david foster wallace: classic or dud

^ 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.

I don't remember how long it took me. Several months. There was some period of weeks where I put it down and read something else and then went back to it. Just needed the break.

Also, 2 months here. One of the most engaging books I've read – I just want to put in a "you should read this, it's not that hard" vote.

i've read it at different rates. first time in college (maybe two or three years after it was first released, after i'd been turned onto him via the release of supposedly fun thing) was a bit of a slogging-it-out deal, and so when i finished it my reaction was somewhere between awe (what the hell was that?) and resentment (that's it?). (in my defense i was like 20 or 21 and hadn't exactly delved into world literature yet. unresolved narratives were still something of a shock/let-down.) second time i read it in like two or three weeks, but i was unemployed, snowed-in for large chunks of the time, and hardly doing anything else all day. third time took about two and a half months, where i struggled through the all the bits everyone usually struggles through and sprinted through the last 1/4th or so (the don g epiphanies) in a couple days.

it all kind depends on a.) your available free time and b.) the mindset you bring to it. like any long, involved novel, really.

i read it in about two or three weeks while travelling in SEA. my memory of the time is odd, because you would think i'd associate IJ with SEA, but they're two very distinct places in my memory that for some reason don't get tangled. i had just started to reread it when he killed himself and i had to put it down. then i read everything else he wrote and still haven't gotten around to rereading IJ.

I read IJ in a week after work when it first came out. I was also taking a fair amount of drugs at the time (and no, not of the kind that would assist deep reading). I should probably reread it.

Took about 3 weeks to read it. I probably enjoyed it more than anything else ive read. Which I suppose is high praise.

Reading it right now. I'm only on like p300 and this:

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

is totally OTM. I actually stayed up til about 2am last night re-skimming the whole damn thing and realised who a few of the characters were. Footnotes are a pain in the ass.

on a practical level, i found the ~70 page summaries at infinite summer very useful for the first few hundred pages

http://infinitesummer.org/archives/413
http://infinitesummer.org/archives/579
etc.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617032271/

so theres one unpublished essay? honestly ill still prob buy it

where u seein one unpublished essay?

Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005,

i mean interview my bad

YES

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/184708494X/

man that is a horrible title

srsly

Most intruiging aspect of the title? The line, "Every love story is a ghost story." can be found in §25 of The Pale King - one of my favourite sections - and in the story Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

oh poo. it's sentimental in this context but hardly horrible.

i hate that section. "irrelevant" chris fogle turns a page etc.

it's extremely sentimental in this context.

also im not sure how interested i am in this book even ignoring the title, and i love dfw.

who is "d.t. max"

he wrote this article on DFW for the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?printable=true

also im not sure how interested i am in this book even ignoring the title

^^ agree

oooooh

http://www.thepointmag.com/2012/essays/coming-to-terms

Jerk friend thinks cool friend is jerk.

frazen is just a dick

this is not a very well-written essay so far

"Wallace’s lifelong battle with depression, culminating in his grizzly suicide"

yeah that was lol but i liked the second half of the essay for saying most of the things i'd said at it during the first half, including

What is the most real thing? This is the question that artists like Wallace want to use their fiction to investigate, and which the realist so often behaves as if he has already answered.

which is pretty key regarding a guy who thinks that the problem with america is ebooks