david foster wallace: classic or dud

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.

Yeah man just start over - that's what I did

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

eyes not dead enough imo

blame the software's "dead eyes" slider.

maybe it's a sketch from prior to his video room anhedonia epiphany

That book is so quietly sinister, nobody ever talks about that

re: uncollected journalism etc: most of those pieces seem to be up at the howling fantods under less portentious titles

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/uncollected-dfw.html

their news page also mentions the paperback edition of the pale king will have four extra chapters, which led to my yelling 'oh come on fuck off' at the computer

also mentions the paperback edition of the pale king will have four extra chapters,

Ugh. Fuck Off.

i think there was some discussion elsewhere about how they were being billed as 'scenes' rather than chapters, maybe curtailing expectations of their length/importance, but yeah i mean i'd totally like to read them. i was trying to remember whether the most recent of the pieces that were extracted before its release in the nyer - about a kid-incarnation of one of the workers' toy truck - made it in, which i guess it did but i can't remember re-reading in there.

i don't think it was.

'scenes' just makes it even more annoyingly like a dvd release

are the constituent parts available in austin or does little, brown have them? how long are we looking at before someone can go in the archive and evaluate pietsch's choices?

afaik the deal was always going to be that the materials would be available upon release of the book, but yeah i've never heard anything about them. after that terrific awl piece on his various self-help books, the estate removed the relevant texts from the collection, which i totally understand & think is not any kind of fascistic censorship or anything, but which is a weird thing about the archives in general.

i have v good memories of the pale king, anyway. i have not read infinite jest.

bio out 8/30 -- http://www.amazon.com/Every-Love-Story-Ghost-Wallace/dp/0670025925/

Just started Infinite Jest, but I'm having a little trouble with the stilted prose ... reminds me of one of those science fiction authors who write like crap but are famed to have interesting ideas. Is it worth slogging through to get to the fabled good stuff?

Only you can answer that question. Slog on until it hurts to slog any further. If this isn't your time to enjoy it, come back to it and try again later in life.

I love it, like it's a rite of passage. I'll keep going since I've heard about this book for so long.