david foster wallace - is he a cunt?

All of this, when I saw him like 7 years ago, seemed really contrived, an image he was marketing, and something that would help him land the ladies.

so, uh: is there a meaningful and/or exploitable connection between the two, or am i reading too much into this?

(this is possibly destined to be one of those thread revivals that sits there until the next revival - like the last one. but i can't elaborate, i gotta go cook.)

I don't love his fiction and have never been able to finish Infinite Jest, but I do adore the first story in Girl With Curious Hair, I think it's called "Little Expressionless Animals." I don't think any other fiction of his I've read touches it, though. this may be just a tin ear that I have toward his type of thing; he definitely has something, whereas Eggers just has a gimmick.

I'm not sure I entirely understand the Orwell question?

I would say that in this age we are overly impressed by science and its mathematical precision through measurement. However, scientific prose is not a model of clarity, but of the painstaking exclusion of ambiguity through the application of professional jargon. 'What we now know about language' is that it doesn't 'do' mathematical precision. It is inapt for that. Ambguity always creeps in.

Genuine clarity is achieved, as it always has been, by the inspired use of metaphor, which condenses ideas and conveys them without the loss of force or exactitude. It works like a mirror, not a calipers.

"It's finally hard for me to predict just whom, besides professional critics and hardcore theory-wienies, 226 dense pages on whether the author lives is really going to interest. For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane."

- which is as relevant a quote as i'm'a try and find for now.

at any rate he's certainly aware of such claims. (what's his position academically currently? dude got tenure*?)

i think the question of the political**/moral/ethical dimension of "clarity" for them is key: however my copy of the orwell essays with 'politics & the english language' is miles away, and i don't have time to read DFW's reply to it right now.

*n.b. i am english i don't quite understand what this phrase means i just think it is funny.

**(isn't it - or is it - sort of an interesting measure of the change in uh climate how much more of consider the lobster is here-come-the-scare-quotes* "political" than his first essay collection.
*("here-come-the-scare-quotes"? i think DFW is a hard case for me
to write about bcz i) how much i usedta wuv him but mainly ii)
writing about him involves reading him first and then the temptation
to borrow from or pastiche his style (or at least his stylistic
tics) is maybe overwhelming, to me))

I said this exact same thing about a month ago, but I can't find the post.

The more I keep reading this DFW book, the more I'm struck by how similar his style is to Nabisco's. Both are capable of writing these long, lucid analyses of something but in this really colloquial way, marked by frequent usage of words like "weird" and "stuff."

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), March 23rd, 2006 12:23 PM. (jaymc) (link)

I believe he's tenured and has a highfalutin' title at Pomona. Even so, it's basically a creative writing position, where the criteria are different than a lit studies position. I mean, he's clearly aware of the lit crit stuff, but casts himself in a sort of outsider position wrt it, as your quotation shows.

So, yeah, I think you're right, that he's trying to do a slightly more self-conscious, stylistically hierarchized Orwellian thing. I just think he has more sympathy with Orwell's take on language and politics than, say, Derrida's. Which is natural for an author.

depressingly, I sometimes think this is all there is to competing theories of interpretation.

I put my focus for both DFW and Orwell on their nonfiction, which I think is far, far better than their fiction. It seems, based on this thread, that I might not be alone in this, at least for DFW.

"Named to Usage Panel, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 4th Edition et seq., 1999"

- haha!

Tom, I've heard from Pomona students that DFW grades their essays really harshly on grammar and usage (like, really harshly: D papers with comments solely about (sometimes arcane) usage errors.)

(furthermore, imagine someone saying this in a police procedural voice.)

Current Courses:
ENGL 64A Elements of Creative Writing: Fiction
ENGL 170R Selected Obscure/Eclectic Fictions for Writers
ENGL 183D Advanced Composition: The Literary Essay

(i think i am myself in favour: undergraduates need to be told to work on this shit.)

(going from my mere experience as one at a midlist UK university, obviously. it is possible that in the colonies things're different.)

he does teach comp! I'm impressed.

(Chris, I don't think the letters signify level of difficulty, especially because Pomona is a fairly selective school. they probably just refer to time block or something.)

- thing learnt from rereading 'A Supposedly Fun Thing ...' (by which quote marks i mean to say, the essay not the whole collection): he was once a lifeguard.

another thing: he mentions dealing with gunk as the only bad thing about lobster, which ah.

also: dude's like 44 now? good god.

wallace's only got his own fawning jacket-blurb on AHWOSG to blame for that ...

my desire to reread girl... has passed, disappointingly.