david foster wallace: classic or dud

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

you had your own dfw?

I kept him in the garage next to my PKD replica

some interviews: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/david-foster-wallace

from the "supposedly fun thing" era interview: "i am in cold turkey from footnotes. i am not doing them anymore."

"people who think they're very bright are a--...buttholes."

The Wall Street Journal is running an adapted version of the Kenyon commencement speech under the title "David Foster Wallace on Life and Work":

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

From the 1996 KCRW interview:

"When I was in my 20s - deep down underneath all the bullshit - what I really believed was that the point of all fiction was to show that the writer was really smart."

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nascar_cancels_remainder_of_season

Apparently, his first fiction piece for a major magazine was for Playboy in 1988, republished here.

I'd like to think DFW would have enjoyed that Onion piece.

Here's another one that I don't remember seeing at the time. Pretty funny:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769