/lit/ - Literature

>>8560824
>unironically ranking DFW

kek

He liked City 27 (I don't know if that's the name in english) and sent a mail and then they were friends. Othet thing: he's very competitive and often says DFW suicided to commit a Cobain and make his literature more known, so he's jealous of that because Wallace is more recognized than him.

>>8560829
?

>>8560835
Wow. I wish this faggot would kill himself but then he wouldnt get to see himself whither into obscurity.

I can't understand it as well. I wouldn't even exchange words with a third-rate writer like Franzen. I would chat with DFW, who's second rate (not historically but of his active period) but friendship? nope.

People have no standards. I have a simple rule: Nobel Price or GTFO

>>8560845
I would rather have a conversation with a schizophrenic homeless man than with a pompous retard who thinks having his books marketed as literary fiction is the same as being a good writer

>>8560856
Talking like that, it seems the pompous it's you.

>>8560824
He's better than what almost all of you will accomplish writing in your lifetime. If at all.

>>8560824
Do you not have any weird friendships? People totally unlike you, somehow got to meet them by being at the right place, right time, long enough?
Two writers can have things in common that don't transpire in their public attitudes, and you don't even need to have things in common with a friend to begin with

>>8560838
>>8560835
ok that's not how he put it and I don't think he's jealous his friend killed himself wtf, and Franzen is more well known with the Oprah club and all that
>often says
don't think so...
he also is/was mad at DF for killing himself, but that's a normal reaction

the look in his eye, you just KNOW they banged
dfw is known to be THE most hung guy in the midwest, possibly one of the biggest in the world. his cock has been described as "like an evian bottle", with gargantual thickness that would rival shane diesel and shorty mac. im estimating his size to be at least 8.5" bone pressed, with OVER 7" of girth. he would have absolutely destroyed franzen's boipussy.
they would have spent hours and hours on foreplay, getting himself wet enough just so he can take it. i can just imagine him begging for it, with dfw barely able to force it past the knob, and franzen moaning and squirming, demanding him to force it in deeper. he would have orgasm'd within seconds of taking the entire length, being filled and stretched right up to his ileum.. the orgasm would have been powerful, with his anal muscles clamping down on dwfs throbbing monstrosity, his whole body quivering in euphoria..
i bet he still masturbates to the memory of it

>>8560824
Did David leave anything for Franny in his will or did he lock him out completely? also was he his only friend? these are just general questions I have.

>>8560902
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/04/26/jonathan_franzen_s_farther_away_is_marred_by_his_anger_about_david_foster_wallace.html
>Elsewhere, Franzen says Wallace’s suicide was “calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most.” More than once, Franzen suggests that Wallace had deliberately gone “the Kurt Cobain route” and “chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.” He says that “infantile rage and displaced homicidal impulses [were] visible in certain particulars of his death.” What those “certain particulars” were, Franzen doesn’t say.

>>8560944
read the bio if you're seriously asking, he had closer and longer friends, but I think Franzen was his most famous friend (besides like Dellilo, they wrote each other)

>>8560953
ok yikes, but I think he says that out of being hurt and angry his friend chose to leave his life (not to mention his family's life//to the extent that it was a choice) and not out of some petty envy over sales numbers

>>8560944
Franzen was very close to DFW in the time before the suicide. He called Franzen in total desperation, asking for help

>>8560944
Why do you keep posting her. stop.

>>8560974
Franzen is such a twat

>>8560974
>Franzen talks about going the Kurt Cobain route because he wants to hide from the fact that the last words he wrote to him were "kys you ugly christfag"

>>8560964
>>8560953
also this article is dumb, at least witht he current information that's out there

>"For instance: “I will pass over the question of diagnosis (it’s possible he was not simply depressive) and the question of how such a beautiful human being had come by such vividly intimate knowledge of the thoughts of hideous men.” Of course, Franzen hasn’t really passed over the question of diagnosis; he has explicitly raised it, while also implying that Wallace had to have been like the “hideous men” in his fiction (as though he were incapable of otherwise imagining such hideousness)."
a. I think Franzen's hinting at bipolar or something like that
b. by all accounts/from the bio DFW DID consider himself one of those hideous men, and a lot of those stories were based not exactly on his own thoughts and actions, but they stemmed from them--and this was brought up to counteract the creepy Saint David stuff that happened right after his death by people who had never known DFW and who now wanted to control the narrative, idk why exactly, but I empathize a lot with his pissed-offness

>>8560974
>"Eventually Wallace asked to go back on Nardill, but he was too agitated to give it the weeks it takes to work. Franzen would call and encourage him to stick with it- the worst was over. "Keep talking like that," Wallace said. "It's helping."

i have to kek at how people are bullied into believing that DFW isn't one of the greatest writers of the last 30 years.Yes you faggots, Infinite Jest is a master piece. People are rusing you, they are laughing at how easy they can mold your opinions because you are scared of not fitting in.

Ranicki also smashed Tin Drum after it's release, but unlike Bloom he had the class to admit his failure.

>>8561077
don't be cry now

I think his project is pretty cool. Harkening back. But he isn't a very good writer in my oh pinion

Anyone see that thing where I think Mary Carr said DFW and Fran had met in real life only once?

Pretty sure it was a New Yorker panel called re-reading DFW

On YT

>>8561131
link? maybe you're misremembering?
I literally just reread the end of the bio and Franzen had visited him in California the last summer he was alive at the very least, they were also in Italy or wherever for a thing that Zadie Smith and some other writers all went to. There's...multiple pictures of them together all from different time periods.

>>8561131
there are at least four seperate events I found where they're pictured together, this one >>8560931, the italy trip, pic related and this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwfQl2LGhwc

>>8561136
found myself
someone link a transcript if there is one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqN52yKI4pg

>>8561077
I agree that he's the best writer to emerge in that period, but I think Infinite Jest was ultimately a failure and he went in the wrong direction with his work in general. Brief Interviews is his best writing.

>>8561157
Why is infinite jest a failure?

>>8561159
Because he was writing a Big Postmodern Novel in the style of Pynchon or Gaddis but worked against himself when he didn't want to admit what he was actually doing despite the obvious influence. That and it just all went in too platitudinous a direction because he couldn't maintain enough detachment from the message he was trying to push with it.

>>8561136
>>8561139

This was before I was into him and have since been wondering about that statement. Pretty sure it's in here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqN52yKI4pg

>>8561196
You either haven't read Infinite Jest or you completely misunderstood it. There's no way someone could read those hundreds of pages about the virtue of platitudes and come away with that criticism. And no, he was not trying to write a "Big Postmodern Novel" - IJ was very clearly a departure from and critique of the postmodernists.

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

This ought to answer some of the questions in this thread.

>>8561077
I like DFW and his writing overall but IJ fucking sucks and deserves its meme status

>>8560824
Because DFW knew DeLillo, Markson, Gass etc and he felt self-conscious about their superiority.

Franzen was always a positive boost because he knew how much better of a writer he was than him. It put him at ease.

It's funny because Franzen is a far, far better writer than Good Ole Dee Eff Dubya.

>>8561244
It was only a "departure" and "critique" of them in the sense that he wanted to one up all these people who'd influenced him while still using their tricks. It didn't work. IJ was still a weaker work than Gravity's Rainbow or J R, and their influence was still obvious.

And recognizing platitudes for what they are but deeming them "necessary" is itself a platitude even if it sounds vaguely thoughtful.

>>8562080

DFW didn't need postmodern tricks to be a better writer than Pychon. He only used them because to him they kept the books "fun." He could write about a kid getting sad over a dead bunny and it'd still be just as good.

>>8560931
Franzen looks like he has those funny glasses on with pictures of eyes on them. What a retard.

>>8562463
>>8562080
What the fuck is a platitude? What are post-modern tricks?

Both of you are spouting horseshit and DFW was a hack