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.

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.)