david foster wallace: classic or dud

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'

i haven't read this yet but apparently it's critical if that's your thing http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n08/jenny-turner/illuminating-horrible-etc

jenny turner piece is damn good, ty

that article (the exiled one) oozes hatefulness and unearned attitude and just all-around smirky unpleasantness, to the point where i kind of feel nauseated that i read the whole thing. makes that 'reader's manifesto' thing from the atlantic a few years ago read like vintage james agee by comparison. also it's hilarious that he decries hipsters and then writes things like this:

Further proof Wallace didn’t know shit about drug culture after the 70s. In his TV essay, “E Unibus (sic) Pluram” (sic) he writes: “My real dependency here is not on a single show or a few networks any more than the hophead’s is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner.” By the 90s, the French Connection was history, Turkey no longer grew much illicit opium and only beatnik-wannabe posers used words like “hophead.”

reminds me of the pre-60s meaning of the word 'hippie,' the guy whose only purpose is to prove his hipness over everyone else in the room.

yeah, i've read that jenny turner piece before and i remember it being good. iirc, i disagreed on some particular points (specifically the part about being disappointed by the ending of IJ), but overall i think it is pretty sharp, though not really very harsh, criticism.

Can I read that Turner piece if I'm at p. 725, or is it spoilerish?

it mostly doesn't talk about IJ, and doesn't discuss the ending except to say she doesn't like it, so yeah it's fine. it's good!

(my position on the IJ ending is that the book has, as it keeps saying, annular ambitions, and ending like it does is part of those -- but yes, there's a whiff of monkishness and even a little self-hatred in how completely it refuses to satisfy the part of you [and him?] that's excited on a Story level and wants to know what happens, and it probably could have been better. the characters, though, are complete.)

‘He wanted to be equal to the vast, babbling, spin-out sweep of contemporary culture,’ Don DeLillo said in a speech at Wallace’s memorial service. ‘Youth and loss. This is Dave’s voice, American.’

Seems kind of weird for DeLillo to riff on one of his own lines at a memorial service.

Or maybe it's just the slyness that bothers me.

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

― farty f baby (Princess TamTam), Monday, May 23, 2011 10:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

did anyone else follow this link and get a pop-up asking you to donate to keep this site going, beginning with the extremely unfortunate choice of words "We've been on a suicide mission"?

Yes, I did :-/

ayup, me too

that post is on reflection such shit i can't even be bothered being pissed off at it, to be honest

i liked the jenny turner piece, though.

I basically agree that Vollmann is creepy and Eggers smarmy, but that hardly excuses this kind of bilious, tedious, self-aggrandizing junk. Reminds me of the Amazong crit of Dr. Joseph Suglia, "The Greatest Author In the World". Excerpt from his review of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City:

At this point, on page 5, it dawned on me what I was reading: CHRONIC CITY is a hipster Bildungsroman, a document of hipsterism in early twenty-first-century America that future historians will use in an attempt to understand how this malady could have infected and corrupted our already vitiated and hollow culture.

Let me explain what I mean by the word "hipster." A hipster is an illiterate nerd. Neither Perkus nor Chase read very much in the book, and their references are almost exclusively cinematic or musical. Not to mention mostly exoteric. The closest they come to approaching literature is by way of Kafka: Perkus recites a passage from Kafka's "Forschungen eines Hundes" at one point (in bad English translation). He neither discusses the story's form nor its meaning. This is very telling. Both hipsters do what all hipsters do: They merely stockpile and warehouse cultural detritus without thinking about what any of it might signify or how it is constructed. And so both characters mindlessly compile references to cultural trash, without any purpose or sense of an overarching project. They might as well have an encyclopedic knowledge of vegetables: "Have you ever eaten a carrot?" "Did you know that there exists an orange cauliflower? I read about it on Wikipedia." And so forth and so on.

The point to be made is the following: Lethem's hipsters are not readers. They are not thinkers. They are not artists. They are not creators. They are not even scholars of cultural trash.

They are repositories of media junk.

Take that, hipsters!

http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj242/donaldparsley/Suglia.png

well, that's another dumb person that is on the internet

we should do something about it

far far worse are the positive reviews on that page.

by that guy, i mean; not of chronic city.

13.) Midget sexuality. The dwarves lust after tall women.

i even like his enthusiasm, i guess, and i was sort of into the hubert selby thing cause i really really can't get into that stuff. then it goes all wrong. fuck, vollmann isn't creepy because he hangs out with prostitutes for "fun" and claims to understand them better than their clients. it's because he clearly isn't doing it for fun or research but due to some profound sort of dysfunction in his life (you could argue).

(3) 25mg of Ativan is not “enough to anxiolytize a good-sized Clydesdale.” Downers usually have the reverse effect on horses.

lol buddy get a life

25mg of ativan is just like a ~ton~ of ativan

(4) 25mg of Ativan is not “like a ~ton~ of ativan.” A ton is 907,184 grams.

w/e

i enjoyed that list. how dare he not have the internet at hand to research his novel!

ugh i just spent twenty minutes checking that bullshit. guess which of them are wrong

isn't there supposed to be a DFW biography or two in the works right now? has anyone heard anything else recently? i thought at least one of them were supposed to be out next year

i think it was one bio versus one interview, which was the lipsky book that came out. but yeah there should be a bio in the works.
i am avoiding these threads because i'm dragging my feet finishing the pale king, but: i've learned some good new words. anfractuous, convolved.

about 20 pages from finishing my re-read of infinite jest.

have really enjoyed it, maybe even more than the first time.

don gately 4 lyfe