david foster wallace: classic or dud

What Would DFW Do: Maria Bustillos, Eric Been, and Mike Goetzman on "Both Flesh and Not" and All Things Foster Wallace

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1196

dfw seemed to think mark leyner was some kind of unstoppable cultural juggernaut

Much more accurate to say he thought David Letterman was some kind of unstoppable cultural juggernaut, and this assertion (understood to apply to Letterman's cultural offspring as well) has held up a lot better.

otm

http://www.amazon.com/dp/193822101X/

lipsky's asides in Although of course... are so distracting and irritating. He just can't seem to distinguish between empathy and flattery, which reflects rather poorly on him. If he'd read the book/essays, which he quotes from and refers to, so he must've, he sure didn't seem to connect much with it/them. And the repeated questions that basically boil down to, "c'mon, just admit that it's awesome to get this much attention." Kinda wanted to punch him.

We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat...Solipsism binds us together...That we are, always, faces in a crowd.

http://www.thewrap.com/jason-segel-david-foster-wallace-jesse-eisenberg-the-end-of-the-tour

Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel are attached to star in Anonymous Content’s “The End of the Tour,” multiple individuals familiar with the project have told TheWrap.

Segel will play David Foster Wallace, the author of “Infinite Jest” who committed suicide in 2008, while Eisenberg will play Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky.

what? noooooooo

i can only shudder and hope that i never hear about this again

http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/tillokm_1395171851_segel.jpg

ughghhh

(to the movie itself, as well as this image)

stab stab stab stab stab

what was that movie where he was a bro, wearin cardigans, hangin out in la? i can see maybe that segel hitting the right beats, striking the right tone, but THIS one, man

http://i.imgur.com/CFV1tVu.jpg

i cant see what that is

DFW's copy of Ulysses

denied, http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2014/05/yes-david-foster-wallace-read-ulysses-how-do-i-know/

always nice to confront marginalia though
very homeland

wow @ these poems by Mary Karr, in the NYer and the Hairpin. I only glanced at them briefly, without actually reading them, but... :(

more like david fosturd wallace

ahaha zing

dud

so the Segel/Eisenberg movie is actually getting good reviews

http://www.reddit.com/r/davidfosterwallace/comments/3695i5/i_found_the_real_1987_late_night_with_david/

interesting reading it again after watching the interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUa5sYHC9s

segal doesn't sound Midwestern enough

ughghgghhhhhhhhhh

can everyone just agree not to watch this terrible movie

looks like a story about the emotional journey of some MFA student

I'm not sure why someone would make this film.

I found this book super-moving and I think I will probably see this movie, though I might cry.

xp in purely economic terms it has to have been really cheap to produce and will easily be profitable

I was just thinking abt that mr squishy could prob be adapted into a cool movie but there obv u need his estate's ok is my understanding

co-sign re: finding this book super moving
also while i was reading it i was listening to rem

haha how would a mr squishy movie even work??

they should make a movie of the published edition of his commencement speech

I feel like they'd have to come up with a new ending for one thing.

die REM, just die already

By the way, the REM song they use is "Strange Currencies," which is a) a great song, the good version of the thing "Everybody Hurts" is a terrible version of; and b) a real-life favorite of DFW.

eephus otm strange currencies is impecxable

haha rem is like the least stupid thing about this

Early reviews have been surprisingly positive. I'm willing to give it a chance.

The problem might be that segal is a comic actor and this is a serious role ?

My girlfriend, who has never read any DFW, saw the trailer for this and thought it looked really good. Yeah, so I bought her a copy "Of Course" as a present. She reads literally about 100 books a year.

The problem might be that segal is a comic actor and this is a serious role ?

― calstars

Maybe, but DFW was comedic. At least he definitely tried to be. Honestly I think the problem is that Segel always plays dorks. I mean sure DFW had nerdy tendencies (he was a writer for Christ's sake) but I never understood that to be essential to his identity. I think maybe riding the nerd wave would have been too easy for someone as self-critical as David. or too boring on a conceptual level. Or too exclusionary. I see Segel in this and I'm just like welp, the nerd's won again. Go ahead and have this one too.

I don't know if it's that Segal's a comic actor, I think it's that the whole thing scans as famous actor vanity project brand extension, the type of thing that one surmises that Wallace detested.

Also, biopics have a justifiably bad reputation, generally engaging in a type of flat reductionism that people probably don't want to see applied to someone they view as an immense, very complicated talent.

I'm not saying this is necessarily that kind of flatly reductive biopic, but that the historical record gives people reason to be skeptical. The "Segal is great as DFW!" headlines out of film festivals probably fuels that fire.

Any famous actor in a biopic is going to be met with skepticism. But I get the feeling there's something particularly cringe worthy about Segel's “brand” that's being extended here. If that's what's even going on, or whatever. I haven't read this book, but I hope an actor being comedic isn’t the problem. I'd hope there would be some funny moments in it!

I think this has the ability to avoid the "flatly reductive biopic" pitfall by not really being a proper biopic. I'm assuming a huge chunk of the dialogue in this is lifted straight from Lipsky's tapes.

I guess him being a comic actor is at least part of it, in that the "comedic actor proves their dramatic chops" thing is, at this point, an eye-rolling cliche. Having that on top of the "Oscar-bait biopic" vibes probably does make things worse.