardized tests. I got to have a relatively happy, exceedingly random childhood, just like all the other dopes.

i was all excited to get my copy yesterday but it hasn't shown up yet

― adult music person (Jordan), Tuesday, 5 April 2011 20:51 (Yesterday) Bookmark

cosign /:

mine showed up! we are rolling.

The first Leonard Stecyk chapter (5) is great in that it hearkens back to the keenly-observed dark humor of IJ and the first Lane A. Dean chapter (6) is great in that it hones in on a small and beautiful truth in a scene that would likely have been played for base melodrama in the hands of many lesser writers and I am now fully invested in this thing.

i liked 6 a lot.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library

i was all excited to get my copy yesterday but it hasn't shown up yet

― adult music person (Jordan), Tuesday, April 5, 2011 3:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

very good & sad piece

Is this book very long?

I don't like DFW much, and wouldn't really want to see his marginalia, but I like the thought that this book could be a little one-off boost for the always ailing book industry, who I hope will make the most of it.

546 pages, which practically makes it a novella.

not sure how i feel abt the whole 'this is a memoir kinda' digression

damn job. damn social life. damn girlfriend.

yup, i was just thinking last night that it'll probably take awhile to finish this if i keep up my current rate of 5 pages per night.

Btw, did anyone else have an immature reaction to "Sylvanshine's window seat was in emergency row, beside an older lady with a sacklike chin who could not seem despite strenuous efforts to open her nuts."

yes.

only compounded when it became a running joke.

no, that didn't bother me so much. might be an english-versus-american thing.

oh it didn't bother me, i love it

obviously the "memoir" stuff is Not Real, but chapter 9 has all this stuff about how "david wallace" made money in college by writing other people's papers for them, and in conjunction with the article linked above and also the incredibly detailed endnote in IJ about plagiarism (which i read like three times because notes kept directing to it as the book's place for detailed information re: the canadian train cult) i kind of suspect there might be some truth to this.

hah, yeah, i thought that part rang oddly true. iirc he did take a break from amherst due to what in the past had been referred to as difficulties with depression and went home where he worked for a brief stint as a bus driver.

yeah. "depression" is code for "too many drugs", i guess it's now certain. (Too Much Fun.) but yeah i would not be surprised at all if being forced to leave an east coast college where everyone called him a genius and coming home to work a boring and unglamorous job for a while was enough of a major life moment for him to want to explore a wackier/grander version of it.

(not that he was not depressed, just that he did more drugs at amherst than he liked to talk about and whenever he made vague references to the reasons for his departure from amherst they always had the character of wanting to keep the extent of the drugs secret without actually having to lie about anything)

(cf. that charlie rose interview where he gets visibly upset and says "i didn't do any more drugs than most people my age" and attributes all his emotional problems to literary success)

idk that he gets visibly upset there, it's just the tv parallel of his fear of not sufficiently making himself understood writing tic imo

yeah, that's how i interpreted it, too

oh well that's evident in every interview he ever did; any time he tries to explain anything even semi-complicated he stops and says "is this making any sense at all?"

but when rose asks about the drugs, dfw first makes a sarcastic joke about tv "he's out of rehab!" narratives, then says that he doesn't think his personal life is very interesting, then says everyone else did just as many drugs, then says (twice) that he just "didn't necessarily have the nervous system to handle it", then redirects the conversation towards the emptiness of early fame. which i'm sure was a big deal too, especially as the article upthread mentions that he was prey to the super-common "drugs are bad for most people but i myself am A WRITER" thing, and probably embarrassed about it in retrospect with the special kind of disproportionate embarrassment people only feel when they are remembering something they once did that they now personally feel to have been seriously deluded or immoral. so he's not lying, but i think he's making the drugs out to be a much smaller problem than they were. which is fine, i mean, i don't think i have a right of access to this stuff or anything. but i think it's true.

oh yeah, well he definitely had a big drug/alcohol problem. i think maybe he was just reluctant to make the drugs a big part of his personal narrative of ~problems~ because (a) its not that exceptional and (b) relative to his apparently absolutely crushing emotional issues the drugs seemed kind of incidental. i'm just skeptical of the idea that the subject upset him b/c he was ashmaed of it rather than b/c he just didn't personally pinpoint drugs as the source of his issues. i mean drugs/alcohol inevitably became a big part of his story anyway, b/c they figure so prominently in his writing.

that 'although in the end ...' book is pretty interesting, as well, in terms of subject avoidance. er, though, the younger brother in 'broom of the system' spends all his time ... doing a lot of drugs, and writing other peoples' papers ... at an east coast college. i think. so, y'know.

(also i remember i think one former professor saying something along the lines of 'yes, that was an unusually good year for thesises at amherst')

I thought he was just helping people with them, as opposed to actually doing it for them?

ive definitely read rumours that he did them for them

NY Times piece today about how it was edited/pasted.

pietsch wrote an account in yesterday's guardian, also.

it's more on the personal side than relative to the book but there's a v affecting, well written piece on karen green, here.

interesting review in 'slate'

http://www.slate.com/id/2290950/pagenum/all/

the giant nihilist-called-to-account chapter in the middle seems like one of the things that would have been shortened after pietsch managed to convince DFW he was not failing to make himself understood.

How else are people here finding it so far??? I'm putting it off for a bit, but am curious about what y'all think...

xp otm it reads kinda like good old neon but more digressive

one of the "david wallace" chapters keeps mentioning how overlong that chapter was and how nobody likes the guy who wrote it because he talks too much and is unable to distinguish between pertinent and nonpertinent information, which like, i get what we're doing here, but

which like, i get what we're doing here, but

so much of wallace's later fiction scans this way to me, unfortunately.

yeah me too.

there's a lot of stuff here i've liked, though: the lane dean abortion chapter, some of the descriptions of the father in the called-to-account chapter, several of the video interviews (although this bit isn't as good as the similar bit in jest with the collection of resident complaints made to gately), actually that weird and so-far-disconnected chapter about the girl in the trailer park, even though i wasn't sure quite what we were doing w/ the voice in that one. (way better at least than the semidisastrous Black Girl Voice chapter near the front of jest.)

i am definitely amenable to its Ideas, although w/r/t (not a single sighting of that one!) these, the book feels a weird kind of misshapen to me in that the sections which are really really direct about Ideas (elevator civics lesson, speech in accounting class, much of the narration in the nihilist chapter) seem kind of awkward and clunky, like they needed a bunch of sanding (not to keep doing this comparison thing but since this guy did like to re-use tricks: compare the elevator scene, all of the characters in which are literally anonymous, to the scenes of steeply + marathe hashing out u.s. cultural history and delivering thesis-pieces while revealing their not-irrelevant characters), and the parts that do that late-DFW-fiction thing where they writhe and twist trying to escape from perceived shackles of Cliche And Dorkiness, and have that feeling of constantly, twitchily, whipping their eyes around fearing the approach of a new Failure To Connect from a new unconsidered angle, are too afraid of being direct.

enjoying though.

I'm too early in the book to really judge it from a macro level (and I'm not sure it should be) but I'm really enjoying the writing and the details. Claude's three-page pile-up of trivial neuroses while standing on the runway had me sold.

xp word it's impossible not to think of steeply & marathe in that elevator scene.

yahh the elevator scene seems like a first-run at things mb: otoh, i have yet to reread it in light of knowing who a lot of people in it are ...

the giant nihilist-called-to-account chapter in the middle seems like one of the things that would have been shortened after pietsch managed to convince DFW he was not failing to make himself understood.

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, 12 April 2011 19:38 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

xp otm it reads kinda like good old neon but more digressive

― johnny crunch, Tuesday, 12 April 2011 23:07 (Yesterday) Bookmark

it's 'the soul is not a smithy'! well, kind of. with the banal memory and the traumatic one swapped around, and the stuff relating to 'the exorcist' and lane dean jr. farmed out elsewhere.

i enjoyed the experience of reading this a lot; i think it's not in a state where any critical approach to it can get beyond second-guessing where it would have gone, though. one scene at the end (and i kind of wish it had finished with that scene at the end, and not one of the last couple fragments) brought that home to me -- the interview with glendenning which is like similar patches in jest except without the sparsely distributed context that would let the reader make sense of it

by 'enjoyed the experience of reading this a lot' i think i mean: none of it is actually boring to me, or overlong, or a failure of register. but that might be, in part, due to the gratitude for and the knowledge of this being basically the last writing of his i'll be able to read.

My impoverished library system has not received this book yet. Anyone wanna lend it to me?

Completely agree with y'all re: the elevator scene's decided unfinishedness. One of the things I love most about DFW is his ability to reframe so many of my random, tangential, and half-formed thoughts, to articulate truths that I nearly understood but knowingly lacked the ability to sufficiently articulate myself, in a transcendent way that seemed to complete my synaptic circuits. Whereas the elevator scene felt like something I might legitimately have been able to cobble together in an afternoon. Meaning that it seems composed of the random, first-draft thoughts (although solid and intriguing) that I myself might never be able to spin into anything of more worth. Besides all else, I feel most certain that there would have been a greater incident of oblique reference to character and setting in the finished piece. Although I'm certain it's not the intent that informed his work, if any portion of DFW's prose doesn't make me feel at least a little inadequate and humbled, I'm guessing that he wouldn't have felt that it had been massaged into its finished state.

rachel maddow show had a brief interview (see what i did there) with the book's editor today. i'm show it's online at msnbc.com somewhere.

Okay, so reading the "called to account" chapter while riding the CTA is, um, inadvisable?

hahaha.

enjoying this so far. only read infinite jest a couple of months ago, and really was blown away by it, looking forward to reading his other stuff after i'm done with this.

i've been caught in the doors of a bus and the driver drove for a lil bit, went past a lamp-post but thankfully the bus was far away enough that i didn't get brained by it.

still think about this book a lot. i tried to pick it up again at the library a while back to re-read iirc chapter six - about the guy whose girlfriend is pregnant, the chapter chronicling the transcendence of his attitude toward this - & if possible to read the momentary flash-forward about steyck in his army days. so much just unique & shimmering gold in this book.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1634&fulltext=1&media=

KAREN GREEN’S NEW — and incredibly, her first — book Bough Down, from Siglio Press, is an astonishment. It is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read. The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, and its harrowing aftermath for Green. The book feels like an instant classic, but without any of the aggrandizement that can attend such a thing. Instead it is suffused throughout with the dissonant, private richness of the minor, while also managing to be a major achievement.…

reread chapter six of this, wow

it's like a taxonomy of attention

I still think about this book on a very frequent basis. Strangely, it's the most longwinded and boring parts that stay in my mind - endless descriptions of car park traffic circulation; the whole long story about how the guy's dad died on the subway; the concluding chapters with the girl in the mental ward etc... I think I'd convinced myself that the tax office and the story around it was more-or-less factual and I was shocked to discover it doesn't even exist, at all, and therefore the entire story about DFW working there was almost certainly an elaborate lie.

The other bit I remember well is the new starter's 15 minute break where he counts the minutes and seconds he has until he has to go back in, like a death sentence, and wanting to 'run around the adjacent field and flap his arms in the air'.

I wish a fanfic culture existed where people tried to finish this and fill in the blanks

I disagree, but this would've been a great novel if it had been finished.

remembering getting to the end of it and being so frustrated and saddened by how abruptly it ends. brought home "one of your favourite writers has died before his time and you'll never read a new book by him ever again"

i'd feel worse about it if "infinite jest" had a proper ending.

it does!

as in by the end if you piece everything together it forms a cohesive linear narrative

(I had to google to figure out some bits I had missed tho)

im now going to reread it ive just decided

Anyone up for doing on of these in a book club?

YOU ARE CALLED TO ACCOUNT

this is really all i need from this novel

you're watching as the world turns

^^^ most stoner moment in a stoner oeuvre

haha, yeah that guy's story is great

claude sylvanshine, fact psychic, special assistant to an HR systems deputy

all the pictures that goes through this poor guy's head is pretty hilar