david foster wallace: classic or dud

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.]

I guess didn't feel it was a midsentence ending so much as a defined one that deliberately omitted its last word, for reasons that made sense! Whereas Broom's is all kinds of poncey and irritating.

Has anyone seen the Brief Interviews film? Is it good?

I read this as "considering the fact of what the Bad Thing is, really."
I liked this story. It feels much less contrived than his other fiction. Unless this is actually about him, in which case :(

i have a bad feeling about that brief interviews movie

i'm sure it's mostly bad but i want to see it anyway

^^^exactly

did anyone else read "All That" yet? I read it on the bus this morning, and I enjoyed it a lot. seemed like a perfect blend of story + philosophy.

yeah liked it

havent read it yet, but whats the deal - is it an excerpt from the novel or

yes

From the Wallace-L mailing list today:

Pietsch says Wallace had been working on [The Pale King] since 1996, and the novel went through various working titles, including "Glitterer," "SJF "(which stood for Sir John Feelgood), and "What is Peoria For?" As we've heard, Wallace did extensive research for the novel in accounting, tax processes, an so forth. What I hadn't heard before today was that various pieces we've seen in stand-alone form are in fact chapter of the novel, including "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" and "Incarnations of Burned Children."

Pietsch is working with more than 1000 pages of manuscript, in 150 unique chapters; the novel will be published in time for tax day in April 2011. As we know, the subject of the novel is boredom. The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it's all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity.

The finished book is expected to be more than 400 pages, and will be explicitly subtitled "An Unfinished Novel"; the plan is to make available the drafts and phases the text went through on a website that will exist alongside the book. Pietsch is editing the book in close collaboration with Bonnie Nadell and the estate, but as we've heard him say before, he sees his role very clearly as attempting to order the text into a unified whole, and not making changes that the author isn't there to argue with.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/19/davidfosterwallace0919.jpg
ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER DO YOU WRITE IT

Anyone see that Brief Interviews movie? Is it terrible?

i dreamed last night that my brother had read infinite jest.

"it was good, you know, but i didn't like it. i wasn't into it."

the brief interviews movie was p. terrible imo

im like 500 emails behind on wallace-l so thx 4 the above~

The opening of the book instructs the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it's all 100% true

Wait surely only the tax stuff is true? That is confusing.

thomp are you bored of wyps :(

no but partly as a result of playing it i've become addicted to facebook scrabble again /:

also i was bored of you always winning

Anyone else read the Zadie Smith piece about Brief Interviews in her new book? I'm still trying to figure out whether I like it or not.

That bit that ran in the NYer recently, by the way: it's really amazing: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/12/14/091214fi_fiction_wallace

i have been dying to read the Zadie Smith piece

^^likewise, couldnt find it at my library when i looked recently

a buddy of mine got the zadie smith book for xmas, i'm going to read that essay this weekend

so about that essay. . . .?

People have certainly raved about it. I wasn't necessarily disappointed, but not as amazed as I'd hoped to be, maybe? But I'm not sure that's her fault -- it might be a function of my already caring/reading/thinking too much about Wallace, to a point where there's slightly less to get out of it. There's some level on which it's pitched to explain What Wallace Is About to those who just think of him as showy and neurotic -- which she says is a very common line in the UK in particular -- and it does that quite well in some ways.

The thing I'm trying to figure out = the number of copyediting/proofing errors in the piece suggests it was pretty hastily appended to the collection; I wonder if that involves its having been hastily finished, too. (She started it before he died.)

the number of copyediting/proofing errors in the piece suggests it was pretty hastily appended to the collection

ugh, this drives me crazy. i want to read it now. i don't know if i wanna buy the whole book though. i liked that review she did of Remainder vs. Neverland, and i loved the essay about her Dad & Faulty Towers

^^ I really hope that doesn't sound like I'm saying "ooo I'm so special I know too much about Wallace for anyone to tell me nothing" -- I just mean it's different for something you're too close to, I guess? I'm trying, instead, to imagine how I'd feel about the essay if I didn't care for Wallace, or read him only casually, or something -- i.e., the way I read most any other piece like this.

xpost - yeah, the one about her dad was terrific

But does it have any dad story nearly as good as your story about the orange juice and binoculars, nabisco?

xpost no, ha ha i do the same thing with articles about him. "yeah, duh, i know he wrote two theses at Amherst and one became Broom of the System, yeah doiiiiiiiiiiiiii."

Okay, you know what? I will come down on the side of this essay. It's a little weird, because part of what can be "difficult" about Brief Interviews is that it's hard to read casually -- it doesn't really let you just read it as stories without having to think really hard about the moral/human ideas it's dealing with. So it's a tough game to write an essay drawing out or explaining those ideas. And it's totally to Smith's credit that she does a really good job of something that difficult, doing really great readings even of those stories where you do have to draw those things out a bit more. (The readings I liked best were of "Forever Overhead" -- the kid on the diving board -- and the one with the poet on his deck chair. The reading that did the least for me was of the story with the hippie girl and the rapist, which is probably because you can't read that story without having all its moral freight dumped right in your lap from the get-go.) So yes. To be honest, if I'm even mostly impressed with a piece like this about something I'm "close to," that probably means the piece is amazing, right?

Also it contains a really great FUN FACT about a detail in "The Depressed Person" and the well-known author whose life it was borrowed from.

To be honest, if I'm even mostly impressed with a piece like this about something I'm "close to," that probably means the piece is amazing, right?

Kind of? Because the essay confirms what you've been thinking about or connects ideas you had about stuff? Okay I can't wait to read it now.

Forever Overhead is A+ amazing, one of my favorite pieces by him. "Shake off the blue clean."

it doesn't really let you just read it as stories without having to think really hard about the moral/human ideas it's dealing with.

yeah, totally. And that's one similar thing I've enjoyed about these pieces from the Pale King that keep coming out. I got this feeling mostly with Good People and All That, not so much with Wiggle Room (maybe it's there, though, i've only read it once) but he has a layer of story going on but then there's this sub-layer of story about morality ang big ideas and stuff, i can't quite put it into the right words.

Yeah, that's one of the things that depresses me most about his death and the fact that he felt his writing wasn't going well -- something like "All That" strikes me as going REALLY well, like he'd started finding a way to pack all these human/moral concerns into really vivid stories, without needing any odd formal tricks to get it in there, and moving past the fun/funny gags he always said he was fond of ... I think he'd really grown into something new. It's such a shame his brain/body couldn't make it all the way through.