david foster wallace - is he a cunt?

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

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

://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

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.

Amy "Just How Much Reader Annoyance Are You Going For Anyway" Wallace.

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.

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

(it's an inversion of e pluribus unum, one of our competing national mottos.)

(xpost)

Unless I'm misreading your irony.

oh good, i was right. as far as it went. thanks for the latin lesson, though, and i mean that sincerely.

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.

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 -

Yr. staff posits that the rapper's is a Scene that has accepted -- yea, reveres -- the up-to-date values and symbols of a Supply-Side prosperity, while rejecting, with a scorn not hard to fathom, what seem to remain the 'rules' for how the Marginal are supposed to improve their lot therein: viz., by studying hard, denying themselves, working hard, being patient, keeping that upper lip stiff in the face of what look like retractions of the last 'great society's' promises to them ... We posit that, for serious rap, these Protestant patience- and work-ethic rules, the really nostalgia-crazed parts of Supply-Side, just don't reconcile with the carrots, the enforced and reinforced images of worth-now as wealth-now, of freedom as just power, of power as just the inclination and firepower to get what you decide you have coming to you.

i've read it. the insistence on arguing for rap in terms of "storytelling" is a big hangup, for me.

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html

My favorite parts:

1) I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering.

2) DFW: But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?

DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them.

Also from the blog Ed Rants, last week:

"It’s worth mentioning that during his San Francisco appearance with Rick Moody last year, Wallace noted that he had attempted a “sentimental” novel, which he abandoned. "