david foster wallace: classic or dud

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

oh fuck yeah don gately!!

yeah any complaint about IJ being an insular whine about the woes of being white and overeducated kinda runs aground on don gately, THE NOVEL'S FUCKING PROTAGONIST

http://ostap.livejournal.com/799511.html

reading Consider the Lobster for the first time. book review of the usage dictionary is dense but interesting. I'm excited to get to Host which people seem to love but I never tracked down the magazine when it came out. (I remember reading something about how hard it was to translate the mag layout into paperback ... it looks bonkers.)

been thinking about it more, and i still think the ending of Infinite Jest is flawed. not that i expected some big "The End" nicely wrapped up ending but overall it just felt like the book...runs out of pages

still loved (almost) every page

yeah I found it a little maddening tbh.

the ending

because the ending is near the beginning?

thankig u for that like, caek

y'all see this weirdnesss?
http://pooryorickentertainment.tumblr.com/
someone making posters for all of James O. Incandenza's movies. some are fun.

because the ending is near the beginning?

― hardcore oatmeal (Jordan), Monday, June 13, 2011 3:43 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i mean i know there's that thing, what is that even on page 28 or something? but that doesn't really do it for me.

there was actually another ref to that scene later in the book too that i hadn't noticed before.

i feel like the pale king works in a similar way ending-wise. everything is set in motion so that you can figure out, or at least easily imagine, how it all shakes out.

from the livejournal link above:

Or we may very well end up here with a form of fascism.

such eerie prescience regarding our new fasco-communistic overlords

i think he just had a real hatred -- okay, or "complex relationship" -- with endings. i can't think of a single story of his that ends in anything like a traditional fashion, and most of them are outright reader-expectation titty-twisters. there's sometimes (often?) a clue in the body of the text that tells you how things ended (or continued after the last page) but this goes right back to [SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT] [though "spoiling the ending" of a dfw story is kinda not the point/at all important] cutting the last sentence off mid-stream in "broom of the system," telling you what happened in "little expressionless animals" via fake newspaper clippings strewn early-on throughout the story while denying you the actual jeopardy showdown, "girl with curious hair" ending on "and this is what i did." it all kinda reached an outright cruel totally-fucking-with-you stage by the "oblivion" stories: "mr. squishy" is this incredibly dense thriller-like build-up to absolutely nothing, the completely unexpected mid-story shift in "the soul is not a smithy," "good old neon" seemingly leading to the great cosmic revelation of what happens when you die slam-cutting into the fact that this is all just dfw's own projection, "the suffering channel" again building through incredibly dense accumulation of fact into nothing except the clue of what happens to the characters after the last page is that for all their intense machinations they *all die in freaking 9/11*. obviously dude had all sorts of justifications for working this way, but sometimes i think he just had a real horror of wrapping things up because of the "everything is too complex to ever be 'wrapped up' in life" argument.

oh man, during that huge drinion/rand conversation setpiece near the end of 'the pale king' [SPOILERS ETC], i thought there were serious echoes of the last interview in BIwHM. except, where that chapter brought some measure of resolution (at least thematically, iirc), this time things get more and more intense to the point of one of the participants literally levitating off of his chair...only to slam into "so, that's how i met him."

haha yeah i remembered the "drinion levitates" thing from the d.t. max ny'er article and so the whole time i'm expecting some hilarious leonard stecyk style set-piece and then we get there and it's like "oh, well, yeah, of course it would just be one element in a data-flood."

and there's that telling note in pietsch's section in the back about how dfw intended (at least at some point) for the novel to be a series of setups, without anything actually happening (explicitly, anyway).

Maud Newton OTM

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/another-thing-to-sort-of-pin-on-david-foster-wallace.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

about what?

Of course, Wallace’s slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, “catching, highly infectious.” And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I’m-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.

This, for starters.