david foster wallace: classic or dud

Pop Quiz 4

Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley's wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal drug addicts' teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill. He smelled very bad. He sat up against the wall with his head on his knees. This took place in Cambridge MA in an alley behind the Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the early hours of 12 January 1993. The terminal drug addict with the coat took off the coat and scooted up over close to the gravely ill terminal drug addict and took and spread the coat as far as it would go over the both of them and then scooted over some more and got himself pressed right up against him and put his arm around him and let him be sick on his arm, and they stayed like that up against the wall together all through the night.

Q: Which one lived?

I think I've given up on The Pale King. I got a good way through it but jesus, once he starts describing the traffic jam on the way into the REC for pages and pages I found myself wondering what I was doing. Should I keep reading or what?

best part is in the second half imo fwiw

okay, I'll maybe pick it up again. Following up that huge rambling account by the one guy who does Oberol with an even duller account of car park infrastructure felt like a purposefully shitty move to me.

My favorite part is the happy hour chapter, which was pretty close to the end, so yeah, keep reading.

I don't think the sequencing of those two sections was purposefully shitty; had he lived to finish it, I don't think a lot of this stuff would have made it to the final draft, or at least it would have been heavily revised.

i was just pretty grateful there was this one last thing to be honest, it'll take a reread until i can make myself dislike any of it

i've been inconvinced by 'octet' for years but i am growing to like that it is there even though i think it fails; it's nice that his various ways of (oy) 'palpating' the issue he's trying to get at are all there in the same volume, even the ones that don't come off

it took until my most recent reread (third? fourth?) to actually make myself read every word of 'i sold sissie-nar to echo', too

yeah i've NEVER made it all the way through that one. or the fake dictionary entry.

ha, me neither

thomp, don't you think that 'octet' being about the failure of 'octet' makes it a success? or do you think it's a case of him having his cake and eating it?

it's the way he goes from a casual (faking it) dismissal of its failure (e.g. "the whole mise en scene is too shot though with ambiguity to make a very good pop quiz") in the early part of the story to the devastating (imo) hand-wringing of the last footnote that holds the story's power.

reactivated one thread wihout seeing this one.

Anyway: advice for starting Oblivion?

what do you mean, advice?

like which story to start with?

I don't read story collections straight through but for this one I'm tempted.

(never read his novels)

i was gonna say start with Mr. Squishy

then i looked up the TOC and saw that Mr. Squishy was first

so start with Mr. Squishy

which is nice, because i think you should read story collections in the order presented by the author

RANKING THE SUPERHUNKS SHORT STORIES IN OBLIVION

MR. SQUISHY
GOOD OLD NEON
THE SUFFERING CHANNEL
INCARNATIONS OF BURNED CHILDREN
THE SOUL IS NOT A SMITHY
PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE
ANOTHER PIONEER

imo

skip the title story?

if it bores you after a couple of pages, yes

DO NOT. it's incredible.

hahaha i totally forgot the title story

the title story is pretty damn incredible yes

RE-RANKING THE SUPERHUNKS SHORT STORIES IN OBLIVION

MR. SQUISHY
GOOD OLD NEON
THE SUFFERING CHANNEL
OBLIVION
INCARNATIONS OF BURNED CHILDREN
THE SOUL IS NOT A SMITHY
PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE
ANOTHER PIONEER

tbh I often read the shortest story first in a collection. If I'm reading history I'll skip ahead if I get bogged down in one chapter, then skip back.

I've got a long bus ride so I'll read "Mr. Squishy" first then.

yeah don't read the short ones first. except maybe incarnations.

i'm kind of OCD about reading short story books in order. i think i feel like i'll inevitably forget to read one of the stories if i just skip around.

i feel like the best short story collections are better and richer if you read them in order -- like dubliners builds so gradually and perfectly from these odd little sketches and almost throwaway stories to the crushing ending of 'the dead.' i've got a chekhov book that gets pretty much the same effect just by printing the stories in the order they were written. on the other hand, flannery o'connor short story books always have the problem of beginning with 'a good man is hard to find' and absolutely anything else you read after that is going to seem underwhelming by comparison.

especially the collection with "A Good Man is Hard to Find." A classic single, an almost-classic single ("Good Country People"), plus a half dozen B-sides

yo flannery o'connor's "the enduring chill" is a pretty fuckin sick A-side

who doesn't read short story collections in order??

do you people just hop around novels as the fancy takes you, too?? hey guys what chapter of middlemarch should i start with, are there any i should skip

skip the one where Casaubon dies.

Short stories are discrete units. Unless they're connected it doesn't matter which you read first.

Mr Squishee is so amazing. It's like everything about the conspiracy-story condensed into 50 pages.

I finished "Mr Squisheee" in one sitting yesterday afternoon and am about ten pages from finishing "The Soul is Not a Smithy"

thomp, don't you think that 'octet' being about the failure of 'octet' makes it a success? or do you think it's a case of him having his cake and eating it?

yeah the latter really! i mean i wish it did work. and when i read it at sixteen or seventeen i thought it absolutely did work and defined how i thought modern literature ought to operate, so my later reversals of opinion are probably at least in part due to rmde @ 16-17yo me. i don't know, i am coming to be somewhat of a reactionary about the possibility of moral urgency in fiction these days. (the best aspects of infinite jest are where he's just writing his dostoyevsky novel, not those in which he's trying to query or ... palpate the difficulties of writing his dostoyevsky novel.)

incidentally 'tri-stan' turned out, i was convinced as i was reading it, to be a very interesting recapitulation and capstone of the arguments about fiction that are running through the 'curious hair' stories and 'e unibus plurum' and 'conspicuously young'. or i thought so at the time and i cannot remember the argument i formed in my head at all, now.

Short stories are discrete units. Unless they're connected it doesn't matter which you read first.

now these, these -- these, friends, are fighting words

thomp otm i think; advertising has fucked up the collective psyche in all kinds of ways no doubt (and when dfw talks about alienation and isolation and culture-of-addiction and the supremacy of comfort and the ubiquitous cultural instruction to "gratify your appetites" i think he's right on and who wants to get high and watch an adam curtis doc w me) but i don't think it's made people any less receptive to or hungry for the kind of fiction dfw wanted to write (if anything it's made them more so) and i don't think the traps he's ostensibly trying to wriggle out of w all the apologetic meta are any more present for him than they were for dostoevsky. (who of course spent his entire career railing against materialism and narcissism and thanatotic godlessness and all the other stuff television is supposed to have invented, even if his enemies' tracts were admittedly painfully earnest -- altho not about the things [jesus] dostoevsky took seriously.) when dfw talks about the death of sincerity or the likelihood that Earnest Honest Artistic Communication will be laughed at or resisted i'm just as perplexed as when i'm reading nyt thinkpieces about the same thing; it just doesn't correspond to my experience even in the slightest and i don't know where it's being beamed from. i guess there was a glib literary fad around the early 90s? but dfw seemed to think mark leyner was some kind of unstoppable cultural juggernaut, whereas it's barely twenty years later and i'm not sure i spelled his really simple name right.

there isn't a lot of that squirming in IJ, though, if i remember right. "weird" stuff sure and structural experiments/gimmicks and a sometimes (extremely) awkward "postmodern polyphony" or whatever and attempts at mimicking a "fractured psychic life" and all the rest of it, which is fine, but not a lot of "i'm sorrynotsorry i'm trying to talk to you about feelings." i guess maybe a little bit in stuff like hal's aphasia but i see that as having more to do w the solipsistic-isolation side of the cultural critique.

my copy of don quixote actually does have all this advice in the intro about what chapters you can probably skip.

Short stories are discrete units. Unless they're connected it doesn't matter which you read first.

this is just stupid. do you listen to albums at random? short story collections are sequenced, too, just like albums

sometimes I do!

I'll usually go back and read them in sequence if I own the collection.

maybe not the best comparison. we listen to albums over and over and over. i guess i mean: when you listen to an album the first time do you listen to it straight through, or do you skip around? seems to me if you want to enjoy a piece of art as the artist intended, straight through the first time, then do whatever you like subsequent times

what's funny is Alice Munro does this, I think, with stories, she starts on page 5 of a story, reads for awhile, then goes back to the beginning. not saying it's wrong, it's just an odd way to read fiction.

Like I said, it depends on a couple things. First, are the stories meant as a sequence? Dubliners accretes more significance with each story you read. Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches works the same way. Second, are the stories variations on a theme? O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge deals with characters who get some kind of comeuppance or glimpse at a fleeting redemption, so it doesn't matter which you read first.

As far as albums go: if I download an album I'll likely pop songs into my iPod, listen randomly, then listen to it in sequence.

i like to check out the last couple paragraphs and keep track of how many pages are left at all times, sometimes when i read a novel i will skim to check out how the various chapters or parts or other larger structural units relate

dlh: there's not so much of the 'but can i earnestly be saying this to you' but there's lots of 'watch as i couch all this stuff i care about deeply in glib or absurd contexts', like how the recurring conversation that's where the book most explicitly discusses its themes is between a federal agent in drag whose false tits are askew and a canadian terrorist who lost his legs in the game of the next train

i could spend far too long talking about the glibness thing and probably shouldn't, i think the cultural circumstances which make people 'hungry for' earnest artistic communication aren't the ones which engender it, something something jonathan franzen on the cover of time magazine something

in the 2000s dfw would claim in a not necessarily unfacile way that the glibness-vs-sincerity argument went all the way back to plato and the sophists, which i don't necessarily degree with one hundred per cent

*disagree with.

anyway yeah this is not a healthy literary climate right here:

http://www.spd.org/images/blog/Stranger_thumb_w_580.jpg

ay yay yay

dlh: there's not so much of the 'but can i earnestly be saying this to you' but there's lots of 'watch as i couch all this stuff i care about deeply in glib or absurd contexts', like how the recurring conversation that's where the book most explicitly discusses its themes is between a federal agent in drag whose false tits are askew and a canadian terrorist who lost his legs in the game of the next train

haha yeah true. although this whole tableau becomes kind of poignant! it's true tho that the stuff i really really like in the book is mostly only slightly skewed "realism" (wait shit have i caught the disease)--tennis academy/halfway house stuff.

v disappointed they chose "the way we live now" over my sentimental favorite "where the hands have come to on the clock"