best David Foster Wallace book besides Infinite Jest

octet is not cool w/ me. some of the interviews are good, forever overhead made me cry once although when i went back to it lots of it was super purple, i have a feeling one (or both?) of the "adult world"s might be good but i'd have to revisit.

keepers from hideous men for me: the last brief interview, the depressed person (which reads like a super cruel zing to me more than A Portent of the Artist's Inevitable Demise), octet, forever overhead, and a couple of the small bits.

girl with curious hair isnt perfect by any means but has a lot more good stories in it than people give it credit for now, i think

i like "the depressed person" when i'm not reading it. it's sort of the ultimate expression of that dfw thing where he's afraid you don't get it so he keeps trying to make it clearer to you.

for like fifty pages.

yeah there's some very good writing in GWCH and obviously comes from an important period in his work but all the celebrity/historical figure fanfiction stuff leaves a bad taste in my mouth

need to read more of these, but like Supposedly so much that I don't mind voting for it over things I'm not familiar w/ first-hand.

yeah the We Are Putting These Corporate Icons to Our Own Uses rhetoric is kind of lol considering we live in a world where one google search will get you stories about ronald mcdonald teabagging the hamburglar or whatever.

The Usage essay was passionate and at least gave lip service to academic linguistics but I think he was pretty much wrong about what he argued.

― carne asada...in my vagina? (silby), Wednesday, August 24, 2011 2:57 AM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how do u mean?

I mean he made an essentially conservative argument about English vernacular and language change and the legitimacy of usage rules, about which topics you can see the academic point of view over on Language Log and reading any random post basically. At least that's what I recall from the essay. I mean like he made about the most viable case that there is to be made about conservative standards of usage, which is that Educated People Expect It, but like there was this awkward cultural component where he brings in the anecdote about his student (of color and of urban background I believe) and told her that she'd have to use Standard Written English (his coinage) in her writing and she was affronted by this and he was like "yeah it's true, this is just white man imperialism, but suck it up because that's how it is". Which might be pragmatically true in some respects but also is not really an argument that any particular stickler position on usage has any merit.

DFW obviously did not ignore any of the potential for exploitation of the vernacular in his own writing, so he probably had the "know the rules to break them" mindset that many folks have. Or at least thought he did.

And I, I guess, disagree with that?

N.B. I read this…2-3 years ago now so I might be misremembering some things, this is my reconstruction of how I felt about it.

i don't remember most of oblivion, but "good old neon" haunts me.

― metal spoons left in gutter (get bent), Tuesday, August 23, 2011

QFT

yeah it is the best of his short stuff, for sure.

i think i'm almost scared to read 'good old neon'

it is one of the most readable things he ever wrote, fiction-wise, but also like being kicked in the face repeatedly by sadness for 50 pages.

voted "supposedly fun thing" because it's the truth, but i'm sadly thinking "broom" will get no votes and i was sorely tempted. all the great dfwisms that he tried so hard and so wrongly to stamp out of his writing later.

like being kicked in the face repeatedly by sadness for 50 pages.

yeah, this is why i am reluctant

also quite beautiful fwiw

brief interviews, despite what i guess are generally accepted as its failings. 'octet' was very important to me when first i encountered it at 16 or so, tho' now i find it sort of awful. 'the depressed person' flips between hilarious and horrific each time i read it. the interviews themselves are unimpeachable.

i like that it's pushing itself both formally and thematically - it's a little weird, when you go back to it, that sex is significantly absent from infinite jest -- i mean, it's acknowledged that people are doing it, that sex is a thing that happens, but it's in there for the hamlet plot & for orin's assignations, which are figured as another mode of addiction -- that the (newly married?) dfw then starts trying to think more seriously about gender relations and work that into fiction endears him to me. it was interesting when 'although in the end ...' how he keeps addressing his interviewer in bro-ish terms, jokingly asking if he can parlay the success of infinite jest into getting laid on a book tour, &c. it seems mainly like a way of remaining guarded and not drawn on the topic - it's interesting that that person turned into the one who published the 'intervews' over the next few years. the interviews themselves are an excellent way of talking about this stuff without becoming too card-carrying Male Feminist (although i suppose someone else might argue that they are a way of having one's cake and eating it also)

formally it's interesting how interdependent all the pieces are, as assembled there; & how it's the last time you see him fitting new strings to his bow, trying out new avenues of attack. some of these, yes, don't succeed - i have never actually convinced myself to finish 'tri-stan: i sold sissee-nar to ecco' and i am still fairly confused about what happens in 'church not made with hands' (though i suspect on fourth or fifth revisit the latter may crystallise into something excellent; this will probably not happen with the former.) but there's a pleasure in seeing a great stylist ... dick around (though obviously it's some very serious dicking around.)

i'm a little sleep-deprived to follow the idea through but i think there's an alliance between the book's gender concerns and its formal ones: that he's resurrecting some deeply naff modes of expression, some 'formal innovations' that people tired of in 1972, at the same time as he's a while dude writing a book in 1999 which takes as its focus an assertion which we seem to consider a truism, both undeniable and too banal to dedicate serious art or thought to: that hey, western society's gender codes are deeply biased in the favour of one particular gender, and that's kind of fucked up

that the (newly married?) dfw then starts trying to think more seriously about gender relations and work that into fiction endears him to me.

per the question mark, he got married about 5 years after Brief Interviews was published, looks like

started rereading Oblivion because of this thread, so far am definitely appreciating it more the 2nd time around

well i haven't read IJ! i've read a few though and would have to vote Oblivion for Good Old Neon and the title story alone.

It's probably Supposedly Fun Thing, but I'm giving my vote to Girl with Curious Hair, as I think it's underappreciated, and weirdly ignored when folks are talking/complaining about What DFW Writes Like.

well he did a pretty good job of repudiating everything pre-jest. not that we should listen to him.

wasn't GWCH kind of his calling card that helped set up some of the anticipation for Infinite Jest (and/or his ability to publish a novel that long)? i get the impression that stuff and short fiction in general were kind of what he was known for before IJ and before Supposedly made his essays probably more widely admired than his stories.

it's good but it definitely feels 'dated' to me that his other stuff doesn't.

i think he was signed as a kind of late '80s enfant terrible/"he's only 25!" for broom. kind of a hangover from the easton ellis thing. but instead of getting a minimalist ennui-of-the-mtv-generation thing, they got...broom.

iirc correctly broom did pretty well on the novelty factor but gwch stiffed completely. but it did build his name with the avant types, college weirdos, reviewers, etc.

yeah i meant more in weirdos/critics terms of building his audience. it seems more likely that any hardcore fans he won pre-IJ were from Girl rather than Broom.

are there any theories online or otherwise about the actual title "Good Old Neon"? those three words are so beautiful together. I'm damned if it know what they could possibly mean though.

my theory: in the final section (SPOLIERS) dfw talks about the protagonist giving off a neon-like glow or aura, so i assumed that was in reference to him. maybe a hs-era nickname, or just something dfw called him in recollection?

cheers, i think i missed that or forgot it.

yeah it was only on like the zillionth re-read that i went "oh, wait, hmmmm."

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

the girl with the curious hair was my intro to DFW, I got it right after it came out and loved it, and it's still my favorite collection of his writing by far.

i've been re-reading Oblivion because of this thread -- weird to realize that both The Pale King and "The Soul Is Not A Smithy" feature tangents about characters going to see The Exorcist

any hardcore fans he won pre-IJ were from Girl rather than Broom.

I am a proud exception to this, and voting accordingly.

xpost: think i remember a posthumous interview (probably with his ed?) where "the soul is not a smithy" (and maybe "incarnations of burned children"?) were actually originally part of the pale king manuscript. (which of course now makes me wonder which characters they're about.)

'the soul is not a smithy' seemed like it wass very clearly recast as whatsisname's long monologue, to me? with the train accident, and the jesuit-who-isn't's lecture? but i'm not sure that seems as plausible to me now as it did on first reading

'the soul is not a smithy' is the one from Oblivion that i just can't get. for some reason i can't visualise the opening comic book panels/window pane image convincingly and can't get a grip on it after that.

ha, i totally did that!

that would make sense, the Chris Fogle monologue is i'm pretty sure where the Exorcist thing pops up in TPK. actually a lot of thematic stuff (relating to his father, learning about his work life after he died) lines up, too.

i remember when he read Incarnations somewhere and made one of his first public allusions to working on a larger piece, which I think given the themes of some of his other recent stories people on wallace-l speculated could be a novel about childhood/parenthood, which is why it so surprised me when the news came out about The Pale King existing and being about the IRS.

re-reading Smithy last week (for the third time) i kind of worked harder on visualizing the panel stuff than i had before and got into the story overall more.

also i can't really get, um, behind the shitting sculptures thing in "the suffering channel" but disregarding that i can still move on with the story.

it took me until last week to realise that was (partly) a joke about freud

all of the weird phenomena like ghosts and levitation and the guy who psychically picks up random trivia about people like Walken in that SNL parody of The Dead Zone that kept creeping into TPK really reminded me how much i enjoy Wallace's willingness to depart from reality and insert unexpected high concept quasi-sci fi ideas into all the hyper-realism.

a lot of oblivion makes me think of eliot's poem/not poem "hysteria"

AS she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part of it, until her
teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying: "If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
tea in the garden ..." I decided that if the
shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
and I concentrated my attention with careful
subtlety to this end.

"careful subtlety" !

"the suffering channel" is, if nothing else, the apex which several thousand years of poop jokes had been moving toward.

there's somthing in "hysteria" that links to Neal's discussion of of long it might take to unravel/describe even the most fleeting thought as text but in tone it's closer to "incarnations of burned children" or "philosophy and the mirror of nature".

does anyone like "mr squishy"? i'm trying to decide if i should try to finish it