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.
― kinder, Sunday, 30 October 2011 20:42 (twelve years ago) link
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/413http://infinitesummer.org/archives/579etc.
― caek, Sunday, 30 October 2011 20:54 (twelve years ago) link
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1617032271/
― markers, Saturday, 19 November 2011 00:58 (twelve years ago) link
so theres one unpublished essay? honestly ill still prob buy it
― johnny crunch, Saturday, 19 November 2011 01:47 (twelve years ago) link
where u seein one unpublished essay?
― Mr. Que, Saturday, 19 November 2011 02:32 (twelve years ago) link
Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005,
i mean interview my bad
― johnny crunch, Saturday, 19 November 2011 02:37 (twelve years ago) link
YES
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/184708494X/
― markers, Thursday, 9 February 2012 17:34 (twelve years ago) link
man that is a horrible title
― Mr. Que, Thursday, 9 February 2012 17:44 (twelve years ago) link
srsly
― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Thursday, 9 February 2012 17:49 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― quick brown fox triangle (schlump), Thursday, 9 February 2012 18:09 (twelve years ago) link
oh poo. it's sentimental in this context but hardly horrible.
― all yoga attacks are fire based (rogermexico.), Thursday, 9 February 2012 18:30 (twelve years ago) link
i hate that section. "irrelevant" chris fogle turns a page etc.
― zverotic discourse (jim in glasgow), Thursday, 9 February 2012 18:34 (twelve years ago) link
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"
― the third kind of dubstep (Jordan), Thursday, 9 February 2012 18:37 (twelve years ago) link
he wrote this article on DFW for the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?printable=true
― Mr. Que, Thursday, 9 February 2012 19:09 (twelve years ago) link
also im not sure how interested i am in this book even ignoring the title
^^ agree
― all yoga attacks are fire based (rogermexico.), Friday, 10 February 2012 00:58 (twelve years ago) link
oooooh
http://www.thepointmag.com/2012/essays/coming-to-terms
― Mr. Que, Friday, 17 February 2012 16:21 (twelve years ago) link
Jerk friend thinks cool friend is jerk.
― getting good with gulags (beachville), Friday, 17 February 2012 16:31 (twelve years ago) link
frazen is just a dick
― dave coolier (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, 17 February 2012 16:46 (twelve years ago) link
this is not a very well-written essay so far
"Wallace’s lifelong battle with depression, culminating in his grizzly suicide"
― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Friday, 17 February 2012 16:50 (twelve years ago) link
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
― the "intenterface" (difficult listening hour), Friday, 17 February 2012 16:58 (twelve years ago) link
that is a pretty long essay just to point out that franzen is dick
― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Friday, 17 February 2012 17:04 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― john-claude van donne (schlump), Friday, 17 February 2012 17:12 (twelve years ago) link
suicide by bear
― Mr. Que, Friday, 17 February 2012 17:17 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Mr. Que, Friday, 17 February 2012 17:18 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― jaymc, Friday, 17 February 2012 17:20 (twelve years ago) link
(Presumably this has been noticed by others.)
haha yeah, there's been a whole media clusterfuck about it, pretty entertaining stuff
― CANDY aka JUNK (some dude), Friday, 17 February 2012 17:22 (twelve years ago) link
jaymc, this is a really good piece on the topic: http://nymag.com/print/?/arts/books/features/jeffrey-eugenides-2011-10/
― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Friday, 17 February 2012 17:22 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Spertify (CompuPost), Friday, 17 February 2012 18:18 (twelve years ago) link
xp Cool, that looks good. I'll check it out when I'm done with the novel.
― jaymc, Friday, 17 February 2012 18:28 (twelve years ago) link
which was. . .
― Mr. Que, Friday, 17 February 2012 18:30 (twelve years ago) link
don't leave us hanging
― CANDY aka JUNK (some dude), Friday, 17 February 2012 18:31 (twelve years ago) link
not really, but that would've been the worst possible title
excellent
― Mr. Que, Friday, 17 February 2012 18:52 (twelve years ago) link
1nfinite F1re :/
(Googleproofed since I was sworn to keep this dumb, insignificant tidbit secret)
― Spertify (CompuPost), Friday, 17 February 2012 19:02 (twelve years ago) link
still laughing at don't leave us hanging
― the "intenterface" (difficult listening hour), Friday, 17 February 2012 19:02 (twelve years ago) link
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
― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Friday, 17 February 2012 19:03 (twelve years ago) link
good title for an action movie tho xp
― johnny crunch, Friday, 17 February 2012 19:03 (twelve years ago) link
sorry
http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/861973297/untitled.JPG
Infinite Fire is a better title
― Mr. Que, Friday, 17 February 2012 19:53 (twelve years ago) link
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316182370/
― markers, Tuesday, 21 February 2012 01:39 (twelve years ago) link
^ !
― john. a resident of chicago., Tuesday, 21 February 2012 01:55 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― NO NUTRITIONAL CONTENT (kelpolaris), Tuesday, 21 February 2012 02:48 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, 21 February 2012 02:49 (twelve years ago) link
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.
― tinker tailor soldier sb (silby), Tuesday, 21 February 2012 03:51 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah man just start over - that's what I did
― Raymond Cummings, Tuesday, 21 February 2012 04:38 (twelve years ago) link
This is kinda neat - a police sketch of Hal Incandenza based on the description of him from the book:
http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzq65kd7hB1r3ke0zo1_500.jpg
― EZ Snappin, Tuesday, 21 February 2012 04:49 (twelve years ago) link
eyes not dead enough imo
― tinker tailor soldier sb (silby), Tuesday, 21 February 2012 04:50 (twelve years ago) link
blame the software's "dead eyes" slider.
― EZ Snappin, Tuesday, 21 February 2012 04:51 (twelve years ago) link