david foster wallace: classic or dud

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/

"david foster wallace is a 19th-century moralist in disguise as a late-20th-century modernist" is even more of a big fat obvious cliche than "david foster wallace makes me feel loved" although it's equally true and speaks equally well for him

i meant postmodernist OR DID I

If, by virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a Substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield MA’s state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts.

The most interesting word here is “you” – this is the chapter where Wallace reveals his ideal reader. And what kind of reader is that? Apparently, someone who finds it “exotic” that “females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.” Or “that cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with.” Or “that not all U.S. males are circumcised.” Or that “black and Hispanic people can be as big or bigger racists than white people.” So, Wallace pretty much admits that his book is written for pampered yupps who’ve never lived in a house with cockroaches or heard a woman swear before.

don't have the book to hand but iirc the chapter in question very obviously uses "you" to refer to hal incandenza, the way hal incandenza would because he's a terminal solipsist, but i guess the free indirect style is beyond the post-taibbi exile

oh, ugh, sorry, i was thinking of that thing with all the tennis facts. look just disregard me i'll go back to the thread about the witcher

i prob shouldnt have posted it in the dfw thread since the parts pertaining to him are the least interesting, most eyerolly part of the article

i think its worth it just for this though:

Dave Eggers, the nucleus of the group, is pretty much the Bono of literature – a sneering, leathery vampire utterly dependent on the plasma of African children to survive.

oh well yeah no argument there.

i winced when it cited the eggers introduction to the second edition of IJ because those really are the most embarrassing five pages ever written by anyone about anything

Who rarely gets mentioned, though, is his older brother William, an equally ghoulish-looking neocon who was once Director of Government Reform at the Koch brothers’ free-market Reason Foundation. He is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an ultra-right Republican think-tank whose other members have included Charles Murray, author of an infamous book (The Bell Curve) arguing that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.

Kinda puts a damper on Eggers’ goody-goody pretensions, doesn’t it?

Um.... no?

This was really unpleasant and I stopped reading when he thought it was clever to call William Vollman a "fag."

vollman part was where i started skimming, yeah. i mean that's also when i noticed how long it was.

lol god forbid your brother is an asshole

yknow there are actually ppl capable of reading/writing/getting published that have criticised (w/ more deft severity even) dfw, no need to dig up some loser crank on some corner of the internet for it

unless this is just another example of 'remember the 90s' a la sebadoh reunion, newt gingrich, matt pinfield, etc

down, boy!

that is one of the worst articles i've read the beginning of in recent memory

that is one of the worst articles i've read the beginning of in recent memory

― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Monday, May 23, 2011 10:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

and i'm not a fan of eggers, vollmann or infinite jest

Nowadays Wallace is seen as a brilliant young(ish) author who was tragically tiger-mothered to death, killed by his own voluminous intelligence.

or by a chemical imbalance in his brain just sayin'