david foster wallace: classic or dud

SUBHEADINGS IN BOLD WITH LONGER AND MORE QUALIFIED NAMES THAN YOU'D EXPECT FROM SOMETHING AS SERIOUS AS A SUBHEADINGϕ

ϕI should point out here that, while long-winded and carefully hedged headings, sub- or just plain-, are considered "bad form" by professional and amateur stylists alike, it is sometimes necessary to establish for the reader that what follows, the discussion that has been announced, is going to be tricky and, well, thorough-goingly difficult to unpack.

<3 gbx

no schlump, that's a good clarification, just, yeah, i didn't "engage" with the fiction on any kind of "level."

no schlump, that's a good clarification, just, yeah, i didn't "engage" with the fiction on any kind of "level."

i totally finished this and was all NOW I MUST READ INFINITE JEST!, so strongly had i regularly connected with passages from tpk, and instead i am just really having to push myself to get through sabato's 140pp the tunnel & comparably slim volumes. just felt like - kinda not too tenuously tying in with the quote from the awl article upthread, about trying to feel other people + get their worlds - the little forays you got into peoples' minds were just so compelling. the final triumph of steyck, as a boy, and the panoramic shift to a soldier remembering that moment; or the sunlit space-between-the-two-people in the first lane dean chapter, all rich with every feeling that was in the air. aw damn yeah i don't know i just dug it, i'm curious to read IJ (at some point in the next 20 years) to see how that makes me feel about it, whether one preps, doesn't prep or unhelpfully prepares me for the other.

How is the The Tunnel, btw?

oh yeah, good. good. i'm terrible, it's an eminently readable epistolary thing you could sit down & read front to back in two hours, & somehow i'm managing to stretch it out to months. like v v readable, even on the bus or whatever. but good, yeah -- it's funny, like it so weirdly fits with books of that era in being this very strong, straight, ott narrator narrative, bold the way in praise of older women is but more so, & the tone is like camus writing notes from underground, stark and moral.

have got waylaid and just started a james salter book (bc more sex), so, check in with me in one calendar year for my actual verdict.

So do people generally agree with the article's collapsing of mock-DFW "sort of enraged" stylings with the 'oh hi'/'Gawker house style' thing? Because I basically 100% think of the latter as "Sady Doyle and people who write like Sady Doyle" - I came down with the 'kind of like' style pretty hard after reading IJ, but the second not at all.

i don't know if i read it as 'gawker house style' so much as 'people who have tumblrs'?

i thought it was more effective in looking at the endearing/disarming psychology of colloquial wallacisms than it was convincing us of how far that has all traveled, or attaching a chronology to wallace being the person who invented a thing and then the thing he invented diffusing outwards. like:

Never before had “folks” been used so relentlessly and enthusiastically as a term of general address outside church suppers, chain restaurants and family reunions. It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread.

i am maybe projecting, but i couldn't help but read this as being, 'he introduced 'folks' as a playing-field levelling term of address', & how widely that spread, to politics. though maybe obama's cloying use of the term is just particularly pronounced on here rather than seen as a wide phenomenon in itself. the tumblr/gawker thing - i don't know, it almost feels like outside of the argument of, do we use those terms to soften up our audience?, is irrelevant in a lot of arenas where you're just using language to be as communicative & as expressive as is possible with strangers - to give yourself a contemporary human voice in text. so perhaps that style has proliferated but not necessarily with an agenda as baggage.

“Oh, hi,” people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.

do people actually do this, and if so, are we sure they're not usually referencing The Room?

from an n+1 piece on oblivion

"To judge by “Octet” and “Good Old Neon,” two of the best Wallace stories of recent years, he seems increasingly eager to tear down the fourth wall—or, as the narrator of “Octet” calls it, to “palpate” the reader directly—by introducing an authorial presence into the midst of his fiction: David Foster Wallace is speaking to you, and here is why. Fourth-wall-breaking constitutes a central technique for the metafictionists with whom Wallace has so often been grouped. But while the means are similar, Wallace pursues them to different ends. He has no interest in highlighting the artificiality of his art, which is and should be self-evident, but rather in communicating thought and feeling as directly as possible without shirking their complexity. The metafictionist’s tools have become part of his standard arsenal, to be used to supplement his talent for self-effacing storytelling and otherwise set aside. Wallace’s goal, finally, is to grant us complete access to his characters’ inner lives, while reminding us that such access must always be incomplete. It’s a brave and paradoxical task worthy of his full attention, and ours."

did you read it strongo? I was not impressed. it kinda bummed me out.

― Mr. Que, Friday, August 19, 2011

i did. took me forever to finish. not because i wasn't enjoying it, though some parts did fall flat for me. the fake memoir bits, with all the footnotes and recursion and endless meta-commentary-on-meta-commentary stuff, were just excruciating. they reminded me of that line in the updike takedown: "they seem less like david foster wallace than someone doing a mean parody of david foster wallace." they were so excruciating i actually started to wonder if that wasn't the point, especially since they came after chris fogle stuff, i.e. the most sincere and earnest stuff, like here is dfw poking fun at his most famous mode because it is tricksy and artificial and false whereas the fogle stuff is transparent and heartfelt and moving. even if that was the intent, it didn't make any more fun to read.

some of it just seemed like him trying on the voices of various influences/interests to see how they fit or just to play around. (mccarthy in the trailer park stuff, gaddis and barthelme in the videotaped interviews stuff and all the untagged dialogue.) and the rand/drinion showdown felt like it was building to some kind of emotional climax and then just fizzled. (it was like a deflated version of biwhm no. 6, the hippie girl rape one.)

but there's also some stuff in there that i think is among the best writing, strictly from a prose standpoint, he's ever done. (i'm one of those rare weirdos who thinks oblivion is among his best work and was looking forward to where, if anywhere, he might take that direction.) and there are some bits that i think would have made killer short stories. (the pacing of the leonard stecyk chapters is kind of amazing in how the character unexpectedly morphs from what seems like an out-of-character straight cruel joke on dfw's part to something moreso.)

Yeah, the fake memoir parts were really off-putting, every time i got to it i was like "really dude? you thought this was a good idea?" But overall I liked TPK way more than I expected to (since I wasn't really on board with Oblivion and Brief Interviews). Knowing it wasn't 'complete' kind of freed me up to just enjoy that handful of really meaty, engrossing chapters more as things unto themselves.

y'know the more i think about that NYT screed, the more dumb it seems. "you know, my problem with this revered novelist is that he made BLOGS worse." like those blogs would be so well written if not for him.

I don't think she's worried so much about the quality of the writing as much as she's worried about people hedging on their opinions, being squirrely, trying really hard to be likeable, and not being direct, instead of making a persuasive stand.

the more i think about that NYT screed, the more dumb it seems

yeah she shoulda softened it up a lil

i felt the same way about the memoir bits: my heart sank.

they read like an obsessive-compulsive dave eggers.

'm one of those rare weirdos who thinks oblivion is among his best work and was looking forward to where, if anywhere, he might take that direction.

agreed. i think mr. squishy is among his best stuff, especially the way something big is about to happen, but never actually does. from what i've read about the pale king, he was hoping for something similar--i think he even mentioned as much in the notes to the book. but yeah, i think that book is his best collection of stories.

one wonders whether those were found integrated with the rest of the novel, actually; whether it's an artifact of the editing process that those sections show up like they're part of the same draft, the same angle of attack as the rest of the stuff in the book

like i can't remember whether 'David Wallace' shows up in the non-memoir segments, actually. maybe he did.

i think he might Turn A Page but maybe not.

especially the way something big is about to happen,

the way he builds the tension in this story should be taught in classrooms, and he has enough interesting things going on in the story to hold the reader's interest. whereas the pale king has lots of tension, but not much of interest (for me at least) going on in the background.

but there's also some stuff in there that i think is among the best writing, strictly from a prose standpoint, he's ever done.

yeah, totally! i forgot about this point, though, because the last half of the book was such a drag.

I'm in the homestretch of Infinite Jest as we speak, my first real attempt at DFW beyond a couple of his essays. I'm back to really enjoying it again, after a period of really hating the slog for a couple hundred pages or so. I'm afraid its not ultimately not going to be fulfilling, but there were enough entertaining moments that I won't regret reading it. I like how detailed he's made this world and I think I had as much fun reading some of the tangents as DFW must have had writing them, like Himself's filmography and Gately's back-story.

the filmography has all these nifty little compressed short stories. really like the giant eyeball one.

may have said this before but the moment the book finally locks in for me is the scene where gately is parking cars. i read that scene in a sweat and the rest of the book in a rush.

(granted that's on like page 700 or something)

Yeah, I think that is right around the time where I snapped out of the funk of reading just to read it and really felt connected with it again.

so should I read IJ or TPK first? nb I have IJ on kindle and TPK in hardcover. also I am in champaign/urbana.

i vote for IJ

When I was flicking back and forth between the footnotes and the main text in IJ, I was so thrilled to have it on my Nook and not trying to lug it around.

I'm weirdly jealous of you being in Champaign/Urbana. Going through one of my random nostalgiac phases for that area.

oh god

I don't know, it sounds like the potential to be awful is sky high, but there's a small part of me that thinks of visualization of Estachon could be pretty cool.

watching it with the sound off is probably the best way to watch it

also it's supposed to be snowing

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/174/380313196_ae45c9463b_o.jpg

I was at least hoping to see Otis P. Lord's head get stuck in the computer!

yeah, i was kind of disappointed when they wheeled on the flatscreen

yeah ending really fizzled.

that was one twee-ass game of eschaton.

uh

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/an-imagined-gchat-between-david-foster-wallace-and-cormac-mccarthy-on-a-recent-party-they-both-attended/

. . .

i think that guy is a tao lin flunky

eschaton is one of my least-favorite parts of IJ

ha i was just thinking i should reread IJ on the kindle and then realized what a mess it would be due to the kindle's inability to handle footnotes.

Are footnotes a pain on the Kindle? When I was test-driving a Kindle that was one feature I never tried out, they are a breeze with the Nook.

Well world, you have successfully ruined every aspect of DFW for me forever, I hope you're fucking happy.

I mean, he's basically the literary equiv. of a Wes Anderson movie, right?

eschaton is one of my least-favorite parts of IJ
yeah, i agree, i found it pretty tedious. loved most of IJ though.
as for ruining every aspect of DFW, yes, I find that it's better if I don't read people's IMPORTANT OPINIONS about his stuff.

ugh, sorry, it's just, I just, that decemberists video, I can't

the way he builds the tension in this story should be taught in classrooms

this, absolutely. the whole thing is so obscenely dense with that kind of dry technicalese/marketing speak that it should deflate the momentum of the narrative but somehow it makes it even more tense. he's the only guy i know who could fill made-up sales reports for a fake cupcake company with the same dread as a horror movie.

que, did you happen to read that looooooooooong essay/appreciation of "mr. squishy" blake butler did on htmlg a while back? (i thought i remembered you positively mentioning scorch atlas on that old "why kant shakey mo read" thread.) apparently there were supposed to be more "elizabeth klemm" stories in the manner of "mr. squishy." i kinda wish he'd pursued that instead of tpk sometimes.

Finished Infinite Jest on the train this morning, absolutely loved it. I know I mentioned it being a slog at one point, still a valid criticism, but the entertainment I got from the other 7/8ths of it more than made up for it. What should I read next?

all the essays except for "greatly exaggerated", then oblivion.

if you get bored amidst the tv essay just drop it.