Jewmanji posted:

Yeah, his short section in Infinite Jest about the effects that videocalls will have on people, as utterly absurdest as it seemed, actually turned out to be entirely prescient

http://kottke.org/10/06/david-foster-wallace-on-iphone-4s-facetime

ManlyGrunting posted:

Not to my knowledge, the man tended to stick to writing about what he knew best (tennis, literature, television) with some occaisional forays into his magazines sending him on "pith-hated anthropology" (sic) like for the state fair or the luxury cruise or porn industry (which is worth reading just for vicariously living through the sheer jaw-dropping incredulity of a rather academic and in some ways estranged man being hurled headlong into an industry that is somehow at once both superficial and base).

meristem posted:

I think I'm mostly fascinated by the complete lack of the Internet anywhere near The Pale King.

Grizzled Patriarch posted:

The weirdest thing about that article is finding out that DFW voted for Reagan twice.

Rusty Staub posted:

I just saw The End of the Tour last night and it didn't make me nearly as upset as I thought it would!

JHomer722 posted:

D.T. Max wrote a piece for the New Yorker about an unfinished, unpublished DFW story about the internet.

Look Under The Rock posted:

He's doing some of the faces but the voice is distractingly wrong. That might seem like a nitpick I guess, but I'm someone who has a crap ton of his audio interviews downloaded and used to fall asleep to them on a regular basis so it didn't quite work.

I'll see it and I'm sure I'll hate it and love it at the same time. Jason Segel really was the right actor for the job I think.

Sir John Feelgood posted:

I too have listened to a ton of Wallace audio, and I thought he sounded good, but I've watched the trailer only once and I don't think I have the best ear in the world.

appropriatemetaphor posted:

I've never seen wallace actually speak, what are some good interviews to check out?

also i just started rereading IJ, and wow, crazy how different it is coming in "knowing" who the characters are already and not being lost for forever.

sicDaniel posted:

This is my favourite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkxUY0kxH80

It's for German television, the interviewer seems a bit inexperienced and the cameraman is a total dick (he accuses DFW of pontificating at one point), and DFW is quite uncomfortable in that whole situation but he still put's his heart into answering the question, instead of being pissed and just leaving, it's just really great to listen to. I listened to the whole thing a couple of times already and I could do it again and again.

The trailer looks great, though I agree the voice is noticeably different. I am glad that I never watched HIMYM so that actor is a blank slate to me.

LoRdOfThEDaNcE posted:

Man, sometimes I get so sad when I think about how somebody who was so good at what he did, that really seemed to be so cherished could end his own life. I get kind of angry about The Pale King being unfinished because I just know it would've been arranged differently from the way it is and his subjects are so relevant – I just wish it had been truly finished. In fact, I haven't been able to touch this book yet, because of my inability to accept that I'll only be able to read it in an unfinished state. He was almost the perfectionist to end all perfectionists, so it seems almost sacrilegious to attempt it. I've been reading his earlier stuff recently (check out http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/) and it's so satisfying; Girl with Curious Hair is brilliant, just brilliant.

Anyways, I just wanted to say how sad it is and everything. But I guess everyone else feels this way, too. If anyone has any advice on the mindset that they brought to their reading of The Pale King, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

Look Under The Rock posted:

I think dude may have killed himself partly because he knew it wouldn't be released unfinished if he was around to give hints and answer questions.

blue squares posted:

No. That's an awful and almost offensive romanticization of the end of a life-long battle against severe depression. His suicide was a final defeat because of intense pain, not some statement.

blue squares posted:

No. That's an awful and almost offensive romanticization of the end of a life-long battle against severe depression. His suicide was a final defeat because of intense pain, not some statement.

DFW posted:

“That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depres¬sion or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a dead¬ening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clin¬ical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.

The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appro¬priate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.”


― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

syscall girl posted:

I always felt that his descriptions of "monopolar depression" (via Kate Gompert) and marijuana addiction (lol, right?) were deeply personal and true in the way that someone pouring their pain into a big long book has to be.

blue squares posted:

Yeah but to say that he killed himself as part of his art or something is just idiotic and offensive to the reality of depression.

Look Under The Rock posted:

I will make sure to apologize to the reality of depression as I did not intend to offend it

blue squares posted:

Yeah but to say that he killed himself as part of his art or something is just idiotic and offensive to the reality of depression.

syscall girl posted:

Who is saying this? That's ridiculous.

Look Under The Rock posted:

I think dude may have killed himself partly because he knew it wouldn't be released unfinished if he was around to give hints and answer questions. Basically he was trying to take the novel format outside of the covers to an extent it hadn't been before.

blue squares posted:

blue squares posted:

gently caress off you know what I mean.

syscall girl posted:

Who is saying this?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/18/farther-away-jonathan-franzen posted:

It is, admittedly, harder to connect with the infantile rage and displaced homicidal impulses visible in certain particulars of his death. But even here I can discern a funhouse-mirror Wallace logic, a perverse sort of yearning for intellectual honesty and consistency. To deserve the death sentence he’d passed on himself, the execution of the sentence had to be deeply injurious to someone. To prove once and for all that he truly didn’t deserve to be loved, it was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best, by killing himself at home and making them firsthand witnesses to his act. And the same was true of suicide as a career move, which was the kind of adulation-craving calculation that he loathed in himself and would deny (if he thought he could get away with it) that he was conscious of making, and would then (if you called him on it) laughingly or wincingly admit that, yeah, O.K., he was indeed capable of making. I imagine the side of David that advocated going the Kurt Cobain route speaking in the seductively reasonable voice of the devil in “The Screwtape Letters,” which was one of David’s favorite books, and pointing out that death by his own hand would simultaneously satisfy his loathsome hunger for career advantage and, because it would represent a capitulation to the side of himself that his embattled better side perceived as evil, further confirm the justice of his death sentence.

This is not to say that he spent his last months and weeks in lively intellectual conversation with himself, à la Screwtape or the Grand Inquisitor. He was so sick, toward the end, that every new waking thought of his, on whatever subject, immediately corkscrewed into the same conviction of his worthlessness, causing him continual dread and pain. And yet one of his own favored tropes, articulated especially clearly in his story “Good Old Neon” and in his treatise on Georg Cantor, was the infinite divisibility of a single instant in time. However continually he was suffering in his last summer, there was still plenty of room, in the interstices between his identically painful thoughts, to entertain the idea of suicide, to flash forward through its logic, and to set in motion the practical plans (of which he eventually made at least four) for effectuating it. When you decide to do something very bad, the intention and the reasoning for it spring into existence simultaneously and fully formed; any addict who’s about to fall off the wagon can tell you this. Though suicide itself was painful to contemplate, it became—to echo the title of another of David’s stories—a sort of present to himself.

Look Under The Rock posted:

1. There is a possibility that TPK was intended to be released unfinished
2. There is a possibility that working on TPK contributed to Wallace feeling the need to kill himself

Which of these statements do you take issue with, given everything available about how Wallace felt about literature/himself/the world?

Look Under The Rock posted:

But for real read Brief Interviews and Oblivion and tell me Wallace didn't write his suicide into the map over a decade before pulling the trigger.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

Jonathan Franzen toyed with the idea, in a long, rambling article that makes him (Franzen) look like a total tool throughout.

Jewmanji posted:

I'm not sure I ever read this, though I've heard it discussed a lot. It's utterly revolting and I can't believe The New Yorker would publish it.

Look Under The Rock posted:

he may have taken on a far more ambitious literary project than anything attempted in the last, oh, hundred years at least,

Nitevision posted:

Also, I have another theory that Infinite Jest's ending is outside of the text because he was already at 1000 pages and starting to write really bloated boring passages by the end imo.