― tom west (thomp), Monday, 1 May 2006 02:15 (eighteen years ago) link
― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Monday, 26 June 2006 03:04 (eighteen years ago) link
― ramon fernandez (ramon fernandez), Thursday, 29 June 2006 11:55 (eighteen years ago) link
― W i l l (common_person), Monday, 3 July 2006 04:33 (eighteen years ago) link
wallace's only got his own fawning jacket-blurb on AHWOSG to blame for that ...
― literalisp (literalisp), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 01:14 (eighteen years ago) link
my desire to reread girl... has passed, disappointingly.
― tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 11:29 (eighteen years ago) link
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 13:25 (eighteen years ago) link
― Laurel (Laurel), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 15:28 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 19:14 (eighteen years ago) link
― toby (tsg20), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 20:14 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 21:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― W i l l (common_person), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 22:08 (eighteen years ago) link
― W i l l (common_person), Wednesday, 23 August 2006 22:09 (eighteen years ago) link
://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html
― a little knowledge can go a long way (lfam2), Thursday, 24 August 2006 15:48 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Thursday, 24 August 2006 21:20 (eighteen years ago) link
And damn I never realized so many people were down on DFW! I can't think of another living writer whom I look forward to reading more.
― Suzy Creemcheese (SuzyCreemcheese), Friday, 25 August 2006 03:07 (eighteen years ago) link
Amy "Just How Much Reader Annoyance Are You Going For Anyway" Wallace.
― Mr. Que (Mr.Que), Friday, 25 August 2006 13:04 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Friday, 25 August 2006 14:09 (eighteen years ago) link
― a little knowledge can go a long way (lfam2), Friday, 25 August 2006 18:41 (eighteen years ago) link
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, 26 August 2006 03:19 (eighteen years ago) link
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, 26 August 2006 03:20 (eighteen years ago) link
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Saturday, 26 August 2006 13:03 (eighteen years ago) link
― W i l l (common_person), Saturday, 26 August 2006 16:25 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Saturday, 26 August 2006 17:58 (eighteen years ago) link
i could be 100 percent wrong, of course. and i think the essay is too rough on '90s on pop culture -- dfw is too quick to dismiss a lot of interesting things, and he also misses some counterpoints that were already emerging at the time he wrote it. but as a reflection on/of the era, it's close to peerless.
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, 26 August 2006 18:07 (eighteen years ago) link
i've been wanting to read this essay again all summer but my friend (who claims "e unibus" shattered a part of him) still has my copy of ASFTINDA
― W i l l (common_person), Saturday, 26 August 2006 19:00 (eighteen years ago) link
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, 26 August 2006 19:25 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Sunday, 27 August 2006 11:04 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Sunday, 27 August 2006 11:43 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 27 August 2006 15:47 (eighteen years ago) link
(it's an inversion of e pluribus unum, one of our competing national mottos.)
(xpost)
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Sunday, 27 August 2006 15:54 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 27 August 2006 15:56 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 27 August 2006 15:57 (eighteen years ago) link
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Sunday, 27 August 2006 15:59 (eighteen years ago) link
― Aimless (Aimless), Sunday, 27 August 2006 16:42 (eighteen years ago) link
Unless I'm misreading your irony.
― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 27 August 2006 17:06 (eighteen years ago) link
― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Sunday, 27 August 2006 17:15 (eighteen years ago) link
oh good, i was right. as far as it went. thanks for the latin lesson, though, and i mean that sincerely.
― tom west (thomp), Sunday, 27 August 2006 19:02 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Monday, 28 August 2006 00:01 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Monday, 28 August 2006 00:08 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 28 August 2006 00:13 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Monday, 28 August 2006 00:33 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Monday, 28 August 2006 00:54 (eighteen years ago) link
― Ray (Ray), Monday, 28 August 2006 06:41 (eighteen years ago) link
― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 28 August 2006 06:48 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Monday, 28 August 2006 16:53 (eighteen years ago) link
What's doubly funny, though, is that at some point it becomes hard to separate DFW being self-conscious from DFW writing about self-consciousness. For instance, toward the beginning of Infinite Jest there is an incredibly long section narrating a man's sitting absolutely still and watching a bug on the wall while waiting for someone to bring him weed, and getting increasingly neurotic about when this will finally happen, and mentally reviewing a whole bunch of totally obsessive steps he takes to control his weed-binging -- all of which would read to most people as being exactly the kind of self-conscious or clever or even ironic styling that the essay seems so wary of. But on another level that's a hard argument to support, because it's not so much that he's doing that stuff so much as making you think about it; apart from the sheer level of detail devoted to a short period of this guy's consciousness, there's nothing particularly unusual or arch or insincere about the scene. You get overloaded with that vibe not because he's selling it to you, but just because he's thinking about it, and making certain of his characters actually go around dealing with it directly.
Not that this helps! It's still there and problematic, and I think the original statement is most of the time the true one, and while some of his short stories nip over at the kind of naturalism we associate with sincerity, it's nevertheless really really hard to imagine him sitting down and writing, you know, That Way. Which is fine; that's not what he's for, and that's fine; but the result really has been his essays shining brighter than his fiction, a lot of the time.
― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 28 August 2006 22:14 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Monday, 28 August 2006 23:11 (eighteen years ago) link
i think dfw's "trying to get out of himself" to the uh Sincere Zone is totally a hat he's capable of putting on: c.f. the moving-but-also-kind-of-i-dunno bit where he refers to himself in that one story in oblivion. hats within hats.
i got around to starting my reread of Curious Hair: the first story is odd in that the uh image-fiction bits, which are like maybe two-thirds of the total words, are something that the apparent concerns of the story (that dialogue about waves and poetry and such, i guess) only touch at a tangent.
i really am curious about where TELEVISION actually tries to bring back an external referent, give up on self-referring irony, dig itself out of its own hole, etc.; that said for obvious reasons i'm not au fait with US TV and also this board has "books" in its name.
re: weed: my impressedness with the way DFW structures his thoughts actually kind of went downhill after the first time i got really stoned, because the kind of "oh and another thing" endless associate chains he gets to suddenly seemed on occasion A Little Too Familiar.
i was wondering the other day whether it'd make any sense to think about whether infinite jest succeeds/fails as A Social Novel, as to whether whatever postmodern whatsit you might think of it embodying is kind of not really there.
n.b. i don't really think the doom-ridden-attempt-to-escape-a-media-saturated-society creation myth we have for american pomo writing is true. the evidence for this is somewhere in the closing number of take out to the ball game. perhaps. said myth seems kind of typical of how we tend to concertina the cultural developments of the 60s. i could be completely wrong, though.
i don't know why i put the bit about the photos in a separate post, it's not like it's any less logically connected than the rest of this -
― tom west (thomp), Monday, 28 August 2006 23:28 (eighteen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Monday, 28 August 2006 23:30 (eighteen years ago) link