david foster wallace: classic or dud

^^ I think DFW was far more charitable and journalistic about investigating the guy's character than I ever could have been

continually amazed the more i read about his depression that he was able to produce so much work... when im in the midst of one of those six-month periods where every day is the weird anxious struggle to feel OK about your life, i cant lift a finger creatively. i imagine he was incredibly sef-critical.

Well, that Salon article made it sound like in his final months as his depression worsened he couldn't write, so maybe his productivity waxed and waned based on his personal state. Does make me feel kind of awful for indulging in any moment of anger at or judgement of his actions, it sounds like he tried very hard for a very long time to soldier on through the rough patches.

I have tried probably ten serious times to quit chewing tobacco in the last decade. I’ve never even made it a year. Besides all the well-documented psychic fallout, the hardest thing about quitting for me is that it makes me stupid. Really stupid. As in walking into rooms and forgetting why I’m there, drifting off in the middle of sentences, feeling coolness on my chin and discovering I’ve been drooling. Without chew, I have the attention span of a toddler. I giggle and sob inappropriately. And everything seems very, very far away. In essence it’s like being unpleasantly stoned all the time… and as far as I can tell it’s not a temporary withdrawal thing. I quit for eleven months once, and it was like that the whole time. On the other hand, chewing tobacco kills you—or at the very least it makes your teeth hurt and turn unpleasant colors and eventually fall out. Plus it’s disgusting, and stupid, and a vector of self-contempt. So, once again, I’ve quit. It’s now been a little over three months. At this moment I have in gum, a mint, and three Australian tea-tree toothpicks that a Wiccan friend swears by. One reason you and I are chatting in print rather than in real time is that it’s taken me twenty minutes just to formulate and press the appropriate keys for the preceding ¶. Actually speaking with me would be like visiting a demented person in a nursing home. Apparently I not only drift off in the middle of a sentence but sometimes begin to hum, tunelessly, without being aware of it. Also, FYI, my left eyelid has been twitching nonstop since August 18. It’s not pretty. But I’d prefer to live past fifty. This is my Tobacco Story.

secret to becoming a brilliant and prolific writer = tons of nicotine?

Writing well, and productively, involves getting into a pretty unusual state of mind: you have to be in a peak state of focused, high-level creativity -- thinking not just about what you're saying and the words you're using, but about where they're going, and how they fit the shape and structure and themes of an overall work -- and you have to do this furious mental work while sitting calmly somewhere. I'm sure there are other tasks in the world that require this kind of mental state, but I don't know what they'd be: most other high-level creative things I've tried still involve some periods of technical or rote work, these brief breaks where you decide on a plan of action and then get to work peacefully at implementing it. They involve some level of just doing the thing you're working on, or else picking up and looking it over, fiddling with it, tweaking things, seeing how it works. Writing isn't often like this -- the real work of it involves sitting there at the blank edge of a page and needing to face it calmly and keep poking forward into an infinity of options. Which is maddeningly rough and a struggle big enough that it's hard to just sit in a chair and keep at it.

Point being: there are various crutches that can help a person stay in that state and stay in the chair without feeling dumb or cowed or mute and driving herself crazy -- and if you've found one, it's going to be hell to let it go, and lose part of the capacity to do the main great thing you do in life.

bisco, do u think the best writers are the pps who can concentrate the longest/hardest

No, not really.

fwiw Signifying Rappers is absolutely fantastic

signifying rappers is trash

I won't disagree with nabisco, but this got my attention:

They involve some level of just doing the thing you're working on, or else picking up and looking it over, fiddling with it, tweaking things, seeing how it works. Writing isn't often like this -- the real work of it involves sitting there at the blank edge of a page and needing to face it calmly and keep poking forward into an infinity of options. Which is maddeningly rough and a struggle big enough that it's hard to just sit in a chair and keep at it.

The hardest part of writing fiction is starting: staring at the blank page, etc. I'm the sort of writer who must complete a minimum number of pages once I start, though, and for the most part I'm improvising. Looking it over, fiddling, tweaking, seeing how it works -- this all happens during a first draft. It was an immense comfort when I read a Flannery O'Connor essay in which she admitted that she had no idea what she was doing when writing ("You must write outlines and character sketches," non-writers will say). The real art -- thinking how words "fit the shape and structure and themes of an overall work" -- happens during revision.

re: what n's talking about - that was one thing i never got in college, the flagrant adderall abuse. How can anyone hoping to be remotely productive as a writer in their life, take adderall and not expect to become addicted ... its beyond me

That's absolutely true, Alfred, but I do think there's a slight difference in scale. It's common enough, in the process of writing something, to do things like switching point of view, or tense, or re-arranging elements, to see how it all looks from various angles. But of course you can't just turn your notepad or computer over and see it that way; it involves whole processes of rewriting and reframing. It seems to me to be slightly different from, say, writing a song (where I can ask, "what if I played it like this" and then do so) or making a piece of visual art (where I can alter something and then step back and look the whole item over at once).

I tend to feel, incidentally, as if you're always staring at the blank page -- or anyway you're staring at the blank end of the page, which can be just as weighty. Maybe that's just me, though: I love the possibilities of the blank page, but find it harder and harder going as each word you put on there narrows you down to a point.

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

heh lil nublets

heh just heh

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

don't sweat it--i think 90% of artists (writers, bands, painters) feel this same thing all the time.

sad stuff

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/09/26/david_foster_wallace/

― Mr. Que, Friday, September 26, 2008 3:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I found this an incredibly sad and genuinely upsetting piece. It hits too close to home.

yes, sad and frustrating and then sad all over again

i think the most disheartening part of the process to me is after ive gotten something written, and i go back to correct and rewrite it, and its saying so much less than i thought it was saying, that ive totally failed to convey the nuance in my brain adequately.

don't sweat it--i think 90% of artists (writers, bands, painters) feel this same thing all the time.

and then if you're lucky it goes to an editor (publisher/producer/critic) whose job is to dissect it for meaning and relevance and then you do rewrites! fun!

tho editing/rewriting is really good and satisfying in its own way - i guess it depends on what you're writing
i always marvelled at how one would attempt to edit dfw

Maybe it was by tag team. Then again wasn't the manuscript accepted in 1992 and published some years later?

here's a pretty cool essay about an early version of IJ, looks like in the fall of 1993 a working draft was completed

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/ij_first.htm

WTF????

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&item=170259650660

That's....interesting.

must be an advance galley, I'm surprised that there was that much editing done after that though

I'm surprised it's only half a galley.

The Lynch essay did not do much for me.

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2009/01/teaser-trailer-brief-interviews-with.html

not sure how i feel about the addition of the feminist dissertation writer -- too much like an NPR version of SATC?

the feminist dissertation writer has been present in the interviews pretty much all along if you read carefully enough-

When Wallace called Krasinski in 2005 to give the film its blessing he asked about the changes. "He said, 'What's it scripted around?' " Krasinski recalled to the L.A. Times. "I said, 'A woman doing her dissertation around feminism looking into the role of the modern man in the post-feminist era.' There was a silence. And he said, 'I never figured out how to do that, how to make them all relate together. That sounds awesome.' It was probably one of the greatest days of my life!"

hmmm (i still haven't read BIwHM, but it's on my shelf)

they're pretty great

for the dfw stans:

http://machines.pomona.edu/166-2009/

tho blog entries from undergrads are pretty hit or miss

http://machines.pomona.edu/166-2009/files/2009/01/cropped-img_0129.jpg

It's good to see they managed to compress Infinite Jest into that cm thick edition on the left there!

I'd love to sit in on that class. Although I have a professor right now who went to Amherst College (and also is seemingly infatuated with the Oxford English Dictionary), and I'm dying to ask her if she ever encountered him.

i think that'a a reader's guide of the IJ, not the actual book

It was a joke.

it's impressive that they're having that class this semester. fitzpatrick seemed like a pretty awesome professor, so i'm glad she's the one doing it.

http://sonorareview.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/dfw-tribute-issue-pre-order/

"Including an uncollected story, Solomon Silverfish, and essays and
reflections from Sven Birkerts, Michael Sheehan interviewing Tom
Bissell, Charles Bock, Marshall Boswell, Greg Carlisle, Jonathan
Franzen, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Glenn Kenny, Lee Martin, Michael
Martone, Rick Moody interviewing Michael Pietsch, and art and prose
from Karen Green."

Not to mention interviews with Marilynne Robinson and Junot Diaz. I wish I weren't broke.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309fi_fiction_wallace?currentPage=all

also from the link above:

a third novel, which he never finished—the “Long Thing,” as he referred to it with Michael Pietsch. His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration.

When Wallace was twelve, he was one of two winners of a local poetry contest. “Did you know that rats breed there? / That garbage is their favorite lair,”

I cannot stop being sad about this and the more I know the worse it gets and it isn't like I was even a big fan of his writing. Just a big fan of who he seemed to be as a person.

what that article really makes clear is how little distance there really was between who he was on the page and in life. all of those philosophical/existential dilemmas weren't just abstract questions for him, they were really major challenges about how to live. in a way it means his failure (what he perceived as his failure) to resolve all that in his writing made it hard for him to see any way forward outside his writing -- it was all the same question. but if you look at how clear and visible and vivid he made that struggle in everything he wrote, i think he really actually succeeded at what he thought he failed at -- conveying "the fucking human being" behind the art. reading that article, to me, the surprise isn't what was hidden about his life but how much and apparently how thoroughly you can know him as a person through his writing. i wish he could've understood that.

yeah i got sad all over again when i read that article. especially where it talks about how supportive he was of his students, particularly those who were troubled by depression and anxiety.

xpost. that is very OTM, tipsy.

re. tipsy mothra's post, i re-read "Octet" last week and it's all laid out pretty clearly in those 25 pages.

"Pop Quiz 9

You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer."

I cannot stop being sad about this and the more I know the worse it gets and it isn't like I was even a big fan of his writing. Just a big fan of who he seemed to be as a person.

― Whiney G. Weingarten (J0hn D.), Sunday, March 1, 2009 11:28 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah. i've been surprised by how sad his death made me because his fiction especially is not my cup of tea, but i really did feel like i knew him from reading his writing.

In a way - this sounds weird, but reading about what he wanted to do fills me with a sort of hope or even joy, because if what he believed was that "Good writing should help readers to 'become less alone inside,'" well, that is what his writing does, for me? His books make me think about what it is to be a fucking human being, about the importance of the struggle to be decent to one another. So like tipsy mothra, I wish that he could have understood that he was succeeding (with this reader, at least); but I'm also just happy that he succeeded, even if he never knew it. I'm so happy that he managed to write what he wrote. That the aim to "make living people feel stuff" was realised.

xpost to one of the things above.
Reading him I'd always thought, "He must be using some sort of authorial persona in his work as that just couldn't possibly be the guy who is actally writing this amazing stuff. If he was, how could he possibly get anything done?"

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. I'm even more impressed with him now, simply for being the person he was, than I was with him as a writer (which is saying a lot)

a good interview that i hadnt read before - http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfwstuff/Whiskey%20Island%20DFW%20Interview%20Looking%20for%20a%20Garde%20of%20Which%20to%20be%20Avant.pdf

this is almost too good to be true:

They fell in love. Wallace put a strikeout through Mary’s name on his tattoo and an asterisk under the heart; farther down he added another asterisk and Karen’s name, turning his arm into a living footnote.