david foster wallace: classic or dud

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?

this thing?

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

it's a short story

yeh but it ends kinda

it ends kinda weirdly midsentence, yeah, just like his first book, can't say i'm a fan of it

i like this ending much more than that ending! this one felt coherent and clear and characteristic.

poor dude :(

god, he was 21 when he wrote that

poor dude :(

yeah

Did Brief Interviews with Hideous Men ever get released to theaters?

i think it was released in limited places? This is kind of interesting

There’s a bit of an announcement we’re hoping you can make about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Can you tell us about that?
John Krasinski: Hulu’s premiering the movie first on the Internet (after it finishes its run in theaters), so we’re a part of that, and that’s fantastic.

Huh, I guess it's played in NYC, L.A., and Boston, and is scheduled for Philadelphia and Austin this weekend. Weird that it never made it to Chicago. But I'd just as soon watch it on Hulu, anyway.

yeah it's weird it hasn't made it to DC either, but then again it's only 80 minutes

i think the ending trailing off is referring to his fear that the Bad Thing is really... "you"

as in:
Being far away sort of helps with respect to the Bad Thing. Except that is just highly silly when you consider what I said before concerning the fact that the Bad Thing is really [you.]