david foster wallace: classic or dud

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.

For me, the "stilted" aspect of Wallace's writing is a reflection of the way he actually talks. I read IJ shortly after it came out, but never heard him speak until about 10 years later. His voice and cadences and speech patterns were exactly as I had always imagined his narrative voice in my head. For me, it was a voice of measured intellectual analytical detachment or whatever, but with a sense of genuine love and concern for his audience. I don't know if it's because his writing reminded me of someone who I heard those traits in or what.

That's interesting... I guess I'm getting a smart guy on sleeping pills kinda vibe. The hype's the problem, I guess ... I'm coming in after hearing how DFW is a genius, so I'm expecting a writer who bested Joyce, Pynchon, Bellow, etc, who I personally think of as genius writers and aren't really referred to like that. Will continue.

DFW was a smart guy on first-generation antidepressants so you might not be far off.

I always wondered to what extent I love DFW's writing because it reads so much like a textual translation of how my brain works (although a far more successful translation than any similar attempt I've ever made) versus the extent to which he's just really good at textually replicating the way the human brain works in general.

W/r/t (ha) his writing replicating his own speech patterns, that seems pretty spot on. Reading Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, I was struck by how similar it was to his written work.

i have never found dfw stilted particularly, i find infinite jest a pleasure to read on a sentence by sentence basis, my only issue with it, and it's not a huge one, is that he just writes too much about everything. literary horror vacui.

wait in what universe is it that Joyce pynchon and bellows are not considered geniuses?

Eh, I misspoke. Disappointed I wasn't immediately blown away by his writing like I was those other authors, but I'm enjoying it a little more. Argument's really beside the point.

yeah, i'd just give it some time, it took me a little bit to shift my interpretation of his style from showy to generously precise.

I had read a lot of Wallace's other work when I first started reading IJ, but I still found the first 100 pages or so a bit of a slog. Stick to it, it's worth it imo.

http://www.infiniteboston.com/

Someone just reminded me that Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story comes out this week.

this seems a little cheesy

http://www.themillions.com/2012/08/excerpt-the-opening-paragraphs-of-d-t-maxs-every-love-story-is-a-ghost-story-a-life-of-david-foster-wallace.html

Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s. He was born in Ithaca, New York, on February 21, 1962. His father, James, was a graduate student in philosophy at Cornell, from a family of professionals. David’s mother, Sally Foster, came from a more rural background, with family in Maine and New Brunswick, her father a potato farmer. Her grandfather was a Baptist minister who taught her to read with the Bible. She had gotten a scholarship to a boarding school and from there gone to Mount Holyoke College to study English. She became the student body president and the first member of her family to get a bachelor’s degree.

whatever, i'm still gonna read it

little ghoulish imo

it's a lot ghoulish; i'm still gonna read it

/:

"Ghoulish" how? Too soon, too cheesy, or?

Finished it earlier tonight.

:((((

No surprise ending I guess :(

No, clever person, there isn't, but there is a lot that surprised me in the material that precedes the last page, along the lines of "how did this dude make it to even 46 in one piece."

OOOF, Bret Easton Ellis is going in HARD on DFW on Twitter today:

Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis
Reading D.T. Max's bio of DFW and OMG is the solemnity of the David Foster Wallace myth on a purely literary level borderline sickening...

Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis
Anyone who finds David Foster Wallace a literary genius has got to be included in the Literary Doucebag-Fools Pantheon...

Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis
David Foster Wallace carried around a literary pretentiousness that made me embarrassed to have any kind of ties to the publishing scene...

Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis
Saint David Foster Wallace: a generation trying to read him feels smart about themselves which is part of the whole bullshit package. Fools.

Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis
Reading D.T. Max's bio I continue to find David Foster Wallace the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation...

Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis
David Foster Wallace was so needy, so conservative, so in need of fans--that I find the halo of sentimentality surrounding him embarrassing.

Bret Easton Ellis ‏@BretEastonEllis
DFW is the best example of a contemporary male writer lusting for a kind of awful greatness that he simply wasn't able to achieve. A fraud.

christ... pot kettle black I'd say...

As much as I admire his writing, Ellis does come across as a rather arrogant, obnoxious person all too often. I pay no heed to anything he says on twitter any more, so even this doesn't upset/offend/dismay/surprise me at all, despite my love for DFW.

Bret Easton Ellis can eat a bag of cocks imo

yeah, fuck that guy

Class act all the way.

Wallace was dissing Ellis in public as far back as the early 1990s, but his disses were better.

It panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.

lol Ellis is one of the worst writers ever but he makes money at it & it drives him nuts that the best he's gonna get is some people buy into his schtick

wallace's highs were pretty high (and in essays rather than fiction) but i dunno if his overall level of readability (in terms of like ratio of good page:awful page) is much better than ellis'. would honestly rather reread glamorama than broom of the system.

this is not to say that ellis is not terrible at being human and should stfu on twitter but that statement can be applied to basically everyone on earth.

God, I never made it through Broom and wouldn't really consider it representative of his work.

I love DFW, but those tweets are baller

yeah, it's like an old school vidal-capote-mailer literary beef, shame DFW can't bite back

v troll-y imo