david foster wallace: classic or dud

IT IS EXECUTION

no, you're execution

the first google result for kronecker is his delta so eh. i don't know -- i wonder how many of the errors are outcomes of the book's conversational tone, & how many are ill-considered elisions, & how many are genuine boners. really i should just buy another copy, my friend who stole it has almost certainly lost it by now.

it's a weird thing about him how popular he is amongst people who don't read, really

the infinity book review in the notices of the ams was the first time i ever heard of DFW!

ij > oblivion > biwhm > gwch > tpk > bots

imo

lobster over fun thing, also imo

― strongo hulkington's ghost dad, Tuesday, August 23, 2011 10:20 PM (Yesterday)

i agree with this exactly, except i'd take fun thing over lobster

actually i'm not sure where i'd place TPK... parts of it are just as good as anything else, its just obviously very unfinished.

"i am told the authors of logicomix are jerks"

I don't know about jerks, but papa-D once wrote a softcore novel about alan turing with nirvana and rage against the machine lyrics spruced throughout.

I'm glad someone wrote a response: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/omer-rosen/david-foster-wallace_b_968257.html

Although I don't know if Newton would dispute that the DFW tropes/tics/tricks in question were both intentional and effective. Seemed like she was more concerned with DFW's pervasive influence, and I don't think the issues she's concerned with (bad blogging etc) can really be laid at his feet.

The idea that a particular author, however widely read and admired, could be responsible for the stylistic ugliness of thousands of bloggers is nonsense. DFW's style was not hatched up parthenogenically, it's a style that pre-existed him in a million mouths and thousands of writings, but it was never so well-honed or controlled for artistic purposes before he made it so. It is no surprise that a gaggle of semi-talented bloggers would fail to rise to his level, but he bears no blame for that.

The only point of this idiotic controversy is to stir up a fuss and beg for attention. As criticism of DFW it is valueless.

i was skimming that and i misread "free indirect discourse" as "free internet discourse"

wonder if i can use that somewhere

Free internet discourse always seems to have popup ads.

i was skimming this and then i saw this

Omer Rosen

Former derivatives banker, Freelance writer

and thought, wow they had to get some dude off the street to respond.

Reaching back, the psycho-kinetic redemption of rape victimhood in Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men became the grad-school Gossip Girl of John Krasinski's adaptation.

huh?

For example, to present Wallace as a 'stoned slacker' (to use Bill O'Reilly's terminology), at even the linguistic level, is a misreading.

why are we using Bill O'Reilly as an example of a dude who understands DFW?

or maybe i forgot all of Bill O'Reilly's contributions to the New York Review of Books--does someone have a link?

The overall point missing is how Wallace mastered the art of bridging academic sophistry with the innately human: e.g. combining a Wittgensteinian notion of addiction not existing beyond an addict's ability to articulate it with the more immediate philosophy of gotta-have-nonpresent-drugz-in-an-ever-fuckuppable-intensity.

huh?

He was, as appears to be the too-obvious definition that seems to cow reviewers by its obviousness, the true crafter of a postmodern 'sincerity' -- a seemingly impossible task in the wake of Pynchon and the psychosexual slapstick of characters like "Oedipa Maas" and "Tyrone Slothrop."

oh okay, so Pynchon wrote a bunch of psychosexual slapstick using characters with funny names and this caused every writer afterward to not be able to write sincere. Gotcha.

Granted, Rosen writes like crap and is not very cogent or incisive. (shrugs) The whole argument Newton started is stupid, so I suppose it acted a clarion call to others of the same quality of mind.

and yet her stupid argument was published in the New York Times and it took two dudes to write this for the Huffington Post.

The NYT is no pinnacle of intellectual excellence. For example, they also publish David Brooks and Tom Friedman.

i agree, both those dudes are odious, but that's guilt by association

I was under the impression you were casting a reflected glory on Newton's piece, by her association with the NYT. I was merely pointing out that the NYT's glory, such as it is, is not especially luminous.

I am willing to say her essay is not odious because of any association it may have with Brooks and Friedman, but it may be deemed so purely on merit.

I went to his office hours the next afternoon. When I apologized for the typos, he pointed at me and said, “Never fail to proofread something you turn in to me,” to which I nodded as convincingly as I could. He worried that he hadn’t gotten through to me, and, confused, he asked, “I mean, did you cry?” “Yes.” “Good. I would’ve cried.”

http://nplusonemag.com/king-of-the-ghosts

i am still reading this but:
it is hard to read one of these things, being at least a little conscious that it might be trampling into 'DFW STUDENT SPILLS BEANS' territory, without feeling a kneejerk probably unearned sensation of wanting to disagree with whatever the author's suggesting, on account of the article's poor etiquette.

the book/speech parts seem maybe ill-advised

tbf compared to what j. franzen got up to this week that's not really a thing

the book/speech parts seem maybe ill-advised

this feels unfairly brief, actually, because the guy is really engaging -- just that both in speculating on alternative courses of the guy's life & alternative endings for his novel he's obviously in a pretty weird area. some of the christian-stuff is interesting.

it does remind you of that idea of tutor-wallace raised by the student's marked-up essay paper, though, just a deeply responsible & engaged resource for young people.

& sure, xp, that seemed a weird thing to have been raised sorta unqualified

tbf compared to what j. franzen got up to this week that's not really a thing

― thomp, Sunday, October 9, 2011 12:20 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

??

he made a fairly forced segue from something he was asked about at the new yorker festival to imply that wallace's non-fiction pieces were dubious, ethically, in that they fudged the lines between 'non-fiction': specific assertion being made-up dialogue in the cruise ship piece

it's not a big deal anywhere outside of tumblr, really; it's just another annoying public development in franzen's continuing relationship with his friend's corpse

ah ok

man i just read "this is water" again and maybe i am just a big ol baby but it sorta felt like church

^ just read that this afternoon too (maybe to the end for the first time?). I miss DFW.

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/jeffrey-eugenides-2011-10/index3.html

cool article

Franzen's still a dick

http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-supposedly-true-thing-jonathan-franzen-said-about-david-foster-wallace#more

eh he's telling tales out of school but i mean they were friends at the time it was being written so i take it he has some inside knowledge and doesn't think he's sharing some dark secret to discredit the guy -- it's not like i ever imagined dude recording/transcribing real conversations verbatim for most of his essays

this is awesome.

I love him.

XD

my god i can't even begin to think what his more passive-aggressive moments are like

& so i'm about 250 pages into IJ after what seems like 3 weeks (!!!) and i love it to shit, but man is it laborious. i'm used to reading 1-3 books a week and having drawn all my attention this this is kinda excruciating, especially with the xtra-xtra-small font and the liberal paragraph breaks once every 43 pages. how long did it take other ilxians?

looking through the pages strongo just linked you should be grateful that the type in IJ isn't as ridiculoulsy tiny as his handwriting. he was a big guy, no? how could he even write that small?

the skull and bones omg

Took me 11 months. Finished it during a 7 hour bus ride.

over like a summer i think the 1st time i read it

I finished IJ in roughly six weeks, although I did not read every bit of the footnotes. I started it just before New Year's Day, so I had plenty of dark quite evening hours for reading. I finished it about a week into February.

<3 his american heritage ballot submissions. how does one get on the list?

the skull and bones omg

― occupy the A train (difficult listening hour), Friday, October 28, 2011 8:21 PM (15 minutes ago)

^^^ seriously

gratified to know even DFW memorized vocabulary words. need to get my own list up and running.

american heritage usage panel is mostly well-known writers and academics. they're listed at the front of the dictionary.

everybody stop looking at that flickr account before you get to the autopsy report. ugh.

cosign^^^

IJ took me fur years to read. I gave up on it about three times, maybe four. Yet something made me go back each time. I'm glad I read it but four years is completely ridiculous for one book.

*four

hfc! (holy fucking christ!)

half of it taking me such an incredibly long time is that i can never really start where my bookmark sits and remember exactly what's going on, necessitating a skimming of the previous page, then a full-on reading, then a backtrack 3 pages back, and then a sudden realization that i never actually absorbed any of this information in the first place

which makes it sound like DFW's writing causes ones mind to meander which - yeah - it does but never really warrants it. i thoroughly enjoy each page i have to regress upon... i just wish i wasn't always doing it.