David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King"

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Kp+ZwtnWL._SS500_.jpg

I would like to read this, but I'm only 400 pp. deep into Infinite Jest right now.

did this ship already? I thought it wasn't out until the 15th. Is it just hip press people who got it already?

email from amazon said mine shipped yesterday, not sure how they got it out early

no, apparently it's shipping everywhere (incl. to book stores) early. for some reason.

actually i think i'm wrong about the book store thing, can't remember where i saw that

yep, i'm just a regular ol dude and i got it yesterday

i really like that cover

NYT review —
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/books/the-pale-king-by-david-foster-wallace-book-review.html?ref=global-home

Cover was designed by his widow, I believe.

Apparently it is already shipping to bookstores -- Skylight in LA said they should have it by the weekend. Not sure what the reason was for releasing it early.

this bit of the NYT review may have put me off reading it

Not surprisingly, a novel about boredom is, more than occasionally, boring. It’s impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium — to make us share the misery of his office workers

even just the one Lane Dean Jr. centered short story in the NYer was tough to get through ("Wiggle Room")

probably should just pick up Consider the Lobster and read that instead.

that's such a reviewer's line though—it kind of puts me in mind of their orientation toward book consumers.

mine arrived from amazon yesterday - teared up at the intro straight-away - about 25 pages in and liking it thus far

We got it in yesterday. I was surprised by the lack of fanfare. 3 of the copies came in damaged, but I had an untorn cover for the lucky soul that had pre-ordered.

big stack at the strand last night

I thought they had said it was going to say "An Unfinished Novel" on the cover

i'm still not convinced that kakutani actually finishes all of the books she writes about.

My stepdad asked me about DFW because of this. Every time there's a Time Magazine write-up about some band or writer it becomes a half-started conversation.

Stacks of them in Foyle's in London yestdy too.

lots in powell's.

oh thanks. was planning to stop by and check tomorrow actually.

amazon still haven't sent mine out. aghghhg

i like the cover

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

whoa i figured all the mom stuff in IJ probably came from somewhere but that is some specific proof right there

love the uk cover

http://bookcoverarchive.com/images/books/the_pale_king_1.large.jpg

Jordan, I just read that DFW piece on The AWL and come here to post it. It's really great. One of the best things I've read about him.
I live in Austin and I've had thoughts of going to check out his archives (or at least trying ... I don't know if just anyone can access them). I'd like to check out his marginalia, particularly in his Don Delillo books.

i reserved a copy of this. there are like 9283592352 copies in the store but for some reason it's on sale if you order it from the website and not if you buy it in the store (maybe because it is still technically a preorder since everyone's selling ahead of street date apparently? i don't know), so i "reserved" it and will go and get one of the copies whenever they email me i guess.

i was surprised by how not-1000-pages it was! and it was my understanding that though it wasn't done, it wasn't hundreds-of-pages-are-missing not-done.

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.

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?

Thanks Jim, that's really generous of you. I'm actually at the Tramway all weekend for Arika's Episode 2: A Special Form Of Darkness. Not tempted by Junko on Saturday night or Keiji Haino on Sunday? I'll be back at work from Wednesday onwards...

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