best David Foster Wallace book besides Infinite Jest

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

me and que, for starters

don't expect it to "go anywhere" though, except further into its own evil little universe

same could be said about ilx

'"the suffering channel" is, if nothing else, the apex which several thousand years of poop jokes had been moving toward.'
I really feel DFW missed an opportunity by not expanding whatever non-fictional element this story was based on into a "Consider the Lobster" essay.

he coulda done a "host" style "looking at all the angles" essay on us weekly or whatever, but i kinda like how the fictional "suffering channel" seems to relieve him from being fair or empathetic toward to the cast.

the description of that story in reviews at the time sounded so lame. that was one of the things that put me off reading Oblivion. so many of you are vouching for Oblivion in here though, I'll probably go check it out ...

voted for Girl With Curious Hair, it was either that or Supposedly Fun Thing. someone loaned me a copy of GWCH and it was the first DFW I read and it got me hooked to read more, so that got the nod.

xpost: think i remember a posthumous interview

!

Wallace: [...]

he was being interviewed by James Orin Incandenza, Jr iirc

brief interviews with decomposing men

haha

too perfect, actually

a friend of mine who doesn't usually read much has been raving about jest, calling it about the best and most compelling thing he has ever read. which is interesting.

i think that's pretty common, people who are not big lit-heads choosing to tackle it because of reputation or whatever?

i've said as much somewhere -- it's the "compelling" which i find the odd bit, given that one of the things his detractors insist on is his monotony

but, then, i guess, you can have a set of non-readers who will find something like the "where was the woman who said she'd come" section compelling, and a set of non-readers who won't find it so, just as you get a set of readers on each side of the issue

i was wondering if there's something about the kinds of style he deploys when doing that sort of thing - of which 'mister squishy' is the epitome, i guess - which is particularly translatable to the reading patterns & pleasures of people who aren't big lit-heads. but i think it might just be that the not-big-reader friends i have who get a lot out of the book have tastes in other things which tend towards repetition-with-variation

it is compelling -- that's what GETS people through all one thousand pages

it's also super funny

i think for a lot people, since its release, it's been their first "weird" book. (by which i mean even people who are "readers" but who don't naturally come to that barth/coover/pynchon/late-nabokov/gaddis tradition dfw thought he was part of.) and so yeah, it seems daunting, but if you go with it you find its also really funny and conversational. so there's the thrill (or daunting-ness) of all the heavy formalist shit, but also pemulis making bad jokes and lots of sincere and unfussy discussion of stuff everyone can relate to.

i mean i knew when i first read it back in college i hadn't read any of the authors it would have been bracketed with (excepting maybe checking gravity's rainbow out of the library and being too daunted to get through much of it) back then, before a new context grew up around what dfw was doing over the next 15 years.

my line for people who are intimidated by it is that it's not a difficult read on a page-by-page basis, there's just a whole lot of it

he has caught up on all the reading he previously never did

that barth/coover/pynchon/late-nabokov/gaddis tradition dfw thought he was part of. ... back then, before a new context grew up around what dfw was doing over the next 15 years.

i'd never thought of this quite so baldly. true, though, i guess

although maybe in another fifteen years that last will seem like a blip, and wallace will belong again to a tradition of black-humour-encyclopedic-novel-types, who knows

got a nice copy of "broom of the system" I've been staring at, thinking "do i want to read this"

supposedly is classic non-fiction. i also thought his rolling stone profile of john mccain ca. 2000 was outstanding.

short story "the asset" reminded me of a martin amis sleazo character (that's a compliment)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

this seems about right, but it's kind of funny how the results sorted out into these parfait-style layers of essay collections > short story collections > novels > long form non-fiction

Huh. There is no arguing with the nonfiction, but I might have voted for Oblivion (or, just possibly, Brief Interviews -- I even liked "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko," and feel alone in this, whereas "Adult World" can fuck right off). Oblivion's title story, "The Suffering Channel" -- Amber Moltke, christ -- "Good Old Neon," and "Mr. Squishy" are some kind of apex of short fiction, to me.

evil little universe

OTM

Visiting the Wallace archive fucked me right up. Recommended.

so I've been chipping away at IJ on my iPhone (kindle app) and...it doesn't support footnotes? which has made the reading so much easier? what am I missing by basically not even knowing about the first chapters worth of footnotes?

there are some very entertaining (and sometimes very lengthy) passages and little stories/histories that take place entirely in the footnotes, but as far as i can remember you could probably not lose any appreciation or comprehension of the main text of the book if you never read the footnotes, unless you're really trying to understand it all and connect the seemingly unexplained dots. best case scenario, though, you're still missing like 100+ pages of text (probably more since it's in a smaller font than the rest of the book).

I had a really hard time getting through Oblivion, though I did really enjoy Mr. Squishy.

If I had voted, it would have gone to The Pale King.

gbx i would say SOME of the footnotes are essential but most are not. a lot are just tedious pharmacological research, unless you're really into linking the street monikers of prescription drugs with their official names. there are at least a few which do advance the plot or answer questions. i always remember the one about pemulis's mom being a real heartbreaker.

There are a couple (not many) key scenes that take place entirely within footnotes, though. Don't remember exactly what they are, I just remember at one point being amused at a few pages of quotidian narrative in which the real plot-heavy revelatory stuff had been buried at the back. Maybe a place where the footnote was attached to a stand-alone ellipsis.

i think the gross and heartbreaking story about the dog and mrs. incandenza's pretense of believing an absurd lie is in the footnotes. or maybe i'm just remembering it as having smaller text because it's an extended quote from a letter.

anyway i don't think anyone should skip the footnotes, although when you flip to one and it's obviously just a pointless brick of pharmacology to Simulate The Information Overload Of Modern Life or whatever you should absolutely abandon it.

also we're all saying footnotes even though they're endnotes

i'd also only recommend reading the filmography if you're sure it's gonna be "your kinda thing"

xpost lol i hadn't even noticed

wasn't the long hal/orin phone call in an endnote?

xp ha

yes!

was all the insanity re. steeply's fake article about orin an endnote or did we suffer through that in the body of the text?

i had forgotten about that but i'm almost positive it's in the back