david foster wallace: classic or dud

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

expand on that

(Aimless groans, smirks, mimes onanism, chortles, & eye-rolls)

The beginning of this thread makes me nostalgic for the days when Wallace was just a fiction writer among many, one you could like or dislike without there being any cultural weight attached to which it was

I guess we'll get back to that in 10 more years

https://jezebel.com/mary-karr-reminds-the-world-that-david-foster-wallace-a-1825799769

I saw a good 'used' (but unread) copy of Infinite Jest for $3 today at my favorite charity bookshop. I picked it up, thumbed through a few pages and realized I had no interest in re-reading it.

You write that Infinite Jest was motivated by his “dysfunctional yearning for Mary Karr.” How did she influence his drive to write the book?

What I meant by that was that he was trying to impress her. He really wants her to think he’s doing wonderful work, and I think when she, at various times, breaks up with him, he’s thrown into those negative spirals that can also be enormously productive for a person, a creative spiral of anger. Almost like something out of a Hollywood movie. There’s a note in one of my files where he says something like, “Infinite Jest was just a means to Mary Karr’s end, as it were.” A sexual pun.

Oh fuck those guys. Both Wallace and Max.

That pun is such bullshit, Wallace is such bullshit, the continuous praise is even worse.

celebrated artist is problematic case #4882567386

i wonder what style of movie karr felt like dfw's behaviour belonged in

I read Infinite Jest a few years ago, aware of DFW’s rep and place as an unfortunate and un-asked-for figurehead of a kind of Lit Bro mentality but... still found it pretty fucking good. Couldn’t put it down. Still think about it a lot.

I don’t really know how to talk about him now.

Or even then.

oh, are we doing cadaver synods now?

i don't know how to talk about him either. if there are still intellectual white dudes out there still saying "dude you should read DFW he's the BEST WRITER EVER" yeah i'll be glad to laugh in their faces. i read his book, like, twenty years or so ago, i liked it a lot. it influenced me. that's not something i can undo. i used to like bill hicks, too. they're dead now, and the work they did when they were alive is very much of a time and a place. we can point out that they were monsters, or we can talk about how they were "problematic", or we can let time render them irrelevant, which it's doing a very good job of.

ive just reread most of the tennis essays, first time in years & i appreciate them much more now, so great

the old "write about what you know" adage proves out once more

infinite jest is great, annoying lit bro debris & saint/martyr status aside.

It's half great

Actually no, the tennis/alcoholism stuff is largely fantastic. But good God is the sci-fi framework awful.

I wouldn’t say it’s awful but def the weakest element of the book.

The drug/alcohol and tennis school stuff (lol at having these things together) is just so well drawn though. Anything outside of it is bound to look weak in comparison. The avant-grade film stuff and filmography is very clever too though.

I didn't find the near dystopian future setting half baked or that imposing, almost all of it is on the periphery of the main action in the book at the school and the halfway house. all the stuff about addiction and AA is the core, the heart music of infinite jest

the Quebecois separatists were pretty dreadful

yeah they are the most boring part of the book by far imo

...all the stuff about addiction and AA is the core, the heart music of infinite jest

one cool & interesting bit of trivia from the D.T. Max bio: the only music DFW listened to while writing Infinite Jest was Nirvana and Enya.

jeez, he never shopped for groceries?

New Pynchons are a bit like New Dylans. Here are some I have known and loved:
1) Don DeLillo (back in the day I heard rumours that he WAS Pynchon, similar to ye olde Salinger rumour)

2) Steve Erickson (underappreciated fantasist - see ILM thread on his top 100 LA songs)

3) George Saunders (maybe more of a Barthelmian miniaturist, but TRP wrote blurbs for CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia)

Those I have loathed: DFW, William T. Vollmann, many more...

― Edna Welthorpe, Mrs, Tuesday, November 20, 2001 8:00 PM (sixteen years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the Quebecois separatists were pretty dreadful

― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, May 5, 2018 11:10 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah they are the most boring part of the book by far imo

― flappy bird, Saturday, May 5, 2018 11:15 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There was a big block of this in the book, it was the one point where I said "god, fuck this" and skipped/skimmed a few pages.