best David Foster Wallace book besides Infinite Jest

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

oblvion or lobster.

Supposedly > Pale King > Consider > Girl > Oblivion > Broom > Everything > Brief

the title essay in 'lobster' played a big part in my deciding to become a vegetarian; can't think of many books that actually literally changed my life in that kind of way.

has anyone read the rap one?

A couple of those Lobster essays (e.g. the David Lynch one) remain for me his most engaging work.

curious hair or brief interviews

i never really remember whats in the lobster book as i had already read all of those previously

A couple of those Lobster essays (e.g. the David Lynch one) remain for me his most engaging work.

the david lynch essay is in Supposedly Fun Thing

also: Oblivion.

oh right my bad

the lynch one was in supposedly fun thing, which got my vote

efb

i'm seriously the hugest DFW fan and so I can't bring myself to read Signifying Rappers

yeah i'd probably feel more strongly about Lobster if it wasn't like "oh all these pieces i already read and enjoyed all in one place" when i bought it

i voted lobster

signifying rappers was the first book of his i read and it soured me on him for a few years

"Authority And American Usage" (aka "Tense Present") from CTL is so great

i've only read the two essay collections, so i'm not gonna vote, but i need to get on his fiction asap

i read that lipsky thing twice though

imo the essay collections have so much of his best stuff and if you've read more than one (or just one and really liked it) you should feel free to vote

those essays are the gateways into his best fiction

i've only read the two essay collections, so i'm not gonna vote, but i need to get on his fiction asap

― markers, Tuesday, August 23, 2011 10:47 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol you really dont

The Usage essay was passionate and at least gave lip service to academic linguistics but I think he was pretty much wrong about what he argued. Every other essay in Consider the Lobster though is fantastic, as I recall, especially the wonderfully-titled review of a John Updike novel, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”.

also I just posted like 1000 words about math in the other DFW thread if anyone wants to experience that!

the only dfw i've ever read is everything and more, because i'm a pop-math nerd

confessed in the other dfw thread to not having read broom or curious hair, but of everything else it's prolly lobster. replace the ziegler essay w/ the cruise ship one and you can drop the "prolly".

my undergrad library had a copy of signifying rappers. i read it for kicks even though i knew it would be bad.

fav might actually be pale king! it shows his desire to shed himself of his worst tics and get down to the real shit.

yeah i fuck with Pale King real real heavy, that shit was soulful 2 me

it shows his desire to shed himself of his worst tics

well some of it does.

wow, you'd dump the ziegler essay?

i'd put it in supposedly fun thing and then also buy that, and then i'd vote for lobster in this thread.

i think i posted this in one of the other dfw threads or maybe some grammar thread

http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs/word_notes.pdf

^a bunch of writers riff on usage of a bunch of words in the "oxford american writer's thesaurus" - a lot of the other writers' entries are either silly/irrelevant or straight up wrong but DFW totally brings it

the essay (review, really) about updike is out there on the web and is a brutal otm zing-fest even if you think dfw'd idea of fiction isnt necessarily the antidote to updike's.

this sounds corny, but the "human connection" aspect of dfw's writing is what has drawn me in the most... even in his ticciest work, there was real empathy or understanding or a striving toward universality. i felt that big time in pale king.

xp strongo otm x 1000

xxp "it never seems to occur to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole" is so great

tru

also anyone who likes dfw-in-writing-about-writers mode should check out the uncollected essay about wittgenstein's mistress, which is available as a pdf on the howling fantods site.

prototypical and most hilarious of American literary zingfests: http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/rissetto/offense.html

as a chaser

and some xposts again: yeah no argument about there being plenty of moving human stuff in TPK. just plenty of tics, too, and i've never been convinced of the supposed oppressiveness of the anti-sentimental caustic culture-of-irony he's trying to escape w/ all that wriggling.

but maybe I should start a Mark Twain thread

yeah i feel like the anti-irony stuff was about 50 percent a "true facts" diagnosis of a real problem with late 20th-century culture and 50 percent a kind of wriggling working-out of disgust over an aspect of himself/his work he just didn't like at all.

Oblivion felt more 'trying to hard to escape his tics' to me, i was actually kind of pleasantly surprised by some of the humor and characterization in TPK that he'd done so well in Infinite Jest but seemed almost too embarrassed to try much again in his later work. my worst fear about TPK was that it'd be a lot of that kind of blank, neutral prose about nameless characters referred to over and over as just 'he' or 'the boy' or 'the man' etc. but there were actually a fair number of memorable characters and genuinely funny moments.

i get the sense it was more self-flagellating than anything else, that his criticism of the external culture was largely a cover for the disgust he felt over his own writing.

anyway how could you forget to include noted full-length printed and bound book "this is water", available at an estate sale i mean bookstore near you

i see where sd is coming from in terms of certain stories ("mr. squishy," the title story, "the suffering channel") but i feel like "good old neon" (and to a lesser extent "the soul is not a smithy") is such an overwhelming empathy gush that it kinda colors the whole of oblivion even if its as a whole his darkest, least optimistic book, easy.

such an overwhelming empathy gush

this is the big deal w/ this guy for me, just as it was for tolstoy + proust.

or i guess for any writer i really love.

(those "for"s should be "with"s, although i'm sure his empathy is what tolstoy and proust like about dfw as well)

tbf Oblivion is probably the one i feel like i would probably benefit most from giving a thorough rereading, out of all these books

brief interviews in particular has some real stinkers, as i recall

yeah i mean from a technical standpoint oblivion is kind of unimpeachable for me but i can totally understand why 99 percent of people (including wallace fans) would be turned off. it's like watching someone let ants build an art farm, but keep his hand hovering nearby, threatening to shake it and ruin everything and show the ants how pitifully small they really are, but never actually shaking it.

and oof, yeah, the highs of brief interviews are high but there is some bulllllllshit in there too

the gibberish retelling of narcissus and echo for starters

yeah that one is all about the interviews, forever overhead, maybe octet.

i don't remember most of oblivion, but "good old neon" haunts me.

octet is not cool w/ me. some of the interviews are good, forever overhead made me cry once although when i went back to it lots of it was super purple, i have a feeling one (or both?) of the "adult world"s might be good but i'd have to revisit.

keepers from hideous men for me: the last brief interview, the depressed person (which reads like a super cruel zing to me more than A Portent of the Artist's Inevitable Demise), octet, forever overhead, and a couple of the small bits.

girl with curious hair isnt perfect by any means but has a lot more good stories in it than people give it credit for now, i think

i like "the depressed person" when i'm not reading it. it's sort of the ultimate expression of that dfw thing where he's afraid you don't get it so he keeps trying to make it clearer to you.

for like fifty pages.

yeah there's some very good writing in GWCH and obviously comes from an important period in his work but all the celebrity/historical figure fanfiction stuff leaves a bad taste in my mouth

need to read more of these, but like Supposedly so much that I don't mind voting for it over things I'm not familiar w/ first-hand.

yeah the We Are Putting These Corporate Icons to Our Own Uses rhetoric is kind of lol considering we live in a world where one google search will get you stories about ronald mcdonald teabagging the hamburglar or whatever.

The Usage essay was passionate and at least gave lip service to academic linguistics but I think he was pretty much wrong about what he argued.

― carne asada...in my vagina? (silby), Wednesday, August 24, 2011 2:57 AM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how do u mean?

I mean he made an essentially conservative argument about English vernacular and language change and the legitimacy of usage rules, about which topics you can see the academic point of view over on Language Log and reading any random post basically. At least that's what I recall from the essay. I mean like he made about the most viable case that there is to be made about conservative standards of usage, which is that Educated People Expect It, but like there was this awkward cultural component where he brings in the anecdote about his student (of color and of urban background I believe) and told her that she'd have to use Standard Written English (his coinage) in her writing and she was affronted by this and he was like "yeah it's true, this is just white man imperialism, but suck it up because that's how it is". Which might be pragmatically true in some respects but also is not really an argument that any particular stickler position on usage has any merit.

DFW obviously did not ignore any of the potential for exploitation of the vernacular in his own writing, so he probably had the "know the rules to break them" mindset that many folks have. Or at least thought he did.

And I, I guess, disagree with that?

N.B. I read this…2-3 years ago now so I might be misremembering some things, this is my reconstruction of how I felt about it.

i don't remember most of oblivion, but "good old neon" haunts me.

― metal spoons left in gutter (get bent), Tuesday, August 23, 2011

QFT

yeah it is the best of his short stuff, for sure.

i think i'm almost scared to read 'good old neon'

it is one of the most readable things he ever wrote, fiction-wise, but also like being kicked in the face repeatedly by sadness for 50 pages.

voted "supposedly fun thing" because it's the truth, but i'm sadly thinking "broom" will get no votes and i was sorely tempted. all the great dfwisms that he tried so hard and so wrongly to stamp out of his writing later.

like being kicked in the face repeatedly by sadness for 50 pages.

yeah, this is why i am reluctant

also quite beautiful fwiw

brief interviews, despite what i guess are generally accepted as its failings. 'octet' was very important to me when first i encountered it at 16 or so, tho' now i find it sort of awful. 'the depressed person' flips between hilarious and horrific each time i read it. the interviews themselves are unimpeachable.

i like that it's pushing itself both formally and thematically - it's a little weird, when you go back to it, that sex is significantly absent from infinite jest -- i mean, it's acknowledged that people are doing it, that sex is a thing that happens, but it's in there for the hamlet plot & for orin's assignations, which are figured as another mode of addiction -- that the (newly married?) dfw then starts trying to think more seriously about gender relations and work that into fiction endears him to me. it was interesting when 'although in the end ...' how he keeps addressing his interviewer in bro-ish terms, jokingly asking if he can parlay the success of infinite jest into getting laid on a book tour, &c. it seems mainly like a way of remaining guarded and not drawn on the topic - it's interesting that that person turned into the one who published the 'intervews' over the next few years. the interviews themselves are an excellent way of talking about this stuff without becoming too card-carrying Male Feminist (although i suppose someone else might argue that they are a way of having one's cake and eating it also)

formally it's interesting how interdependent all the pieces are, as assembled there; & how it's the last time you see him fitting new strings to his bow, trying out new avenues of attack. some of these, yes, don't succeed - i have never actually convinced myself to finish 'tri-stan: i sold sissee-nar to ecco' and i am still fairly confused about what happens in 'church not made with hands' (though i suspect on fourth or fifth revisit the latter may crystallise into something excellent; this will probably not happen with the former.) but there's a pleasure in seeing a great stylist ... dick around (though obviously it's some very serious dicking around.)

i'm a little sleep-deprived to follow the idea through but i think there's an alliance between the book's gender concerns and its formal ones: that he's resurrecting some deeply naff modes of expression, some 'formal innovations' that people tired of in 1972, at the same time as he's a while dude writing a book in 1999 which takes as its focus an assertion which we seem to consider a truism, both undeniable and too banal to dedicate serious art or thought to: that hey, western society's gender codes are deeply biased in the favour of one particular gender, and that's kind of fucked up

that the (newly married?) dfw then starts trying to think more seriously about gender relations and work that into fiction endears him to me.

per the question mark, he got married about 5 years after Brief Interviews was published, looks like

started rereading Oblivion because of this thread, so far am definitely appreciating it more the 2nd time around

well i haven't read IJ! i've read a few though and would have to vote Oblivion for Good Old Neon and the title story alone.

It's probably Supposedly Fun Thing, but I'm giving my vote to Girl with Curious Hair, as I think it's underappreciated, and weirdly ignored when folks are talking/complaining about What DFW Writes Like.

well he did a pretty good job of repudiating everything pre-jest. not that we should listen to him.

wasn't GWCH kind of his calling card that helped set up some of the anticipation for Infinite Jest (and/or his ability to publish a novel that long)? i get the impression that stuff and short fiction in general were kind of what he was known for before IJ and before Supposedly made his essays probably more widely admired than his stories.

it's good but it definitely feels 'dated' to me that his other stuff doesn't.

i think he was signed as a kind of late '80s enfant terrible/"he's only 25!" for broom. kind of a hangover from the easton ellis thing. but instead of getting a minimalist ennui-of-the-mtv-generation thing, they got...broom.

iirc correctly broom did pretty well on the novelty factor but gwch stiffed completely. but it did build his name with the avant types, college weirdos, reviewers, etc.

yeah i meant more in weirdos/critics terms of building his audience. it seems more likely that any hardcore fans he won pre-IJ were from Girl rather than Broom.

are there any theories online or otherwise about the actual title "Good Old Neon"? those three words are so beautiful together. I'm damned if it know what they could possibly mean though.

my theory: in the final section (SPOLIERS) dfw talks about the protagonist giving off a neon-like glow or aura, so i assumed that was in reference to him. maybe a hs-era nickname, or just something dfw called him in recollection?

cheers, i think i missed that or forgot it.

yeah it was only on like the zillionth re-read that i went "oh, wait, hmmmm."

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

the girl with the curious hair was my intro to DFW, I got it right after it came out and loved it, and it's still my favorite collection of his writing by far.

i've been re-reading Oblivion because of this thread -- weird to realize that both The Pale King and "The Soul Is Not A Smithy" feature tangents about characters going to see The Exorcist

any hardcore fans he won pre-IJ were from Girl rather than Broom.

I am a proud exception to this, and voting accordingly.

xpost: think i remember a posthumous interview (probably with his ed?) where "the soul is not a smithy" (and maybe "incarnations of burned children"?) were actually originally part of the pale king manuscript. (which of course now makes me wonder which characters they're about.)

'the soul is not a smithy' seemed like it wass very clearly recast as whatsisname's long monologue, to me? with the train accident, and the jesuit-who-isn't's lecture? but i'm not sure that seems as plausible to me now as it did on first reading

'the soul is not a smithy' is the one from Oblivion that i just can't get. for some reason i can't visualise the opening comic book panels/window pane image convincingly and can't get a grip on it after that.

ha, i totally did that!

that would make sense, the Chris Fogle monologue is i'm pretty sure where the Exorcist thing pops up in TPK. actually a lot of thematic stuff (relating to his father, learning about his work life after he died) lines up, too.

i remember when he read Incarnations somewhere and made one of his first public allusions to working on a larger piece, which I think given the themes of some of his other recent stories people on wallace-l speculated could be a novel about childhood/parenthood, which is why it so surprised me when the news came out about The Pale King existing and being about the IRS.

re-reading Smithy last week (for the third time) i kind of worked harder on visualizing the panel stuff than i had before and got into the story overall more.

also i can't really get, um, behind the shitting sculptures thing in "the suffering channel" but disregarding that i can still move on with the story.

it took me until last week to realise that was (partly) a joke about freud

all of the weird phenomena like ghosts and levitation and the guy who psychically picks up random trivia about people like Walken in that SNL parody of The Dead Zone that kept creeping into TPK really reminded me how much i enjoy Wallace's willingness to depart from reality and insert unexpected high concept quasi-sci fi ideas into all the hyper-realism.

a lot of oblivion makes me think of eliot's poem/not poem "hysteria"

AS she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part of it, until her
teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying: "If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
tea in the garden ..." I decided that if the
shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
and I concentrated my attention with careful
subtlety to this end.

"careful subtlety" !

"the suffering channel" is, if nothing else, the apex which several thousand years of poop jokes had been moving toward.

there's somthing in "hysteria" that links to Neal's discussion of of long it might take to unravel/describe even the most fleeting thought as text but in tone it's closer to "incarnations of burned children" or "philosophy and the mirror of nature".

does anyone like "mr squishy"? i'm trying to decide if i should try to finish it

me and que, for starters

don't expect it to "go anywhere" though, except further into its own evil little universe

same could be said about ilx

'"the suffering channel" is, if nothing else, the apex which several thousand years of poop jokes had been moving toward.'
I really feel DFW missed an opportunity by not expanding whatever non-fictional element this story was based on into a "Consider the Lobster" essay.

he coulda done a "host" style "looking at all the angles" essay on us weekly or whatever, but i kinda like how the fictional "suffering channel" seems to relieve him from being fair or empathetic toward to the cast.

the description of that story in reviews at the time sounded so lame. that was one of the things that put me off reading Oblivion. so many of you are vouching for Oblivion in here though, I'll probably go check it out ...

voted for Girl With Curious Hair, it was either that or Supposedly Fun Thing. someone loaned me a copy of GWCH and it was the first DFW I read and it got me hooked to read more, so that got the nod.

xpost: think i remember a posthumous interview

!

Wallace: [...]

he was being interviewed by James Orin Incandenza, Jr iirc

brief interviews with decomposing men

haha

too perfect, actually

a friend of mine who doesn't usually read much has been raving about jest, calling it about the best and most compelling thing he has ever read. which is interesting.

i think that's pretty common, people who are not big lit-heads choosing to tackle it because of reputation or whatever?

i've said as much somewhere -- it's the "compelling" which i find the odd bit, given that one of the things his detractors insist on is his monotony

but, then, i guess, you can have a set of non-readers who will find something like the "where was the woman who said she'd come" section compelling, and a set of non-readers who won't find it so, just as you get a set of readers on each side of the issue

i was wondering if there's something about the kinds of style he deploys when doing that sort of thing - of which 'mister squishy' is the epitome, i guess - which is particularly translatable to the reading patterns & pleasures of people who aren't big lit-heads. but i think it might just be that the not-big-reader friends i have who get a lot out of the book have tastes in other things which tend towards repetition-with-variation

it is compelling -- that's what GETS people through all one thousand pages

it's also super funny

i think for a lot people, since its release, it's been their first "weird" book. (by which i mean even people who are "readers" but who don't naturally come to that barth/coover/pynchon/late-nabokov/gaddis tradition dfw thought he was part of.) and so yeah, it seems daunting, but if you go with it you find its also really funny and conversational. so there's the thrill (or daunting-ness) of all the heavy formalist shit, but also pemulis making bad jokes and lots of sincere and unfussy discussion of stuff everyone can relate to.

i mean i knew when i first read it back in college i hadn't read any of the authors it would have been bracketed with (excepting maybe checking gravity's rainbow out of the library and being too daunted to get through much of it) back then, before a new context grew up around what dfw was doing over the next 15 years.

my line for people who are intimidated by it is that it's not a difficult read on a page-by-page basis, there's just a whole lot of it

he has caught up on all the reading he previously never did

that barth/coover/pynchon/late-nabokov/gaddis tradition dfw thought he was part of. ... back then, before a new context grew up around what dfw was doing over the next 15 years.

i'd never thought of this quite so baldly. true, though, i guess

although maybe in another fifteen years that last will seem like a blip, and wallace will belong again to a tradition of black-humour-encyclopedic-novel-types, who knows

got a nice copy of "broom of the system" I've been staring at, thinking "do i want to read this"

supposedly is classic non-fiction. i also thought his rolling stone profile of john mccain ca. 2000 was outstanding.

short story "the asset" reminded me of a martin amis sleazo character (that's a compliment)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

this seems about right, but it's kind of funny how the results sorted out into these parfait-style layers of essay collections > short story collections > novels > long form non-fiction

Huh. There is no arguing with the nonfiction, but I might have voted for Oblivion (or, just possibly, Brief Interviews -- I even liked "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko," and feel alone in this, whereas "Adult World" can fuck right off). Oblivion's title story, "The Suffering Channel" -- Amber Moltke, christ -- "Good Old Neon," and "Mr. Squishy" are some kind of apex of short fiction, to me.

evil little universe

OTM

Visiting the Wallace archive fucked me right up. Recommended.

so I've been chipping away at IJ on my iPhone (kindle app) and...it doesn't support footnotes? which has made the reading so much easier? what am I missing by basically not even knowing about the first chapters worth of footnotes?

there are some very entertaining (and sometimes very lengthy) passages and little stories/histories that take place entirely in the footnotes, but as far as i can remember you could probably not lose any appreciation or comprehension of the main text of the book if you never read the footnotes, unless you're really trying to understand it all and connect the seemingly unexplained dots. best case scenario, though, you're still missing like 100+ pages of text (probably more since it's in a smaller font than the rest of the book).

I had a really hard time getting through Oblivion, though I did really enjoy Mr. Squishy.

If I had voted, it would have gone to The Pale King.

gbx i would say SOME of the footnotes are essential but most are not. a lot are just tedious pharmacological research, unless you're really into linking the street monikers of prescription drugs with their official names. there are at least a few which do advance the plot or answer questions. i always remember the one about pemulis's mom being a real heartbreaker.

There are a couple (not many) key scenes that take place entirely within footnotes, though. Don't remember exactly what they are, I just remember at one point being amused at a few pages of quotidian narrative in which the real plot-heavy revelatory stuff had been buried at the back. Maybe a place where the footnote was attached to a stand-alone ellipsis.

i think the gross and heartbreaking story about the dog and mrs. incandenza's pretense of believing an absurd lie is in the footnotes. or maybe i'm just remembering it as having smaller text because it's an extended quote from a letter.

anyway i don't think anyone should skip the footnotes, although when you flip to one and it's obviously just a pointless brick of pharmacology to Simulate The Information Overload Of Modern Life or whatever you should absolutely abandon it.

also we're all saying footnotes even though they're endnotes

i'd also only recommend reading the filmography if you're sure it's gonna be "your kinda thing"

xpost lol i hadn't even noticed

wasn't the long hal/orin phone call in an endnote?

xp ha

yes!

was all the insanity re. steeply's fake article about orin an endnote or did we suffer through that in the body of the text?

i had forgotten about that but i'm almost positive it's in the back

i've honestly forgotten most of the orin quarter of the book, except for the 1984 ending and the great phone calls.

and the grossness of hal's toenail basketball

Mmmmmyellow

hahaha

god i wish i had my copy with me

i like that orin calls the girls he womanizes "Subjects" and hal observes at some point that orin's grammar had always disappointed their mother

"the next sound you hear will be unpleasant"

orin is definitely a hideous man

i think i read some of the phone calls out loud

they do a Beatles one something like Orin calls up

"I want to tell you. My head is filled with things to say."

right? something like that. the brother stuff is so hilarious with those two (and with Mario.)

for some reason pemulis's yachting cap just cracks me up every time i think of it

also the u.s.s. millicent kent

for the name alone

oh and the way pemulis looks from side to side, all conspiratorial like

i always pictured pemulis looking just like jw or vice versa

"please commit a crime"

orin's sadistically ungrammatical fake form letters as "jethro bodine, assistant mailroom technician"

haha "but you have the... MR. HOPE"

the set piece with them eating dinner, some of them like refugees, which turns into the discussion about powdered milk

it turns out this is a very difficult book to find specific scenes in

BOOM

http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm

hahahahahaha wow

oh my god Lyle

^ wkiw

"everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising towards what he wants to pull down"

some of the footnotes are inessential... just like some of the main text. skip it if you don't care about reading the whole book.

soooooooo.....the reason i didn't know anything about the first chapter's worth of footnotes is because there aren't any

yeah so I checked Oblivion out of the library for the weekend.

orin's sadistically ungrammatical fake form letters as "jethro bodine, assistant mailroom technician"

my eyes are watering at this

god that book is fucking hilarious in places

OTM

although maybe in another fifteen years that last will seem like a blip, and wallace will belong again to a tradition of black-humour-encyclopedic-novel-types, who knows

― thomp

HE STILL DOES BELONG AGAIN

Mmmmmyellow

― Mr. Que, Thursday, September 1, 2011

i think i wanted to win the powerball just so i could take a couple weeks and do nothing but reread inf jest

maybe play nintendo, too

the two times i have read that book have been some of the best times in my life. now that i think about it, both times i was in a major life transition. such a perfect book to get bogged down with and drag it around with you from room to room

yeah i always seem to get the urge to read it again when everything falls apart in my life. i'm not quite sure why but it certainly feels appropriate.

somehow i had never read that markson review before. haven't dug much into wallace-ania, i guess.

and it's a sad review because he seems to me so obviously off to a good start on interpreting 'wittgenstein's mistress' in view of skepticism and wittgenstein that it makes me want to run home and start rereading markson right now. but his interpretation of wittgenstein is so off, so bluff, that it's just chagrining to think how much happier he might have been if he were able to bring his concerns to his reading of markson with the help of a reading of wittgenstein that brought W in line with him and markson, rather than him feeling/acting as if it's mostly markson's achivement and W's personal/professional torment not to have been able to do so that he as the reviewer is trying to bring out.

this makes the sophomoric / amateurish / immature quirks of the voice / intellectual style of the review more painful, too, given that there would have been, i think, plenty of sufficiently useful material on W available to wallace in the late 80s. so that if wallace had forced himself to be more 'scholarly' maybe he wouldn't have felt comfortable biffing that stuff. janik and toulmin's 'wittgenstein's vienna' (from 1973) was widely feted, reviewed popularly and part of a general revival of interest in the fin-de-siecle vienna connection that wallace works a bit in a footnote. and it stresses a point that would have been in circulation in some philosophical circles, that the 'ethical part' of the tractatus is important. yet everything wallace says about the tractatus and ethics seems to get the ethics wrong by literally ignoring everything that is said near the end of the tractatus about ethics. the main other sad thing is that wallace signals some awareness of austin and cavell, who would have given him so many tools for thinking through the connections between philosophical skepticism and literature/relations to other people that wallace obviously cares about - but wallace seems to have taken almost nothing from them or not done enough of the (pain in the ass) reading to be able to use the tools or know that they were available. so instead he's caught up in imagining markson's narrator as a 'solipsist' (even though it's other people that have gone missing, not the rest of the world - anyway, a serious blunder re the tractatus that's tied up with his neglect of the ethical part) and latches on to the tractatus as the main attractor of intellectual interest to the detriment of the investigations. which i think would serve wallace's reading just as congenially - kate trying to have things of interest to say under conditions when there are no people to take an interest in anything that's said (except her), kate's uses of names becoming shaky under same conditions, etc., kate's monomania for fragments of the lost parts of human culture rather than a more intense interest in / relation to the (natural / physical) world as such...

also, he uses 'female' as a noun, super gross.

oh and also he seems irrationally abusive of bruce duffy's 'the world as i found it', like he lost a prize contest to him or something.

every time i go into a public bathroom, i think about that part in Brief Interviews about the dad who's the bathroom attendant, and the phrase "meaty tussis."

Whenever I go into a restroom stall, I make sure to "drive the latch home with a certain, purposeful force."

xpost Jesus christ is that ever sadly otm.

I must have missed this here. I think there was some Wallace discussion on ILB, where I praised Girl with Curious Hair to the skies. Still one of my favorite books, so many of those stories are near-perfect acts of ventriloquism. "Everything is Green" is a work of art.

No one cares, but my login here (variously The Mad Puffin, MadPuffin, Ye Mad Puffin) is half a nod to "the Mad Stork" in IJ. (The other half is that my initials are P F N and I pronounce them pfin, so the puffin is my totem animal.)