David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King"

I'll see if i can drop it off next week then,after that I'm away off on holiday for a while.

Thanks! Send me an email for non-public chat... itsnot✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧

Ach, it's on the website... http://www.crimsonglow.co.uk/

http://www.themillions.com/2012/03/a-previously-unpublished-scene-from-the-pale-king-by-david-foster-wallace.html

I just picked up a copy of this. I've never read anything by DFW - is it okay to start here?

lol. you know the story with this book, right? how it was assembled, etc.?

i guess it i might be an ok place to start, but pretty much everything else he's ever written except that undergrad philosophy thesis would be a better place.

i've read the editor's note about how cobbled together it is. i didn't realise it was unfinished when i bought it. figured, given my "careful" reading speed and general lack of perseverance, that IJ might be a waste of money at this stage.

then you should prob start with his nonfiction, 'a supposedly fun thing...' or 'consider the lobster.' i can't really imagine reading 'a pale king' first.

Seconding A Supposedly Fun Thing..., but if you prefer fiction, start with one of the short story collections, maybe? But this is pretty much one of the last things of his you should read imo.

I just picked up a copy of this. I've never read anything by DFW - is it okay to start here?

― Scary Move 4 (dog latin), Wednesday, 11 July 2012 12:45 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i started with this! in terms of his fiction, at least; yeah i guess it's worth reading a couple of the essays just as a primer before a 500 page book, but the freshness of this just in its context helped me persevere (i am not a great reader). do it, i say.

start with A ... Fun Thing

tho tbh this will likely be my first jab at ~finishing~ some DFW fiction

Enjoying this so far!

Good grief. I can't believe how long it's taken (there were whole months when I couldn't face even picking it up) but I finally finished this and it was worth it. There's a whole something like 100 pages in the middle that seem to be deliberately tedious on a trolling level (that whole chapter with DFW in the Gremlin coming to the REC for the first time, not to mention Chris 'Irrelevant' Fogle's extremely long chapter and whole sections where it'll just be describing complex tax procedures etc...) But somehow even these parts have their gems stowed in them. The final scenes (including the four extra chapters in the version I read - the 6 months of TV, the bar-room scene) are probably the most enjoyable.

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.

After Chuck Palahnuik's Guts, I have to agree. I felt quite disturbed by this.

(including the four extra chapters in the version I read - the 6 months of TV, the bar-room scene)

um, what version has extra chapters?

I have a paperback copy that came out in the UK last year or something?

that new yorker piece was pretty intense, yes

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