david foster wallace: classic or dud

When Wallace called Krasinski in 2005 to give the film its blessing he asked about the changes. "He said, 'What's it scripted around?' " Krasinski recalled to the L.A. Times. "I said, 'A woman doing her dissertation around feminism looking into the role of the modern man in the post-feminist era.' There was a silence. And he said, 'I never figured out how to do that, how to make them all relate together. That sounds awesome.' It was probably one of the greatest days of my life!"

hmmm (i still haven't read BIwHM, but it's on my shelf)

they're pretty great

for the dfw stans:

http://machines.pomona.edu/166-2009/

tho blog entries from undergrads are pretty hit or miss

http://machines.pomona.edu/166-2009/files/2009/01/cropped-img_0129.jpg

It's good to see they managed to compress Infinite Jest into that cm thick edition on the left there!

I'd love to sit in on that class. Although I have a professor right now who went to Amherst College (and also is seemingly infatuated with the Oxford English Dictionary), and I'm dying to ask her if she ever encountered him.

i think that'a a reader's guide of the IJ, not the actual book

It was a joke.

it's impressive that they're having that class this semester. fitzpatrick seemed like a pretty awesome professor, so i'm glad she's the one doing it.

http://sonorareview.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/dfw-tribute-issue-pre-order/

"Including an uncollected story, Solomon Silverfish, and essays and
reflections from Sven Birkerts, Michael Sheehan interviewing Tom
Bissell, Charles Bock, Marshall Boswell, Greg Carlisle, Jonathan
Franzen, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Glenn Kenny, Lee Martin, Michael
Martone, Rick Moody interviewing Michael Pietsch, and art and prose
from Karen Green."

Not to mention interviews with Marilynne Robinson and Junot Diaz. I wish I weren't broke.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309fi_fiction_wallace?currentPage=all

also from the link above:

a third novel, which he never finished—the “Long Thing,” as he referred to it with Michael Pietsch. His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration.

When Wallace was twelve, he was one of two winners of a local poetry contest. “Did you know that rats breed there? / That garbage is their favorite lair,”

I cannot stop being sad about this and the more I know the worse it gets and it isn't like I was even a big fan of his writing. Just a big fan of who he seemed to be as a person.

what that article really makes clear is how little distance there really was between who he was on the page and in life. all of those philosophical/existential dilemmas weren't just abstract questions for him, they were really major challenges about how to live. in a way it means his failure (what he perceived as his failure) to resolve all that in his writing made it hard for him to see any way forward outside his writing -- it was all the same question. but if you look at how clear and visible and vivid he made that struggle in everything he wrote, i think he really actually succeeded at what he thought he failed at -- conveying "the fucking human being" behind the art. reading that article, to me, the surprise isn't what was hidden about his life but how much and apparently how thoroughly you can know him as a person through his writing. i wish he could've understood that.

yeah i got sad all over again when i read that article. especially where it talks about how supportive he was of his students, particularly those who were troubled by depression and anxiety.

xpost. that is very OTM, tipsy.

re. tipsy mothra's post, i re-read "Octet" last week and it's all laid out pretty clearly in those 25 pages.

"Pop Quiz 9

You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer."

I cannot stop being sad about this and the more I know the worse it gets and it isn't like I was even a big fan of his writing. Just a big fan of who he seemed to be as a person.

― Whiney G. Weingarten (J0hn D.), Sunday, March 1, 2009 11:28 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah. i've been surprised by how sad his death made me because his fiction especially is not my cup of tea, but i really did feel like i knew him from reading his writing.

In a way - this sounds weird, but reading about what he wanted to do fills me with a sort of hope or even joy, because if what he believed was that "Good writing should help readers to 'become less alone inside,'" well, that is what his writing does, for me? His books make me think about what it is to be a fucking human being, about the importance of the struggle to be decent to one another. So like tipsy mothra, I wish that he could have understood that he was succeeding (with this reader, at least); but I'm also just happy that he succeeded, even if he never knew it. I'm so happy that he managed to write what he wrote. That the aim to "make living people feel stuff" was realised.

xpost to one of the things above.
Reading him I'd always thought, "He must be using some sort of authorial persona in his work as that just couldn't possibly be the guy who is actally writing this amazing stuff. If he was, how could he possibly get anything done?"

And now it turns out he was that guy; which is both terribly sad and utterly flabbergasting. I mean, how can someone with all those profound issues about self-image be so nakedly honest about them in such a public forum as print? I've often said that I keep my neuroses out in public where everyone can see them, mainly so I can keep an eye on the buggers to see if they start multiplying, but that really doesn't compare to what Wallace was doing with his personal demons. I'm even more impressed with him now, simply for being the person he was, than I was with him as a writer (which is saying a lot)

a good interview that i hadnt read before - http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfwstuff/Whiskey%20Island%20DFW%20Interview%20Looking%20for%20a%20Garde%20of%20Which%20to%20be%20Avant.pdf

this is almost too good to be true:

They fell in love. Wallace put a strikeout through Mary’s name on his tattoo and an asterisk under the heart; farther down he added another asterisk and Karen’s name, turning his arm into a living footnote.

i know!!

feeling some kind of combination of excited and horrified at the news that his uncompleted final novel is being published

2x.

jesus, that new yorker piece is just heartbreaking.

I am really against publishing stuff a writer didn't have the final say-so on, I think it should all be consigned to the furnace but that's me

i totally agree...but i still want to read it. i think.

I can get pretty heated about this question so I'm just gonna STFU.

like, every time I hear Max Brod's name, I spit

once my parents bought me the kurt cobain diaries for xmas and i couldnt even bring myself to open it

I think it was actually finished, you guys, just not yet edited. But this is more than a business deal, people feel really strongly personal about DFW. I've probably said too much, I'm not sure what level of secrecy this is under at this point, but know that he is really loved by everyone in his publisher's office.

it definitely didn't sound finished in that article.

like, every time I hear Max Brod's name, I spit

blasphemy! the world needs great art more than, well, just about anything. And while I am a great believer in the artist's right to decide what is and what isn't released under his name, the world's need for great art far outweighs this right.

That article just about reduced me to tears yesterday, but I'm very excited to hear about The Pale King. We shouldn't apologize for wanting to read the work of a great writer, even if that writer didn't think it was good enough (yet).

also i'm kind of thinking that if he tidied it all up and left it on his desk he was thinking it would get published?

Yeah, it definitely sounds like it was unfinished...I'm sure there are big finished and totally readable chunks that are the equal of a normal-sized novel, but it's pretty clear it was nowhere near what he meant it to become.

I'm with J0hn on principle (hence "horrified") but at the same time there are written works and songs and films I love that I'd never have experienced had someone not posthumously violated the artist's vaults, so it's hard to be principled about it. The fact of the matter is that once you record something on paper/tape/camera/etc. it's pretty impossible to control where it goes once you're dead, and sometimes even when you're alive.

Oh well, I'm just going on what I was told over cocktails, so who knows.

xpost to HOOS bingo^

We of course each have a responsibility to be respectful and honorable in our treatment of such work, and sometimes the answer is not to publish unfinished work, if it, say, embarrasses or exposes the artist in ways that are neither respectful nor honorable. But let's not diminish the world-historical, irreducible, non-negotiable good that is having Kafka's works in the world.

I think a gesture of friendship ("please destroy my works when I'm dead") would have added as much good to the world as the works themselves did, but that's just me. And it's not like I don't listen to Mahler's 10th. Still - I mean, I'll never be a great artist so this comparison only works as far as it goes, but I sure as fuck shred/delete/destroy EVERYTHING that I don't want published/released because I am horrified by the idea of people reading/hearing stuff I didn't personally decide to share.

I am really against publishing stuff a writer didn't have the final say-so on, I think it should all be consigned to the furnace but that's me

This resonates with me about a lot of things -- letters, diaries, completed work that the author intentionally shelved -- but I'm not too bothered when it comes to unfinished work that's universally understood as unfinished: the main privacy the author is losing here is just a peek into his/her process, and the worst-case turnout is that readers think he/she was working on something awful (though the author might have insisted that no, it's not finished, it was headed someplace you'd have respected).

Three reasons this doesn't strike me as a bad thing with DFW: (a) he was certainly conscious and self-aware enough of how these things go that he could have done the furnace-consignment himself, instead of sort of prepping the manuscript as much as he could, knowing people would want it; (b) his process was apparently such that he already considered portions of this work publishable, so it's not as if he was planning any grand overhaul of the material; and (c) well, it sort of fits the type of writer he is -- not someone who's continually going back and reframing things to make this perfect gem, but someone whose line-by-line writing and ideas are worth it alone, and tend to have exactly the kind of refracted loads-of-information tone that unfinished manuscripts wind up having. (I mean, imagine an unfinished Infinite Jest.)

Besides which I can't help but imagine DFW, personality-wise, as someone who'd be generally in favor of his wife and family getting some income out of the thing they were working awfully hard to help him be okay to finish, and probably being more queasy about the personal details in that article than any incomplete fiction.

but for all we know Wallace's note asked people to publish the manuscript as it was, I should say - his family knows what he would have wanted, I'd guess, and his friends.

and I'll be saying this for a long time I imagine but I really wish he had found a way out of the horrible dark hole he was in. it makes me so sad, to think of his suffering.

And now it turns out he was that guy; which is both terribly sad and utterly flabbergasting. I mean, how can someone with all those profound issues about self-image be so nakedly honest about them in such a public forum as print? I've often said that I keep my neuroses out in public where everyone can see them, mainly so I can keep an eye on the buggers to see if they start multiplying, but that really doesn't compare to what Wallace was doing with his personal demons.

This – Wallace's wrestling with neuroses in pubilc, without masks – makes me instinctively recoil. I like masks, secrets, and unresolved tensions. If this is true, is Wallace's honesty his greatest strength?

I wrote some challopsy shit a few months ago when he died. As a writer myself I thought his approach and style so unattractive, and the work of his I really liked the exceptions. But I spoke hastily, and maybe I should give him another shot.

I sure as fuck shred/delete/destroy EVERYTHING that I don't want published/released because I am horrified by the idea of people reading/hearing stuff I didn't personally decide to share.

Obviously, fair enough.

But I, as listener/reader/fan/etc., wish you wouldn't!

Wallace's wrestling with neuroses in pubilc, without masks

^^ I don't think he did this in the least, to be honest -- I think he was forthright and articulate about a lot of the issues he had, especially on an intellectual level, but I don't feel like any public wrestling was going on.

Well, it was public wrestling insofar as each footnote and dependent clause appended additional explanations, apologies, and involutions to a given sentence.

Washington Post piece on NYer pieces.

Oh, you mean the fiction! I have trouble considering that "public" in that sense -- it's art! It's fiction! It seems to me somewhat impossible to have fiction that doesn't involve the author wrestling with whatever the author has to wrestle with -- and if not impossible then certain undesirable!

like, every time I hear Max Brod's name, I spit

brod's personal justification for his decision, IIRC, was that he'd told kafka a bunch of times that he had no intention of destroying any of his works, and kafka still opted to make him his executor, knowing that he wasn't likely to carry out the request.

i find it hard to believe that kafka wouldn't have wanted the trial or the castle published in some form, if not his random notes/private letters/et al.

I posted earlier before I'd finished the article, so I feel a little bit more comfortable now w/ the book being published given that he apparently kind of left it out and somewhat organized to be found and shared.

yeah i was gonna say, he deliberately left it out, stacked with his suicide note. who knows what exact instructions he gave about it, but it doesn't sound like he intended it to be just junked.

everyone's said everything that needs saying in this thread. i'm not against it coming out though, for the reason that at least as the article presents it, that he'd ordered and left it out (and also because it sounds awesome). i was listening to that recent arthur russell comp, and hearing stuff that's totally fully formed but for whatever reason didn't come out (cf. goodbye old paint, which is totally ready and a whole lot of work must have been involved in) - seeing that stuff come out unnerves me more than something that's obviously unfinished and is presented as such. the new yorker piece makes it sound like it was readied and left there, that he tied up all the strings of the sprawling novel he had and put his affairs in order.

reading unfinished novels is so frustrating though. so there's something to chew on. it's worse if they have an epilogue, and you don't know they're finishing because there's still thirty sheets between the fingers on your right hand. but still.