david foster wallace: classic or dud

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

that is a pretty long essay just to point out that franzen is dick

thanks for that, que. just reading through, i'm remembering how much less offensive i seemed to find farther away than some people, here. & i think the story about signing a book with a drawing of his penis is being misconstrued as some sort of weird graffiti rather than self-deprecatingly juvenile taunt.

suicide by bear

yeah i don't think the essay was well written but in parts it made some excellent points about what kind of writers those two are and the differences between them.

I just started The Marriage Plot and there is a character in there who is interested in philosophy, wears a bandana and ponytail, and chews tobacco.

(Presumably this has been noticed by others.)

haha yeah, there's been a whole media clusterfuck about it, pretty entertaining stuff

jaymc, this is a really good piece on the topic: http://nymag.com/print/?/arts/books/features/jeffrey-eugenides-2011-10/

man that is a horrible title

Should be noted that this title is 10X better than the title Max had originally attached to the book, which must've been murdered during the later editing rounds.

xp Cool, that looks good. I'll check it out when I'm done with the novel.

Should be noted that this title is 10X better than the title Max had originally attached to the book, which must've been murdered during the later editing rounds.

which was. . .

don't leave us hanging

not really, but that would've been the worst possible title

excellent

which was. . .

1nfinite F1re :/

(Googleproofed since I was sworn to keep this dumb, insignificant tidbit secret)

still laughing at don't leave us hanging

http://www.google.com/imgres%3Fum%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial%26biw%3D1680%26bih%3D850%26tbm%3Disch%26tbnid%3DEFYXUAZGGkQaBM%3A%26imgrefurl%3Dhttp%3A//twitter.com/infinitefires%26docid%3DxsMUvaRAAop1tM%26imgurl%3Dhttp%3A//a0.twimg.com/profile_images/861973297/untitled.JPG%26w%3D500%26h%3D375%26ei%3DYqQ-T7e3A83TgQfKrLWxCA%26zoom%3D1

good title for an action movie tho xp

sorry

http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/861973297/untitled.JPG

Infinite Fire is a better title

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316182370/

^ !

yeesh i've taken 4 months break from IJ and not sure i can get back into it

and i was like 400 pages in! there's no way i can just negate all that and start all over again this summer. entertaining but fucking brutal book.

it took me a year to get around to reading _the pale king_ but i'm doing it now and it makes me feel i was wasting time reading other novels.

xp you can get back into it. I spent 11 months finishing it in spurts, my longest break may have approached that long. You're not going to build a totally coherent map of the plot on one readthrough and it's not even that important to enjoying the novel. It's super impressionistic, so just pick up where you were and remember that confusion is part of the intended effect.