David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King"

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.

finished this last night. i enjoyed it and i'm glad it was published but it is quite a sad, frustrating read. with the material that's there and the notes you can roughly tell what might have been formed, and i would have loved to have read the book this could have been. no doubt the final version would have been double the length, and would have padded out the characters and explored the different themes. as it is the central conflict in the novel, human examiners v automisation, glendenning vs lehrl, is hardly explored.

obv it would be cool if wallace wasn't dead as well.

I finally finished this. There were certain moments when I felt empathetic toward and invested in his characters, but for the most part, I couldn't fully engage with it, page to page.

there's a lot of stuff here i've liked, though: the lane dean abortion chapter

Yes! The "Lane A. Dean Jr. and his girlfriend" chapter (6) was the first point in the book where I started to care--it's also interesting because it comes from Lane's POV, but Lane also somehow knows exactly how his girlfriend is feeling, so in this scene you can see both POV's and also the maneuvering Lane must do to not in any way acknowledge what his girlfriend wants.

The first Leonard Stecyk chapter (5) is great

Also agree with this. There's some great exposition here about the effect he has on others, like: "Eventually even the marginal and infirm stop returning his calls."

that weird and so-far-disconnected chapter about the girl in the trailer park

Agreed. In Chapter 8 DFW seems to connect with this character and make the reader care about her. I wonder if his strength is actually in describing childhood and adolescence and filling in the back stories of his character's histories, and that's why these type of scenes all seem to make literary sense, whereas the more rote tax scenes that deal with the I.R.S. as beauracractic system are lacking in that level of immersion.

The sweating chapter (13) is pretty phenomenal (DFW takes us into Cusk's adolescence and the beginning of his attacks), so when the sweating/fear of sweating surfaces later, it seems we've already lived through it with him, and are primed to care.

the giant nihilist-called-to-account chapter in the middle

This (chapter 22) is about 100 pages of Chris Fogle's back story--and I think the stuff about his dad and his mom and his mom's girlfiend Joyce are really interesting here. Also, there seems to be an unreliable-narrator Fitzgeraldian "This Side of Paradise" mock grandeur here: "Gentlemen, you are called to account."

Chapter 36, about the boy whose goal is "to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body"(which was excerpted as "Backbone" in the "New Yorker") creeps me out--I think it is the most disgusting bit of fiction I've ever read.

The Meredith Rand/Shane Drinion chapter toward the end (46) is my favorite. It's a nice mismatch of characters, with the conflicted Rand feeling the need to confide in the austistic Drinion the details of her adolsecent stay in the psychiatric hospital and also the details of her subsequent marriage. The notes say that DFW was considering having Rand become obsessed with Drinion as a type of "savior," similar to how she felt about her husband originally, which would have been very interesting.

I don't know, maybe DFW really wanted to be/could have been a Salinger figure, but just felt the necessity for some reason to put too much alineating digressions or hurdles between his readers and his stories.

Sorry for the long post. It's a slow work morning, and I'm trying to figure some of this stuff out for myself.

The sweating chapter (13) is pretty phenomenal (DFW takes us into Cusk's adolescence and the beginning of his attacks), so when the sweating/fear of sweating surfaces later, it seems we've already lived through it with him, and are primed to care.

just read this. came here to say the sweating chapter is vintage DFW. funny and heart breaking at the same time.

Really wish we got to see those characters taken to their conclusion, they're all introduced so brilliantly and then go nowhere.

^^^ this

i read & really loved this. i wanna go point by point on virginia plain's post above but i feel like i couldn't discuss this in text, it's such an undertaking. v broadly, one thing i think & thought throughout was that, although it's almost explicity singled out as the theme by wallace at some point, and referred to as the concern of the book, i didn't really think this was so much about boredom as it was complexity, and multivalence, and context.

the thing that's playing on my mind at the moment is the footnote from the end which talks about steyck coming to realise or being confronted with the idea that generosity ultimately impoverishes the one it is heaped on, arousing feelings of owing a debt of gratitude to the giver. coming after the rand/drinion chapter, which was so neatly observed in the dynamics of exchanges, it was almost too much to bear.

but yes this was wonderful. i've never read IJ!, but y'know obviously am going to read some 100pp books now before i do anything like that

The called to account section was the real gem for me

The trailer park chapter was way, way Cormac McCarthy. Am I the only one who thought that?

Just requested this from the lib. Looking forward to it.

Paperback apparently coming out at the start of April here in the UK. I will take the plunge then.

I could give you my hardback copy if you want.

If you would like, that would be great, thank you! I'd love to read it, but move very slowly at doing so, I have to warn you - this could take even longer than that Villolobos CD to return...

Haha,i could maybe exchange it for the villalobos cd.im not bothered with getting books back,don't like clutter in the flat and rarely reread things.you in work over the weekend?

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