david foster wallace: classic or dud

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

Responding to Dan Savage's It Gets Better campaign, aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT youth, Ellis tweeted "Not to bum everyone out, but can we get a reality check here? It gets worse."

did dfw ever zing another author/critic?

yup: http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/observer1.html

I haven't heard anything this alienating in years

yeah but you are in favor of all beef. you are just a beef junkie.

whoops wrong c/p that was to whiney's "those tweets are baller"

did dfw ever zing another author/critic?

Also Kathy Acker (in a review) and Mark Leyner (in "E Unibus Pluram" and in person on Charlie Rose IIRC)

lol I have read very little DFW, just some essays, but he hates a lot of the same people I hate

I'm expecting BEE to retract the comments later today with his usual 'lol insomnia + adderall' get out clause tbh.

Maria Bustillos @mariabustillos
He thought so too MT‏ @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.

http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/71036_46895370925_7187062_n.jpg

Dale Peck's essay on DFW, not to far from Ellis's, has a lot of points I agree with.

would honestly rather reread glamorama than broom of the system.

Even as a huge DFW fan, I agree with this because Glamorama is the better (or at least more entertaining) of the two. That said, Ben Stiller never had to settle out of court for coming up with the same story idea as DFW, so I think those Ellis tweets reveal some literary sour grapes.

xpost - That said, his tweets have as much projection in them as the average blurb. (Would be easy for Ellis to describe himself with all of those tweets, on a bad day.)

BEE is a troll

BEE sounds so painfully just not very smart in those tweets. I mean those zings pretty much SUCK.

I mean you are a PROFESSIONAL WRITER, dude, and you can't even come up with anything better to sling than poorly expressed cliches

BEE sounds so painfully just not very smart in those tweets. I mean those zings pretty much SUCK.

according to prof. whiney they don't suck...because they are zings

but yeah OTM. dude has no insight or critique, just take shots at the more successful dead guy. what a hack

as for the dt max excerpt, yeah, something rings false and hollow about it, like the dude is just trying to write the All American Story instead of DFW's story.

I h8 BEE

I don't really like DFW but BEE writes stuff for stunted americans imo

(I haven't read any tho)

I'm a bigger fan of Ellis (at least if we quantify it in terms of #s of books read) than Wallace, and/but I'm curious about the "more successful" thing. Has Infinite Jest (cause let's be honest it towers over everything else DFW released, in terms of public awareness beyond lit circles) really outsold the combo of Less Than Zero and American Psycho? I mean, if we're talking about generating-income-from-one's-writing, I think Ellis wins; he's never had to take a teaching job, has probably spent a significant portion of the last few decades living off royalties from adapted screenplays, etc. Of course, if "more successful" takes into account critical love and lit-circle sainthood, then yeah, DFW stomps him into the dirt.

I mean you are a PROFESSIONAL WRITER, dude, and you can't even come up with anything better to sling than poorly expressed cliches

― look at this quarterstaff (Hurting 2), Thursday, September 6, 2012 11:42 AM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah there have been so many pointed and stinging critiques of the guy's writing at this point that just repeating the word "pretentious" is so toothless

xxpost

Not unlike John Grisham's ribald space operas for stunted Americans. At least that's what I assume he writes, based solely on having seen one of his books misshelved in the erotic sci-fi section that one time.

btw the thing I like most about dfw is this part of some article I read once where a fawning interviewer is just so crushed, just seemingly almost in tears because he walks into a room to interview dfw and the dude is sitting on a couch eating kfc and watching the x files