david foster wallace: classic or dud

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

it reminded me of that time when jodorowsky actually cried because he wanted pink floyd to score dune and he revered them so much and when he walked into a room they were dudes just sitting around eating fish and chips

and the old "people just like him to feel smart" canard -- you can just as easily throw that at ANY literary author, hell, at the entire idea of "literary authors."

he walks into a room to interview dfw and the dude is sitting on a couch eating kfc and watching the x files

this = a reason for love

To turn the end of Wallace's Updike review into a posthumous BEE zing, Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's BEE's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page first tweet. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.

Love that review.

We are paying attention to the opinions of Brett Easton Ellis now?! When did this misfortune befall?

Here's the opening of Dale Peck's Infinite Jest review:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n14/dale-peck/well-duh

The US literary world can be divided into two camps: those who think Thomas Pynchon is a very clever guy, and those who also think he’s a great writer.

Dale Peck is an idiot, though

Peck knows what he wants and he wants recognizable human characters, which is a legitimate desire. His ability to recognize human characters seems to be limited by how closely they resemble people or fictional characters already familiar to him. This makes him not an idiot, but not an ideal reviewer of books like Infinite Jest.

dale peck, internet nobody

the myth of foster wallace is p gross to me but ellis is just bringing nothing in those zings

I haven't read Infinite Jest but that review and all the things it resents makes me wanna read it more

the myth of foster wallace is p gross to me but ellis is just bringing nothing in those zings

agreed.

I haven't read Infinite Jest but that review and all the things it resents makes me wanna read it more

300 pages of it are really good and the rest is good for arguing with people about

I think back wistfully to a time when I enjoyed DFW and never saw/heard anyone talking about him outside of, like, newsgroups.

(Eternal thanks to erstwhile(?) ILXor D. Wolk for introducing me to the dude via his review of Supposedly Fun Thing... in CMJ.)

ellis has been like this all his life: 'american psycho' is basically one long troll of whoever's reading it.

judging from the first few paragraphs of that review dale peck is even dumber than that 'reader's manifesto' guy.

but b r myers is pretty cool and often right