david foster wallace: classic or dud

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

i only just started this but it is calling elif batuman out by name for her magazine writing, v poor show

she kinda sucks tho

shuuuut up!
her nyer articles are so great! & exploratory! i could go too far with this but i really feel like the kinda diaristic, peripatetic, casually Sebaldian mode, always really usefully tethered to such alluring backdrops, feels so of its time, & fresh, to me. i am not crazy about her book but the past however many things that have been in the magazine are like ... perfect i think.

what is yr problem w/EB?

i am googling around re: katherine boo, i don't remember reading her.

boo--she's been writing for the nyer forever, right?

EB, I just don't think she's that great a writer, and as the author of the bookforum article puts it, she has this weird anxiety that comes out when she writes. not anxiety in the good sebaldian way either!

when you write dumb shit like this, it's kind of obvious she's a frustrated fiction writer. i dig some of the points she makes here, but there's no reason to shit all over the workshop

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-real-degree

i don't know, for a while i guess? i feel like her writing the football hooligans article was the first or second time she was in the magazine, having previously done stuff for n+1 that was reprinted in harper's.

sucked into ILX instead of finishing this article so i'll try to connect w/its criticisms later. that doesn't ring a bell for me at all, fwiw - she seems really straightforward, to me, not in terms of the product, but in terms of being p satisfied w/her role in a story - she's usually an active participant, in the Malcolmian sense?, & the stories are usually total splits between research & documentary.

the LRB MFA thing was good!, i think. her whole dissection of modern american fiction - like that line, "In acknowledgment of the times, the 2004 and 2005 volumes each contain exactly one Middle East story, each featuring a character called Hassan" - still gives me a pang of lazy-reader guilt whenever i am, like i am right now, waiting for a michael chabon reservation to appear in the library, & she seems to have some legitimate concerns about either the locality of its scope or the fetishisation of concision & terse stylising that a bunch of stuff displays right now. idk, i say this as a consumer of contemporary american fiction, but it doesn't hurt to be shitting over the workshop (this phrase is accumulating different meanings as i reuse it, sorry), afaict - i think she is snappy & funny enough to carry it off, also, rather than seeming bitter or frustrated.

i think shitting (in a public forum) on people trying to make art is a bad idea, especially when you yourself make art

― shitting (in a public forum) (schlump), Friday, September 28, 2012 5:32 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think shitting (in a public forum) on people trying to make art is a bad idea, especially when you yourself make art

literary lyfe

i think i disagree - this is based on a local level, rather than in terms of lit scenes or w/e, but i feel like things are stronger when they're honestly debated, & i feel like honesty trumps the kind of fraternity that often prevails in these scenes. i used to live in a v kinda "creative" town & found it q stifling that one almost had an obligation towards people, having seen what they'd made, to either be diplomatic or to stay quiet. (to digress a little, when i think of things people i know have made, it's way more exciting to me that i tend to like those things varyingly, rather than automatically on the force of their personality, & there's a satisfaction to realising i like something someone made when i've thought their stuff was kind benign, previously). author spats are fun because they are fun to read about, but good criticism is important, too, & calling out trends - re: style or poverty of ambition or insularity or w/e - is part of either the discourse or just the natural correction 'movements' need to go through. dave eggers, who is like an obvious case study for things to say about modern american fiction, always seems to respond pretty well to it - like he has his aesthetic & yeah some people don't like it & yeah there are things you can charge it with, but he seems fairly stable in repping for it, you read an article where people hate on him & he's fairly aware of its strengths or of its positive values on its own terms. i wouldn't want elif batuman not to write an article about the deficiencies of the contemporary american novel out of diplomacy, you know? it's interesting that she's an artist, & has such a reverence for classics, has apparently been working on a novel for awhile (iirc), & i guess to some degree (though also not) her authority is stacked on how that turns out. but i don't think its a bad idea for her to go all state of the union. ESPECIALLY WHEN SHE WRITES SO NICELY.

i feel like instead of reviewing the book and discussing the book, she just took a big dumb on American Literary Culture, but then included stuff that was totally outside of that

The law of ‘find your voice’ and ‘write what you know’ originates in a phenomenon perhaps most clearly documented by the blog and book Stuff White People Like: the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures. Hence Stuff White People Like #20, ‘Being an Expert on Your Culture’, and #116, ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore’. Non-white, non-college-educated or non-middle or upper-class people may write what they know, but White People have to find the voice of a Vietnamese woman impregnated by a member of the American army that killed her only true love.

this is just a gigantic piece of bullshit. Why does she bring up Stuff White People Like? It has nothing to do with her point.

big dumb=big dump

her book about russian literature is not very insightful!

i wonder what her thesis is like

The windmill and the giant : double-entry bookkeeping in the novel

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/harvill-acquires-novel-batuman.html

O lord

Batuman was inspired by Chekov's comment that we all lead two lives: a public one, full of falsehood, and a secret one, meaningful and essential. In the last six years, while working as a journalist, Batuman came to feel she was writing only about the first life, and leaving out the second. The novel, a fictionalised account of her experiences, follows the journalist narrator through the stories she reports and the ones she doesn't, as she tries to figure out how to fit love into a human life.

Shavit said: "We are over the moon to be publishing Elif Batuman's debut novel. Over the last few years Elif has come to be recognised as a very significant new voice in international literature. She is clever, funny and utterly brilliant and this book marks a major departure for her as she ventures into fiction and explores the untrammelled terrains of the secret life that her non-fiction doesn't allow for."

why you gotta revive this thread for this

also, how does someone get to be "recognised as a new voice in international literature"

sorry :/

we were talking about EB earlier

explores the untrammelled terrains of the secret life

publisher proves how hard it is to hype garden-variety highbrow lit

can't wait to be vindicated ... in 2015

this is the most excited i've been for something that's three years away since i was a fifteen year old who thought life would be really great when i was eighteen

haha wait 2015? they signed a contract for a not-yet-written novel? with someone whose most conspicuous fictional bona fide is making a big deal of not having an mfa?

Well, there's always the Wuthering Expectations post about reading The Possessed as a novel: The protagonist’s struggle to transform her arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as her favorite books - Elif Batuman's novel

did a double-talk when i saw this headband/glasses combo on tv:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUylMMk18cs

double-take

guy looks more like Marc Maron to me.