david foster wallace - is he a cunt?

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. "

it's signed "summer '90" on the last page, and the references to lots of '88 and '89 events make that sound right.

I rly don't think it'd be a half the book it is with a different picture on the cover, it's so, I dunno, evocative of all the stuff I get out of it, not jst itself but in my reaction to it?

At the end of the last brief interview, the long one, I was crying a bit and I didn't know why, I feel I should admit that somehow (I don't cry at all really).

I dunno, tell me abt this book and you!

Sounds like an abusive marriage to me.

this is the m.o. of i.j. to a t. (or maybe not. i'm not positive he was enjoying the disappointment. more like he felt it was inevitable.)

New U.S. paperback cover, ten year anniversary edition. Due out November 13.

Oh, let me take you to the BDSM 101 workshop down the hall.

I felt almost bad about how much I enjoyed Tri-Stan, since it was so clearly the sort of thing I ought to enjoy. Back in the day, that is.

New IJ edition will have intro by Dave FUCKING Eggars. WTF? Inferior! Derivative!

Sorry, intoxicated.

i find the current uk edition presently brickish, and have on more than one occasion found it hard to stop myself buying a second copy

want

reviving, sadly. r.i.p.

too soon

hard to write a sincere message here given the post's name. Still, this came as a terrible shock. Hardly made a mention in the Australian media.

RIP

it is a regrettable thread title. i could change it probably, but i don't like to change things. free speech and and all that.

i was really shocked by this too. i didn't know about his depression/years of medication. knowing that certainly makes it all much more understandable.

actually, maybe i couldn't even if i wanted to. i don't even know if i'm still a moderator on nu-nu-ilb. maybe chris knows.

lot of discussion on the ILE thread: david foster wallace: classic or dud

it's sad he was a writer

i would vote for changing the name. i am still upset over this.

you could, you know, not bump the thread

I am surprised at how shocked I've been about this. I've been at home with a cold and it's just been the toughest couple of days. I'm stuck in the loop of walking past the bookshelf and casting a furtive glance at his books, resisting and then failing to pick them up and leaf through. Have mostly gone for Obliviion, and I don't know about anyone else but have found it hard to do. I've thought about his "Good Old Neon" for so long but reading it again is too hard.

Ѿ

.. what?

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/affective-exchange-amy-hungerfords-making-literature-now

Hungerford, however, does not see the gain of “love” in the work of another contemporarily canonical icon, David Foster Wallace — she sees the cost of hatred. On the basis of preliminary evidence of Wallace’s “misogyny” found in selections of his short stories and in D. T. Max’s biography of Wallace (Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 2012), Hungerford declares that she will “not read any further in Wallace’s work” and proposes: “If there was something rotten in Wallace’s relationships with women [ … ] might there be something rotten in the writer-reader relationship, too?” She suggests that if Foer’s writer-reader ethos is “lovemaking,” then Wallace’s is “fucking.” Thus she posits — as “heretical” as it may seem — that every act of reading can be an “act of choosing.” In the case of herself and Wallace, she “refuse[ s ]” her consent.

In September 2016, Hungerford published a version of her Wallace chapter as an article, “On Refusing to Read,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which sparked competing cries of support and dissent. As Tom LeClair notes in his Full Stop review of her book, Hungerford’s Chronicle article has a different argumentative thrust: she refuses Wallace in order to resist the “market imperatives” which led his publishers to “dare” reviewers to read the tome-like Infinite Jest and then led those reviewers to assign it critical value as recompense for their cognitive and temporal losses. While this argument is also in Making Literature Now, it takes a backseat to Hungerford’s misogyny claim which, in turn, is absent from the article. LeClair reads this omission as a ploy on Hungerford’s part, a “defanged” teaser to her book’s melodramatic “two takedowns” of Foer and Wallace. I have to wonder instead whether the misogyny argument is absent because Hungerford had trouble placing an article about misogyny. In Making Literature Now, she notes that upon pitching an article about not reading Wallace on the grounds of misogyny, she was met with the advice to read more Wallace to find more misogyny. Hungerford sees this as an assumption “that Wallace’s work ‘about’ misogyny must somehow be revealing or smart about that subject.” This is the assumption that she wishes to interrogate.

I think he was more of a misanthrope than people generally realize and I stopped reading "Oblivion" because I found it kind of unpleasant. But the rape/consent metaphor this writer uses for refusing to read an allegedly misogynistic author is too loaded. And claiming the authority to mount a comprehensive takedown of an author without undertaking the labor of reading them is dumb.

I don’t think Hungerford is suggesting, here, that literature courses should never confront misogyny — or other iterations of hatred — but that seeing as teachers hold the readerly consent of their students in hand, they should choose their texts and authors carefully. To me, Hungerford’s affective-interpretive “worth” system reads as fair: if a reader must pay the cost of imbibing hatred, the author must offer the payback of equivalently potent critical “insight.” Any less is hatred for hatred’s sake. And hatred is worthless

This is such a transactional take on reader response theory. I don't think much good can come from analyzing literary texts as a balance sheet with "value" in one ledger and "cost" in the other. Isn't art supposed to be a repository for kinds of knowledge -- emotional, experiential -- that can't easily be translated into concepts (much less quantified)?

What do u think of that article j.?

making literature now...with McSweeney’s and Everything Is Illuminated and DFW? yuck. thanks, trump!

she must have been sitting on that book for a good ten years waiting for the right time to strike.

i re-read his tracy austin piece -- i think hes otm abt her just lacking introspection/depth; ive come to really like her as a commentator, shes astute but every bit of analysis is p surface level idk not knocking her

j. never explained what he thought about the tendentious la review of books piece he linked to.

Recently read Adrienne Miller's In the Land of Men and I am voting cunt

You push a woman out of a moving car, you’re an undeniable cunt

was she wheel shaped though?