david foster wallace: classic or dud

"people who think they're very bright are a--...buttholes."

The Wall Street Journal is running an adapted version of the Kenyon commencement speech under the title "David Foster Wallace on Life and Work":

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

From the 1996 KCRW interview:

"When I was in my 20s - deep down underneath all the bullshit - what I really believed was that the point of all fiction was to show that the writer was really smart."

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nascar_cancels_remainder_of_season

Apparently, his first fiction piece for a major magazine was for Playboy in 1988, republished here.

I'd like to think DFW would have enjoyed that Onion piece.

Here's another one that I don't remember seeing at the time. Pretty funny:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769

the first joke that came to mind when i heard about this was basically that onion article, but about his suicide note (that was probably the first joke that came to everyones mind, huh)

I wonder if he left a footnote. And but so what do you think it said?

this is terribly sad, his death and learning how ill he had been beforehand. his writing was so full of personality that i'm not sure how much feeling the loss of the authorial persona is linked to feeling the loss of the person, but it is hard not to link them.

wow

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/graphics/092108_infinite_jest/

has anyone read the math book? i was thinking of getting it (i did math at university but that was over 5 yrs ago and i cant remember any of it)buttut that review that caek linked to up above made it sound pretty bad (i didnt get the general idea that the review was favourable at all)

it's certainly the weakest of his books that i've read (still haven't read signifying rappers). it's still his prose, though, so it's still good in that sense - but on the other hand if you don't understand the math it'd be heavy going, and if you do the fact that a lot of it is if not wrong then at least has the wrong emphasis is annoying.

ok thanks, i do like his prose so maybe i'll pick it up and see. can you recommend any other math books? that are relatively easy to read but arent totally rubbish?

It's been a long time since I've read any "popular" math books. I used to love Martin Gardner's books as a kid, but they're essays rather than a whole book. "A Mathematician's Apology" is great, I think, though again I haven't looked at it for a while. This might be helpful:

http://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/reader-survey-what-makes-a-good-popular-math-book-good/

Best popular math book I read recently was Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife, but you can never go wrong with Martin Gardner.

i know it's chickenshit 2 crap on a dude who just merc'd himself, but i cant really get mad @ ziegler for that piece. if u take it @ face value (i never read DFW's essay on him), he seems 2 b comin from a place of real vulnerability and frustration there, so i cant blame him 4 wantin 2 take a few potshots imo~~~

cheers caek + toby, i'll have a look at those

sad stuff

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/09/26/david_foster_wallace/

good interview on the math stuff: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200311/?read=interview_wallace

(i never read DFW's essay on him), he seems 2 b comin from a place of real vulnerability and frustration there

Actually, I think the phrase "seems 2 b comin from a place of real vulnerability and frustration" is a pretty good summary of what DFW wrote about him. Which is why his commentary wasn't unexpected: it pretty much confirms the portrait of him in the piece. The guy's own recap of his career paints him as someone who can't stay in the same place for more than two years without being acrimoniously fired; he's the kind of guy who will then rant about how every one of the people in each of those situations was a vicious snake or P.C. cop; he sounds like the type who actually feels vulnerable and persecuted and continually frustrated: the Angry White Male.

^^ I think DFW was far more charitable and journalistic about investigating the guy's character than I ever could have been

continually amazed the more i read about his depression that he was able to produce so much work... when im in the midst of one of those six-month periods where every day is the weird anxious struggle to feel OK about your life, i cant lift a finger creatively. i imagine he was incredibly sef-critical.

Well, that Salon article made it sound like in his final months as his depression worsened he couldn't write, so maybe his productivity waxed and waned based on his personal state. Does make me feel kind of awful for indulging in any moment of anger at or judgement of his actions, it sounds like he tried very hard for a very long time to soldier on through the rough patches.

I have tried probably ten serious times to quit chewing tobacco in the last decade. I’ve never even made it a year. Besides all the well-documented psychic fallout, the hardest thing about quitting for me is that it makes me stupid. Really stupid. As in walking into rooms and forgetting why I’m there, drifting off in the middle of sentences, feeling coolness on my chin and discovering I’ve been drooling. Without chew, I have the attention span of a toddler. I giggle and sob inappropriately. And everything seems very, very far away. In essence it’s like being unpleasantly stoned all the time… and as far as I can tell it’s not a temporary withdrawal thing. I quit for eleven months once, and it was like that the whole time. On the other hand, chewing tobacco kills you—or at the very least it makes your teeth hurt and turn unpleasant colors and eventually fall out. Plus it’s disgusting, and stupid, and a vector of self-contempt. So, once again, I’ve quit. It’s now been a little over three months. At this moment I have in gum, a mint, and three Australian tea-tree toothpicks that a Wiccan friend swears by. One reason you and I are chatting in print rather than in real time is that it’s taken me twenty minutes just to formulate and press the appropriate keys for the preceding ¶. Actually speaking with me would be like visiting a demented person in a nursing home. Apparently I not only drift off in the middle of a sentence but sometimes begin to hum, tunelessly, without being aware of it. Also, FYI, my left eyelid has been twitching nonstop since August 18. It’s not pretty. But I’d prefer to live past fifty. This is my Tobacco Story.

secret to becoming a brilliant and prolific writer = tons of nicotine?

Writing well, and productively, involves getting into a pretty unusual state of mind: you have to be in a peak state of focused, high-level creativity -- thinking not just about what you're saying and the words you're using, but about where they're going, and how they fit the shape and structure and themes of an overall work -- and you have to do this furious mental work while sitting calmly somewhere. I'm sure there are other tasks in the world that require this kind of mental state, but I don't know what they'd be: most other high-level creative things I've tried still involve some periods of technical or rote work, these brief breaks where you decide on a plan of action and then get to work peacefully at implementing it. They involve some level of just doing the thing you're working on, or else picking up and looking it over, fiddling with it, tweaking things, seeing how it works. Writing isn't often like this -- the real work of it involves sitting there at the blank edge of a page and needing to face it calmly and keep poking forward into an infinity of options. Which is maddeningly rough and a struggle big enough that it's hard to just sit in a chair and keep at it.

Point being: there are various crutches that can help a person stay in that state and stay in the chair without feeling dumb or cowed or mute and driving herself crazy -- and if you've found one, it's going to be hell to let it go, and lose part of the capacity to do the main great thing you do in life.

bisco, do u think the best writers are the pps who can concentrate the longest/hardest

No, not really.

fwiw Signifying Rappers is absolutely fantastic

signifying rappers is trash

I won't disagree with nabisco, but this got my attention:

They involve some level of just doing the thing you're working on, or else picking up and looking it over, fiddling with it, tweaking things, seeing how it works. Writing isn't often like this -- the real work of it involves sitting there at the blank edge of a page and needing to face it calmly and keep poking forward into an infinity of options. Which is maddeningly rough and a struggle big enough that it's hard to just sit in a chair and keep at it.

The hardest part of writing fiction is starting: staring at the blank page, etc. I'm the sort of writer who must complete a minimum number of pages once I start, though, and for the most part I'm improvising. Looking it over, fiddling, tweaking, seeing how it works -- this all happens during a first draft. It was an immense comfort when I read a Flannery O'Connor essay in which she admitted that she had no idea what she was doing when writing ("You must write outlines and character sketches," non-writers will say). The real art -- thinking how words "fit the shape and structure and themes of an overall work" -- happens during revision.

re: what n's talking about - that was one thing i never got in college, the flagrant adderall abuse. How can anyone hoping to be remotely productive as a writer in their life, take adderall and not expect to become addicted ... its beyond me

That's absolutely true, Alfred, but I do think there's a slight difference in scale. It's common enough, in the process of writing something, to do things like switching point of view, or tense, or re-arranging elements, to see how it all looks from various angles. But of course you can't just turn your notepad or computer over and see it that way; it involves whole processes of rewriting and reframing. It seems to me to be slightly different from, say, writing a song (where I can ask, "what if I played it like this" and then do so) or making a piece of visual art (where I can alter something and then step back and look the whole item over at once).

I tend to feel, incidentally, as if you're always staring at the blank page -- or anyway you're staring at the blank end of the page, which can be just as weighty. Maybe that's just me, though: I love the possibilities of the blank page, but find it harder and harder going as each word you put on there narrows you down to a point.

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

heh lil nublets

heh just heh

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

don't sweat it--i think 90% of artists (writers, bands, painters) feel this same thing all the time.

sad stuff

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/09/26/david_foster_wallace/

― Mr. Que, Friday, September 26, 2008 3:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I found this an incredibly sad and genuinely upsetting piece. It hits too close to home.

yes, sad and frustrating and then sad all over again

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

don't sweat it--i think 90% of artists (writers, bands, painters) feel this same thing all the time.

and then if you're lucky it goes to an editor (publisher/producer/critic) whose job is to dissect it for meaning and relevance and then you do rewrites! fun!

tho editing/rewriting is really good and satisfying in its own way - i guess it depends on what you're writing
i always marvelled at how one would attempt to edit dfw

Maybe it was by tag team. Then again wasn't the manuscript accepted in 1992 and published some years later?

here's a pretty cool essay about an early version of IJ, looks like in the fall of 1993 a working draft was completed

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/ij_first.htm

WTF????

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&item=170259650660

That's....interesting.

must be an advance galley, I'm surprised that there was that much editing done after that though

I'm surprised it's only half a galley.

The Lynch essay did not do much for me.

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2009/01/teaser-trailer-brief-interviews-with.html

not sure how i feel about the addition of the feminist dissertation writer -- too much like an NPR version of SATC?

the feminist dissertation writer has been present in the interviews pretty much all along if you read carefully enough-

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)