david foster wallace - is he a cunt?

maybe i should try infinite jest (or anything else, really) before i complain.

he wrote an essay on the illinois state fair that i would very much like to read.

i have not been impressed in the slightest with oblivion.

(And screw the 'posthuman' - wtf indeed - I know what they're trying to say, but it's a silly academic categorization (but my academic tolerance levels are currently low, so...) and there are better/clearer/more informative ways to say it. I'm pretty sure now that it's just a snappy way to sell otherwise dull, rehashed-theory books. ooh, 'posthuman', edgey... pfft, read one Haraway.)

A really big question related to the the cuntliness divide is: you can see from the (pre IJ) essays and his own biography that he was interested in tennis, cantorian maths, TV etc, so why did he wait until his third book to tackle these things? Was it that he was waiting to be a mature writer (in which case he is a frightening iceman) or that he realised he SHOULD be writing about what he loved (in which case he is a reformed cunt, now lovely)...

HURTING. is probably right, or partly right, based on what i've heard about infinite jest and that latin essay thing. what i maintain is interesting is that he cannot himself escape from that particular prison. infinite jest by his own standards was a failure.

I was listeing to an interview with eggers and he takled about how 'goofiness' isn't valued or something else today. so he wrote a short story where a bird alights on a woman's shoulder and she says 'zippity doo-da' and then her arm disappears. good for him?

I mean, they're all comparable once you've read them (he has recurring themes, oh does he ever, and I need not mention his tics style), but if you aren't liking Oblivion but still want to give him a chance, switch to IJ, which is more accessible. (His most accessible stuff is probably the magazine features, like lobsters (supra), title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing..., Tense Present, or the current cover article of the Atlantic which profiles a talk radio host. Or maybe one of the shorts in Girl With Curious Hair, the Letterman one, perhaps.).

Best starting place in my view is neither Infinite Jest or Supposedly Fun but the short-story collection Girl With Curious Hair. Each story is a universe unto itself, and most are pitch-perfect and short. At the time of GWCH, I don't think he'd developed his DFW shtick of footnotes and hyperselfconsciousness, so they're better acts of ventriloquism.

S: most of: Supposedly Fun, Brief Interviews, and GWCH
D: IJ, and from everything I've heard, the hiphop book

Haven't read and have heard mixed things about the infinity book. I might give it a go sometime. I am pretty much the target audience for it, after all!

The infinity book is the only thing I've read of his I'd call unambiguously bad. (Maybe also Mr Squishy).

I mean, you could take any 300-page chunk of IJ and it would *still* be my most favourite book ever, and that's partly because his sentence (in a kind of Room With a View sense, sorta the Platonic Form of his individual sentence) is so perfectly attuned to my own personal, internal one. But it's also a kind of Catcher In The Rye, for me, because I first read it at an impressionable age, it clarified my relationship w/ my father, etc. So I wouldn't necessarily *recommend* it to people who might quite legitimately get neither of those things out of it.

Your whole second paragraph is how I felt for a year or so after reading IJ. It hit me at a turning point etc.

Infinity book = dud (and I'm pretty much its target audience, too, I think!)

well i suppose i'll get that essaybook shortly and then maybe give ij a go eventually. ij certainly interests me, but i assumed i'd be wiser to pick up a book of short fiction instead of a 1000 page novel i had no intention of finishing anytime soon. looks like i fucked that up.

can we talk about his prose for sec here? does it seem a bit clinical(ly dead) to anyone else?? i mean he's certainly got an immense talent for detail & description, but it reads like some kind of mechanical eye registering every detail and then spouting it out in sheets of crystalline sentences.

ANYWAY um that's based on not much at all, but it's my experience as yet and i'm hoping yall can tell me it's atypical or that i'm way off somehow.

also is the (non-) ending to ij as much as a bummer as everyone says?

Yeah, when he's at his best. I didn't find this to be nearly as true of IJ as it is of, say, Brief Interviews, though.

Ditto "Everything Is Green" or "Girl With Curious Hair" or "Here and There" or "My Appearance." And definitely the title essay of "ASFTINDA" (the cruise ship one).

What Gravel said--that he find's DFW's sentence is in tune with Gravel's own--would seem to disprove the notion that the prose is robotic. Obviously it's just like the way at least some people process the world. So if Gravel and I are humans, then DFW's prose is human also.

Hahaha: so but anyway I do feel like the thought process is very, very human—even more human than the artifice of clean simple prose. I mean, it admits to the problem of humans speaking, which is that as soon as you open your mouth to make an argument, you’re secretly bringing to bear everything you’ve ever learned about life—and if you really want to support what you’re saying, you could trace infinitely back in every direction through howevermany examples and related points and contextual notes. (You an say “I like the Rolling Stones” but I don’t fully know what that means until you’ve told me how you feel about blues and the Beatles and where you grew up and what music you don’t like and what you do for a living and on and on recursively.) It seems human to me that Wallace pushes back the border a little to include more of that recursive thought; if there’s anything android-like it’s the idea that someone can actually whittle a complex thought down to a clean, well-organized essay!

i'm talking more about the fiction, which seems (and again my exp is extremely limited here) wholly without poetry, lacking pynchon's intensity or delillo's understated grace or proust's opiate rhythms or nabokov's playfulness or joyce circa dubliner's detatched humanist portraits. instead it just comes across as detatchment cold & clinical. i guess that isn't automatically a bad thing, but for me it's difficult to stomach here.

ok, i'll shut up until i actually finish one of his stories. maybe (seems logical) these are problems that are most visible in the exposition and dissolve as the text progresses, or maybe i've just badlucked across them. but really, i think there's just something about his goddamn writing i can't stand.

Two of my favorite bits of writing in fiction are: in Beckett's Molloy, where he goes for a page or two describing his system of moving 12 rocks from one pocket to his mouth to the other pocket; and Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing, where he describes going through a modestly complex arithmetic problem in his head:

five and four is nine and five is fourteen and nine is twenty-three and
five is twenty-eight and nine is thirty-seven and four is forty-one carry
over four four and eight is twelve and eight is twenty and four is
twenty-four and five is twenty-nine and two makes thirty-one and eight
is thirty-nine carry over three three and six is nine and five is fourteen
and seven makes twenty-one and three is twenty-four and five is
twenty-nine and one is thirty and four is thirty-four carry over three
three and one is four and two is six and one is seven four and one is
five for a grand total of: 574.91

An interesting guy, basically. Smart as hell.

The more I think about DFW, the less I like him. It seems to me that most of his appeal is superficial, and has maybe too much to do with his audience. i do love his linguistic energy, inventiveness, but the thing that does bug me a lot is his post-grad-MTV-Keanu Reeves(sp?) put on where he interjects a lot of pat, blank, empty teen talk and I can't help but think that he's one of those very irritating post adolescent male cunts who, still in their 30s, seem to be coming to terms with the idea that they were, in their early teens, thought highly precocious, and that, their being aware of this label became for them a kind of badge, which they always draw attention to, ie., cling to, by trying to sound extremely brainy one moment and then offering some kind of anaesthetised teen response which is a kind of ingratiating "apology", for being so smart.

So, in conclusion, false modesty does pretty much qualify you for a cunt. But then again, Martin Amis seems like the biggest cunt around, as far as authors go, and no-one could accuse him of false modesty.

As you might be able to guess I like the guy's work. If only because one of my friends, after borrowing IJ from me, said it read like it was written by an idealised version of me.

New collection of essays coming out sometime relatively soon, too.

Oh, and not a cunt.

There are a couple fan-friendly pictures - the beefy pic with the short hair, where he kind of looks like he's lost (from Broom or Girl, I think) and the one w/ the dogs.

I'm actually kind of interested in the contractual ins/outs of cover art and the dust-jacket photos. Anyone here published and have to go through w/ all of this?

there's a fiction anthology edited by zadie smith a couple years ago ('the burned children of america') (oyy) which has an introduction all about finding some manic-with-their-foster-wallace-fannishness-foster-wallace-fans in spain or something and one of them produces something from a pocket and OMG ITS THE BANDANNA

in my case cover was designed in house by the publisher w/ my input and approval and owned by them. author photos were provided (and paid for) by me. this is fairly typical in the US. at the urging of my agent, I was pretty demanding about the cover: rejecting two versions, settling on a third, then getting a fourth that was absolutely perfect. much to my chagrin, six months after publication I was informed the two biggest bookstore chains had basically passed on the book because they didn't like the cover! so I ceded control on the paperback cover and ended up liking that one too.

Like this ...

http://www.ncf.ca/~ek867/david_foster_wallace.jpg

http://www.twbookmark.com/images/46/25786.jpg

"I am a part-time yoga instructor, but I'm going to massage school."

http://www.sherdog.com/fightfinder/Pictures/coleman_profile.jpg

I read broom of the system for the first time last week and loved it. I have no idea why I wrote this.

Please let me know when they make a miniature version I can keep on my dresser.

All of this, when I saw him like 7 years ago, seemed really contrived, an image he was marketing, and something that would help him land the ladies.

so, uh: is there a meaningful and/or exploitable connection between the two, or am i reading too much into this?

(this is possibly destined to be one of those thread revivals that sits there until the next revival - like the last one. but i can't elaborate, i gotta go cook.)

I don't love his fiction and have never been able to finish Infinite Jest, but I do adore the first story in Girl With Curious Hair, I think it's called "Little Expressionless Animals." I don't think any other fiction of his I've read touches it, though. this may be just a tin ear that I have toward his type of thing; he definitely has something, whereas Eggers just has a gimmick.

I'm not sure I entirely understand the Orwell question?

I would say that in this age we are overly impressed by science and its mathematical precision through measurement. However, scientific prose is not a model of clarity, but of the painstaking exclusion of ambiguity through the application of professional jargon. 'What we now know about language' is that it doesn't 'do' mathematical precision. It is inapt for that. Ambguity always creeps in.

Genuine clarity is achieved, as it always has been, by the inspired use of metaphor, which condenses ideas and conveys them without the loss of force or exactitude. It works like a mirror, not a calipers.

"It's finally hard for me to predict just whom, besides professional critics and hardcore theory-wienies, 226 dense pages on whether the author lives is really going to interest. For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane."

- which is as relevant a quote as i'm'a try and find for now.

at any rate he's certainly aware of such claims. (what's his position academically currently? dude got tenure*?)

i think the question of the political**/moral/ethical dimension of "clarity" for them is key: however my copy of the orwell essays with 'politics & the english language' is miles away, and i don't have time to read DFW's reply to it right now.

*n.b. i am english i don't quite understand what this phrase means i just think it is funny.

**(isn't it - or is it - sort of an interesting measure of the change in uh climate how much more of consider the lobster is here-come-the-scare-quotes* "political" than his first essay collection.
*("here-come-the-scare-quotes"? i think DFW is a hard case for me
to write about bcz i) how much i usedta wuv him but mainly ii)
writing about him involves reading him first and then the temptation
to borrow from or pastiche his style (or at least his stylistic
tics) is maybe overwhelming, to me))

I said this exact same thing about a month ago, but I can't find the post.

The more I keep reading this DFW book, the more I'm struck by how similar his style is to Nabisco's. Both are capable of writing these long, lucid analyses of something but in this really colloquial way, marked by frequent usage of words like "weird" and "stuff."

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), March 23rd, 2006 12:23 PM. (jaymc) (link)

I believe he's tenured and has a highfalutin' title at Pomona. Even so, it's basically a creative writing position, where the criteria are different than a lit studies position. I mean, he's clearly aware of the lit crit stuff, but casts himself in a sort of outsider position wrt it, as your quotation shows.

So, yeah, I think you're right, that he's trying to do a slightly more self-conscious, stylistically hierarchized Orwellian thing. I just think he has more sympathy with Orwell's take on language and politics than, say, Derrida's. Which is natural for an author.

depressingly, I sometimes think this is all there is to competing theories of interpretation.

I put my focus for both DFW and Orwell on their nonfiction, which I think is far, far better than their fiction. It seems, based on this thread, that I might not be alone in this, at least for DFW.

"Named to Usage Panel, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 4th Edition et seq., 1999"

- haha!

Tom, I've heard from Pomona students that DFW grades their essays really harshly on grammar and usage (like, really harshly: D papers with comments solely about (sometimes arcane) usage errors.)

(furthermore, imagine someone saying this in a police procedural voice.)

Current Courses:
ENGL 64A Elements of Creative Writing: Fiction
ENGL 170R Selected Obscure/Eclectic Fictions for Writers
ENGL 183D Advanced Composition: The Literary Essay

(i think i am myself in favour: undergraduates need to be told to work on this shit.)

(going from my mere experience as one at a midlist UK university, obviously. it is possible that in the colonies things're different.)

he does teach comp! I'm impressed.

(Chris, I don't think the letters signify level of difficulty, especially because Pomona is a fairly selective school. they probably just refer to time block or something.)

- thing learnt from rereading 'A Supposedly Fun Thing ...' (by which quote marks i mean to say, the essay not the whole collection): he was once a lifeguard.

another thing: he mentions dealing with gunk as the only bad thing about lobster, which ah.

also: dude's like 44 now? good god.

wallace's only got his own fawning jacket-blurb on AHWOSG to blame for that ...

my desire to reread girl... has passed, disappointingly.

://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html

And damn I never realized so many people were down on DFW! I can't think of another living writer whom I look forward to reading more.

Amy "Just How Much Reader Annoyance Are You Going For Anyway" Wallace.

i could be 100 percent wrong, of course. and i think the essay is too rough on '90s on pop culture -- dfw is too quick to dismiss a lot of interesting things, and he also misses some counterpoints that were already emerging at the time he wrote it. but as a reflection on/of the era, it's close to peerless.

i've been wanting to read this essay again all summer but my friend (who claims "e unibus" shattered a part of him) still has my copy of ASFTINDA

(it's an inversion of e pluribus unum, one of our competing national mottos.)

(xpost)

Unless I'm misreading your irony.

oh good, i was right. as far as it went. thanks for the latin lesson, though, and i mean that sincerely.

What's doubly funny, though, is that at some point it becomes hard to separate DFW being self-conscious from DFW writing about self-consciousness. For instance, toward the beginning of Infinite Jest there is an incredibly long section narrating a man's sitting absolutely still and watching a bug on the wall while waiting for someone to bring him weed, and getting increasingly neurotic about when this will finally happen, and mentally reviewing a whole bunch of totally obsessive steps he takes to control his weed-binging -- all of which would read to most people as being exactly the kind of self-conscious or clever or even ironic styling that the essay seems so wary of. But on another level that's a hard argument to support, because it's not so much that he's doing that stuff so much as making you think about it; apart from the sheer level of detail devoted to a short period of this guy's consciousness, there's nothing particularly unusual or arch or insincere about the scene. You get overloaded with that vibe not because he's selling it to you, but just because he's thinking about it, and making certain of his characters actually go around dealing with it directly.

Not that this helps! It's still there and problematic, and I think the original statement is most of the time the true one, and while some of his short stories nip over at the kind of naturalism we associate with sincerity, it's nevertheless really really hard to imagine him sitting down and writing, you know, That Way. Which is fine; that's not what he's for, and that's fine; but the result really has been his essays shining brighter than his fiction, a lot of the time.

i think dfw's "trying to get out of himself" to the uh Sincere Zone is totally a hat he's capable of putting on: c.f. the moving-but-also-kind-of-i-dunno bit where he refers to himself in that one story in oblivion. hats within hats.

i got around to starting my reread of Curious Hair: the first story is odd in that the uh image-fiction bits, which are like maybe two-thirds of the total words, are something that the apparent concerns of the story (that dialogue about waves and poetry and such, i guess) only touch at a tangent.

i really am curious about where TELEVISION actually tries to bring back an external referent, give up on self-referring irony, dig itself out of its own hole, etc.; that said for obvious reasons i'm not au fait with US TV and also this board has "books" in its name.

re: weed: my impressedness with the way DFW structures his thoughts actually kind of went downhill after the first time i got really stoned, because the kind of "oh and another thing" endless associate chains he gets to suddenly seemed on occasion A Little Too Familiar.

i was wondering the other day whether it'd make any sense to think about whether infinite jest succeeds/fails as A Social Novel, as to whether whatever postmodern whatsit you might think of it embodying is kind of not really there.

n.b. i don't really think the doom-ridden-attempt-to-escape-a-media-saturated-society creation myth we have for american pomo writing is true. the evidence for this is somewhere in the closing number of take out to the ball game. perhaps. said myth seems kind of typical of how we tend to concertina the cultural developments of the 60s. i could be completely wrong, though.

i don't know why i put the bit about the photos in a separate post, it's not like it's any less logically connected than the rest of this -

Yr. staff posits that the rapper's is a Scene that has accepted -- yea, reveres -- the up-to-date values and symbols of a Supply-Side prosperity, while rejecting, with a scorn not hard to fathom, what seem to remain the 'rules' for how the Marginal are supposed to improve their lot therein: viz., by studying hard, denying themselves, working hard, being patient, keeping that upper lip stiff in the face of what look like retractions of the last 'great society's' promises to them ... We posit that, for serious rap, these Protestant patience- and work-ethic rules, the really nostalgia-crazed parts of Supply-Side, just don't reconcile with the carrots, the enforced and reinforced images of worth-now as wealth-now, of freedom as just power, of power as just the inclination and firepower to get what you decide you have coming to you.

i've read it. the insistence on arguing for rap in terms of "storytelling" is a big hangup, for me.

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html

My favorite parts:

1) I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering.

2) DFW: But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?

DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them.

Also from the blog Ed Rants, last week:

"It’s worth mentioning that during his San Francisco appearance with Rick Moody last year, Wallace noted that he had attempted a “sentimental” novel, which he abandoned. "

it's signed "summer '90" on the last page, and the references to lots of '88 and '89 events make that sound right.

I rly don't think it'd be a half the book it is with a different picture on the cover, it's so, I dunno, evocative of all the stuff I get out of it, not jst itself but in my reaction to it?

At the end of the last brief interview, the long one, I was crying a bit and I didn't know why, I feel I should admit that somehow (I don't cry at all really).

I dunno, tell me abt this book and you!

Sounds like an abusive marriage to me.

this is the m.o. of i.j. to a t. (or maybe not. i'm not positive he was enjoying the disappointment. more like he felt it was inevitable.)

New U.S. paperback cover, ten year anniversary edition. Due out November 13.

Oh, let me take you to the BDSM 101 workshop down the hall.

I felt almost bad about how much I enjoyed Tri-Stan, since it was so clearly the sort of thing I ought to enjoy. Back in the day, that is.

New IJ edition will have intro by Dave FUCKING Eggars. WTF? Inferior! Derivative!

Sorry, intoxicated.

i find the current uk edition presently brickish, and have on more than one occasion found it hard to stop myself buying a second copy

want

reviving, sadly. r.i.p.

too soon

hard to write a sincere message here given the post's name. Still, this came as a terrible shock. Hardly made a mention in the Australian media.

RIP

it is a regrettable thread title. i could change it probably, but i don't like to change things. free speech and and all that.

i was really shocked by this too. i didn't know about his depression/years of medication. knowing that certainly makes it all much more understandable.

actually, maybe i couldn't even if i wanted to. i don't even know if i'm still a moderator on nu-nu-ilb. maybe chris knows.

lot of discussion on the ILE thread: david foster wallace: classic or dud

it's sad he was a writer

i would vote for changing the name. i am still upset over this.

you could, you know, not bump the thread

I am surprised at how shocked I've been about this. I've been at home with a cold and it's just been the toughest couple of days. I'm stuck in the loop of walking past the bookshelf and casting a furtive glance at his books, resisting and then failing to pick them up and leaf through. Have mostly gone for Obliviion, and I don't know about anyone else but have found it hard to do. I've thought about his "Good Old Neon" for so long but reading it again is too hard.

Ѿ

.. what?

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/affective-exchange-amy-hungerfords-making-literature-now

Hungerford, however, does not see the gain of “love” in the work of another contemporarily canonical icon, David Foster Wallace — she sees the cost of hatred. On the basis of preliminary evidence of Wallace’s “misogyny” found in selections of his short stories and in D. T. Max’s biography of Wallace (Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 2012), Hungerford declares that she will “not read any further in Wallace’s work” and proposes: “If there was something rotten in Wallace’s relationships with women [ … ] might there be something rotten in the writer-reader relationship, too?” She suggests that if Foer’s writer-reader ethos is “lovemaking,” then Wallace’s is “fucking.” Thus she posits — as “heretical” as it may seem — that every act of reading can be an “act of choosing.” In the case of herself and Wallace, she “refuse[ s ]” her consent.

In September 2016, Hungerford published a version of her Wallace chapter as an article, “On Refusing to Read,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which sparked competing cries of support and dissent. As Tom LeClair notes in his Full Stop review of her book, Hungerford’s Chronicle article has a different argumentative thrust: she refuses Wallace in order to resist the “market imperatives” which led his publishers to “dare” reviewers to read the tome-like Infinite Jest and then led those reviewers to assign it critical value as recompense for their cognitive and temporal losses. While this argument is also in Making Literature Now, it takes a backseat to Hungerford’s misogyny claim which, in turn, is absent from the article. LeClair reads this omission as a ploy on Hungerford’s part, a “defanged” teaser to her book’s melodramatic “two takedowns” of Foer and Wallace. I have to wonder instead whether the misogyny argument is absent because Hungerford had trouble placing an article about misogyny. In Making Literature Now, she notes that upon pitching an article about not reading Wallace on the grounds of misogyny, she was met with the advice to read more Wallace to find more misogyny. Hungerford sees this as an assumption “that Wallace’s work ‘about’ misogyny must somehow be revealing or smart about that subject.” This is the assumption that she wishes to interrogate.

I think he was more of a misanthrope than people generally realize and I stopped reading "Oblivion" because I found it kind of unpleasant. But the rape/consent metaphor this writer uses for refusing to read an allegedly misogynistic author is too loaded. And claiming the authority to mount a comprehensive takedown of an author without undertaking the labor of reading them is dumb.

I don’t think Hungerford is suggesting, here, that literature courses should never confront misogyny — or other iterations of hatred — but that seeing as teachers hold the readerly consent of their students in hand, they should choose their texts and authors carefully. To me, Hungerford’s affective-interpretive “worth” system reads as fair: if a reader must pay the cost of imbibing hatred, the author must offer the payback of equivalently potent critical “insight.” Any less is hatred for hatred’s sake. And hatred is worthless

This is such a transactional take on reader response theory. I don't think much good can come from analyzing literary texts as a balance sheet with "value" in one ledger and "cost" in the other. Isn't art supposed to be a repository for kinds of knowledge -- emotional, experiential -- that can't easily be translated into concepts (much less quantified)?

What do u think of that article j.?

making literature now...with McSweeney’s and Everything Is Illuminated and DFW? yuck. thanks, trump!

she must have been sitting on that book for a good ten years waiting for the right time to strike.

i re-read his tracy austin piece -- i think hes otm abt her just lacking introspection/depth; ive come to really like her as a commentator, shes astute but every bit of analysis is p surface level idk not knocking her

j. never explained what he thought about the tendentious la review of books piece he linked to.

Recently read Adrienne Miller's In the Land of Men and I am voting cunt

You push a woman out of a moving car, you’re an undeniable cunt

was she wheel shaped though?