david foster wallace: classic or dud

I read this as "considering the fact of what the Bad Thing is, really."
I liked this story. It feels much less contrived than his other fiction. Unless this is actually about him, in which case :(

i have a bad feeling about that brief interviews movie

i'm sure it's mostly bad but i want to see it anyway

^^^exactly

did anyone else read "All That" yet? I read it on the bus this morning, and I enjoyed it a lot. seemed like a perfect blend of story + philosophy.

yeah liked it

havent read it yet, but whats the deal - is it an excerpt from the novel or

yes

From the Wallace-L mailing list today:

Pietsch says Wallace had been working on [The Pale King] since 1996, and the novel went through various working titles, including "Glitterer," "SJF "(which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and "What is Peoria For?" As we've heard, Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, an so forth. What I hadn't heard before today was that various pieces we've seen in stand-alone form are in fact chapter of the novel, including "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and "Incarnations of Burned Children."

Pietsch is working with more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. As we know, the subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it's all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity.

The finished book is expected to be more than 400 pages, and will be explicitly subtitled "An Unfinished Novel"; the plan is to make available the drafts and phases the text went through on a website that will exist alongside the book. Pietsch is editing the book in close collaboration with Bonnie Nadell and the estate, but as we've heard him say before, he sees his role very clearly as attempting to order the text into a unified whole, and not making changes that the author isn't there to argue with.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/19/davidfosterwallace0919.jpg
ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU WRITE IT

Anyone see that Brief Interviews movie? Is it terrible?

i dreamed last night that my brother had read infinite jest.

"it was good, you know, but i didn't like it. i wasn't into it."

the brief interviews movie was p. terrible imo

im like 500 emails behind on wallace-l so thx 4 the above~

The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it's all 100% true

Wait surely only the tax stuff is true? That is confusing.

thomp are you bored of wyps :(

no but partly as a result of playing it i've become addicted to facebook scrabble again /:

also i was bored of you always winning

Anyone else read the Zadie Smith piece about Brief Interviews in her new book? I'm still trying to figure out whether I like it or not.

That bit that ran in the NYer recently, by the way: it's really amazing: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/12/14/091214fi_fiction_wallace

i have been dying to read the Zadie Smith piece

^^likewise, couldnt find it at my library when i looked recently

a buddy of mine got the zadie smith book for xmas, i'm going to read that essay this weekend

so about that essay. . . .?

People have certainly raved about it. I wasn't necessarily disappointed, but not as amazed as I'd hoped to be, maybe? But I'm not sure that's her fault -- it might be a function of my already caring/reading/thinking too much about Wallace, to a point where there's slightly less to get out of it. There's some level on which it's pitched to explain What Wallace Is About to those who just think of him as showy and neurotic -- which she says is a very common line in the UK in particular -- and it does that quite well in some ways.

The thing I'm trying to figure out = the number of copyediting/proofing errors in the piece suggests it was pretty hastily appended to the collection; I wonder if that involves its having been hastily finished, too. (She started it before he died.)

the number of copyediting/proofing errors in the piece suggests it was pretty hastily appended to the collection

ugh, this drives me crazy. i want to read it now. i don't know if i wanna buy the whole book though. i liked that review she did of Remainder vs. Neverland, and i loved the essay about her Dad & Faulty Towers

^^ I really hope that doesn't sound like I'm saying "ooo I'm so special I know too much about Wallace for anyone to tell me nothing" -- I just mean it's different for something you're too close to, I guess? I'm trying, instead, to imagine how I'd feel about the essay if I didn't care for Wallace, or read him only casually, or something -- i.e., the way I read most any other piece like this.

xpost - yeah, the one about her dad was terrific

But does it have any dad story nearly as good as your story about the orange juice and binoculars, nabisco?

xpost no, ha ha i do the same thing with articles about him. "yeah, duh, i know he wrote two theses at Amherst and one became Broom of the System, yeah doiiiiiiiiiiiiii."

Okay, you know what? I will come down on the side of this essay. It's a little weird, because part of what can be "difficult" about Brief Interviews is that it's hard to read casually -- it doesn't really let you just read it as stories without having to think really hard about the moral/human ideas it's dealing with. So it's a tough game to write an essay drawing out or explaining those ideas. And it's totally to Smith's credit that she does a really good job of something that difficult, doing really great readings even of those stories where you do have to draw those things out a bit more. (The readings I liked best were of "Forever Overhead" -- the kid on the diving board -- and the one with the poet on his deck chair. The reading that did the least for me was of the story with the hippie girl and the rapist, which is probably because you can't read that story without having all its moral freight dumped right in your lap from the get-go.) So yes. To be honest, if I'm even mostly impressed with a piece like this about something I'm "close to," that probably means the piece is amazing, right?

Also it contains a really great FUN FACT about a detail in "The Depressed Person" and the well-known author whose life it was borrowed from.

To be honest, if I'm even mostly impressed with a piece like this about something I'm "close to," that probably means the piece is amazing, right?

Kind of? Because the essay confirms what you've been thinking about or connects ideas you had about stuff? Okay I can't wait to read it now.

Forever Overhead is A+ amazing, one of my favorite pieces by him. "Shake off the blue clean."

it doesn't really let you just read it as stories without having to think really hard about the moral/human ideas it's dealing with.

yeah, totally. And that's one similar thing I've enjoyed about these pieces from the Pale King that keep coming out. I got this feeling mostly with Good People and All That, not so much with Wiggle Room (maybe it's there, though, i've only read it once) but he has a layer of story going on but then there's this sub-layer of story about morality ang big ideas and stuff, i can't quite put it into the right words.

Yeah, that's one of the things that depresses me most about his death and the fact that he felt his writing wasn't going well -- something like "All That" strikes me as going REALLY well, like he'd started finding a way to pack all these human/moral concerns into really vivid stories, without needing any odd formal tricks to get it in there, and moving past the fun/funny gags he always said he was fond of ... I think he'd really grown into something new. It's such a shame his brain/body couldn't make it all the way through.

i know :(

"Also it contains a really great FUN FACT about a detail in "The Depressed Person" and the well-known author whose life it was borrowed from."

spoil this for me, please. (no idea when i'd be able to get around to reading the essay.)

im like 500 emails behind on wallace-l so thx 4 the above~

ha, right now I have 9463 unread messages in my wallace-l folder (stopped keeping up in '05 tbh)

Used my amazing powers of library catalog-using to get a copy of the Zadie Smith book in question on the way home New Year's Eve, but haven't really spent much quality time with it yet. The Barthes/Nabokov essay looks pretty good.

i stopped following wallace-l around the same time (just got new e-mail account and never bothered to re-subscribe) -- it was always kind of overwhelming to keep up with, and i'm kinda glad i wasn't there for his passing, i don't know if i would've been able to handle how that community reacted, however they reacted.

I get wallace-l in digest form. I don't read it all closely and I almost never post, but I try to keep up. It's how I learned of Wallace's death. The reaction was altogether a bit more muted than you might've expected, but initially people were very upset indeed.

spoil this for me, please. (no idea when i'd be able to get around to reading the essay.)

Yes, please spoil. Elizabeth Wurtzel? What was the detail?

I don't know if this is taken from elsewhere, but I found this nice touching little bit from George Saunders on the Guardian's website:

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) by George Saunders

A few years back I was flying out to California, reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. Suddenly, up there over the midwest, I felt agitated and flinchy, on the brink of tears. If the reader was a guy standing outdoors, Dave's prose had the effect of stripping his clothes away and leaving him naked, with super-sensitised skin, newly susceptible to the weather, whatever that weather might be. If it was a sunny day, he was going to feel the sun more. If it was a blizzard, it was going to really sting. Something about the prose was inducing a special variety of openness, that I might call terrified tenderness: a sudden new awareness of what a fix we're in on this earth, stuck in these bodies, with these minds.

This alteration seemed more spiritual than aesthetic. I wasn't just "reading a great story" – what was happening was more primal and important: my mind was being altered in the direction of compassion, by a shock methodology that was, in its subject matter, actually very dark. I was undergoing a kind of ritual stripping away of the habitual. The person who had induced this complicated feeling was one of the sweetest, most generous people I've ever known.

I first met Dave at the home of a mutual friend in Syracuse. I'd just read Girl with Curious Hair and was terrified that this breakfast might veer off into, say, a discussion of Foucault or something, and I'd be humiliated in front of my wife and kids. But no: I seem to remember he was wearing a Mighty Mouse T-shirt. Like Chekhov in those famous anecdotes, who put his nervous provincial visitors at ease by asking them about pie-baking and the local school system, he defused the tension by turning the conversation to us. Our kids' interests, what life was like in Syracuse, our experience of family life. He was about as open and curious and accepting a person as I'd ever met, and I left feeling I'd made a great new friend. And I had. We were together only occasionally, corresponded occasionally but every meeting felt super-charged, almost – if this isn't too corny – sacramental.

I don't know much about Dave's spiritual life but I see him as a great American Buddhist writer, in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg. He was a wake-up artist. That was his work, as I see it, both on the page and off it: he went around waking people up. He was, if this is even a word, a celebrationist, who gave us new respect for the world through his reverence for it, a reverence that manifested as attention, an attention that produced that electrifying, all-chips-in, aware-in-all-directions prose of his.

that is great

I see him as a great American Buddhist writer

i've always thought this myself!

also looking forward to this:

http://www.fivedials.com/fivedials

As we like to overload our friends with gifts for New Year’s, you will also be receiving an email in the next few days to let you know where you can download our special issue on David Foster Wallace, featuring writing by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith and others. Don’t worry, you won’t have to sign in, or give us your mobile number, or type in a code word. If you know any David Foster Wallace fans who would like to receive a link to the issue please tell them to subscribe to the magazine. It’s free.

spoil this for me, please. (no idea when i'd be able to get around to reading the essay.)

Yes, please spoil. Elizabeth Wurtzel? What was the detail?

yea i guess the bit in the depressed person story about the character's parents arguing abt which would pay for the depressed person as a child's orthodontics was lifted from Wurtzel's Prozac Nation

Ah. I'd vaguely heard that "The Depressed Person" referred to her in some way. I've never read anything of hers.

Some more apparently-Pale-King-excerpted stuff that has been around for a while but is slightly less well known: "The Compliance Branch" (pdf); three pieces from a reading in 2000 (unpublished transcript; pdf).

Also: A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O. Incandenza. Wonder if anyone made Blood Sister: One Tough Nun.

yeah it's weird, im pretty sure ive read prozac nation but i dont remember that bit at all. tbf i was prob skimming it

it's fun to think abt how the overacheiver kid & bendy boy pieces fit into the Pale King

I really like Saunders' line about him being a "wake-up artist" - I had a few experiences over break with art and literature and film (though not DFW's in this case) that reminded me that art can actually do that, and I remember DFW having that kind of impact on me in college.

the Five Dials thing is out today, and it's worth looking at

http://www.fivedials.com/fivedials

So looking forward to this:

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/news/dfw-biography/david-lipskys-dfw-bio.html

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2010/dfw/

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/releases/2010/dfw/books/

lol at fangs drawn on on cormac mccarthy

puttermesser papers is one of my favorites <3

~sigh~

it's good i'll never be famous because some of my books have really embarrassing things written in them

"brobdingnagian penises"