david foster wallace: classic or dud

Haven't read any big DFW books. Liked "A supposedly fun thing" a lot, especially the cruise ship bit. Hated his article on proper usage & language in Harper's. Weirdest thing about him is his first book, Signifying Rappers. It's so bad.

Personally: lately I've been finding his essays far more enlightening than his literature. The McCain item, to an extent, but more particularly the David Lynch article from A Supposedly Fun Thing... and the grammar/usage article from Harpers, which was, if not informative to me personally, a really enjoyable analysis.

Of the not-yet-in-book-form material, I'm very fond of "Up, Simba!" and the grammar/usage piece in Harper's. His recent short stories have mostly been "experimental" in the sense of trying to get away from his comfortable subjects and trying to eliminate his tics while maintaining his style. A lot of them end up collapsing at one point or another ("Adult World," in particular, is a very ambitious near-total misfire).

But for verbal glory plus neatly masked high moral seriousness, there's nobody anywhere near him writing right now in English, I think.

DFW = Bruce McCulloch?

I am tempted to say that I like all of the new Pynchons better than the old Pynchon, but it's not true.

DFW is classic. I loved IJ, Brief Interviews was... meh, A Supposedly Fun Thing was good, and I really like all the stories from Girl with Curious Hair.

I could care less about the pretentiousness/ego/wunderkind/pynchon rip off criticisms of him. It's great stuff to read.

All said, I'm a huge fan of IJ, Girl with Curious Hair and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again...so DFW = classic IMO. I've never gotten the Pynchon refs, BTW...they mostly seem to be due to the bulk of IJ. Wallace has always struck me as closer to Donald Barthelme.

Whoa.:

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1997 tome "Infinite Jest," was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the Claremont Police Department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find her husband had hanged himself.

That's really sad. Suicide is just so awful, so terrible for everyone left behind.

Oh my God. Rest in Peace, DFW, "Infinite Jest" is a masterpiece.

Dang. How... unexpected.

holy shit

Classic or Dead

pouring out 40 footnotes.

i really, really liked his essays

^ this. I really wasn't a heavy reader of his but the essays I did read I v. much enjoyed.

He inspired one of the longer author-centered threads on I Love Books - the unfortunately titled: David Foster Wallace - is he a cunt?

I've read only one of his books, the 'supposedly fun thing' collection of essays. It was ok.

His strong point was having a distinctive authorial voice, so you knew at once there was a person behind the words. His weak point seemed to be self-editing, but there are worse weaknesses. Blandness, for one.

Requiscat in pacem, DFW.

r.i.p.

Horrible.

My best wishes to his family, I'll be re-reading Girl With Curious Hair.

ugh, bad news, so sad

RIP and hugs and best wishes to his family. His tennis writing alone is great, but I always enjoyed everything, every footnote, including his music writing. Damn.

totally bummed out about this, really. r.i.p.

sad news. rip

Terrible news.

holy shit.

got such a kick out of his writing. so much pleasure and humor and wisdom in Infinite Jest. read it during a sad time in my life. it gave me so much hope. read it at the dinner table, read it during breaks at work at my job in a bookstore, laughing the whole time. was waiting anxiously for a new novel from him. . .such a very very sad thing. RIP.

here's his kenyon college commencement speech, well worth reading, from 2005

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

Such bad news. RIP.

OMG I am speechless and so, so sad :-(

RIP

I reread his Kenyon commencement speech a week or two ago and was really inspired by it again. God, this is just awful.

All I ever got around to reading by the guy was the cruise ship essay and that great list of book recommendations that included Wittgenstein's Mistress. Still, this makes my very sad. RIP.

;_;

the tennis-as-geopolitical-power-struggle bit in infinite jest was the best thing ever

this is a good read

https://theoutline.com/post/5543/david-foster-wallace-conference-profile?zd=1&zi=xgemvmqv

indeed, thx

The space in which it matters that DFW was an abuser of women is the space of ordinary reality, which we all occupy. This makes it a serious charge, that must be dealt with by real people doing whatever is possible to mitigate the harm done through his abuse. One mitigation is to identify him as an abuser and publically decry that fact and condemn his actions.

As for his books, the thing about writing in general is that no matter how 'realistic' it aspires to be, it occupies its own unreal space that only exists in the mind of the audience as the it plays out. Within that mental space, the author and audience cannot either create or repair real life abuses and it is hopeless to try to do so through direct action against his books, such as denouncing them as the work of a real life abuser. You can only deal with them effectively by thinking about them as clearly as possible.

part of argument in the outline article is that this distinction is particularly difficult to make in DFW's case, though

The question is thornier with Wallace than it would be for most of his contemporaries. Plenty of people love the novels of Jeffrey Eugenides — but how many of them love Jeffrey Eugenides? Wallace’s work overflows with complex and vibrant characters, but of these the most enduring — the only one to transcend his writing, a la Holden Caufield or Jay Gatsby, to become a pop culture figure in their own right — is Wallace himself, the “Wallace” of his first-person essays and reviews.

This Wallace was self-aware, morally engaged, alert to hypocrisy (especially his own), and deliriously funny. You felt like you knew him, even if you knew, and knew he knew, that it was all on some level a ruse, that the ‘I’ on the page was always an invention. There are other reasons for his fandom’s intensity — Infinite Jest’s sprawl has made it the rare literary novel able to generate and sustain genre-style online communities — but it’s the voice that brings his fans two hours south of Chicago to the town of Normal, Illinois, from multiple continents and both U.S. coasts, paying anywhere from $40 (for students/part-time workers) to $150 (for teachers/full-time workers) to get in.

Authors understand very well that the "I" in any well-constructed book is as much of a construction as any other part of their writing.

It's the audience that gets confused about what that "I" is.

you are, unfortunately, a deceased fiction writer

but how many of them love Jeffrey Eugenides

tough of ol jeff

on*

whoever is updating Jeffrey Eugenides' wiki page apparently does not love Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides (born March 8, 1960) is an American novelist, nonce and short story writer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Eugenides

I feel like it says something about our era vs his that he once ironically titled a book of thinky essays “Consider the Lobster” whereas today we have a dude whose schtick is unironically to consider the lobster.

"Consider the Lobster" is an unironic consideration of lobsters tho

Very good long essay by Patricia Lockwood: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/patricia-lockwood/where-be-your-jibes-now