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.

This is actually the anniversary of his death which I had no idea about when I posted that. That's weird.

weird, i finished infinite jest tonight after trying for 8 years, many false starts. this is a strange bump

that's a beautiful passage

that really is quite nice, isn't it?

this:

That is what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see, who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock.

is actually very similar to what schopenhaur said:

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

that i believe dfw's quote was actually his reaction to reading schopenhauer

https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-have-David-Foster-Wallace-as-a-teacher

from his class syllabus:

Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machines-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student's in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.

<3

sadly likely to earn a visit to the dean's office these days based on anonymous butthurt rats

expand on that

(Aimless groans, smirks, mimes onanism, chortles, & eye-rolls)

The beginning of this thread makes me nostalgic for the days when Wallace was just a fiction writer among many, one you could like or dislike without there being any cultural weight attached to which it was

I guess we'll get back to that in 10 more years

https://jezebel.com/mary-karr-reminds-the-world-that-david-foster-wallace-a-1825799769

I saw a good 'used' (but unread) copy of Infinite Jest for $3 today at my favorite charity bookshop. I picked it up, thumbed through a few pages and realized I had no interest in re-reading it.

You write that Infinite Jest was motivated by his “dysfunctional yearning for Mary Karr.” How did she influence his drive to write the book?

What I meant by that was that he was trying to impress her. He really wants her to think he’s doing wonderful work, and I think when she, at various times, breaks up with him, he’s thrown into those negative spirals that can also be enormously productive for a person, a creative spiral of anger. Almost like something out of a Hollywood movie. There’s a note in one of my files where he says something like, “Infinite Jest was just a means to Mary Karr’s end, as it were.” A sexual pun.

Oh fuck those guys. Both Wallace and Max.

That pun is such bullshit, Wallace is such bullshit, the continuous praise is even worse.

celebrated artist is problematic case #4882567386

i wonder what style of movie karr felt like dfw's behaviour belonged in

I read Infinite Jest a few years ago, aware of DFW’s rep and place as an unfortunate and un-asked-for figurehead of a kind of Lit Bro mentality but... still found it pretty fucking good. Couldn’t put it down. Still think about it a lot.

I don’t really know how to talk about him now.

Or even then.

oh, are we doing cadaver synods now?

i don't know how to talk about him either. if there are still intellectual white dudes out there still saying "dude you should read DFW he's the BEST WRITER EVER" yeah i'll be glad to laugh in their faces. i read his book, like, twenty years or so ago, i liked it a lot. it influenced me. that's not something i can undo. i used to like bill hicks, too. they're dead now, and the work they did when they were alive is very much of a time and a place. we can point out that they were monsters, or we can talk about how they were "problematic", or we can let time render them irrelevant, which it's doing a very good job of.

ive just reread most of the tennis essays, first time in years & i appreciate them much more now, so great

the old "write about what you know" adage proves out once more

infinite jest is great, annoying lit bro debris & saint/martyr status aside.

It's half great

Actually no, the tennis/alcoholism stuff is largely fantastic. But good God is the sci-fi framework awful.

I wouldn’t say it’s awful but def the weakest element of the book.

The drug/alcohol and tennis school stuff (lol at having these things together) is just so well drawn though. Anything outside of it is bound to look weak in comparison. The avant-grade film stuff and filmography is very clever too though.

I didn't find the near dystopian future setting half baked or that imposing, almost all of it is on the periphery of the main action in the book at the school and the halfway house. all the stuff about addiction and AA is the core, the heart music of infinite jest

the Quebecois separatists were pretty dreadful

yeah they are the most boring part of the book by far imo

...all the stuff about addiction and AA is the core, the heart music of infinite jest

one cool & interesting bit of trivia from the D.T. Max bio: the only music DFW listened to while writing Infinite Jest was Nirvana and Enya.

jeez, he never shopped for groceries?

New Pynchons are a bit like New Dylans. Here are some I have known and loved:
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...

― Edna Welthorpe, Mrs, Tuesday, November 20, 2001 8:00 PM (sixteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the Quebecois separatists were pretty dreadful

― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, May 5, 2018 11:10 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah they are the most boring part of the book by far imo

― flappy bird, Saturday, May 5, 2018 11:15 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There was a big block of this in the book, it was the one point where I said "god, fuck this" and skipped/skimmed a few pages.

Not the desert-on-a-rise stuff, mind - which I liked. I feel like it was something in a Canadian downtown? It's been a while since I read it.

hah, just went for a run and saw a tall dude with long dark hair and a white bandana playing tennis.

Shoulda said hi

Hi dave hows the writing coming along

this is a good read

https://theoutline.com/post/5543/david-foster-wallace-conference-profile?zd=1&zi=xgemvmqv

indeed, thx

The space in which it matters that DFW was an abuser of women is the space of ordinary reality, which we all occupy. This makes it a serious charge, that must be dealt with by real people doing whatever is possible to mitigate the harm done through his abuse. One mitigation is to identify him as an abuser and publically decry that fact and condemn his actions.

As for his books, the thing about writing in general is that no matter how 'realistic' it aspires to be, it occupies its own unreal space that only exists in the mind of the audience as the it plays out. Within that mental space, the author and audience cannot either create or repair real life abuses and it is hopeless to try to do so through direct action against his books, such as denouncing them as the work of a real life abuser. You can only deal with them effectively by thinking about them as clearly as possible.

part of argument in the outline article is that this distinction is particularly difficult to make in DFW's case, though

The question is thornier with Wallace than it would be for most of his contemporaries. Plenty of people love the novels of Jeffrey Eugenides — but how many of them love Jeffrey Eugenides? Wallace’s work overflows with complex and vibrant characters, but of these the most enduring — the only one to transcend his writing, a la Holden Caufield or Jay Gatsby, to become a pop culture figure in their own right — is Wallace himself, the “Wallace” of his first-person essays and reviews.

This Wallace was self-aware, morally engaged, alert to hypocrisy (especially his own), and deliriously funny. You felt like you knew him, even if you knew, and knew he knew, that it was all on some level a ruse, that the ‘I’ on the page was always an invention. There are other reasons for his fandom’s intensity — Infinite Jest’s sprawl has made it the rare literary novel able to generate and sustain genre-style online communities — but it’s the voice that brings his fans two hours south of Chicago to the town of Normal, Illinois, from multiple continents and both U.S. coasts, paying anywhere from $40 (for students/part-time workers) to $150 (for teachers/full-time workers) to get in.

Authors understand very well that the "I" in any well-constructed book is as much of a construction as any other part of their writing.

It's the audience that gets confused about what that "I" is.

you are, unfortunately, a deceased fiction writer

but how many of them love Jeffrey Eugenides

tough of ol jeff

on*

whoever is updating Jeffrey Eugenides' wiki page apparently does not love Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides (born March 8, 1960) is an American novelist, nonce and short story writer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Eugenides

I feel like it says something about our era vs his that he once ironically titled a book of thinky essays “Consider the Lobster” whereas today we have a dude whose schtick is unironically to consider the lobster.

"Consider the Lobster" is an unironic consideration of lobsters tho

Very good long essay by Patricia Lockwood: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/patricia-lockwood/where-be-your-jibes-now