david foster wallace: classic or dud

Sure, but they're all by mathematicians and they're generally not the kind of high profile mainstream pop sci that gets reviewed elsewhere. A book by an English professor is an exception.

Not to labor the point, but this isn't true (except in as much that there aren't so many books by English profs that mention math). For example, just picking up the current issue, there's a review of a young adult novel featuring some math (this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Katherines-John-Green/dp/0525476881 ).

It would be weird if anyone wrote a popular book on the subject of E&M and it didn't get reviewed in the Notices of the AMS, frankly.

I stand corrected : )

Anyway, here's the Ellenberg review I was talking about (webmail me if you want a copy of the full thing):

Wallace is an inspired choice of guide through this briar patch: His characters, from the overly abstract tennis players in Infinite Jest (note title) to the eponym of the brilliant and excruciating story “The Depressed Person” tend to get caught thinking about their thinking, landing them in infinite cycles strangely reminiscent of the ones logicians tangle with in Everything and More. And the famous paradox of the barber who shaves only those people who don’t shave themselves (question—who shaves the barber?) plays a key part in his first novel, The Broom of the System. Among Wallace's strengths is an ability to bring to bear in fiction not only the simple, lyrical truths about human life, but the complicated and hard to grasp ones, the ones requiring some preliminary structural setup—that is, the technical ones. In a review of his book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, I wrote that higher math (along with NAFTA and the House Ethics Committee) was a subject to which I think Wallace’s prose would be uniquely suited. Now I’ve got my wish.

Everything and More is not a math book of the usual kind. Most general-interest books about mathematics scrupulously avoid technicalities; Wallace, on the other hand, dives into them exultantly and rolls around. This is not to say that the book is a dry monograph; there are figures and formulas, yes, but they tend to come flying at you like debris in the flow of Wallace's torrential narrative. Reading Everything and More is like nothing so much as having a conversation—a one-sided conversation—with that really smart guy you knew in college who responded to the briefest questions by sitting you down in a chair and launching into an impromptu dissertation. In this case, the question is: "How did mathematicians figure out how to handle the concept of infinity in the late 1800s?" And the dissertation begins: "Look, we'd better start with Zeno and Aristotle... have you got a few minutes?"

Wallace is taking a swing at the problem he wrote about in his 2000 essay "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama:"

"Not just professional mathematicians, but almost anyone lucky enough ever to have studied higher math understands what a pity it is that most students never pursue the subject past its introductory levels... Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and context-less formulae fall away and all that's left are pencil and paper and what gets called 'genius,' viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind."

This OTM-ness of that final paragraph, coming from a non-mathematician, is stunning.

Also, this is going in my teaching philosophy statement:

Early in the book he makes a wise comment about the decontextualized nature of school math: "That we end up not even knowing that we don't know is the really insidious part of most math classes."

my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong.

Well, I'm aftraid that is not an intellectual attainment. I don't know what kind it is, either.

xpost

i just cannot believe this. my rubric for people i think have intellectually mastered living is totally wrong. what a shame. RIP.

What I thought too. I'm torn up about this.

From the NY Times obit (sorry if already quoted, haven't read whole thread):

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst. [...] James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

From a posting on the DFW e-mail discussion list, extracted from a remembrance by a professor of his at Amherst:

He wrote two senior theses at Amherst: a creative thesis in English that was his first novel, "The Broom of the System," and a philosophy thesis on fatalism. Both were judged to be Summa Cum Laude theses. The opinion of those who looked at the philosophy thesis was that it, too, with just a few tweaks to flesh out the scholarly apparatus, was a publishable piece of creative philosophy investigating the interplay between time and modality in original ways.

That much is probably common knowledge. Here's what is not so widely known: Though theses normally take a whole school year to write, DFW had complete drafts of both of his theses by Christmas, and they were finished by spring break. He spent the last quarter of his senior year reading, commenting on, and generally improving the theses of all his friends and acquaintances. It was a great year for theses at Amherst.

God damn it.

mmm amphetamines

or maybe just the mania side of the depression.

I couldn't believe this when I heard it. Very sad news.

in re: to the footnote thing.

obv. it's one of his signature devices. but i found it enlightening once when i read a couple of stories and essays while skipping all the footnotes. surprisingly, the pieces read just fine without them. after that i wondered if the footnote thing had been his way of trying to make his writing more accessible for people that didn't have the patience for all the minutia of his writing...like you could take them or leave them....i almost want to say they were sort of like hyperlinks in a web story but it's probably more of a coincidence than anything.

well the end of the charlie rose interview is horribly prescient

xp I think with "Host" it might be more than coincidence.

all the harpers stuff: http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557

i almost want to say they were sort of like hyperlinks in a web story but it's probably more of a coincidence than anything.

There's a piece in Consider the Lobster that kind of follows through on this logic, and I feel incredibly sorry for the book designer who had to lay it out: it's put together like an org chart, with callouts breaking from the text into bubbles of commentary and evidence and sub-argument.

I wrote something years ago on I Love Books that probably sums up why I cared so much about Wallace, but I think I'll read this thread more deeply before looking for it...

It makes you wonder what the manuscripts he submitted to magazines and book publishers look like and how he composed them. Does anyone have any information on this?

http://www.edrants.com/operation-dfw/

As for “Host,” apparently DFW had submitted the whole essay on a giant posterboard. He confessed to being “kind of a dick” about this, but was very happy with the way the Atlantic had found a way to typeset it. He also confessed that it’s “probably a little harder to read than it’s worth.”

There's a piece in Consider the Lobster that kind of follows through on this logic, and I feel incredibly sorry for the book designer who had to lay it out: it's put together like an org chart, with callouts breaking from the text into bubbles of commentary and evidence and sub-argument.

are you talking about the one on the conservative talk radio host?

i think that was the one...in any case...my friend had read it in the original magazine form and apparently there it was a different system...color coded footnotes of some sort. apparently they couldn't do the color coding thing for the book so the boxes and arrows were the solution...i have not read the original but my friend said it worked far better in practice than in the book.

Here's the original, as it appeared in the Atlantic

http://www.artindeepkoma.com/DFW%20-%20Host.pdf

Yeah, "Host," already linked and discussed upthread -- sorry about that.

His other "kind of a dick" move in Consider the Lobster -- getting sent to cover some kind of lobster festival for Gourmet (?) and coming back with a short piece about the moral fine points of boiling the lobsters while they're still alive.

The two posts following from this link = one of the main reasons I care about Wallace:

david foster wallace - is he a cunt?

i was subscribing to the atlantic when the dfw pice was in it--a gift from my uncle (? i think) when i was a freshman in college--and frankly the atlantic is filled with a lot of garbage but i remember that piece so clearly; i must have read it two or three times.

wallace's death hits hard i think not just because he was such a personal writer--all his essays seemed sort of compulsive, like he needed to get everything in his head out on paper, where he could organize and process it all better (which is why the flowcharts and color-coded footnotes make so much sense to me!)--but because he was such a "flawed" "genius" (or whatever); a man of incredible intelligence and warmth whose superhuman talents seemed to never translate fully (maybe a fault of the nature of writing or the nature of novels or the nature of journalism rather than of the nature of david foster wallace), and who seemed all the more loveable (for lack of a better word) because of it.

I was in Australia when it ran. I got a PDF of it somehow through my library's institutional subscription. I remember thinking that reading a PDF of something by DFW was probably the most modern thing I would ever do until personal hovercrafts were available.

thanks mr que! i was feeling stupid for not saving my back issues...

here's a non-copyright violation version

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace

Fuck it. I didn't read this thread yesterday thinking it was just a revive and haven't seen the web/news all day and then I'm driving home and some woman is speaking about someone who had problems following up his huge 1000 page novel and now we'll never know what he had in mind and I thought 'it can't be David Foster Wallace because he's only 40-something' and yet it was.

When I had really got bored of reading fiction IJ (and to a lesser but significant extent, Broom) got me reading it again.

RIP

(and who was/is Edna Wellthorpe upthread? Using Joe Orton's nom de plume to get all 'he was NO Thomas Pynchon' on the thread...that's the kind of thing I used to do...wait...it wasn't me was it?)

Edna Wellthorpe was Stevie Tr0uss3, I believe

Correct.

Well, thank god it wasn't me.

some very good and some not so good (but all heartfelt) personal tributes to DFW on the front page of mcwseeneys:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/

Can't believe this!

The last thing I read by him was his intro to "The Best American Essays 2007" and it was just cracking good, for an editor intro.

and I feel incredibly sorry for the book designer who had to lay it out:

From what I'm told we tried and tried to get different color options to price out, but there was no practically satisfactory way. The whole book didn't need to be (and couldn't be) printed in color, only that section -- the color part could have been printed separately and inserted into the back of the book, but then it wouldn't be alongside the text. Etc. I guess there was a flurry of pros and cons and when it died down, what was left was the boxes-and-arrows method.

What if it had been in the middle of the book, like you see sometimes with a set of photo plates? Too expensive?

i don't suppose the michael joyce essay is online somewhere? i haven't found it yet and i want to send it to a friend.

Every time I translated one of his works, I sent him questions. He was reluctant to answer, he struggled with the answers, he kept saying that that particular story was impossible to translate in a decent and faithful way—this occasionally made me shed tears—and then he would write whole pages to explain a single word or phrase, and end up declaring his complete trust in my skills as a translator

i'd love to read some of those notes

Such terrible, sad sad news. I'm really shocked and upset to hear this. So very unexpected and a dreadful shame that he's died so young and in such a horrible way.

the uncollected dfw: http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/uncollected-dfw.html

John Ziegler, subject of of "Host," remembers: http://johnziegler.com/editorials_details.asp?editorial=165

If I ever meet him I swear to God I'll spit in his eye.

Fucking disgusting.

Without trying to sound flippant, did you expect him to raise three cheers?

Isn't that exactly what he's doing?

Poorly phrased, admittedly. Even so -- gotta say, his reaction doesn't surprise me at all.

Frankly I'm just shocked to see him speak quite that viciously of the recently deceased, his opinion of DFW notwithstanding. Then again, he notes with some glee on his front page that the editorial "is sure to be among the most controversial opinions on Wallace that you'll read" or somesuch similar garbage.

Not to mention, if you imagine the kindest possible treatment of Ziegler you'd get something very much like "Host" and he wants BEEF?

"He fooled the knobhead literary elites but he didn't fool ME" is obtuse and classless (which is to say: Ziegler). "He offed himself in a calculated move to ensure his literary reputation" is grounds for tar and feathers.

Frankly, if I don't get ripped by a right-wing talk radio personality days after my untimely death, I'm going to have to admit I didn't live up to my potential.

Ziegler's little spitty obit there has already gotten him more attention than he deserves, so let's be bigger and just stop discussing it.

i wonder if celebrity cruises inc. will issue a statement. or the illinois state fair.

Frankly, if I don't get ripped by a right-wing talk radio personality days after my untimely death, I'm going to have to admit I didn't live up to my potential.

lol. thank you for that.

"That last one’s of especial value, I think. As
exquisite verbal art, yes, but also as a model
for what free, informed adulthood might look
like in the context of Total Noise: not just
the intelligence to discern one’s own error or
stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb
it, and move on and out there from,
bravely, toward the next revealed error. This is
probably the sincerest, most biased account of
‘Best’ your Decider can give: these pieces are
models—not templates, but models—of ways
I wish I could think and live in what seems to
me this world."

i would read all this david foster wallace, why because he look interstin

weird - I have just learned that my DFW was in my dad's AA group

you had your own dfw?

unreleased, uncollected essay from the 1996 US Open

http://www.tennis.com/features/general/features.aspx?id=145230