david foster wallace: classic or dud

/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.

I was interested to learn that DFW had attended a Buddhist meditation retreat at Plum Village (the place in France set up under the auspices of Thich Nhat Hanh), sometime in the 2000s iirc. It doesn't seem to have done him much good -- he left before the 10-day retreat was over, and made a jokey reference to it in a note to somebody -- but it lends weight, or at least context, to George Saunders' tribute in which he claimed DFW as a sort of American Buddhist writer (quoted in full waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay upthread), which tribute had struck me before as an unexpected (tho not totally loony) sort of special pleading.

xpost: Yes, to learn that there is an actual guy upon whom Gately was based was just fucking weird. Half of me wanted that dude -- "The sonofabitch (DFW) was doing research all that time (in the 12-step meetings)!" -- to have, like, sued or made some other sort of hellacious public fuss after IJ came out, and half just...doesn't care that much? Idk. But it's discomfiting, yeah.

oh saunderspaws

It's actually p great. As noted I found the Buddhist angle surprising tho it made a kind of sense to me even then.

ha, of course there's an actual gately -- can you imagine wallace inventing that out of whole cloth?

a sadder realisation is that the crippling agoraphobia the narrator of 'a supposedly fun thing' protests of is a way of talking and not talking about being in recovery

"Hyperconsciousness makes life meaningless ... : but what of will to construct OWN meaning? Not the world that gives us meaning but vice versa? Dost embodies this -- Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers -- they do not. Their fictions reduce to complaints and self-pity. Dostoevski has BALLS."

D.T. Max's worst discursive endnote yet:

"Rock music was the cultural venue in which signs of disaffection and dis-ease first appeared with serious energy. In the early 1990s bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana sung of alienation and sophisticated frustration. Their music emphasized the person rather than the political, much as Wallace's fiction did."

'popular beat combo'

can you imagine wallace inventing that (Gately) out of whole cloth?

...Yes? At least, I don't know why not -- clearly he didn't lack powers of invention.

the crippling agoraphobia the narrator of 'a supposedly fun thing' protests of is a way of talking and not talking about being in recovery

And all refs to his "church group" (like in, e.g., "The View from Mrs. Thompson's") were in fact to 12-step groups. Such authorial reticence is totally understandable and OK, but as a reader (& prob a naive one) I can't help feeling a bit disoriented after learning these details of how DFW navigated between fact and fiction.

This I might read:

http://www.amazon.com/Both-Flesh-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316182370

looks like they struggled to fill it

pretty sure that essay has always been known as "Roger Federer as Religious Experience", but I guess that's a less snappy title.

What I've read of DFW's uncollected work should make this well worth buying, however padded out it may otherwise be.

Lots of the essays had their titles changed for re-publication. "Shipping Out" becomes a "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" etc. Obviously DFW was around for those changes though

in those cases it was his title vs. the one the publication that commissioned the piece used.

or he came up with a more pretentious title later?

i thought this was interesting http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/019_03/10012

i think its p dumb and bad

a great big 'huh' to their collecting that 'all hail the returning dragon' essay, though