david foster wallace: classic or dud

i am a fan of this guy. i don't like his short stories very much because they're usually about his less valid preoccupations (How Can We Make Art Now That We Know About Sarcasm? seemed to be a big one) but his essays are wonderful and infinite jest is utterly overwhelming and gorgeous and i don't even care how much of an obvious stoner that makes me. so thanks for this!

I think this radio thing makes him sound kind of doofy -- "Tennis was a constant in the life and art of David Foster Wallace" -- oyy. So does 'How Can We Make Art,' etc., which is a caricature, although one with something in it, sure.

oh yeah it is a total caricature. i mean, i read "octet" with interest and pleasure and i don't think it's a good story but i don't mean to write it off. i just think that some of the chains he tries to escape with short stories like that aren't actually there.

kinda want to get infinite jest for my kindle due to huegness but i think the endnote thing would be even more annoying?

Probably yeah.

It is perhaps my favourite novel written in english tho so read it.

i would have thought it would be easier? like you could just click on the link + go straight to the note rather than having 2 bookmarks like w/ a normal copy

yeah i figured that, too? footnotes would suck, but endnotes seem manageable

Would endnote to page 457 or whatevs be easy enough (i don't own any sort if reader)?

it would be cool if the footnotes just popped up in a new window over the text...

reading my old paperback from the 90s with the blue sky cover...always have to keep 2 bookmarks going but it's not too bad

it would almost be worth reading it on a kindle just to increase the text size, esp for the long endnotes

(i'm assuming this is the sort of thing you can do on a kindle)

i could deal with the text size of the end notes, but the lines were so long at that size. reading paragraphs in the endnotes was hard work, kept losing my line.

I am going to read through some of the handwritten drafts of IJ in the Ransom Center archive at UT-Austin next month. Awed, grateful, etc.

IJ not available for kindle as far as I can see :/

http://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-ebook/dp/B000S1M9LY

Hmmm, doesn't come up in my search results, even if search .com rather than .co.uk

are you working on wallace, ctrl-z?

oh yeah it is a total caricature. i mean, i read "octet" with interest and pleasure and i don't think it's a good story but i don't mean to write it off. i just think that some of the chains he tries to escape with short stories like that aren't actually there.

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, 8 February 2011 18:03 (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah i don't know — I first read that at fifteen and it made a huuuuuuuuuuuge impression on me, because at fifteen I spent a lot of time struggling with similar what-is-the-use-of-irony questions? And I read that collection again a few months later and it didn't make such an impression, and I read it again last year and it was one of the pieces I enjoyed least. So there's that. I mean, it helped me because I came across it at a time I needed to read it, so I feel charitable to it for that reason: that there will be people who need to read it, and that I imagine he needed to write it, to.

Also between my two readings of it a few months apart 'The Depressed Person' had morphed from 'mostly horrifying' to 'mostly hilarious', or possibly the other way around.

I was looking at IJ yesterday and thinking, I should probably read this, at last.

But then I see Gareth, of all people, at the top of this thread, saying the book doesn't go anywhere and DFW is 2d. Possibly this is reassuring.

Gareth is wrong on both of those points.

I mean you could only say it "doesn't go anywhere" if you're unfamiliar with the concept of a story beginning at the end, but it covers a pretty vast amount of ground in between. I don't think it's two-dimensional either, all the main characters are well drawn, he clearly has a lot of sympathy for some of them, his portrayals of depression and addiction are excellent.

That said, I'm not sure you'd like Infinite Jest.

clicky if you can't navigate the BBC site

"DFW is 2d"
I think he has a tendency in fiction to describe the characters to a degree of resolution beyond the limits of his ability to invent them credibly, kind of like CG Yoda is less compelling than a felt puppet Yoda. This is obviously not a problem if the person he's describing actually exists.

the point where i realized infinite jest was Really Really Good, when (almost) everything i'd read to that point suddenly opened up, was the long sequence with Gately moving the cars around on the street, which is simultaneously a huge emotional peak for the novel and a piece of actual thriller writing so good it's almost funny. now granted this is something like page 600, so i understand when people get frustrated with this book.

I think he has a tendency in fiction to describe the characters to a degree of resolution beyond the limits of his ability to invent them credibly

this is why i was wary of him for a long time; i'm kinda sympathetic to james wood.

on about pg 120 of my re-read...really having a ball...all the main story stuff is coming back to me, but there is a ton of great minor stuff that i forgot about...just read this pretty amazing vignette of some boston heroin addicts

I'm currently on my third try of Infinite Jest. First attempt, in 1996, failed because I was 17 and, despite having enjoyed "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in Harpers, I think it was just too intimidating. Second attempt, circa 2003, failed because I wasn't in the right emotional state at the time. I found it too depressing. (Which is weird because I hardly ever have reactions like that to art/literature.) Both times I made it approx. 100 pages in.

Now I'm on p. 200 and am reasonably sure I'll finish it this time. It seems like it's kind of gotten into a groove within the last few chapters, too.

re: "some of the chains he tries to escape with short stories like that aren't actually there."

Yabbut this is kinda part of the point, given his persona as both author and person. I think he was being honest, in that he felt bound by all sorts of false constraints. Even when he admits to knowing them to be false, he can't help but act as though the chains are really there.

There's a passage in Supposedly Fun Thing about how he feels embarrassed by how much time he's spending in his stateroom. So he clutters up the bed with work papers, so that the staff will conclude he's working instead of just creepily introverted. But then he mocks himself for having that concern with a little footnote: "Yeah, like this guy even _cares_." Trying to live as if your ethics are your aesthetics (and vice versa) and that these are frequently identical with your neuroses is an interesting and pretty basic modern tangle.

I still think some of the Girl with Curious Hair stories are little gems of ventriloquism; each one is its own world (though they're all still his). The voice in "Everything Is Green" and the one with the electrician and the Sick Puppy one all seemed so distinct to me. Even if in retrospect they might have been MFA-workshoppy kind of exercises in point of view.

Re two bookmarks: I just use one. When I'm reading, I use it to mark my place in the endnotes, and when I'm not reading, I use it to mark my place in the main text. Since the endnotes are numbered, it's usually not a big deal to flip through and find the appropriate page upon encountering the first endnote number of the day's reading.

I am reading IJ now (two bookmark style!)...about 300 pages in and plan to keep going.
I have to say, it was a lot less humorous than I was expecting (though I knew it wasn't going to be necessarily laugh out loud funny).
Maybe I just have a different sense of humor? I am enjoying it otherwise...I think DFW has a good style.

I think if you want to get a better sense of some of the "constraints" Wallace saw you have to read E Unibas Pluram: Television and US Fiction. I mean maybe it was just something about being in college at the time when he became popular, but there really was this sense of literature having exhausted itself and its possible subjects. I remember a line in a David Lodge novel about a guy at a cocktail party explaining that we were "running out of experience." But not just that -- it was a sense that every possible feeling and sentiment had been replaced by a cliched approximation of itself. Everything seemed risible. As much as I disliked it, that was the point of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -- a novel overtaken by its own exaggerated blurb, a genuinely painful and meaningful experience trying to escape suffocation by the branding of pain and meaning.

I mean that was all before 9/11 changed everything and twee child narrators showed us the way out though.

I use one bookmark, bent in half.

hey does anyone know the last thing he published (like essay or magazine piece)? - (not counting the pale king excerpts that published while he was living)

was it the tennis thing he did for the ny times? can't remember when exactly that was ...

yeah the roger federer thing for NY times is what i was thinking it was, but i don't get the new yorker and those type of mags that often so i could have missed it

look at that

?

But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.

ah gotcha so that was the last thing?

i think the stuff published subsequently in the nyer was all excerpts?

I use one bookmark, bent in half.
^^^

orin did it

HB DFW

are you working on wallace, ctrl-z?

Nope. I just like his writing.

the published philosophy thesis w/ all of the background arguments is really good imo. im already positive the nuts & bolts of dfw's refutation of taylor's fatalism argument is largely over my head at least in relation to how much time i want to put in to understand it, and thats fine.

the 30 page intro by james ryerson is worth the price of admission alone. he does a great job really explaining what Wallace thinks is so genius abt David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress in a way i really get & can understand and i learned several other tidbits abt dfw i never knew also.

the pale king has shipped, eta: saturday :D

:D

I sincerely hope that someone on the train today will think I'm pulling an April Fool's prank when they see me reading this. Ha.

I'm only a dozen or so pages in (just shipped yesterday). Definitely feels a bit unpolished, but it's also amazingly deft at handling a weird stream of consciousness structure (with the protagonist's perspective switching from a variety of reflections to perceptions of his immediate environment literally almost every sentence) while remaining entirely lucid.

I'm gonna miss you, you talented fucker.

mine should arrive on monday, apparently. should we have a new thread for pale king?

Definitely feels a bit unpolished, but it's also amazingly deft at handling a weird stream of consciousness structure (with the protagonist's perspective switching from a variety of reflections to perceptions of his immediate environment literally almost every sentence) while remaining entirely lucid.

this^^ really a very awesome effect, makes the character's consciousness feel very, very real. i'm also only about a dozen pages in. i'm going to have this constant nagging in the back of my mind the whole time wondering how he would've changed this around, or if he would've actually ended up using this phrase, etc.

should we have a new thread for pale king?

do it. i'm gonna give up after a dozen pages or so but am in favour of having somewhere to check in and catch up with the enthusiasm.

David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King"

http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/