david foster wallace: classic or dud

like, every time I hear Max Brod's name, I spit

blasphemy! the world needs great art more than, well, just about anything. And while I am a great believer in the artist's right to decide what is and what isn't released under his name, the world's need for great art far outweighs this right.

That article just about reduced me to tears yesterday, but I'm very excited to hear about The Pale King. We shouldn't apologize for wanting to read the work of a great writer, even if that writer didn't think it was good enough (yet).

also i'm kind of thinking that if he tidied it all up and left it on his desk he was thinking it would get published?

Yeah, it definitely sounds like it was unfinished...I'm sure there are big finished and totally readable chunks that are the equal of a normal-sized novel, but it's pretty clear it was nowhere near what he meant it to become.

I'm with J0hn on principle (hence "horrified") but at the same time there are written works and songs and films I love that I'd never have experienced had someone not posthumously violated the artist's vaults, so it's hard to be principled about it. The fact of the matter is that once you record something on paper/tape/camera/etc. it's pretty impossible to control where it goes once you're dead, and sometimes even when you're alive.

Oh well, I'm just going on what I was told over cocktails, so who knows.

xpost to HOOS bingo^

We of course each have a responsibility to be respectful and honorable in our treatment of such work, and sometimes the answer is not to publish unfinished work, if it, say, embarrasses or exposes the artist in ways that are neither respectful nor honorable. But let's not diminish the world-historical, irreducible, non-negotiable good that is having Kafka's works in the world.

I think a gesture of friendship ("please destroy my works when I'm dead") would have added as much good to the world as the works themselves did, but that's just me. And it's not like I don't listen to Mahler's 10th. Still - I mean, I'll never be a great artist so this comparison only works as far as it goes, but I sure as fuck shred/delete/destroy EVERYTHING that I don't want published/released because I am horrified by the idea of people reading/hearing stuff I didn't personally decide to share.

I am really against publishing stuff a writer didn't have the final say-so on, I think it should all be consigned to the furnace but that's me

This resonates with me about a lot of things -- letters, diaries, completed work that the author intentionally shelved -- but I'm not too bothered when it comes to unfinished work that's universally understood as unfinished: the main privacy the author is losing here is just a peek into his/her process, and the worst-case turnout is that readers think he/she was working on something awful (though the author might have insisted that no, it's not finished, it was headed someplace you'd have respected).

Three reasons this doesn't strike me as a bad thing with DFW: (a) he was certainly conscious and self-aware enough of how these things go that he could have done the furnace-consignment himself, instead of sort of prepping the manuscript as much as he could, knowing people would want it; (b) his process was apparently such that he already considered portions of this work publishable, so it's not as if he was planning any grand overhaul of the material; and (c) well, it sort of fits the type of writer he is -- not someone who's continually going back and reframing things to make this perfect gem, but someone whose line-by-line writing and ideas are worth it alone, and tend to have exactly the kind of refracted loads-of-information tone that unfinished manuscripts wind up having. (I mean, imagine an unfinished Infinite Jest.)

Besides which I can't help but imagine DFW, personality-wise, as someone who'd be generally in favor of his wife and family getting some income out of the thing they were working awfully hard to help him be okay to finish, and probably being more queasy about the personal details in that article than any incomplete fiction.

but for all we know Wallace's note asked people to publish the manuscript as it was, I should say - his family knows what he would have wanted, I'd guess, and his friends.

and I'll be saying this for a long time I imagine but I really wish he had found a way out of the horrible dark hole he was in. it makes me so sad, to think of his suffering.

And now it turns out he was that guy; which is both terribly sad and utterly flabbergasting. I mean, how can someone with all those profound issues about self-image be so nakedly honest about them in such a public forum as print? I've often said that I keep my neuroses out in public where everyone can see them, mainly so I can keep an eye on the buggers to see if they start multiplying, but that really doesn't compare to what Wallace was doing with his personal demons.

This – Wallace's wrestling with neuroses in pubilc, without masks – makes me instinctively recoil. I like masks, secrets, and unresolved tensions. If this is true, is Wallace's honesty his greatest strength?

I wrote some challopsy shit a few months ago when he died. As a writer myself I thought his approach and style so unattractive, and the work of his I really liked the exceptions. But I spoke hastily, and maybe I should give him another shot.

I sure as fuck shred/delete/destroy EVERYTHING that I don't want published/released because I am horrified by the idea of people reading/hearing stuff I didn't personally decide to share.

Obviously, fair enough.

But I, as listener/reader/fan/etc., wish you wouldn't!

Wallace's wrestling with neuroses in pubilc, without masks

^^ I don't think he did this in the least, to be honest -- I think he was forthright and articulate about a lot of the issues he had, especially on an intellectual level, but I don't feel like any public wrestling was going on.

Well, it was public wrestling insofar as each footnote and dependent clause appended additional explanations, apologies, and involutions to a given sentence.

Washington Post piece on NYer pieces.

Oh, you mean the fiction! I have trouble considering that "public" in that sense -- it's art! It's fiction! It seems to me somewhat impossible to have fiction that doesn't involve the author wrestling with whatever the author has to wrestle with -- and if not impossible then certain undesirable!

like, every time I hear Max Brod's name, I spit

brod's personal justification for his decision, IIRC, was that he'd told kafka a bunch of times that he had no intention of destroying any of his works, and kafka still opted to make him his executor, knowing that he wasn't likely to carry out the request.

i find it hard to believe that kafka wouldn't have wanted the trial or the castle published in some form, if not his random notes/private letters/et al.

I posted earlier before I'd finished the article, so I feel a little bit more comfortable now w/ the book being published given that he apparently kind of left it out and somewhat organized to be found and shared.

yeah i was gonna say, he deliberately left it out, stacked with his suicide note. who knows what exact instructions he gave about it, but it doesn't sound like he intended it to be just junked.

everyone's said everything that needs saying in this thread. i'm not against it coming out though, for the reason that at least as the article presents it, that he'd ordered and left it out (and also because it sounds awesome). i was listening to that recent arthur russell comp, and hearing stuff that's totally fully formed but for whatever reason didn't come out (cf. goodbye old paint, which is totally ready and a whole lot of work must have been involved in) - seeing that stuff come out unnerves me more than something that's obviously unfinished and is presented as such. the new yorker piece makes it sound like it was readied and left there, that he tied up all the strings of the sprawling novel he had and put his affairs in order.

reading unfinished novels is so frustrating though. so there's something to chew on. it's worse if they have an epilogue, and you don't know they're finishing because there's still thirty sheets between the fingers on your right hand. but still.

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/35660000/35666121.JPG

does anyone know what this is? it's 144pp., so i guess more than just the commencement speech.

Nah, it is just the commencement speech, apparently. Publishers these days could take this post and publish it as a novella.

reading unfinished novels is so frustrating though.

but probably no more frustrating than the last 50 or so pages of infinite jest. i'm not sure dfw ever really "finished" a novel.

I think a gesture of friendship ("please destroy my works when I'm dead") would have added as much good to the world as the works themselves did, but that's just me.

The more I think about this, the more it grates. I think I was initially disarmed (although I disagreed), because you did seem to appeal to a righteous ideal. But although I agree that a true gesture of friendship is something the world cries out for, you don't honor your friend by merely respecting his expressed wishes, you honor him by respecting the work. And the work, in this case, was bigger than Kafka (and, of course, bigger than Kafka knew). A great work of art like The Trial wants to be seen.

Art can be a gift to the world, because art is a gift from the world--it's bigger than anything like 'expression' or 'ownership'. Who can tell what force brought Kafka's stories into existence? Kafka couldn't--he felt possessed and feverish when staying up all night to write a story. Can you imagine a world without The Trial? (And we're not talking about some Sophie's Choice shit like which would you save, Shakespeare's works or a baby--we're talking about would you save The Trial or just destroy it, 'cause its author said to.) The world needs Kafka's works more than Kafka needed (posthumously!) his insecurities to be 'respected' and confirmed.

If you find yourself the custodian of a great work of art, your responsibility is to the work, not to some notion of what the artist wanted to do with the work. Your responsibility is to the work--that's how you honor your friendship.

You could use that to argue you should publish work by living authors against their wishes. The pragmatic answer is to just make sure you've got trustworthy people looking after yr estate to do as you see fit, but if you agree to destroy and don't that's a real betrayal that's not legitimised because it's against the dead. If g00blar is right and I die a famous artist, I should to appoint a loyal friend who hates my work (and and has no grand ideas of its importance) as custodian.

If you find yourself the custodian of a great work of art, your responsibility is to the work, not to some notion of what the artist wanted to do with the work. Your responsibility is to the work--that's how you honor your friendship.

My saying that you know better than your friend, the artist, what the work's final disposition ought to be? Respectfully, but strongly, disagree. I also think every artist who doesn't want something published should know that any friend no matter how well-intentioned is likely to say "well, he really would have wanted it published, and besides, history/the world/posterity/posited good is more important that the artist's wishes" - Kafka ought to have burned his manuscripts himself. Personally, of course I would destroy The Trial - posterity can hang, its author didn't want you to read it, that's the end of the matter as far as I'm concerned.

"my" = "by" in first word there

then again if a friend entrusted his works to me and said "whatever you do, publish these after I'm gone," I'd probably destroy them anyway just to be on the safe side

you really like destroying

I can't be alone in that

I just realized they have an excerpt from the "Long Thing" right after the New Yorker article; it's very good--looking forward to see what is released.

I think the article went a long way toward explaining his mental state--I didn't realize he was suffering so badly.
Also surprised that he stayed on Nardil for so long (rather than switching to an SSRI)--I didn't realize that that was still prescribed. It may have been the only thing strong enough for though, as it seems that his suicide occurred after going off the drug.

Nardil and the other MAOIs seem to be somewhat more effective for what I think is called "atypical" depression, in which a lot of stuff is really somaticized?

It has been a while since I read "The Noonday Demon" but I do seem to recall something about that.

The New Yorker piece (the D.T. Max one) is beautiful. That said I had a little trouble with the excerpt from the unfinished novel (although I really liked the stuff quoted in the Max piece). I got a distinct feeling of "I don't know if I'd be up for a whole novel's worth of this."

i'm pretty keen to see the novel. i thought it being super mundane and minute clicked with his rhythm and detail. also this:

In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn’t allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he’d have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.

I loved the "You're watching 'As The World Turns'" bit.

Yeah...his later short fiction (particularly the longer pieces in Oblivion) could be kind of forbidding in its abandonment of most of the humor/broad characters/meta stuff that made Jest easier to swallow, a thick part-of-novel in that vein might be a really difficult read. There is something about the topic/theme of this book that I find pretty intriguing, though, so I'm still up for it.

i was totally anti-publishing this, totally on J0hn D.'s side theoretically and then I read the excerpt. . . holy shit, cannot wait until it comes out.

i've been reading supposedly fun thing... i think he's best when writing by tennis, by a huge margin. the first thing i ever read by dude was signifying rappers (sux), which i think turned me off of him for a long time.

agreed regarding Oblivion, too--a lot of those pieces (the title story especially) did not click for me the way the majority of Infinite Jest did

xpost uh, gonna have to completely disagree with you there, the best story in that book isn't about tennis, its about a cruise.

on Oblivion: yeah, I had the same problem with it, but I'm actually kinda eager to go back and give it another chance after having read everything else by him.

I really really loved the excerpts from The Pale King. I understand the qualms about post-mortem publishing, but sometimes people, particularly the extremely self-critical author-types, need a little push out the door from their loved ones, and the world is usually a better place because of it.

i havent finished the book yet dillweed! anyway i like him best talkin bout tennis, happy now

have you read his Federer piece from a few years ago? so great.

guys re: 'the qualms about post-mortem publishing', he left it out on his desk! all neatly in a pile! it's no like it's nabokov or something w a note saying 'PLS DESTROY'

yeah i know...i regret jump-starting that line of thinking before i got to the end of the article explaining that part.

ya that federer piece was just like... d-damn

yeah, i do love the federer piece.

and yes, i read that article, too, i know he wanted it to be published. i said the qualms thing more in response to the conversation that's been going on in this thread.

yeah but i mean his note might have specified what he wanted done with it--sounds like he wanted it published as is, i guess? it still feels weird i guess

Yeah...I imagine that since he left his wife a note, there's certain things he expressed to her that will never be made public, and we just have to assume that she's carrying out his wishes to the best of her abilities.

re-reading the federer piece these days breaks my heart a bit due to fed's continuous waffling against that other guy.

the excerpt from his new book does sound really good but on the other hand, i don't really have much to compare it to - it's the first piece of fiction by him I've ever read (read both a supposedly fun thing and consider the lobster). where should I start with his fiction - the short stories? Broom? IJ, even?

i would say IJ