david foster wallace: classic or dud

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"

the man who loved children is a really great book

It is! I didn't know DFW had read it.

Thanks, Que. I've fallen behind on wallace-l and this is the first I've heard of the archive acquisition.

yah, i read it first on HTML Giant, but it looks like wallace-l people are aware of it

btw: you can see, and potentially buy, Karen Green's art here:
http://www.beautifulcrap.com/

I just bought a drawing off her, which felt a bit weird, but I would've liked her work a lot had she had no connection to Wallace.

I phrased that poorly. You see what I meant, I hope.

waiting for the new edition of the man who loved children to come next month - it's insane that it's been oop for years.

is it really oop? i bought an everyman's library ed of it mb like 5 years ago

s did u buy one of the ink drawings? i know someone who has one (braggin?) & its really beautiful.

Yes, an ink drawing. It was very hard to choose one; I wanted four or five of her pieces.

I also bought her book.

Wow. The Victorian Mourning/Morning Jewelry photos kind of got me right here.

lol @ the drawing on cormac's author photo in suttree

waiting for the new edition of the man who loved children to come next month - it's insane that it's been oop for years.
Wut? I bought this one from amazon two years ago: http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Loved-Children-Novel/dp/0312280440/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268176320&sr=8-1

Heavily annotated copies of that + Puttermesser Papers = <3

Seriously scheming on a trip to Austin to check out the archive.

In Fall 2010 when it all becomes publicly available, that is.

dfw's listening habits, via an interview with his sister:

"he really loved pearl jam." O_o

but also:

"there was a cover of 'our lips are sealed' by fun boy three which he played over and over and OVER again one summer. and he really loved the band madness." :D

pearl jam rocks

the 0_o was less a comment on pearl jam's quality than in trying to imagine dfw rocking out to "daughter" given various (negative) comments in his interview about rock music.

his interview about rock music

Which one? Where?

counterpoint: totally looks like a pearl jam fan

actually upon re-reading "negative" is probably a little strong (and he does caveat his opinion):

"DFW: About the only way music informs my work is in terms of rhythm; sometimes I associate certain narrators' and characters' voices with certain pieces of music. Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split."

from another posthumous tribute i learned he was big into section 25 and solo eno in college, which seems about right, really.

hmmm. i wanna say i read something somewhere where he said he was into the flaming lips

yah i guess it was in the sonora review

http://www.magicmonads.com/2009/09/sonora-reviews-david-foster-wallace.html

What's the UT connection?

dont believe there is one, i think they have similar other writers archived there tho, at least delillo

and Stormin' Norman Mailer