david foster wallace: classic or dud

I truly believe that David was the finest writer of his generation, but his design for living seems to me naive and likely to collapse at the first impact of life’s implacable difficulties. It badly needed an injection of Montaigne or Marcus Aurelius.

WOW

Me, I find Bret Ellis’ scalding, cynical, brittle, savagely unillusioned worldview curiously refreshing. He is the Loki or Trickster of the literary world (or maybe the Lou Reed), poking sharp sticks in our eyes and daring us to figure out if he could possibly mean that.

Double WOW.

The Loki of the literary world

maybe I'm just too much of a DFW stan, but im having difficulty seeing how a savagely unillusioned worldview (wake up sheeple!) could be considered bracing nowadays. I get it, ppl are horrible, that is not interesting.

"could he possibly mean that?" = "oh no you DIDN'T... you just WENT THERE."

^^^agreed.

Aimless OTM: another reminder, if one were necessary, that the artist and the work may be closely connected, but are two entirely separate things

i don't care about the artist so much, i care about the work

my WOWs up there=can't believe Gerry Howard wrote such a silly article about those two

Me, I find Bret Ellis’ scalding, cynical, brittle, savagely unillusioned worldview curiously refreshing. He is the Loki or Trickster of the literary world (or maybe the Lou Reed), poking sharp sticks in our eyes and daring us to figure out if he could possibly mean that.

that someone decided to write this and didnt immediately die of shame is more illuminating of the eternal darkness of the human soul than any stupid ellis book about killing prostitutes

every time i say i play pool in my head its going to be amazing like im playing pool in a leather jacket in new york with lou reed and a snake

he is the table

Hate to be that person, but I seriously wonder if dude was ever diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Naaahhh. Dude was way too empathetic and too easily able to put himself in other headspaces for that to be the case. I mean, I'm no clinician, but I've had enough intimate exposure to BPD cases to spot 'em a mile away.

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."

Haha um, this is basically how I feel about "literary authors" and a large part of why I only read tacky sf/fantasy.

sux 4 u

literally nothing about DFW says "borderline personality disorder"

Well obviously I don't know, and I don't mean to speculate irresponsibly or to offend. Having just read the Max bio and gotten what I think is reasonably clear/reliable idea of how extremely fragile Wallace was in terms of baseline mental health a lot of the time, as well as having read a bunch of stuff about BPD recently-ish, it struck me that DFW might well have hit more than a few of the diagnostic criteria. BPD != evil, obv, more like "painfully fucked up in a way that's p difficult to fix."

gbx otm re dfw bpd

̅ \(o_º)/ ̅

Read the bio, & then look at the BPD criteria. I could well be wrong.

i'm familiar with the bpd criteria, and have just re-read them. i haven't read the bio. the problem with the bpd criteria is that, like a lot of dsm criteria, they read a little like horoscopes, and can be massaged over anyone's shoulders.

being "fragile" doesn't quite cut it. i've only seen borderlines (i'm using that as shorthand, not pejoratively) in inpatient settings, so maybe i'm biased to the margins, but i've rarely seen the kind of crippling insight that dfw seemed to have; most of them literally did not realize ~how~ their behavior was destructive. that isn't to say that bpd renders a person insensitive or anything, just that i think it might make writing lots of words and having lots of thoughts about being really considerate somewhat difficult, certainly as a profession. otoh maybe dfw was sublimating and writing was a way to redress his mistakes or something. personality disorders are...difficult, and getting a whiff of one from a bio is like diagnosing a heart attack when you see an old guy clutch his chest in a restaurant.

/tl;dr - i get a little invested when ppl bring up personality disorders

dfw was p throughly diagnosed irl no

/tl;dr - i get a little invested when ppl bring up personality disorders

stop it--not tl at all, this is interesting stuff. he was diagnosed but i don't recall with what exactly

bi polar no

i think so? man googling this dude brings up lots of sad shit

"most of them literally did not realize ~how~ their behavior was destructive."

i take this back. the difficulty was with understanding how they ended up doing what they did (getting blackout drunk when they were scolded at work, torching a friendship after a slight, etc), not with how it was harmful to them and others. some bpds get that, others don't. but, again, the trouble with personality/developmental disorders is that most ppl that have them ("have them") carry (or could carry) 4 or 5 other personality disorder diagnoses, and then your Venn diagram turns into big smudgy blob and fuck it i'm going home

xp i thought with major depression? i know he was on medication for a very long time, weaned off of it, changed his mind, went back on but found it ineffective, etc. never struck me as bipolar (i don't know of any manic episodes), but maybe. then again, i'm leery of most bipolar diagnoses since every kid that comes through the hospital with behavioral issues is on an anti-psychotic and i am like 'you have got to be kidding me'

mdd afaik

I don't know a lot about this kinda stuff, but do these diseases really have to fit in a certain box? like couldn't somebody be effectively 80% depressive 20% borderline or something.

ya it couldve been depression, i pulled that diagnosis from a v hazy iirc

okay reading gbx's last post he basically says what i said

His diagnosis seems to have been atypical/treatment-resistant major depressive.disorder, along with the whole substance abuse/addiction situation. Acc. to Max he also self-diagnosed at one point at least as a sex addict, apparently in earnest.

iatee did you just ask if it's possible to be borderline borderline?

A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects, as well as marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. Note: Do not include suicidal or self-injuring behavior covered in Criterion 5

A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.

Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, excessive spending, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving). Note: Do not include suicidal or self-injuring behavior covered in Criterion 5

Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars or picking at oneself (excoriation).

Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).

Chronic feelings of emptiness

Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).

Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms

wait for suicide people... wait for it

someone please make a new thread for diagnosing artists

would it even be possible for someone to be 100% 'borderline' and 0% anything else? it just seems like such a vague disease

I don't know a lot about this kinda stuff, but do these diseases really have to fit in a certain box? like couldn't somebody be effectively 80% depressive 20% borderline or something.

― iatee, Saturday, September 8, 2012 3:16 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, yeah. psych diagnoses are pretty soft, if anyone's being honest about it, i mean consider that basic life stuff like being in love with a certain kind of other person was 'pathological' up until pretty recently. we don't ~actually~ know why ppl with mdd have depressive episodes that are deeper and more recurrent than most ppl, but the patterns of presentation seem sufficiently stereotyped that giving it the status of 'diagnosis' is ok. that someone's symptoms improve with medication (half the time) doesn't really tell us a whole lot about what's going on, physiologically. cuz in a way, as soon as a psychiatric condition is found to have an organic cause ("your irritability is actually because of your hyperthyroid, your personality changes are because you have Pick's disease"), it ceases to be psychiatric. lotta tautology over on the psych ward.

I guess it was mostly the recurrent suicidality (inc. srs attempts) starting in late adolescence & on into adulthood, along with the substance abuse and intense/poss. compulsive relationship stuff, as far as actual behaviors, that sent up that flag in my head. The mood stuff seemed to me to fit, too, as well as a baseline super-negative and rather...wobbly sense of self. But I do not know.

BPD isn't a disease, nor, really, is any kind of personality disorder. they're generally assumed to be developmental, which is both accurate as well as a bit of hand-waving; if you want to be waggish, it's a way of saying "we can't find anything ~wrong~ with you, but..."

there are no neuroanatomical findings, no presumed synaptic imbalances (so to speak), just...something didn't go as planned while you were growing up. nb - shooting from the hip here, i have like six weeks of psychiatric experience and only one personal diagnosis, so salt shakers all around

xp i didn't know about the recurrent suicidality and relationship stuff, maybe you're right, who knows

yeah I want a pocket version of you to come out when my mom decides people in our family are bipolar or ADD and that explains all their problems

ha, i prob shouldn't be explaining anything to anyone, but ok when's dinner

its at 6 but you only get a pocket-sized portion

p.s.: srs q: have yall read the bio

i haven't :(

gave the lipsky one a shot, but something about it grated, and i gave up

Lipsky's yammering ruined it for me; I couldn't finish it either. The bio is no masterpiece of literary art but it struck me as well-researched and p even-handed, given the inevitable limitations. Anyhow I obv found it tremendously affecting and should probably stfu. In any case my opinion of DFW's work is unaffected, or maybe higher than before.

really like the lipsky just because of the sheer quantity of the man himself -- am less excited about reading the bio

"...to the extent that I understand reality TV, it has a certain logic, and it's not hard to take that kind of logic to its extreme. I think 'Celebrity Autopsy,' while childhood friends of the celebrity sit around talking about whether or not this celebrity was a good person while his or her organs are being excised, would be the terminus of that logic." -- dfw, 2004 intv

^otm

Enjoyed the bio way more than I expected to, although it felt a little slight - would have been happy for it to have been twice as long. Found the extent to which stuff in the fiction was drawn from life and stuff in the nonfiction was made up really interesting. Guess I should read the Lipsky.

i like the lipsky a lot.

i enjoyed reading this a lot (& am getting a lot out of the notes, at the end, in which a lot of v good, relatively uncondensed minutiae is featured), though i'm kinda just thrown by the end at the moment - just so sad i can barely reach back to before it. i find some of the compressions of 'wow wallace was an asshole/&c' that i've read in response to the bio too reductive to be worth engaging with.

i liked dfw's belated appreciation for wharton, & his speculation on his younger self's thought processes when encountering it.

some of the compressions

some of the reactions

but they are compressions of course

(and of course you end up compressing yourself)

the footnote-to-text relation is hilariously arbitrary sometimes. i feel like he half wanted to do DFW style notes but then ... didn't somehow? half of the information in there should just be in the text frankly

it's a good effort, but: hrm. certainly i already am at the point where i feel we're invading the privacy of other, still-living people. i just got to the point where there's a footnote acknowledging he talked to wallace's AA buddies.