david foster wallace: classic or dud

This is the thing about the freshness of it, though, obviously: if DFW had continued on unto the age of 85 writing whatever it is he would have written, there is every chance that he'd have expired well-known or out-of-fashion or any of a million things that would make a biography not seem all that important to anyone. There's a pretty ideal arrangement of factors here to make a biography valuable (not least the posthumous flow of obits and articles and so on that first started converting him in people's heads to someone with a complete life that you might really start thinking of as A Life).

xpost - haha I think Que was pretty clear there, though obviously it depends on what Eggers does between here and when he dies

(P.S. if we are going to play a "what the fuck does this even mean" game, I think seemingly non-sequitur posting of the name "Eggers" in the middle of the conversation probably merits it -- I don't follow your point, could you explain more?)

the book did not get low six figs because the publisher felt that, as the last great american writer, david foster wallace warranted a well-remunerated biographer.

the book probably got the low six figures because the guy wrote a great, interesting article for the new yorker and probably followed up on it with a great proposal

It seems like all the juicy Eggers bio stuff is already plainly embedded in '...heartbreaking' while DFW was pretty cagey about putting anything personal not involving tennis or math or grammar out there, so a bio that connects the dots seems less redundant in DFW's case at the very least.

I'm not sure why Eggers' name is here at all ... if he died tomorrow much of his life would be covered in the memoir, and if he went on doing Eggersy things for 40 years I don't think he'd merit a significant biography -- maybe a book tracing out some larger McSweeney's-associated aesthetic, if that still seems somehow significant, or maybe long after that one of those books that takes up a more "minor" figure to make some larger cultural point.

Wish I could unpack the "Major American Writer" thing; maybe a good way to think about it in this context is people whose biographies wouldn't look too out of place on an imagined shelf alongside books about Oates, Mailer, Didion, Vidal, Morrison, Salinger,* etc. Canonical writers; writers people in an English department might casually refer to by last name only without feeling like that meant anything.

* haha at some point that one would either get really boring or really interesting

in 40 years we will all be living in roboeurope under a muslim pope

reading robert jordan biographies

the book probably got the low six figures because the guy wrote a great, interesting article for the new yorker and probably followed up on it with a great proposal

yeah, no doubt. and my surprise at it, like i said, mostly no doubt reveals how little i know about publishing. i have no idea how many books you even have to sell to recoup a $100,000-plus advance. or how well literary biographies sell as a rule. or, you know, anything about it at all.

as for the major writer thing, i don't know. had wallace reached the level of someone like delillo, in terms of scholarly interest or ubiquity in the curriculum? (honest question -- i was never a lit major in the first place, much less within the last 10 years.) i think he's important because he's important to me, but i don't have a very clear sense of how widespread that impression is. i guess i've thought of him as a little bit more of a cult figure. which doesn't rule out his being a major writer, i just have no idea what his standing is with the literary/critical establishment.

no doubt.

The question isn't whether DFW reached the level of ubiquity on curricula as Delillo has (he hasn't yet), it's whether he's reached a threshold of 'major-ness' in those worlds...is there a big enough silent majority of people (in the 'scholarly community,' say) who recognize him as major writer for people to talk about him across their own particular specialisms without explaining why he's worthy of being talked/written about? I think the answer to that is definitely yes. (The answer is not yes, btw, in English department-world, for Chabon, whom I heard someone give a paper on in December. The speaker felt the need to introduce him in a way that made clear he felt he could not assume everyone would know who he was.)

the other book's getting published - http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/another-david-foster-wallace-biography-is-planned/

readin oblivion; it sucks

i read like 4 stories from it and was pretty 50/50 on 'em...then i gave up.

not really my thing tbh.

the one to read is Infinite Jest--it's his best work by a long shot everything else, for the most part is another level down in terms of quality

Just out of curiosity, has DeLillo been adopted onto curricula beyond White Noise? Am asking because I don't think anyone thinks of Sandra Cisneros as a major writer, despite the fact that House on Mango Street is hella read in high schools and colleges. I mean, it's pretty obvious to me that DeLillo is more of a major writer than Cisneros is -- but I don't know that we can go by "he's read in English classes" as the sole standard.

i never finished oblivion; i didnt hate it but at the time it was just too dense & involved and i was beginning to dread picking it up to read.

broom of the system is great & funny and easier to read. and not as big and intimidating as IJ

i said to cankles the other day that i wanted to jump to defend oblivion but i felt like someone going "no no jerry garcia's playing on the 70s versions of dark star is totally different"

broom of the system's first chapter is a glimmer of real potential; a lot of the rest of the book he spends being the sort of writer he spent a lot of the rest of his career kicking against

my po-mo/contemporary american lit. course as an undergrad had cosmopolis on it, by the way: i get the feeling this one might be on a lot of syllabi bcz it's easy to teach in a "Hey, kids, this is what POSTMODERNISM looks like" way, like the dead father is.

oblivion is patchy but "good old neon" and "oblivion" are undeniably great.

good old neon is the only one i actively hated

guess undeniably was the wrong adverb to use

heh. yeah. undeniably owned.

http://www.samplereality.com/2009/07/19/the-truth-behind-jay-murray-siskinds-review-of-david-foster-wallace/

hey guys, i'm trying to find an essay written by a woman who taught a class on david foster wallace after he died. i think she's a professor at the same college he taught at and the article talked about the temptation of reading too much of his life in the work. does anyone have the link? i'm not having any luck here.

look at infinitesummer.org -- I think she did a blog post there about teaching the class

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is that who you're looking for?
http://infinitesummer.org/archives/931

sure is, thanks!

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/content/823228?inPopup=true

^^this interview is so great

wow. i'm only like ten minutes in, too.

some great mp3s here incl. old DFW interviews and a long interview with his sister with some funny anecdotes.

where

oh ha

http://www.wpr.org/book/090823a.cfm

cheers, look awes

this is so great.

day before yesterday was driving across central Illinois listening to that WPR show.

It sound so good I'm actually considering taking a break to locate/purchase a USB connection so I can put it on my mp3 player for the walk home.

It's good, wouldn't say magnificent. It really brings home -- or maybe this is done with editing -- how the problem DFW writes about in "E Unibus Pluram" is central to him for twenty-five years afterwards, and in some sense he makes no progress on it.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/briefinterviewswithhideousmen/

features two different law and order spinoff alums!

oh man that looks like shit.

yeah seriously bummed about this probable garbage.

May be of interest only to DFW fans who are also serious tennis fans: tennis journalist/blogger Steve Tignor has been writing a great series of articles about DFW's tennis essays on his blog Concrete Elbow.

This explains much.

Re Alan Lelchuk, quoted in Ned's link: I liked his novel _American Mischief_, which I think has been completely forgotten.

http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/2665.htm

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

http://quomodocumque.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/wallace-amherst_review-the_planet.pdf

:(

jeez :/

has this been posted before?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwS5pEfcQNk

hardened my resolve 2 retackle infinite jest

Intense essay. Anyone else puzzled by the ending?