david foster wallace: classic or dud

had forgotten that after the pontificating remark there's "well these are hard questions. particularly when they're about something that you did like seven years ago. [hand farts]"

probably the only reasonable reply to the cameraman's utterances is hand farts, as it echoes the sounds he emits

I never followed Wallace much but liked the movie a lot.

boo !

The Awl puts in the boot

http://www.theawl.com/2015/08/the-bro-of-the-system

I'm so out of touch I don't even know what they're referring to when they say "the kinds of guys who even in their twenties are walking advertisements for the “low-T” scam the pharmaceutical industry is trying to pull on the flagging libido of the American male" and I don't want to google "low-T" lest it mess up my ads for life

low testosterone id imagine

That's what I guessed, but what's the scam? Are there lots of people walking around buying OTC testosterone supplements???

I was in a pharmacy a few days ago and they were selling a book which was about eating paleo and doing this and that in order to raise your testosterone as the majority of health conditions in men (according to the blurb) are caused by low testosterone.

so yes, I guess?

so I guess the awl writer is making some complicated cultural bankshot of the form "paleo dudes are deluded jerkwads but who can blame them for thinking there's a nationwide testosterone shortage when there's so many David Foster Wallace fans around"

Bret Easton Ellis still hates DFW. His article about the movie seems to make the same point as the NY Mag article about "bros" reading (or, I guess, fronting that they have read and been profoundly affected by) Infinite Jest. i.e., they want to be perceived as sensitive, but are actually selfish jerks, the same way BEE sez DFW was? This is hard hitting stuff.

like Nas said why don't you let the late great veteran live!

I really feel the term "bro" should be referred to actual bros, i.e. dudes who wear ballcaps with their college team logo, and etc. Yes there is a solid feminist account which establishes continuity between behavior of bros and that of creepy alt-lit guys but Tao Lin is not a bro. Actual bros, as far as I can see, neither read nor pretend to have read David Foster Wallace? Tho the scuzzy boyfriend of Lena Dunham's character in GIRLS is seen to have a Saul Bellow paperback by his bed. Not sure whether he's a bro or whether the book is meant to be understood as read or unread.

OK I started reading that Bret Easton Ellis piece and got bored by its stupidity (I don't think BEE is a stupid person, I just think there are certain topics w/r/t which he has chosen stupidity as part of his self-concept)

eephus! otm wrt bros. but this is how language works doesn't it? tomorrow we'll all be old and be saying "back in my day that meant something else entirely". so, i feel like i'm at the older age of what news reporters/journalists call "millenials".

the bee piece is a collection of truths that have already been published mixed in with his own personal beef with dfw. the whole thing reads like he needed to repeat what a lot of fans actually already believe, then decided to attack his new fans, which is fair enough, but then he grinds his axe about how he isn't jealous of dfw. it gets way too personal at the bottom.

but actually dfw would probably agree with almost everything bee has written up there.

like Nas said why don't you let the late great veteran live!

― VC, Thursday, August 13, 2015 2:44 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

tomorrow we'll all be old and be saying "back in my day that meant something else entirely"

It may provide some useful context to add that I'm actually already old, so I'm locked into a notion of DFW fandom that is more "E Unibus Pluram" and DFW-as-experimental-fiction than "This is Water" and DFW-as-guru. I feel like the contemporary analogue of my idea of David Foster Wallace is, like, Ben Lerner.

i've not read lerner.

will rectify that promptly

I actually think the analogy is pretty strong in many ways (obsessive self-examination and self-consciousness, resistance to mass culture mixed with a recognition of its unavoidability and charm, a certain amount of drug abuse, many readers love love love him and many think he's a pretentious fuck who should get over himself...) Even down to the fact that Lerner got a huge advance for a weird literary novel, 10:04. Except in this case it obviously didn't explode commercially like Infinite Jest. It's really good though!

i saw this, its ok i v much got from it more abt lipskys character and like hero worship
its still unforgiveable segal doesnt/cant do? the midwestern dialect but he gets the twitches m/l
their banter is a lil off too fast/forced or something for 60% of this imo & from following wallace he was some degree more personable/charming than i think comes across really

lol i forgot i have that lipsky "the art fair" novel i got it discarded from a pub library yeesh has anyone read this

http://i57.tinypic.com/oqauix.jpg

Updike (...) makes it plain that he views the narrator’s impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I’m not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the book’s first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/books/review/everything-about-everything-david-foster-wallaces-infinite-jest-at-20.html

ken erdedy kind of a weird example of "method acting" in dfw's free indirect style. don't think marijuana addiction was some wild alien territory for him. hal has a less extreme but similarly compulsive habit himself iirc and hal's certainly not being method-acted.

do you mean to say that, e.g., it would only be "method acting" if dfw wasn't already familiar with addiction?

i don't know because i don't really know what the piece means by it. like this--

The literary craftsman’s term for what Wallace is doing within the Erdedy interlude is free indirect style, but while reading Wallace you get the feeling that bloodless matters of craftsmanship rather bored him. Instead, he had to somehow psychically become his characters, which is surely why he wrote so often, and so well, in a microscopically close third person.

--says that dfw was doing something specialer than mere free indirect style, that he was inhabiting his characters in a way that went somehow beyond lily the caretaker's daughter being literally run off her feet, and even suggests that this inhabiting was dangerous to him, in the way people often casually and sort of ridiculously right? said of heath ledger playing the joker--

And Erdedy is merely one of the novel’s hundreds of differently damaged walk-on characters! Sometimes I wonder: What did it cost Wallace to create him?

--and i don't think ken erdedy was some deep dive into Total Empathy either in the unprecedented-literary-achievement sense or the dangerous-walk-on-the-dark-side sense. i see a novelist novelizing his experience. i love this book but like that's what books do. idk this is a weird thing to obsess over obv, the piece is long and i agree w much of it, but dfw inspires this kind of blowsy special-category verbiage that i'm never rly convinced by.

Bought that big IJ character poster today, as it's the not 5 bud this week.

Didn't like the quotes from IJ.

All great stylists eventually become prisoners of their style and, in a final indignity, find themselves locked up with their acolytes. Wallace avoided this fate. For one, he never finished another novel.

OK then.

otm that it would suck to be locked up w/ his acolytes tho

reread the first chapter of IJ last night. so masterly.

https://twitter.com/cat_beltane/status/694231485306540032

jordan are you trying to give dead dfw the howling fantods

The Wardine section is terrible

A lot of that book is terrible. I reread it last year and I'm sorry I did.

what was so terrible about it

I read it about a year ago, found it pretty fucking amazing

I should reread, but I might prefer Broom of the System.

what was so terrible about it

The uniformly bad/unfunny jokes, the ethnic and gender/sexual stereotypes, the commonly known urban legends borrowed as plot points, the total lack of characters worth caring about, the overwhelming impression that Wallace was a virgin when he wrote it (none of his characters seem to have the slightest idea about sex or how one might go about having it, even the ones who are explicitly described as having it), the entire concept of Subsidized Time (see under "uniformly bad/unfunny jokes")...it's a bad book. Even the parts that are sort of good (the exploration of the world of nerdy teenage boys bonded by mutual interests/obsessions and close-quarter confinement) don't go anywhere, or do anything but describe a world and a set of circumstances, and description isn't enough. Indeed, after awhile overwhelming, reeking mountains of description, mortared together with dialogue mostly composed of neurotic witticisms, start to slide into diminishing-returns land and stay there. I'm glad I read it, if only because it helped immunize me against future critical hype-waves.

i think it's a wonderful book, I only read it about 5 or 6 years ago for the first and only time, but I was utterly gripped - by the prose rather than the story, Wallace is for me the most wonderful sentence by sentence writer - and got through it in about a month, although I was working a lot etc, despite its size. I usually take a long, long while with such a tome. feel like war and peace sat on my bedside table for months.

just found the wardine chapter a typical middle-class writer attempting a demotic inner-dialogue of a person of a different race and lower socioeconomic class and falling flat on his face in the most dramatic fashion possible in an incredibly cringe-inducing way.

it's a nerdy and very male book, the quips and jokes and coined stock-phrases are corny, it's incredibly anachronistic, its satire of contemporary culture and politics is a little broad, to say the least, etc. it's still one of the better books ive ever read.

the overwhelming impression that Wallace was a virgin when he wrote it

almost stopped reading your post right about here. really weird thing to assume about an author--although i think it says more about you than him.

that's just. . . weird man

characters without copious copulation experience need not apply

sexual interfacing

This is devastating, from Good Old Neon

Good Old Neon
The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open… That is what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see, who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali–it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

This is actually the anniversary of his death which I had no idea about when I posted that. That's weird.

weird, i finished infinite jest tonight after trying for 8 years, many false starts. this is a strange bump

that's a beautiful passage

that really is quite nice, isn't it?

this:

That is what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see, who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock.

is actually very similar to what schopenhaur said:

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

that i believe dfw's quote was actually his reaction to reading schopenhauer

https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-have-David-Foster-Wallace-as-a-teacher

from his class syllabus:

Anybody gets to ask questions about any fiction-related issues she wants. No question about literature is stupid. You are forbidden to keep yourself from asking a question or making a comment because you fear it will sound obvious or unsophisticated or lame or stupid. Because critical reading and prose fiction are such hard, weird things to try to study, a stupid-seeming comment or question can end up being valuable or even profound. I am deadly-serious about creating a classroom environment where everyone feels free to ask or speak about anything she wishes. So any student who groans, smirks, mimes machines-gunning or onanism, chortles, eye-rolls, or in any way ridicules some other student's in-class question/comment will be warned once in private and on the second offense will be kicked out of class and flunked, no matter what week it is. If the offender is male, I am also apt to find him off-campus and beat him up.

<3

sadly likely to earn a visit to the dean's office these days based on anonymous butthurt rats