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Koholint posted:Regarding Infinite Jest (ending/beginning spoilers): Didn't James's head explode when he killed himself? If so, how are Hal and Gately supposed to dig it up? I believe it was stated the likely effect of sticking your head in a microwave would be that your brain explodes out of your eyeballs - hence, the skull itself remains intact.
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Jan 28, 2010 05:21
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Man, I can't wait for Pale King. Reading something unfinished by such a particular, precise writer will be interesting. In the meantime I've picked up A Supposedly Fun Thing and Consider the Lobster, which I'd never read. What I love most about DFW's fiction isn't necessarily his pinpoint-mastery of the modern dilemna but the sortof painfully honest way he goes about wrestling with it. More than any other author of his caliber, and despite his technical brilliance, he seems at all times somewhat unsure of himself and, at times, emotionally naked and really raw. Very few writers' work that I've read strikes me as such an open wound. There's something incredibly intimate about IJ in particular, as if you're part of the struggle.
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Oct 23, 2010 23:41
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shizen posted:http://katiemanderfield.wordpress.com/2011/02/19/david-foster-wallace-documentary/ That's cool and all, and thanks for sharing, but is anyone else a little tired of the fact that everything written about DFW now revolves exclusively around his depression and death? I guess its inevitable given our culture's Cobain-complex, and his depression obviously plays a huge role in his body of work. But I feel like Infinite Jest, despite being basically universally acclaimed, never got the serious discussion in the literary world it deserved, especially compared to other novels that were similarly loved around the same time. All I hear now in reference to it involves its "difficulty", and the criticism rarely goes deeper than that. We talk about his peers like Roth and McCarthy through their work, and yet with DFW the work always seems to come second to the personality cult. Anyway, mini-rant over. I'm reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men now - which is the second to last thing of his I hadn't gotten to, the last being Broom of the System - and holy poo poo, why didn't anyone tell me how good it was? I love that the title story is broken up and interspersed throughout the collection. Along with the fact that all the stories revolve around key themes (relationships, I guess? to put it simply) and seem to follow some sort of structural progression, it feels much more cohesive than his other short story collections. Honeslty it almost feels like reading a novel, which is fantastic considering he wrote so few. Anyway, once I've finished it I'll post something a little more substantial.
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Mar 5, 2011 22:01
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PopZeus posted:I love Brief Interviews. If memory serves me correctly, it's got perhaps my all-time favorite DFW short fiction piece, "Octet". Yeah, Octet is great. I love that DFW omits the last four intended sections of the story only to essentially tell a few of them in full anyway in the footnotes. The basic apology/explanation he replaces them with is pretty cool and heartfelt, too, and encapsulates what makes DFW so endearing to me - his sortof desperation to break past the hardened/irony-trained sensibilities of modern readers to get at something genuine and universal (and potentially sentimental, oh no). PopZeus posted:I guess what I'm asking is: Is David Foster Wallace a hit or miss kind of author? Did it just click with me where it failed to click with others? What about all of you? To what extent would you call yourself a DFW fan and why or why not? I don't know why I'm so fascinated with this, but I'd like to know why he seems to be polarizing. Apparently enough to type out this rant/love letter. I think this goes for any author who experiments or risks coming off as pretentious and yet hasn't been around long enough to be vindicated by posterity - basically, any modern author worth a drat is bound to be controversial. Hell, just take a look at the "Books You Couldn't Get Through" thread. Being weird is risky and DFW can be pretty loving weird. I think alot of vitriol can be attributed to Infinite Jest being the first "unconventional" book alot of readers pick up - it's definitely not obscure and it's at the top of a lot of lists, so odds are more people are coming at it with a background in nothing but Stephen King and that Fire and Ice guy than people who're accustomed to stuff like Pynchon and Delillo. DFW is also long-winded, let's be honest, and that combined with some of his more overbearing stylistic ticks can be hard to stomach. His penchant for listing off technical minutiae and brand names has worn on me. And while I almost always love his use of footnotes, one of his collected nonfiction pieces about conservative talk-radio degenerates into a sprawling forest of interconnected digressions and is nigh unreadable. I can only imagine if this sort of stubborn excess of, er, DFW-isms can get to me, I'm sure it can get to someone uninitiated.
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Mar 6, 2011 08:57
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barkingclam posted:I think it bears repeating that Host was meant to be read online, with each of the footnotes popping up as a new window. It's a mess on the printed page, but online it works pretty well. Oh right, I'd heard that somewhere. Totally slipped my mind when I was searching around for examples. The online format definitely makes more sense - formatting that for the page must have been a nightmare. Just finished On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand in Brief Interviews. Which to refresh is about a dying father hooked up to tubes and being attended by nurses ranting about how he loathed his infant son for being helpless and generally infant-like. The irony is pretty heavy-handed, but it's still pretty hilarious at times, and definitely sad towards the end. Quite a loathsome character. Tri-Stan, the Greek myth set in modern Hollywood, was fantastic. I hope I'm not the only one who was completely loving baffled by Church Not Made with Hands though. Just totally left in the dust, glossy-eyed, clueless. I aim to re-read it after some interpretation trawling.
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Mar 6, 2011 20:46
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Circlewave posted:So I read Broom over holiday break, and reading this thread has got me thinking about it again: what do you guys think was the point of all the Wittgenstein? I get that it describes the younger Lenore's character, and even the older Lenore, since she doesn't really ever appear in the story (we just hear about her from other characters), but I really feel like the biggest philosophical/theoretical touchstone was Lacan - what with all the endless self/Other riffing. I'm nearly done with Broom. I'll probably have it finished tonight, after which I'll try to add a bit more to the discussion. Right now the motif that sticks out most to me is definitely the self/other distinction, as it seems to be a touchstone with every character and storyline. LeVache's fake leg, Rick Vigorous's obsession with possessing Lenore and maybe his oft-mentioned beret, Dr. Jay's hygiene schtick, of course Bombardini's quest to eat the universe - there's a constant fascination with the "membrane" (doc's words) that separates the characters from the world, specifically where it ends and what it means to be breached. I'm not sure how it all fits together yet but it's interesting. I also just read Lolita for the first time a few weeks ago and the obvious allusions to that book in regards to Rick Vigorous's infatuation with Mindy is neat, and definitely made me rethink the character.
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Mar 21, 2011 01:57
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JustFrakkingDoIt posted:Oi, I'd forgotten all about LeVache and his sick little crew. I think I'm gonna re-read it just for that. Well, that and the Great Ohio Desert that was kind of a proto-Concavity/Convexity. And Rick's other obsession. They only really show up in one scene but yeah, they're pretty entertaining. LeVache in particular is an interesting character and I wish we could've gotten more of him. The G.O.D./Concavity/Convexity connection is pretty cool, that actually hadn't occurred to me. quote:I guess when you describe Broom as the sum of its parts it sounds kind of pop-fiction-y (think the above mentioned Mark Leyner, who I would never compare to DFW) but it reads as more literary, iirc. Broom definitely comes off as more pop-fictiony than anything else he's written in terms of plot, structure, etc. There's also alot more zaniness and slapstick - lots of mini little Eschaton-moments. The hilarious scene in the Gilligan-restaurant with the nursing home director and his sex-doll springs to mind. But yeah, the prose is pretty rigorously experimental and DFW changes up how he tells the story almost chapter to chapter - straightforward prose to naked dialogue exchanges, often with no indication of who's talking until context clues maybe halfway through, to occasional little side stories. In that regard it feels like a bit of a precursor to Brief Interviews. And it's still definitely a heavy, serious novel.
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Mar 21, 2011 05:31
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Just got this beauty delivered. The book cover design is embossed, which looks pretty cool. I sortof expected it to be delayed. I'm about a quarter of the way through Denis Johnson's Already Dead and I can't really bring myself to put it down for Pale King - I know if I do I probably won't get around to finishing it. Ugh. Looks like the next few days promise some frantic reading.
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Apr 5, 2011 04:55
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so what alexander posted:http://johnziegler.com/editorials_details.asp?editorial=165 That's interesting. I thought DFW was pretty fair to Ziegler in that story, especially considering the man's a loving moron. For those who aren't familiar, he's basically a second-rate Limbaugh. It is funny watching a conservative demagogue (THE LITERARY ELITE AMIRITE?) squirm under the microscope. This article, in contrast: Marvel posted:http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library Definitely is worth reading. A pretty insightful look at DFW's apparent interest in cheesy self-help books and some of his own thoughts on the genesis of his depression. I was interested to learn his relationship with his mother bore a lot of resemblance to that of Hal Incandenza. Definitely some heavy self-insertion there.
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Apr 6, 2011 16:21
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 18:54 |
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So I'm at Chapter 14 and loving it so far. It really does feel "tornadic", as DFW intended - there's a menagerie of characters and plotliness thrown at us from the very start, only a few thus far directly involved with the IRS (although the same themes are emerging all over the place). Something that struck me as a little sad - and I'm sorry I'm bringing this up again because I really do hate the trend of DFW's death overshadowing talk about his work - is the first chapter in which he inserts himself into the story. It's a great chapter and really fun and well written, but the way he goes into lots of tangential talk about editing and multiple drafts and negotiations with his publisher and all that sortof pulled me out of the book. I realize it'd be obviously fictitious even if he had really gone through that process, but the contradiction of knowing things never got to that point and how convincingly DFW writes about it feels a bit strange. Definitely not a complaint or criticism, though.
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Apr 18, 2011 02:46
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