david foster wallace: classic or dud

i'll write more about this when i don't have to go to a seminar. meanwhile i thought this was an amusing review/parody:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3964999,00.html

Leave aside the question of whether the ease w/which he can be pastiched is a good or a bad sign.

thought it read like a slightly more literate Bridget Jones to tell you the truth.

i imagine that "a slightly more literate Bridget Jones" is a criticism quite a few people would make of dfw's style...

anyway, to answer the question properly, i'd say classic for two reasons:

i) his prose style, which captures the way people talk/think more accurately than any other author i can think of. though i'm never sure these days whether my emails read like a crap version of dfw because i'm nicking his style or because his style is based on the way that people ramble on.

ii) his attmepts to address the difficulties with really communicating on an honest level with other people, whether this be between author/reader (as in one of those pop quizzes in brief interviews) or psycho/victim (one of the hideous interviews) or

umm, i really do have to go to a seminar now. i'll expand on this later.

1) Don DeLillo (back in the day I heard rumours that he WAS Pynchon, similar to ye olde Salinger rumour)

2) Steve Erickson (underappreciated fantasist - see ILM thread on his top 100 LA songs)

3) George Saunders (maybe more of a Barthelmian miniaturist, but TRP wrote blurbs for CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia)

Those I have loathed: DFW, William T. Vollmann, many more...

none of his other books have had the same effect on me, though i enjoyed 'the broom of the system' and 'supposedly fun things...'.

i was disappointed by 'a heartbreaking work...' too. i think because i expected something more like infinite jest. I've never been able to read 'gravity's rainbow' past the first 150 pages or so. is there a 'pynchon for beginners' i should read first?

of course, i like delillo a lot while finding pynchon overrated, so my opinion's probably shit anyways.

I used to be able to just breeze by the subject of DFW, without care, capriciously, even. Having to deal with a bad imitation of DFW for a while made me want to MURDER the man though. Argh. But don't listen to me, I'm illiterate.

Haven't read any big DFW books. Liked "A supposedly fun thing" a lot, especially the cruise ship bit. Hated his article on proper usage & language in Harper's. Weirdest thing about him is his first book, Signifying Rappers. It's so bad.

Personally: lately I've been finding his essays far more enlightening than his literature. The McCain item, to an extent, but more particularly the David Lynch article from A Supposedly Fun Thing... and the grammar/usage article from Harpers, which was, if not informative to me personally, a really enjoyable analysis.

Of the not-yet-in-book-form material, I'm very fond of "Up, Simba!" and the grammar/usage piece in Harper's. His recent short stories have mostly been "experimental" in the sense of trying to get away from his comfortable subjects and trying to eliminate his tics while maintaining his style. A lot of them end up collapsing at one point or another ("Adult World," in particular, is a very ambitious near-total misfire).

But for verbal glory plus neatly masked high moral seriousness, there's nobody anywhere near him writing right now in English, I think.

DFW = Bruce McCulloch?

I am tempted to say that I like all of the new Pynchons better than the old Pynchon, but it's not true.

DFW is classic. I loved IJ, Brief Interviews was... meh, A Supposedly Fun Thing was good, and I really like all the stories from Girl with Curious Hair.

I could care less about the pretentiousness/ego/wunderkind/pynchon rip off criticisms of him. It's great stuff to read.

All said, I'm a huge fan of IJ, Girl with Curious Hair and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again...so DFW = classic IMO. I've never gotten the Pynchon refs, BTW...they mostly seem to be due to the bulk of IJ. Wallace has always struck me as closer to Donald Barthelme.

Whoa.:

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1997 tome "Infinite Jest," was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.

That's really sad. Suicide is just so awful, so terrible for everyone left behind.

Oh my God. Rest in Peace, DFW, "Infinite Jest" is a masterpiece.

Dang. How... unexpected.

holy shit

Classic or Dead

pouring out 40 footnotes.

i really, really liked his essays

^ this. I really wasn't a heavy reader of his but the essays I did read I v. much enjoyed.

He inspired one of the longer author-centered threads on I Love Books - the unfortunately titled: David Foster Wallace - is he a cunt?

I've read only one of his books, the 'supposedly fun thing' collection of essays. It was ok.

His strong point was having a distinctive authorial voice, so you knew at once there was a person behind the words. His weak point seemed to be self-editing, but there are worse weaknesses. Blandness, for one.

Requiscat in pacem, DFW.

r.i.p.

Horrible.

My best wishes to his family, I'll be re-reading Girl With Curious Hair.

ugh, bad news, so sad

RIP and hugs and best wishes to his family. His tennis writing alone is great, but I always enjoyed everything, every footnote, including his music writing. Damn.

totally bummed out about this, really. r.i.p.

sad news. rip

Terrible news.

holy shit.

got such a kick out of his writing. so much pleasure and humor and wisdom in Infinite Jest. read it during a sad time in my life. it gave me so much hope. read it at the dinner table, read it during breaks at work at my job in a bookstore, laughing the whole time. was waiting anxiously for a new novel from him. . .such a very very sad thing. RIP.

here's his kenyon college commencement speech, well worth reading, from 2005

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

Such bad news. RIP.

OMG I am speechless and so, so sad :-(

RIP

I reread his Kenyon commencement speech a week or two ago and was really inspired by it again. God, this is just awful.

All I ever got around to reading by the guy was the cruise ship essay and that great list of book recommendations that included Wittgenstein's Mistress. Still, this makes my very sad. RIP.

;_;

the tennis-as-geopolitical-power-struggle bit in infinite jest was the best thing ever

OK, that list was called "Overlooked: Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels >1960" and was on salon.com.

Ye, this is it here; http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/04/12/wallace/

Infinite Jest meant a lot to me when I was 19 or so. Very sad to come home to this news.

As a writer of fiction I thought he was mostly terrible, and a dangerous influence on the young; but, to echo what Ned and a couple others have said, he was on occasion a terrific essayist, one whose, shall we say, discursive tendencies dovetailed with genuine insight. His piece on David Lynch before the release of Lost Highway remains one of the best things I've ever read abou the man.

clud

His piece on David Lynch before the release of Lost Highway remains one of the best things I've ever read abou the man.

Agreed, I'm pretty positive that's the first thing I actually read by him.

Huge, huge loss. He was a genius.

i think he was a sometimes great essayist and a mostly failed fiction writer, but the failures were interesting. i like a lot of the pieces of infinite jest, even though the thing as a whole is frustrating. (to him too, it felt like.) i guess i also identified with him as sort of a generational voice, smarter and funnier and more not-making-me-want-to-punch-him than the whole dave eggers/ira glass nexus.

his whole sort of wrestling with moving beyond irony, postmodern self-awareness, all that gen-x angst, i think was really emblematic of artists of his generation in a lot of different ways. he articulated the problem better than anyone else, even if he never really solved it.

One thing you quickly realize when reading DFW was he was one ridiculously smart dude. Maybe too smart for his own good, based on the horrible events of yesterday.

Any writer as ambitious as he is will have some hits and misses, but when he was 100% on, like the Cruise Ship essay, or the Illinois State Fair, the John McCain 2000 piece or the highlights of Infinite Jest, he was a wizard who could seemingly do anything.
RIP

Guys, where is the ideal place to start in Foster's oeuvre?

This is so weird because just last night I reread parts of the John McCain piece, to remind myself that at one time there was something likable about him.

i think ideal place to start is a supposedly fun thing, but that's because i think his nonfiction >>> his fiction.

For fiction, Infinite Jest is clearly the magnum opus. Broom of the System is great too. His short stories aren't as much fun as the longer stuff.

But my favorite DFW stuff will always be his nonfiction pieces, particularly "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and the Illinois State Fair piece.

Thanks for the suggestions. I generally prefer nonfiction to fiction, by the way... if that helps.

you start with his non-fiction, i'll go and try cracking infinite jest again. 10th grade clearly wasn't the right time for that.

i gave infinite jest to my brother for christmas a few years ago, because i knew he'd dig it if he ever gave it a shot. a few months ago he called me to tell me he was a few hundred pages in and loved it. (he's 27 now, i think i was 28 or 29 when i read it, which is probably also about the age dfw was when he wrote it. it's a very late-20s/early-30s sort of book.)

Maybe I'll give it a few years then. I'm 23.

well you could be prodigy.

anyway infinite jest makes more sense in the context of his nonfiction. it's a lot of the same themes, recast.

I'm kind of dreading the thought of a published suicide note. That would be some heavy, dark shit.

Too bad. I liked reading him, but I loved him for his imperfections.

failure

(never understood his proclivity for goofy bandanas. but anyway.)

whoa, wtf? wtf? This is a strange death/suicide to process. Really hard to believe.

RIP

i get so scared and confused when people i consider to be wiser than me yet kindred souls give in to this personal darkness that they always so eloquently teach you to fight against....

Poor dude. Never got into his writings, but all my friends love his work. But I can understand ... no matte rhow good life gets, there will always be this intense darkness inside of you that never goes away, regardless of love and success. My second cousin hanged himself depsite having the most amazing life possible. Who knows what that's about. The mysteries of biology and the concept of the human soul.

Ouch, fuck. Yeah, that.

this is crushingly sad.

I'm really still too just shocked and torn up to add anything except just tipsy mothra as OTM as ever but even more so because this is a hard hard hard thing to be OTM in the face of

I enjoyed a lot of his nonfiction pieces, always meant to start on IJ and maybe I will someday. Incredibly sad indeed. RIP.

so okay this: "The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle... our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."

oh shit

(he's 27 now, i think i was 28 or 29 when i read it, which is probably also about the age dfw was when he wrote it. it's a very late-20s/early-30s sort of book.)

IJ was published when he was 34, so he likely wrote it in his early 30s. He published Broom of the System when he was only 25 though, and its protagonist was a 24 year old

RIP

I remember Stevie T showing me The Broom of the System, years ago. I didn't like the title much, I don't think.

I have never read him except things like the first paragraph or so of an essay on Roger Federer. Steady Mike has read him a lot more!

i read A Supposedly Fun Thing recently and absolutely loved it. apart from the quality of the writing and the insight and the jokes, i enjoyed it because DFW came across as extremely likeable. i can't believe he's dead, it's too horrible :(

i'm totally gutted about this, espcially since i clicked the thread with expectations and high hopes for news of new work to be imminently released. damn. RIP big guy.

Fucking Fuck.. This Is crushing. He was one of my favorite contemporary authors, for his fiction, yes, but (as many of you have noted) ESPECIALLY for his essays. Ned, OTM regarding the Lynch piece: Easily the finest appraisal of Lynch's work I've come across, and perhaps the single piece of writing I've reread most in recent years.

Devastating. R.I.P.

..a dangerous influence on the young - I would have to agree with this, however.

holy shit... this is terrible

this also needs to be posted:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769

There's this one: "Federer as Religious Experience"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

Make sure you print the footnotes if you're printing it out.

Shit shit shit.

Fuck fuck fuck. I only finished Infinite Jest about a month ago so this feels very raw for me. One of the things that stuck out was the ease in which he moved from goofy comedy to articulating absolute crushing despair. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised or shocked by this news, but still, I am. RIP.

God, this is too much. He's been a sort of a big literary voice for me (me, who has never been particularly immersed with literature). I remember hearing he had contemplated suicide earlier in his life, but nevertheless, I couldn't even post here until this morning because it's been a bit too surreal. I've been reading IJ all summer, as well. An enormous writer and wit. Rest in Peace.

sad :(

i'm a huge fan of his essays too, although maybe it's finally time to get around to IJ.

i feel quite bad that my third thought after hearing this news (after "what the fuck" and "god I never read oblivian") was "I wonder how much my signed first editions of Girl with Curious Hair and Infinite Jest are worth now?"

Oblivion is about half totally incredible and half ...what the hell? i don't recommend a reading of Good Old Neon to anyone who is particularly upset about this news right now but, jesus, what an incredible story. i've read the story 3 or 4 times and i've still no idea what he does in the last paragraph or what it means.

very sad, brutal, worrying
onion article still makes me laugh tho
but, sigh

i'm really crushed.

i loved his writing so much.

it's hard to think of things to say about him, this is really hard for me because -- good old neon aside (good lord there's no way i could read that now) -- but despite his reputation as some sort of po-mo trickster/showoff...to me what made wallace was his heart...if anything he was painfully sincere...a guy that had so much to express, wanted to explain everything he felt to you in such detail....the footnotes always seemed like a byproduct of a real exuberance to me, not some sort of stylistic schtick...

but the sad thing to me is that I always felt his worldview, while sad at times, was a positive one...that the things we love are worth it, despite all the mental horrors of the world....to find out he ended up losing to them is infinitely sad to me.

first thing i thought of was the above referenced Kenyon University commencement speech, which in it's own small way might be my favorite thing he ever wrote:

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

"i wish you way more than luck"...i dunno...that line always sort of got me a little choked, what else can you say to a kid going out in this world?

but despite his reputation as some sort of po-mo trickster/showoff...to me what made wallace was his heart...if anything he was painfully sincere...a guy that had so much to express, wanted to explain everything he felt to you in such detail....the footnotes always seemed like a byproduct of a real exuberance to me, not some sort of stylistic schtick...

yeah, this. he always seemed so....affable.

also:

By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this experience. Because there is one. It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling. One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.

i love the ending.

ugh i am furious. i just cannot believe this. my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong. what a shame. RIP.

Nothing like discovering that my all-time favorite writer has committed suicide on the eve of my grandfather's funeral. I am just going to stop trying to process anything for a little while, thanks.

if anything he was painfully sincere...a guy that had so much to express, wanted to explain everything he felt to you in such detail....the footnotes always seemed like a byproduct of a real exuberance to me, not some sort of stylistic schtick...

so very very OTM.

Yesterday evening my friend Kevin and I had this big conversation about DFW because I saw IJ lying around. Husband didn't know who he was so we were explaining and he decided to borrow the book and give it a go. After five hours later at 2 in the a.m. we came home and saw the news. It was made even more WTF by the conversation we'd had earlier. :-(

jeez deric sorry man.

WTF?!

lol, classic or dead

also: when i originally read "a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again" i thought the title story, the account of the cruise ship experience was a great bit of non fiction writing.

last year, my wife and i went (somewhat unenthusiastically) along on a family cruise with her side of the fam...and goddamn...i realized it was not just great, but like absolutely amazing in how he explained the weird layers of dread/boredom/horror/relaxation/guilt that are build into a cruise.

oh good cankles is here

Douglas's comment way upthread -- "for verbal glory plus neatly masked high moral seriousness, there's nobody anywhere near him writing right now in English" -- dovetails excellently with Wallace's stated fondness for The Screwtape Letters (hardly masked there, admittedly).

This is really hard to process. It's got to be a pretty surreal and depressing way for Claremont Colleges kids to start their school year.

at least he got to see that last Wimbledon

Shit, this is a shocker. No doubt somebody has already recycled a joke from the Onion to depict
him writing a 76-page multi-footnoted suicide note. Me, I thought both "Broom" and "IJ" were wonderfully
entertaining reads (even tho parts of the latter were more satisfying than the whole) and I'm sad there won't
be any followup. RIP

I totally forgot about the article on cruises. Anyone read David Rakoff? The tone of much of the essays in Fraud reminds me of Wallace.

Who was doing the footnote thing first, him or Baker?

man i just assumed this thread was revived for some contrarian b.s. seemed too engaged with the world for something like this.

The Mezzanine is from 1988, and I don't know if there are footnotes in Broom of the System (1987).

Of the footnote generation, I've been more of a fan of Vollmann and Baker. But Wallace, poor guy, poor guy, and best thoughts to those who connected with his work. As with the week when Elliott Smith died, I think of the folks I love who are hurting from this.

I'm kind of dreading the thought of a published suicide note. That would be some heavy, dark shit.

― kornrulez6969, Sunday, September 14, 2008 4:46 AM (18 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^this

its really terrible news. my heart really goes out to the guy. i have a vhs of his appearance on charlie rose that ive watched a ton of times and i think if i put it on now im gonna ball my eyes out

i'd forgotten about this, which i read and liked when it came out and which struck me as possibly a small breakthrough for him.

Who was doing the footnote thing first, him or Baker?

jack vance ("dying earth") did the footnote thing first

I'm really sad about this. Motherfuck the haters. E Unibus Pluram is probably one of the most personally important things I read in my college years and it's still great.

In fact, going back to that essay now, I'd even say some of his thoughts about television were proto-poptimist.

jesus guys, is now really the time for this vv important inquiry into who was "first" on footnotes? really?

jesus guys, is now really the time for this vv important inquiry into who was "first" on footnotes?† really?

― rogermexico., Sunday, September 14, 2008 5:37 PM (2 minutes ago)
________________________________________
† (footnotes have, in fact, been used for some time)

haha

and they're endnotes, too, not footnotes

All the links posted have been great. Thanks.

jesus guys, is now really the time for this vv important inquiry into who was "first" on footnotes? really?

Talking about what he wrote in context >> posts saying "RIP"

Sounds like it was fun to take his classes!

http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=266836

I just searched my notes for mention of his name. He keeps coming up during 2005 when, through personal circumstances, I had the energy and opportunity to read and take notes on countless long articles and books and think seriously about them. I miss that.

Here's a great review of his book on infinity in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/notices/200406/rev-harris.pdf. The fact that it got reviewed in this journal, never mind reviewed favourably, says it all really.

Salon interview: http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace1.html

Last paragraph of this LRB review is a major bummer: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/maso02_.html

Wallace has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him. I flatter myself to think that I am one of them, but I haven’t any idea how to convince you that you should be, too; nor, clearly, does Wallace. And it might not be the worst thing in the world, next time out, when big novel number three thumps into the world, were he to dig deeper, search longer, and find a more generous way to make his feelings known.

If you can track it down, there was a good review of the infinity book by Jordan Ellenberg in one of the first issues of SEED, which was also 2005. I'll see if I can dig up my copy.

n+1 manages to make itself useful for once:

http://www.nplusonemag.com/david-foster-wallace

(I mean I really thought this was a good piece)

10/23/03 writing 2 4 4 emoticon smiley 1215949 Very particular about usage. Excellent at explaining concepts. Very neurotic and tends to chew tobacco and spit in a cup while lecturing. If you are a female, do NOT fall under his spell...he's a heartbreaker.

At story's end, this narrative "I" is peeled back, revealing a David Wallace who's gazing at a picture of an acquaintance in an old high-school yearbook, "trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven himself to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way."

:(

The Charlie Rose episode mentioned upthread, I think. The DFW roundtable part starts around minute 36

there's also one with just him
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7171768127610835594
starts about 23:00

(lump in throat)

this: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace

was my first exposure to wallace, in fact. It was laid out like that with colored boxes scattered about the page, if I remember correctly. Maybe works even better like this.

I can't say he was a major influence on my writing.

What I learned from him, however, was further, vivid confirmation that life is too short not to write about everything and include everything.

What I now learn from him is further, garish confirmation that life is too short not to wait for the rest of everything so that you might write greatness as well as live it.

The importance of telling the whole tale.

So long, bandana man.

Here's a great review of his book on infinity in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/notices/200406/rev-harris.pdf. The fact that it got reviewed in this journal, never mind reviewed favourably, says it all really.

I'm not really sure that this is true; I don't think it's a very favourable review, and a lot of pop math books/novels with a math theme get reviewed in Journal of the AMS. E&M was pretty disappointing, basically.

Sure, but they're all by mathematicians and they're generally not the kind of high profile mainstream pop sci that gets reviewed elsewhere. A book by an English professor is an exception.

More links:
http://fimoculous.com/archive/post-5030.cfm

ryan, there was a PDF of that article that reveal the boxes in some weird magical way. I am trying to track it down now.

Sure, but they're all by mathematicians and they're generally not the kind of high profile mainstream pop sci that gets reviewed elsewhere. A book by an English professor is an exception.

Not to labor the point, but this isn't true (except in as much that there aren't so many books by English profs that mention math). For example, just picking up the current issue, there's a review of a young adult novel featuring some math (this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Katherines-John-Green/dp/0525476881 ).

It would be weird if anyone wrote a popular book on the subject of E&M and it didn't get reviewed in the Notices of the AMS, frankly.

I stand corrected : )

Anyway, here's the Ellenberg review I was talking about (webmail me if you want a copy of the full thing):

Wallace is an inspired choice of guide through this briar patch: His characters, from the overly abstract tennis players in Infinite Jest (note title) to the eponym of the brilliant and excruciating story “The Depressed Person” tend to get caught thinking about their thinking, landing them in infinite cycles strangely reminiscent of the ones logicians tangle with in Everything and More. And the famous paradox of the barber who shaves only those people who don’t shave themselves (question—who shaves the barber?) plays a key part in his first novel, The Broom of the System. Among Wallace's strengths is an ability to bring to bear in fiction not only the simple, lyrical truths about human life, but the complicated and hard to grasp ones, the ones requiring some preliminary structural setup—that is, the technical ones. In a review of his book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, I wrote that higher math (along with NAFTA and the House Ethics Committee) was a subject to which I think Wallace’s prose would be uniquely suited. Now I’ve got my wish.

Everything and More is not a math book of the usual kind. Most general-interest books about mathematics scrupulously avoid technicalities; Wallace, on the other hand, dives into them exultantly and rolls around. This is not to say that the book is a dry monograph; there are figures and formulas, yes, but they tend to come flying at you like debris in the flow of Wallace's torrential narrative. Reading Everything and More is like nothing so much as having a conversation—a one-sided conversation—with that really smart guy you knew in college who responded to the briefest questions by sitting you down in a chair and launching into an impromptu dissertation. In this case, the question is: "How did mathematicians figure out how to handle the concept of infinity in the late 1800s?" And the dissertation begins: "Look, we'd better start with Zeno and Aristotle... have you got a few minutes?"

Wallace is taking a swing at the problem he wrote about in his 2000 essay "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama:"

"Not just professional mathematicians, but almost anyone lucky enough ever to have studied higher math understands what a pity it is that most students never pursue the subject past its introductory levels... Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and context-less formulae fall away and all that's left are pencil and paper and what gets called 'genius,' viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind."

This OTM-ness of that final paragraph, coming from a non-mathematician, is stunning.

Also, this is going in my teaching philosophy statement:

Early in the book he makes a wise comment about the decontextualized nature of school math: "That we end up not even knowing that we don't know is the really insidious part of most math classes."

my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong.

Well, I'm aftraid that is not an intellectual attainment. I don't know what kind it is, either.

xpost

i just cannot believe this. my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong. what a shame. RIP.

What I thought too. I'm torn up about this.

From the NY Times obit (sorry if already quoted, haven't read whole thread):

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst. [...] James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

From a posting on the DFW e-mail discussion list, extracted from a remembrance by a professor of his at Amherst:

He wrote two senior theses at Amherst: a creative thesis in English that was his first novel, "The Broom of the System," and a philosophy thesis on fatalism. Both were judged to be Summa Cum Laude theses. The opinion of those who looked at the philosophy thesis was that it, too, with just a few tweaks to flesh out the scholarly apparatus, was a publishable piece of creative philosophy investigating the interplay between time and modality in original ways.

That much is probably common knowledge. Here's what is not so widely known: Though theses normally take a whole school year to write, DFW had complete drafts of both of his theses by Christmas, and they were finished by spring break. He spent the last quarter of his senior year reading, commenting on, and generally improving the theses of all his friends and acquaintances. It was a great year for theses at Amherst.

God damn it.

mmm amphetamines

or maybe just the mania side of the depression.

I couldn't believe this when I heard it. Very sad news.

in re: to the footnote thing.

obv. it's one of his signature devices. but i found it enlightening once when i read a couple of stories and essays while skipping all the footnotes. surprisingly, the pieces read just fine without them. after that i wondered if the footnote thing had been his way of trying to make his writing more accessible for people that didn't have the patience for all the minutia of his writing...like you could take them or leave them....i almost want to say they were sort of like hyperlinks in a web story but it's probably more of a coincidence than anything.

well the end of the charlie rose interview is horribly prescient

xp I think with "Host" it might be more than coincidence.

all the harpers stuff: http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557

i almost want to say they were sort of like hyperlinks in a web story but it's probably more of a coincidence than anything.

There's a piece in Consider the Lobster that kind of follows through on this logic, and I feel incredibly sorry for the book designer who had to lay it out: it's put together like an org chart, with callouts breaking from the text into bubbles of commentary and evidence and sub-argument.

I wrote something years ago on I Love Books that probably sums up why I cared so much about Wallace, but I think I'll read this thread more deeply before looking for it...

It makes you wonder what the manuscripts he submitted to magazines and book publishers look like and how he composed them. Does anyone have any information on this?

http://www.edrants.com/operation-dfw/

As for “Host,” apparently DFW had submitted the whole essay on a giant posterboard. He confessed to being “kind of a dick” about this, but was very happy with the way the Atlantic had found a way to typeset it. He also confessed that it’s “probably a little harder to read than it’s worth.”

There's a piece in Consider the Lobster that kind of follows through on this logic, and I feel incredibly sorry for the book designer who had to lay it out: it's put together like an org chart, with callouts breaking from the text into bubbles of commentary and evidence and sub-argument.

are you talking about the one on the conservative talk radio host?

i think that was the one...in any case...my friend had read it in the original magazine form and apparently there it was a different system...color coded footnotes of some sort. apparently they couldn't do the color coding thing for the book so the boxes and arrows were the solution...i have not read the original but my friend said it worked far better in practice than in the book.

Here's the original, as it appeared in the Atlantic

http://www.artindeepkoma.com/DFW%20-%20Host.pdf

Yeah, "Host," already linked and discussed upthread -- sorry about that.

His other "kind of a dick" move in Consider the Lobster -- getting sent to cover some kind of lobster festival for Gourmet (?) and coming back with a short piece about the moral fine points of boiling the lobsters while they're still alive.

The two posts following from this link = one of the main reasons I care about Wallace:

david foster wallace - is he a cunt?

i was subscribing to the atlantic when the dfw pice was in it--a gift from my uncle (? i think) when i was a freshman in college--and frankly the atlantic is filled with a lot of garbage but i remember that piece so clearly; i must have read it two or three times.

wallace's death hits hard i think not just because he was such a personal writer--all his essays seemed sort of compulsive, like he needed to get everything in his head out on paper, where he could organize and process it all better (which is why the flowcharts and color-coded footnotes make so much sense to me!)--but because he was such a "flawed" "genius" (or whatever); a man of incredible intelligence and warmth whose superhuman talents seemed to never translate fully (maybe a fault of the nature of writing or the nature of novels or the nature of journalism rather than of the nature of david foster wallace), and who seemed all the more loveable (for lack of a better word) because of it.

I was in Australia when it ran. I got a PDF of it somehow through my library's institutional subscription. I remember thinking that reading a PDF of something by DFW was probably the most modern thing I would ever do until personal hovercrafts were available.

thanks mr que! i was feeling stupid for not saving my back issues...

here's a non-copyright violation version

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace

Fuck it. I didn't read this thread yesterday thinking it was just a revive and haven't seen the web/news all day and then I'm driving home and some woman is speaking about someone who had problems following up his huge 1000 page novel and now we'll never know what he had in mind and I thought 'it can't be David Foster Wallace because he's only 40-something' and yet it was.

When I had really got bored of reading fiction IJ (and to a lesser but significant extent, Broom) got me reading it again.

RIP

(and who was/is Edna Wellthorpe upthread? Using Joe Orton's nom de plume to get all 'he was NO Thomas Pynchon' on the thread...that's the kind of thing I used to do...wait...it wasn't me was it?)

Edna Wellthorpe was Stevie Tr0uss3, I believe

Correct.

Well, thank god it wasn't me.

some very good and some not so good (but all heartfelt) personal tributes to DFW on the front page of mcwseeneys:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/

Can't believe this!

The last thing I read by him was his intro to "The Best American Essays 2007" and it was just cracking good, for an editor intro.

and I feel incredibly sorry for the book designer who had to lay it out:

From what I'm told we tried and tried to get different color options to price out, but there was no practically satisfactory way. The whole book didn't need to be (and couldn't be) printed in color, only that section -- the color part could have been printed separately and inserted into the back of the book, but then it wouldn't be alongside the text. Etc. I guess there was a flurry of pros and cons and when it died down, what was left was the boxes-and-arrows method.

What if it had been in the middle of the book, like you see sometimes with a set of photo plates? Too expensive?

i don't suppose the michael joyce essay is online somewhere? i haven't found it yet and i want to send it to a friend.

Every time I translated one of his works, I sent him questions. He was reluctant to answer, he struggled with the answers, he kept saying that that particular story was impossible to translate in a decent and faithful way—this occasionally made me shed tears—and then he would write whole pages to explain a single word or phrase, and end up declaring his complete trust in my skills as a translator

i'd love to read some of those notes

Such terrible, sad sad news. I'm really shocked and upset to hear this. So very unexpected and a dreadful shame that he's died so young and in such a horrible way.

the uncollected dfw: http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/uncollected-dfw.html

John Ziegler, subject of of "Host," remembers: http://johnziegler.com/editorials_details.asp?editorial=165

If I ever meet him I swear to God I'll spit in his eye.

Fucking disgusting.

Without trying to sound flippant, did you expect him to raise three cheers?

Isn't that exactly what he's doing?

Poorly phrased, admittedly. Even so -- gotta say, his reaction doesn't surprise me at all.

Frankly I'm just shocked to see him speak quite that viciously of the recently deceased, his opinion of DFW notwithstanding. Then again, he notes with some glee on his front page that the editorial "is sure to be among the most controversial opinions on Wallace that you'll read" or somesuch similar garbage.

Not to mention, if you imagine the kindest possible treatment of Ziegler you'd get something very much like "Host" and he wants BEEF?

"He fooled the knobhead literary elites but he didn't fool ME" is obtuse and classless (which is to say: Ziegler). "He offed himself in a calculated move to ensure his literary reputation" is grounds for tar and feathers.

Frankly, if I don't get ripped by a right-wing talk radio personality days after my untimely death, I'm going to have to admit I didn't live up to my potential.

Ziegler's little spitty obit there has already gotten him more attention than he deserves, so let's be bigger and just stop discussing it.

i wonder if celebrity cruises inc. will issue a statement. or the illinois state fair.

Frankly, if I don't get ripped by a right-wing talk radio personality days after my untimely death, I'm going to have to admit I didn't live up to my potential.

lol. thank you for that.

"That last one’s of especial value, I think. As
exquisite verbal art, yes, but also as a model
for what free, informed adulthood might look
like in the context of Total Noise: not just
the intelligence to discern one’s own error or
stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb
it, and move on and out there from,
bravely, toward the next revealed error. This is
probably the sincerest, most biased account of
‘Best’ your Decider can give: these pieces are
models—not templates, but models—of ways
I wish I could think and live in what seems to
me this world."

i would read all this david foster wallace, why because he look interstin

weird - I have just learned that my DFW was in my dad's AA group

you had your own dfw?

unreleased, uncollected essay from the 1996 US Open

http://www.tennis.com/features/general/features.aspx?id=145230

you had your own dfw?

I kept him in the garage next to my PKD replica

some interviews: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/david-foster-wallace

from the "supposedly fun thing" era interview: "i am in cold turkey from footnotes. i am not doing them anymore."

"people who think they're very bright are a--...buttholes."

The Wall Street Journal is running an adapted version of the Kenyon commencement speech under the title "David Foster Wallace on Life and Work":

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

From the 1996 KCRW interview:

"When I was in my 20s - deep down underneath all the bullshit - what I really believed was that the point of all fiction was to show that the writer was really smart."

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nascar_cancels_remainder_of_season

Apparently, his first fiction piece for a major magazine was for Playboy in 1988, republished here.

I'd like to think DFW would have enjoyed that Onion piece.

Here's another one that I don't remember seeing at the time. Pretty funny:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769

the first joke that came to mind when i heard about this was basically that onion article, but about his suicide note (that was probably the first joke that came to everyones mind, huh)

I wonder if he left a footnote. And but so what do you think it said?

this is terribly sad, his death and learning how ill he had been beforehand. his writing was so full of personality that i'm not sure how much feeling the loss of the authorial persona is linked to feeling the loss of the person, but it is hard not to link them.

wow

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/graphics/092108_infinite_jest/

has anyone read the math book? i was thinking of getting it (i did math at university but that was over 5 yrs ago and i cant remember any of it)buttut that review that caek linked to up above made it sound pretty bad (i didnt get the general idea that the review was favourable at all)

it's certainly the weakest of his books that i've read (still haven't read signifying rappers). it's still his prose, though, so it's still good in that sense - but on the other hand if you don't understand the math it'd be heavy going, and if you do the fact that a lot of it is if not wrong then at least has the wrong emphasis is annoying.

ok thanks, i do like his prose so maybe i'll pick it up and see. can you recommend any other math books? that are relatively easy to read but arent totally rubbish?

It's been a long time since I've read any "popular" math books. I used to love Martin Gardner's books as a kid, but they're essays rather than a whole book. "A Mathematician's Apology" is great, I think, though again I haven't looked at it for a while. This might be helpful:

http://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/reader-survey-what-makes-a-good-popular-math-book-good/

Best popular math book I read recently was Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife, but you can never go wrong with Martin Gardner.

i know it's chickenshit 2 crap on a dude who just merc'd himself, but i cant really get mad @ ziegler for that piece. if u take it @ face value (i never read DFW's essay on him), he seems 2 b comin from a place of real vulnerability and frustration there, so i cant blame him 4 wantin 2 take a few potshots imo~~~

cheers caek + toby, i'll have a look at those

sad stuff

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/09/26/david_foster_wallace/

good interview on the math stuff: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace

(i never read DFW's essay on him), he seems 2 b comin from a place of real vulnerability and frustration there

Actually, I think the phrase "seems 2 b comin from a place of real vulnerability and frustration" is a pretty good summary of what DFW wrote about him. Which is why his commentary wasn't unexpected: it pretty much confirms the portrait of him in the piece. The guy's own recap of his career paints him as someone who can't stay in the same place for more than two years without being acrimoniously fired; he's the kind of guy who will then rant about how every one of the people in each of those situations was a vicious snake or P.C. cop; he sounds like the type who actually feels vulnerable and persecuted and continually frustrated: the Angry White Male.

^^ I think DFW was far more charitable and journalistic about investigating the guy's character than I ever could have been

continually amazed the more i read about his depression that he was able to produce so much work... when im in the midst of one of those six-month periods where every day is the weird anxious struggle to feel OK about your life, i cant lift a finger creatively. i imagine he was incredibly sef-critical.

Well, that Salon article made it sound like in his final months as his depression worsened he couldn't write, so maybe his productivity waxed and waned based on his personal state. Does make me feel kind of awful for indulging in any moment of anger at or judgement of his actions, it sounds like he tried very hard for a very long time to soldier on through the rough patches.

I have tried probably ten serious times to quit chewing tobacco in the last decade. I’ve never even made it a year. Besides all the well-documented psychic fallout, the hardest thing about quitting for me is that it makes me stupid. Really stupid. As in walking into rooms and forgetting why I’m there, drifting off in the middle of sentences, feeling coolness on my chin and discovering I’ve been drooling. Without chew, I have the attention span of a toddler. I giggle and sob inappropriately. And everything seems very, very far away. In essence it’s like being unpleasantly stoned all the time… and as far as I can tell it’s not a temporary withdrawal thing. I quit for eleven months once, and it was like that the whole time. On the other hand, chewing tobacco kills you—or at the very least it makes your teeth hurt and turn unpleasant colors and eventually fall out. Plus it’s disgusting, and stupid, and a vector of self-contempt. So, once again, I’ve quit. It’s now been a little over three months. At this moment I have in gum, a mint, and three Australian tea-tree toothpicks that a Wiccan friend swears by. One reason you and I are chatting in print rather than in real time is that it’s taken me twenty minutes just to formulate and press the appropriate keys for the preceding ¶. Actually speaking with me would be like visiting a demented person in a nursing home. Apparently I not only drift off in the middle of a sentence but sometimes begin to hum, tunelessly, without being aware of it. Also, FYI, my left eyelid has been twitching nonstop since August 18. It’s not pretty. But I’d prefer to live past fifty. This is my Tobacco Story.

secret to becoming a brilliant and prolific writer = tons of nicotine?

Writing well, and productively, involves getting into a pretty unusual state of mind: you have to be in a peak state of focused, high-level creativity -- thinking not just about what you're saying and the words you're using, but about where they're going, and how they fit the shape and structure and themes of an overall work -- and you have to do this furious mental work while sitting calmly somewhere. I'm sure there are other tasks in the world that require this kind of mental state, but I don't know what they'd be: most other high-level creative things I've tried still involve some periods of technical or rote work, these brief breaks where you decide on a plan of action and then get to work peacefully at implementing it. They involve some level of just doing the thing you're working on, or else picking up and looking it over, fiddling with it, tweaking things, seeing how it works. Writing isn't often like this -- the real work of it involves sitting there at the blank edge of a page and needing to face it calmly and keep poking forward into an infinity of options. Which is maddeningly rough and a struggle big enough that it's hard to just sit in a chair and keep at it.

Point being: there are various crutches that can help a person stay in that state and stay in the chair without feeling dumb or cowed or mute and driving herself crazy -- and if you've found one, it's going to be hell to let it go, and lose part of the capacity to do the main great thing you do in life.

bisco, do u think the best writers are the pps who can concentrate the longest/hardest

No, not really.

fwiw Signifying Rappers is absolutely fantastic

signifying rappers is trash

I won't disagree with nabisco, but this got my attention:

They involve some level of just doing the thing you're working on, or else picking up and looking it over, fiddling with it, tweaking things, seeing how it works. Writing isn't often like this -- the real work of it involves sitting there at the blank edge of a page and needing to face it calmly and keep poking forward into an infinity of options. Which is maddeningly rough and a struggle big enough that it's hard to just sit in a chair and keep at it.

The hardest part of writing fiction is starting: staring at the blank page, etc. I'm the sort of writer who must complete a minimum number of pages once I start, though, and for the most part I'm improvising. Looking it over, fiddling, tweaking, seeing how it works -- this all happens during a first draft. It was an immense comfort when I read a Flannery O'Connor essay in which she admitted that she had no idea what she was doing when writing ("You must write outlines and character sketches," non-writers will say). The real art -- thinking how words "fit the shape and structure and themes of an overall work" -- happens during revision.

re: what n's talking about - that was one thing i never got in college, the flagrant adderall abuse. How can anyone hoping to be remotely productive as a writer in their life, take adderall and not expect to become addicted ... its beyond me

That's absolutely true, Alfred, but I do think there's a slight difference in scale. It's common enough, in the process of writing something, to do things like switching point of view, or tense, or re-arranging elements, to see how it all looks from various angles. But of course you can't just turn your notepad or computer over and see it that way; it involves whole processes of rewriting and reframing. It seems to me to be slightly different from, say, writing a song (where I can ask, "what if I played it like this" and then do so) or making a piece of visual art (where I can alter something and then step back and look the whole item over at once).

I tend to feel, incidentally, as if you're always staring at the blank page -- or anyway you're staring at the blank end of the page, which can be just as weighty. Maybe that's just me, though: I love the possibilities of the blank page, but find it harder and harder going as each word you put on there narrows you down to a point.

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

heh lil nublets

heh just heh

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

don't sweat it--i think 90% of artists (writers, bands, painters) feel this same thing all the time.

sad stuff

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/09/26/david_foster_wallace/

― Mr. Que, Friday, September 26, 2008 3:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I found this an incredibly sad and genuinely upsetting piece. It hits too close to home.

yes, sad and frustrating and then sad all over again

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

don't sweat it--i think 90% of artists (writers, bands, painters) feel this same thing all the time.

and then if you're lucky it goes to an editor (publisher/producer/critic) whose job is to dissect it for meaning and relevance and then you do rewrites! fun!

tho editing/rewriting is really good and satisfying in its own way - i guess it depends on what you're writing
i always marvelled at how one would attempt to edit dfw

Maybe it was by tag team. Then again wasn't the manuscript accepted in 1992 and published some years later?

here's a pretty cool essay about an early version of IJ, looks like in the fall of 1993 a working draft was completed

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/ij_first.htm

WTF????

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&item=170259650660

That's....interesting.

must be an advance galley, I'm surprised that there was that much editing done after that though

I'm surprised it's only half a galley.

The Lynch essay did not do much for me.

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2009/01/teaser-trailer-brief-interviews-with.html

not sure how i feel about the addition of the feminist dissertation writer -- too much like an NPR version of SATC?

the feminist dissertation writer has been present in the interviews pretty much all along if you read carefully enough-

When Wallace called Krasinski in 2005 to give the film its blessing he asked about the changes. "He said, 'What's it scripted around?' " Krasinski recalled to the L.A. Times. "I said, 'A woman doing her dissertation around feminism looking into the role of the modern man in the post-feminist era.' There was a silence. And he said, 'I never figured out how to do that, how to make them all relate together. That sounds awesome.' It was probably one of the greatest days of my life!"

hmmm (i still haven't read BIwHM, but it's on my shelf)

they're pretty great

for the dfw stans:

http://machines.pomona.edu/166-2009/

tho blog entries from undergrads are pretty hit or miss

http://machines.pomona.edu/166-2009/files/2009/01/cropped-img_0129.jpg

It's good to see they managed to compress Infinite Jest into that cm thick edition on the left there!

I'd love to sit in on that class. Although I have a professor right now who went to Amherst College (and also is seemingly infatuated with the Oxford English Dictionary), and I'm dying to ask her if she ever encountered him.

i think that'a a reader's guide of the IJ, not the actual book

It was a joke.

it's impressive that they're having that class this semester. fitzpatrick seemed like a pretty awesome professor, so i'm glad she's the one doing it.

http://sonorareview.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/dfw-tribute-issue-pre-order/

"Including an uncollected story, Solomon Silverfish, and essays and
reflections from Sven Birkerts, Michael Sheehan interviewing Tom
Bissell, Charles Bock, Marshall Boswell, Greg Carlisle, Jonathan
Franzen, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Glenn Kenny, Lee Martin, Michael
Martone, Rick Moody interviewing Michael Pietsch, and art and prose
from Karen Green."

Not to mention interviews with Marilynne Robinson and Junot Diaz. I wish I weren't broke.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309fi_fiction_wallace?currentPage=all

also from the link above:

a third novel, which he never finished—the “Long Thing,” as he referred to it with Michael Pietsch. His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration.

When Wallace was twelve, he was one of two winners of a local poetry contest. “Did you know that rats breed there? / That garbage is their favorite lair,”

I cannot stop being sad about this and the more I know the worse it gets and it isn't like I was even a big fan of his writing. Just a big fan of who he seemed to be as a person.

what that article really makes clear is how little distance there really was between who he was on the page and in life. all of those philosophical/existential dilemmas weren't just abstract questions for him, they were really major challenges about how to live. in a way it means his failure (what he perceived as his failure) to resolve all that in his writing made it hard for him to see any way forward outside his writing -- it was all the same question. but if you look at how clear and visible and vivid he made that struggle in everything he wrote, i think he really actually succeeded at what he thought he failed at -- conveying "the fucking human being" behind the art. reading that article, to me, the surprise isn't what was hidden about his life but how much and apparently how thoroughly you can know him as a person through his writing. i wish he could've understood that.

yeah i got sad all over again when i read that article. especially where it talks about how supportive he was of his students, particularly those who were troubled by depression and anxiety.

xpost. that is very OTM, tipsy.

re. tipsy mothra's post, i re-read "Octet" last week and it's all laid out pretty clearly in those 25 pages.

"Pop Quiz 9

You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer."

I cannot stop being sad about this and the more I know the worse it gets and it isn't like I was even a big fan of his writing. Just a big fan of who he seemed to be as a person.

― Whiney G. Weingarten (J0hn D.), Sunday, March 1, 2009 11:28 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah. i've been surprised by how sad his death made me because his fiction especially is not my cup of tea, but i really did feel like i knew him from reading his writing.

In a way - this sounds weird, but reading about what he wanted to do fills me with a sort of hope or even joy, because if what he believed was that "Good writing should help readers to 'become less alone inside,'" well, that is what his writing does, for me? His books make me think about what it is to be a fucking human being, about the importance of the struggle to be decent to one another. So like tipsy mothra, I wish that he could have understood that he was succeeding (with this reader, at least); but I'm also just happy that he succeeded, even if he never knew it. I'm so happy that he managed to write what he wrote. That the aim to "make living people feel stuff" was realised.

xpost to one of the things above.
Reading him I'd always thought, "He must be using some sort of authorial persona in his work as that just couldn't possibly be the guy who is actally writing this amazing stuff. If he was, how could he possibly get anything done?"

And now it turns out he was that guy; which is both terribly sad and utterly flabbergasting. I mean, how can someone with all those profound issues about self-image be so nakedly honest about them in such a public forum as print? I've often said that I keep my neuroses out in public where everyone can see them, mainly so I can keep an eye on the buggers to see if they start multiplying, but that really doesn't compare to what Wallace was doing with his personal demons. I'm even more impressed with him now, simply for being the person he was, than I was with him as a writer (which is saying a lot)

a good interview that i hadnt read before - http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfwstuff/Whiskey%20Island%20DFW%20Interview%20Looking%20for%20a%20Garde%20of%20Which%20to%20be%20Avant.pdf

this is almost too good to be true:

They fell in love. Wallace put a strikeout through Mary’s name on his tattoo and an asterisk under the heart; farther down he added another asterisk and Karen’s name, turning his arm into a living footnote.

i know!!

feeling some kind of combination of excited and horrified at the news that his uncompleted final novel is being published

2x.

jesus, that new yorker piece is just heartbreaking.

I am really against publishing stuff a writer didn't have the final say-so on, I think it should all be consigned to the furnace but that's me

i totally agree...but i still want to read it. i think.

I can get pretty heated about this question so I'm just gonna STFU.

like, every time I hear Max Brod's name, I spit

once my parents bought me the kurt cobain diaries for xmas and i couldnt even bring myself to open it

I think it was actually finished, you guys, just not yet edited. But this is more than a business deal, people feel really strongly personal about DFW. I've probably said too much, I'm not sure what level of secrecy this is under at this point, but know that he is really loved by everyone in his publisher's office.

it definitely didn't sound finished in that article.

like, every time I hear Max Brod's name, I spit

blasphemy! the world needs great art more than, well, just about anything. And while I am a great believer in the artist's right to decide what is and what isn't released under his name, the world's need for great art far outweighs this right.

That article just about reduced me to tears yesterday, but I'm very excited to hear about The Pale King. We shouldn't apologize for wanting to read the work of a great writer, even if that writer didn't think it was good enough (yet).

also i'm kind of thinking that if he tidied it all up and left it on his desk he was thinking it would get published?

Yeah, it definitely sounds like it was unfinished...I'm sure there are big finished and totally readable chunks that are the equal of a normal-sized novel, but it's pretty clear it was nowhere near what he meant it to become.

I'm with J0hn on principle (hence "horrified") but at the same time there are written works and songs and films I love that I'd never have experienced had someone not posthumously violated the artist's vaults, so it's hard to be principled about it. The fact of the matter is that once you record something on paper/tape/camera/etc. it's pretty impossible to control where it goes once you're dead, and sometimes even when you're alive.

Oh well, I'm just going on what I was told over cocktails, so who knows.

xpost to HOOS bingo^

We of course each have a responsibility to be respectful and honorable in our treatment of such work, and sometimes the answer is not to publish unfinished work, if it, say, embarrasses or exposes the artist in ways that are neither respectful nor honorable. But let's not diminish the world-historical, irreducible, non-negotiable good that is having Kafka's works in the world.

I think a gesture of friendship ("please destroy my works when I'm dead") would have added as much good to the world as the works themselves did, but that's just me. And it's not like I don't listen to Mahler's 10th. Still - I mean, I'll never be a great artist so this comparison only works as far as it goes, but I sure as fuck shred/delete/destroy EVERYTHING that I don't want published/released because I am horrified by the idea of people reading/hearing stuff I didn't personally decide to share.

I am really against publishing stuff a writer didn't have the final say-so on, I think it should all be consigned to the furnace but that's me

This resonates with me about a lot of things -- letters, diaries, completed work that the author intentionally shelved -- but I'm not too bothered when it comes to unfinished work that's universally understood as unfinished: the main privacy the author is losing here is just a peek into his/her process, and the worst-case turnout is that readers think he/she was working on something awful (though the author might have insisted that no, it's not finished, it was headed someplace you'd have respected).

Three reasons this doesn't strike me as a bad thing with DFW: (a) he was certainly conscious and self-aware enough of how these things go that he could have done the furnace-consignment himself, instead of sort of prepping the manuscript as much as he could, knowing people would want it; (b) his process was apparently such that he already considered portions of this work publishable, so it's not as if he was planning any grand overhaul of the material; and (c) well, it sort of fits the type of writer he is -- not someone who's continually going back and reframing things to make this perfect gem, but someone whose line-by-line writing and ideas are worth it alone, and tend to have exactly the kind of refracted loads-of-information tone that unfinished manuscripts wind up having. (I mean, imagine an unfinished Infinite Jest.)

Besides which I can't help but imagine DFW, personality-wise, as someone who'd be generally in favor of his wife and family getting some income out of the thing they were working awfully hard to help him be okay to finish, and probably being more queasy about the personal details in that article than any incomplete fiction.

but for all we know Wallace's note asked people to publish the manuscript as it was, I should say - his family knows what he would have wanted, I'd guess, and his friends.

and I'll be saying this for a long time I imagine but I really wish he had found a way out of the horrible dark hole he was in. it makes me so sad, to think of his suffering.

And now it turns out he was that guy; which is both terribly sad and utterly flabbergasting. I mean, how can someone with all those profound issues about self-image be so nakedly honest about them in such a public forum as print? I've often said that I keep my neuroses out in public where everyone can see them, mainly so I can keep an eye on the buggers to see if they start multiplying, but that really doesn't compare to what Wallace was doing with his personal demons.

This – Wallace's wrestling with neuroses in pubilc, without masks – makes me instinctively recoil. I like masks, secrets, and unresolved tensions. If this is true, is Wallace's honesty his greatest strength?

I wrote some challopsy shit a few months ago when he died. As a writer myself I thought his approach and style so unattractive, and the work of his I really liked the exceptions. But I spoke hastily, and maybe I should give him another shot.

I sure as fuck shred/delete/destroy EVERYTHING that I don't want published/released because I am horrified by the idea of people reading/hearing stuff I didn't personally decide to share.

Obviously, fair enough.

But I, as listener/reader/fan/etc., wish you wouldn't!

Wallace's wrestling with neuroses in pubilc, without masks

^^ I don't think he did this in the least, to be honest -- I think he was forthright and articulate about a lot of the issues he had, especially on an intellectual level, but I don't feel like any public wrestling was going on.

Well, it was public wrestling insofar as each footnote and dependent clause appended additional explanations, apologies, and involutions to a given sentence.

Washington Post piece on NYer pieces.

Oh, you mean the fiction! I have trouble considering that "public" in that sense -- it's art! It's fiction! It seems to me somewhat impossible to have fiction that doesn't involve the author wrestling with whatever the author has to wrestle with -- and if not impossible then certain undesirable!

like, every time I hear Max Brod's name, I spit

brod's personal justification for his decision, IIRC, was that he'd told kafka a bunch of times that he had no intention of destroying any of his works, and kafka still opted to make him his executor, knowing that he wasn't likely to carry out the request.

i find it hard to believe that kafka wouldn't have wanted the trial or the castle published in some form, if not his random notes/private letters/et al.

I posted earlier before I'd finished the article, so I feel a little bit more comfortable now w/ the book being published given that he apparently kind of left it out and somewhat organized to be found and shared.

yeah i was gonna say, he deliberately left it out, stacked with his suicide note. who knows what exact instructions he gave about it, but it doesn't sound like he intended it to be just junked.

everyone's said everything that needs saying in this thread. i'm not against it coming out though, for the reason that at least as the article presents it, that he'd ordered and left it out (and also because it sounds awesome). i was listening to that recent arthur russell comp, and hearing stuff that's totally fully formed but for whatever reason didn't come out (cf. goodbye old paint, which is totally ready and a whole lot of work must have been involved in) - seeing that stuff come out unnerves me more than something that's obviously unfinished and is presented as such. the new yorker piece makes it sound like it was readied and left there, that he tied up all the strings of the sprawling novel he had and put his affairs in order.

reading unfinished novels is so frustrating though. so there's something to chew on. it's worse if they have an epilogue, and you don't know they're finishing because there's still thirty sheets between the fingers on your right hand. but still.

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/35660000/35666121.JPG

does anyone know what this is? it's 144pp., so i guess more than just the commencement speech.

Nah, it is just the commencement speech, apparently. Publishers these days could take this post and publish it as a novella.

reading unfinished novels is so frustrating though.

but probably no more frustrating than the last 50 or so pages of infinite jest. i'm not sure dfw ever really "finished" a novel.

I think a gesture of friendship ("please destroy my works when I'm dead") would have added as much good to the world as the works themselves did, but that's just me.

The more I think about this, the more it grates. I think I was initially disarmed (although I disagreed), because you did seem to appeal to a righteous ideal. But although I agree that a true gesture of friendship is something the world cries out for, you don't honor your friend by merely respecting his expressed wishes, you honor him by respecting the work. And the work, in this case, was bigger than Kafka (and, of course, bigger than Kafka knew). A great work of art like The Trial wants to be seen.

Art can be a gift to the world, because art is a gift from the world--it's bigger than anything like 'expression' or 'ownership'. Who can tell what force brought Kafka's stories into existence? Kafka couldn't--he felt possessed and feverish when staying up all night to write a story. Can you imagine a world without The Trial? (And we're not talking about some Sophie's Choice shit like which would you save, Shakespeare's works or a baby--we're talking about would you save The Trial or just destroy it, 'cause its author said to.) The world needs Kafka's works more than Kafka needed (posthumously!) his insecurities to be 'respected' and confirmed.

If you find yourself the custodian of a great work of art, your responsibility is to the work, not to some notion of what the artist wanted to do with the work. Your responsibility is to the work--that's how you honor your friendship.

You could use that to argue you should publish work by living authors against their wishes. The pragmatic answer is to just make sure you've got trustworthy people looking after yr estate to do as you see fit, but if you agree to destroy and don't that's a real betrayal that's not legitimised because it's against the dead. If g00blar is right and I die a famous artist, I should to appoint a loyal friend who hates my work (and and has no grand ideas of its importance) as custodian.

If you find yourself the custodian of a great work of art, your responsibility is to the work, not to some notion of what the artist wanted to do with the work. Your responsibility is to the work--that's how you honor your friendship.

My saying that you know better than your friend, the artist, what the work's final disposition ought to be? Respectfully, but strongly, disagree. I also think every artist who doesn't want something published should know that any friend no matter how well-intentioned is likely to say "well, he really would have wanted it published, and besides, history/the world/posterity/posited good is more important that the artist's wishes" - Kafka ought to have burned his manuscripts himself. Personally, of course I would destroy The Trial - posterity can hang, its author didn't want you to read it, that's the end of the matter as far as I'm concerned.

"my" = "by" in first word there

then again if a friend entrusted his works to me and said "whatever you do, publish these after I'm gone," I'd probably destroy them anyway just to be on the safe side

you really like destroying

I can't be alone in that

I just realized they have an excerpt from the "Long Thing" right after the New Yorker article; it's very good--looking forward to see what is released.

I think the article went a long way toward explaining his mental state--I didn't realize he was suffering so badly.
Also surprised that he stayed on Nardil for so long (rather than switching to an SSRI)--I didn't realize that that was still prescribed. It may have been the only thing strong enough for though, as it seems that his suicide occurred after going off the drug.

Nardil and the other MAOIs seem to be somewhat more effective for what I think is called "atypical" depression, in which a lot of stuff is really somaticized?

It has been a while since I read "The Noonday Demon" but I do seem to recall something about that.

The New Yorker piece (the D.T. Max one) is beautiful. That said I had a little trouble with the excerpt from the unfinished novel (although I really liked the stuff quoted in the Max piece). I got a distinct feeling of "I don't know if I'd be up for a whole novel's worth of this."

i'm pretty keen to see the novel. i thought it being super mundane and minute clicked with his rhythm and detail. also this:

In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn’t allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he’d have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.

I loved the "You're watching 'As The World Turns'" bit.

Yeah...his later short fiction (particularly the longer pieces in Oblivion) could be kind of forbidding in its abandonment of most of the humor/broad characters/meta stuff that made Jest easier to swallow, a thick part-of-novel in that vein might be a really difficult read. There is something about the topic/theme of this book that I find pretty intriguing, though, so I'm still up for it.

i was totally anti-publishing this, totally on J0hn D.'s side theoretically and then I read the excerpt. . . holy shit, cannot wait until it comes out.

i've been reading supposedly fun thing... i think he's best when writing by tennis, by a huge margin. the first thing i ever read by dude was signifying rappers (sux), which i think turned me off of him for a long time.

agreed regarding Oblivion, too--a lot of those pieces (the title story especially) did not click for me the way the majority of Infinite Jest did

xpost uh, gonna have to completely disagree with you there, the best story in that book isn't about tennis, its about a cruise.

on Oblivion: yeah, I had the same problem with it, but I'm actually kinda eager to go back and give it another chance after having read everything else by him.

I really really loved the excerpts from The Pale King. I understand the qualms about post-mortem publishing, but sometimes people, particularly the extremely self-critical author-types, need a little push out the door from their loved ones, and the world is usually a better place because of it.

i havent finished the book yet dillweed! anyway i like him best talkin bout tennis, happy now

have you read his Federer piece from a few years ago? so great.

guys re: 'the qualms about post-mortem publishing', he left it out on his desk! all neatly in a pile! it's no like it's nabokov or something w a note saying 'PLS DESTROY'

yeah i know...i regret jump-starting that line of thinking before i got to the end of the article explaining that part.

ya that federer piece was just like... d-damn

yeah, i do love the federer piece.

and yes, i read that article, too, i know he wanted it to be published. i said the qualms thing more in response to the conversation that's been going on in this thread.

yeah but i mean his note might have specified what he wanted done with it--sounds like he wanted it published as is, i guess? it still feels weird i guess

Yeah...I imagine that since he left his wife a note, there's certain things he expressed to her that will never be made public, and we just have to assume that she's carrying out his wishes to the best of her abilities.

re-reading the federer piece these days breaks my heart a bit due to fed's continuous waffling against that other guy.

the excerpt from his new book does sound really good but on the other hand, i don't really have much to compare it to - it's the first piece of fiction by him I've ever read (read both a supposedly fun thing and consider the lobster). where should I start with his fiction - the short stories? Broom? IJ, even?

i would say IJ

The line about the guy footnoting his tattoo is cringeworthy.

seems pertinent to link to http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs/Wallace-Good_People.pdf - earlier excerpt from the pale king.
this is interesting too (and i am consequently exploring tony hoagland)

the writing, or the fact that he footnoted his tattoo?

i would say IJ

thanks, that was my feeling too, but for my "gah, big book" reaction to it. I'm not so much intimidated by the length though so much as trying to find the time to really dig into it.

Jordan - both, I guess.

my feeling is that if you've read his non-fiction, and are interested in reading some of his previous fiction before The Pale King comes out, you really should just go ahead and invest your time into Infinite Jest, however long it takes...Broom and his short stories really just don't compare imo.

oh come on, the tattoo thing is awesome (would've been less awesome done by anyone else, though)

xkcd, say

now why'd you have to take it there

my feeling is that if you've read his non-fiction, and are interested in reading some of his previous fiction before The Pale King comes out, you really should just go ahead and invest your time into Infinite Jest, however long it takes...Broom and his short stories really just don't compare imo.

― blame it on the HOOS got you steenin' loose (some dude), Tuesday, March 10, 2009 6:35 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think some of his short story work is right up there with Infinite Jest, which i love, and a lot less scary to start.

though i would say that infinite jest, for how long it is in length and reputation, is a very very readable book.

yeah i dunno...i look at his short fiction as porridges each with its own specific fatal flaws, Curious Hair is too this, Brief Interviews is too that, etc. but IJ is, for all its imperfections and challenges, just right.

otm

yeah so otm. and it's really not that hard to read at all, i was expecting a lot worse bcz of its rep

IJ is super readable: for me it was one of those books where you have an early-ish slump and put it aside a bit, but when you pick it back up it catches like a fire and you can't stop reading (except for the bits where you stop to re-read something because it was great).

yeah, before i started reading it someone told me these two things, which i now repeat when i lend it to someone:

1) it doesn't really start picking up momentum until 2-300 pages in

2) it's very readable and entertaining on a page-to-page basis (ie not especially dense or difficult), there's just a lot of it.

i have to admit that i have zero interest in his fiction

I maintain that Girl with Curious Hair is his best collection of work, and better than IJ. But I read it first.

2) it's very readable and entertaining on a page-to-page basis (ie not especially dense or difficult), there's just a lot of it.

Yeah, this. I had to keep reassuring a few friends that I did, in fact, love the book, because I kept on complaining that I would never get through it. I think I loved just about every bit of it, it's just so goddamn long (it took me like two months!).

Is IJ anything like that excerpt from the book that's going to be published posthumously? Because I couldn't even read 10 pages of that let alone 1000 but I like really long novels.

Just started reading Infinite Jest so I can see what all of you are banging on about.

Girl With Curious Hair was what I started with and I loved it, so I'd say if Infinite Jest is too daunting I'd start there

NY'er article was great

many xposts

I tend not to have massive patience with long novels.

Is IJ anything like that excerpt from the book that's going to be published posthumously?

no, not really

weird:

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i134/dgoobl/05tiwlarge.jpg

i fall asleep whenever i try to read the gay chapter about television

ha ha--people always talk about how that's the essay that really lays out the DFW aesthetic and it puts me to sleep too

oh no is that what the commencement speech book is going to look like? yikes.

Yeah, apparently it's shipping. Approx. one (1) sentence per page.

was wondering how they were going to stretch it over 144 pages

: (

i was hoping it was so many pages because he had some really really longer form version of it.

yeah i was hoping it was just big type and big margins

13 months later, Infinte Jest has been put down. By the end it truly feels like it stopped a thousand pages short itself.

it does. i was surprised and at a loss when it stopped.

I felt that way the first time.

The second time, I cried.

Usually it goes the other way around, I realize.

i felt that way the first time i finished it and i have to admit i teared up a little. then he killed himself while i was reading it the second time and i just had to put it down. since then i've read everything else by him but still haven't gone back to infinite jest again.

he has three names = his books are poo

lol

Karl, I know what you mean. I've been carrying around one of his essay collections to reread for a long time because I really loved it, but I somehow never get past cracking it open and putting it back on the shelf.

i enjoyed <a href="http://www.coh.arizona.edu/Sonora/";>sonora review</a>'s special issue w/ dfw tribute. he was fiction editor during his time at UA and published one of his first stories in it. it's reprinted and there's an interview with his editor michael pietsch, a thoughtful piece by marshall boswell, and some other good stuff.

dammit

i've been trying to get a copy of that without ordering one online--did you send away for it?

i believe i mailed a check per the directions on their site. dunno where you could even order sonora review online?

not trying to sound snotty, just surprised

oops, no i meant ordering it from them online. i think it's the only way to get this.

I used to be the Poetry editor of Sonora Review. After DFW's time tho.

how much after?

About 6 years I think.

friend of friend who showed me around austin lived with him in college and had just got back from giving a eulogy at his funeral when i was in town.

http://www.observer.com/2009/media/dueling-foster-wallace-two-bios-hit-market-one-sold

the lipsky book sounds way more interesting

yeah maybe. I think I'd read both--I'd love a proper bio of the dude.

for those who want to read infinite jest bookclub style:

http://infinitesummer.org/

my copy is currently on another coast, back at my parents' place. my options are (a) asking my folks to rummage through my stuff and ship it to me, or (b) seeing how cheaply i can find it used. option (b) sounds far less invasive.

it'll be interesting to read IJ again. my understanding of the world and my thinking skills have grown exponentially since i last read it, over a decade ago.

I think I'd read both

me too. max's new yorker article was good, and lipsky's thing -- if it's really essentially just a series of conversations -- could be really interesting in its own way. if it gets published ... (also, i guess i just don't know anything about publishing and the marketplace, but i'm a little surprised anyone got a six-figure advance for a DFW biography. i'm imagining it's a very niche sort of book.)

thanks

xp

niche perhaps, but interest in foster wallace as a writer is only going to increase in the years that follow, among a readership sure to explore a definitive biography on the author in addition to his texts. i could easily see DFW as a set text on future literature and writing courses, and a biography would be a major secondary source for students, guaranteeing long term steady sales.

maybe they meant six figures, including decimal places

max's new yorker article

damn son

ha.

i wonder what the d.t. in d.t. max stands for.

david tosser

"downtown"

Low six figures makes total sense to me for the first biography of the guy who presently stands as the last Major American Writer to be really broadly accepted as such and to feel somehow relevant to the culture as a whole -- especially given that he died young enough (and suddenly enough) to have his readership still fresh and curious and caring about him. (I think Stevie's right about academic adoption, too, which is part of what I mean about being the last "Major American Writer.")

i'd tend to agree except that when he died, i did a quick survey of my office (of journalists, mind you, ranging in age from 20s to 60s), and nobody had ever read anything by him and only a few had even vaguely heard of him. i mean, i totally think he's a major dude and all, and i have plenty of friends who are dfw devotees. but his presence in the culture was always pretty tenuous. i bet i know more people who have read michael chabon or jonathan franzen than have read dfw. actually i'm sure of it.

but hey, i hope the bio's a hit. i'm all for more dfw.

(btw, since discovering that appalling lapse in my office, i have successfully pressed a supposedly fun thing on three people, all of whom liked it.)

i don't doubt that chabon/franzen are more widely known, but nabisco is right, DFW is a Major American Writer and this

i could easily see DFW as a set text on future literature and writing courses, and a biography would be a major secondary source for students, guaranteeing long term steady sales.

is otm, and probably what merits the big ticket price.

No doubt that certain others might be more widely read. I'm trying without success to think of more ways to unpack what I mean with the construct "Major American Writer" -- possibly one aspect of it is that it's a lot easier to imagine DFW devotees reading a biography of him than it is to imagine many people ever for any reason being even slightly interested in reading a biography of Michael Chabon.

yah or Franzen (or even Eugenides)

eggers

(obviously that's not remotely meant as a knock on those dudes, just one gauge of whatever sort of Major Writer significance happens to attach to people, versus just having your books enjoyed and everyone assuming you're just a person)

i never did make it through the corrections

sorry i doubt anyone would read an eggers bio in the way they'd read a Wallace bio

though i'd read the shit out of a gaddis bio

is there a vollman bio? i would read that.

sorry i doubt anyone would read an eggers bio in the way they'd read a Wallace bio

― Mr. Que, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 1:33 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the fuck does this even mean?

the book did not get low six figs because the publisher felt that, as the last great american writer, david foster wallace warranted a well-remunerated biographer.

This is the thing about the freshness of it, though, obviously: if DFW had continued on unto the age of 85 writing whatever it is he would have written, there is every chance that he'd have expired well-known or out-of-fashion or any of a million things that would make a biography not seem all that important to anyone. There's a pretty ideal arrangement of factors here to make a biography valuable (not least the posthumous flow of obits and articles and so on that first started converting him in people's heads to someone with a complete life that you might really start thinking of as A Life).

xpost - haha I think Que was pretty clear there, though obviously it depends on what Eggers does between here and when he dies

(P.S. if we are going to play a "what the fuck does this even mean" game, I think seemingly non-sequitur posting of the name "Eggers" in the middle of the conversation probably merits it -- I don't follow your point, could you explain more?)

the book did not get low six figs because the publisher felt that, as the last great american writer, david foster wallace warranted a well-remunerated biographer.

the book probably got the low six figures because the guy wrote a great, interesting article for the new yorker and probably followed up on it with a great proposal

It seems like all the juicy Eggers bio stuff is already plainly embedded in '...heartbreaking' while DFW was pretty cagey about putting anything personal not involving tennis or math or grammar out there, so a bio that connects the dots seems less redundant in DFW's case at the very least.

I'm not sure why Eggers' name is here at all ... if he died tomorrow much of his life would be covered in the memoir, and if he went on doing Eggersy things for 40 years I don't think he'd merit a significant biography -- maybe a book tracing out some larger McSweeney's-associated aesthetic, if that still seems somehow significant, or maybe long after that one of those books that takes up a more "minor" figure to make some larger cultural point.

Wish I could unpack the "Major American Writer" thing; maybe a good way to think about it in this context is people whose biographies wouldn't look too out of place on an imagined shelf alongside books about Oates, Mailer, Didion, Vidal, Morrison, Salinger,* etc. Canonical writers; writers people in an English department might casually refer to by last name only without feeling like that meant anything.

* haha at some point that one would either get really boring or really interesting

in 40 years we will all be living in roboeurope under a muslim pope

reading robert jordan biographies

the book probably got the low six figures because the guy wrote a great, interesting article for the new yorker and probably followed up on it with a great proposal

yeah, no doubt. and my surprise at it, like i said, mostly no doubt reveals how little i know about publishing. i have no idea how many books you even have to sell to recoup a $100,000-plus advance. or how well literary biographies sell as a rule. or, you know, anything about it at all.

as for the major writer thing, i don't know. had wallace reached the level of someone like delillo, in terms of scholarly interest or ubiquity in the curriculum? (honest question -- i was never a lit major in the first place, much less within the last 10 years.) i think he's important because he's important to me, but i don't have a very clear sense of how widespread that impression is. i guess i've thought of him as a little bit more of a cult figure. which doesn't rule out his being a major writer, i just have no idea what his standing is with the literary/critical establishment.

no doubt.

The question isn't whether DFW reached the level of ubiquity on curricula as Delillo has (he hasn't yet), it's whether he's reached a threshold of 'major-ness' in those worlds...is there a big enough silent majority of people (in the 'scholarly community,' say) who recognize him as major writer for people to talk about him across their own particular specialisms without explaining why he's worthy of being talked/written about? I think the answer to that is definitely yes. (The answer is not yes, btw, in English department-world, for Chabon, whom I heard someone give a paper on in December. The speaker felt the need to introduce him in a way that made clear he felt he could not assume everyone would know who he was.)

the other book's getting published - http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/another-david-foster-wallace-biography-is-planned/

readin oblivion; it sucks

i read like 4 stories from it and was pretty 50/50 on 'em...then i gave up.

not really my thing tbh.

the one to read is Infinite Jest--it's his best work by a long shot everything else, for the most part is another level down in terms of quality

Just out of curiosity, has DeLillo been adopted onto curricula beyond White Noise? Am asking because I don't think anyone thinks of Sandra Cisneros as a major writer, despite the fact that House on Mango Street is hella read in high schools and colleges. I mean, it's pretty obvious to me that DeLillo is more of a major writer than Cisneros is -- but I don't know that we can go by "he's read in English classes" as the sole standard.

i never finished oblivion; i didnt hate it but at the time it was just too dense & involved and i was beginning to dread picking it up to read.

broom of the system is great & funny and easier to read. and not as big and intimidating as IJ

i said to cankles the other day that i wanted to jump to defend oblivion but i felt like someone going "no no jerry garcia's playing on the 70s versions of dark star is totally different"

broom of the system's first chapter is a glimmer of real potential; a lot of the rest of the book he spends being the sort of writer he spent a lot of the rest of his career kicking against

my po-mo/contemporary american lit. course as an undergrad had cosmopolis on it, by the way: i get the feeling this one might be on a lot of syllabi bcz it's easy to teach in a "Hey, kids, this is what POSTMODERNISM looks like" way, like the dead father is.

oblivion is patchy but "good old neon" and "oblivion" are undeniably great.

good old neon is the only one i actively hated

guess undeniably was the wrong adverb to use

heh. yeah. undeniably owned.

http://www.samplereality.com/2009/07/19/the-truth-behind-jay-murray-siskinds-review-of-david-foster-wallace/

hey guys, i'm trying to find an essay written by a woman who taught a class on david foster wallace after he died. i think she's a professor at the same college he taught at and the article talked about the temptation of reading too much of his life in the work. does anyone have the link? i'm not having any luck here.

look at infinitesummer.org -- I think she did a blog post there about teaching the class

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is that who you're looking for?
http://infinitesummer.org/archives/931

sure is, thanks!

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/content/823228?inPopup=true

^^this interview is so great

wow. i'm only like ten minutes in, too.

some great mp3s here incl. old DFW interviews and a long interview with his sister with some funny anecdotes.

where

oh ha

http://www.wpr.org/book/090823a.cfm

cheers, look awes

this is so great.

day before yesterday was driving across central Illinois listening to that WPR show.

It sound so good I'm actually considering taking a break to locate/purchase a USB connection so I can put it on my mp3 player for the walk home.

It's good, wouldn't say magnificent. It really brings home -- or maybe this is done with editing -- how the problem DFW writes about in "E Unibus Pluram" is central to him for twenty-five years afterwards, and in some sense he makes no progress on it.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/briefinterviewswithhideousmen/

features two different law and order spinoff alums!

oh man that looks like shit.

yeah seriously bummed about this probable garbage.

May be of interest only to DFW fans who are also serious tennis fans: tennis journalist/blogger Steve Tignor has been writing a great series of articles about DFW's tennis essays on his blog Concrete Elbow.

This explains much.

Re Alan Lelchuk, quoted in Ned's link: I liked his novel _American Mischief_, which I think has been completely forgotten.

http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/2665.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_sQrxAorDo

http://quomodocumque.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/wallace-amherst_review-the_planet.pdf

:(

jeez :/

has this been posted before?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwS5pEfcQNk

hardened my resolve 2 retackle infinite jest

Intense essay. Anyone else puzzled by the ending?

this thing?

http://quomodocumque.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/wallace-amherst_review-the_planet.pdf

it's a short story

yeh but it ends kinda

it ends kinda weirdly midsentence, yeah, just like his first book, can't say i'm a fan of it

i like this ending much more than that ending! this one felt coherent and clear and characteristic.

poor dude :(

god, he was 21 when he wrote that

poor dude :(

yeah

Did Brief Interviews with Hideous Men ever get released to theaters?

i think it was released in limited places? This is kind of interesting

There’s a bit of an announcement we’re hoping you can make about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Can you tell us about that?
John Krasinski: Hulu’s premiering the movie first on the Internet (after it finishes its run in theaters), so we’re a part of that, and that’s fantastic.

Huh, I guess it's played in NYC, L.A., and Boston, and is scheduled for Philadelphia and Austin this weekend. Weird that it never made it to Chicago. But I'd just as soon watch it on Hulu, anyway.

yeah it's weird it hasn't made it to DC either, but then again it's only 80 minutes

i think the ending trailing off is referring to his fear that the Bad Thing is really... "you"

as in:
Being far away sort of helps with respect to the Bad Thing. Except that is just highly silly when you consider what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really [you.]

I guess didn't feel it was a midsentence ending so much as a defined one that deliberately omitted its last word, for reasons that made sense! Whereas Broom's is all kinds of poncey and irritating.

Has anyone seen the Brief Interviews film? Is it good?

I read this as "considering the fact of what the Bad Thing is, really."
I liked this story. It feels much less contrived than his other fiction. Unless this is actually about him, in which case :(