/lit/ - Literature

[3rd No.1713217]

>friends posthumous novel getting more publicity than your last book did
>spend the better part of 15 pages committing character assassination and talking shit about him

Franzen never gets tired of being an asshole; it's a shame he's pretty on point about Wallace.

[Behemoth !!Twl3DmqEY/B No.1713219]

Where are these 15 pages located?

[3rd No.1713221]

>>1713219
Latest issue of The New Yorker.

Since I have no interest in supporting it why not read a transcript here? http://liberatormagazine.com/community/showthread.php?tid=1223

[Behemoth !!Twl3DmqEY/B No.1713223]

>>1713221
>I have no interest in supporting it
>He's pretty on point

Make up your mind, 3rd.

[3rd No.1713224]

>>1713223

I meant supporting the New Yorker. Franzen is an okay guy in my book. So's Wallace.

[Fabulous !!GXZe+d0RTva No.1713227]

>>1713224
you and him are kind of the same person

[Truman Capote !!cO9KVBDtkqQ No.1713231]

I always thought being angry at someone who has committed suicide and is dead is too absurd to be a rational view and instead comes from their inability to accept and almost denial of the person's death, especially when that deceased was a close friend.

[3rd No.1713232]

>>1713227

[Anonymous No.1713252]

>The Rise of the Novel correlated the eighteenth-century burgeoning of novelistic production with the growing demand for at-home entertainment by women who’d been liberated from traditional household tasks and had too much time on their hands.

I thought this Franzen effimera was with it. Now, he is casually raking up the medium's pussy origins for all to see.

[Anonymous No.1713335]

>the problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning
gold

>>1713217
I'm not sure I would call it character assassination, just a typical critique. There don't seem to be enough ad hominems present to qualify that statement which you made.

Besides, I'd be pissed off too if a good friend of mine, a person of many talents, were to kill himself too.

[Anonymous No.1713342]

>>1713335
also i think this is more of a thing about Defoe's "Treasure Island" than about DFW. Did you skim this one, 3rd?

[Brownbear !Wfn4kkpLag!!fEGZw8wphGR No.1713377]

>>1713342
>>1713342
Heyy 3rd
character commits suicide and the last 5 pages are stream of consciousness
enjoy therestof the pale king

[Anonymous No.1713379]

>>1713342
my thoughts exactly. of course that's all anyone mentioned when linking to it

[Anonymous No.1713384]

i have no subscription and the site's got a paywall. is there a work around?

and "no duh" re: franzen's seething jealousy of DFW. he's been that way since BEFORE he died

[Anonymous No.1713386]

>>1713384
see
>>1713221

[Anonymous No.1713395]

Skimmed the fuck out of that. A lot of interesting parts though, some good points, and whilst I think Franzen certainly seems quite jealous, he also makes sense.

I couldn't be bothered reading about his fucking camping holiday though.

[Anonymous No.1713398]

>>1713384
What writer isn't jealous of DFW.

Even if he isn't your thing, he did some pretty exciting stuff with writing. When I'm reading him, I often think, "I didn't know you could even do that."

[Anonymous No.1713399]

Too bad Franzen is a better writer than DFW.

>Aww here we go

[Anonymous No.1713404]

>What writer isn't jealous of DFW.

true, but franzen's is a more personal jealousy. remember, he and DFW were close buddies--i think they met at amherst. franzen is so pissed that DFW killed himself because his ghost will forever overshadow him (franzen) and his own work. he will never be able to topple it because DFW is now a legend. it's sad, really.

[Anonymous No.1713409]

>>1713404

and so franzen is really trying to demystify DFW by kind of blowing up his spot and showing all the ugly parts of him. it's his only recourse at this point.

[Anonymous No.1713412]

>>1713399
0/10. Babby's first troll.

>>1713404
Yeah, I've been wondering, just how much of The Pale King is DFW's work, and how much of it is the result of some ghostwriter's attempt to polish up an unfinished manuscript?

I'm really wondering if purchasing the book is worth it.

[Anonymous No.1713416]

>>1713409

Except that Wallace is sort of a self-depreciation king, and he talks about his own flaws all the time. Kinda hard to insult a guy like that.

[Anonymous No.1713421]

>>1713416

just read the new yorker piece. you'll see.

[Anonymous No.1713424]

"David and I had a friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete. A few years before he died, he signed my hardcover copies of his two most recent books. On the title page of one of them, I found the traced outline of his hand; on the title page of the other was an outline of an erection so huge that it ran off the page, annotated with a little arrow and the remark “scale 100%.” I once heard him enthusiastically describe, in the presence of a girl he was dating, someone else’s girlfriend as his “paragon of womanhood.” David’s girl did a wonderfully slow double take and said, “What?” Whereupon David, whose vocabulary was as large as anybody’s in the Western Hemisphere, took a deep breath and, letting it out, said, “I’m suddenly realizing that I’ve never actually known what the word ‘paragon’ means.”"

LOL what a dick

[Anonymous No.1713449]

>>1713424
Newsflash! Late Esteemed American Author Revealed to be Only Ten Years Old!

[Anonymous No.1713455]

Just finished reading the article. Really good, suggest everyone check it out.

>>1713412
Bro I'm not even trolling. DFW was a just OK author until his suicide and then everybody started sucking his dick.

[Anonymous No.1713462]

>>1713455
Authors always ruin their own work by trying to explain it.His suicide makes his books valid.

[Anonymous No.1713470]

>>1713455
Pretty sure everyone was sucking his dick before he killed himself. The only group that hopped on the dicksucking train after his suicide were wannabe-intellectual hipsters.

I've never really known people who hate all of his stuff though. Most people are either into his essays or his fiction, but usually not both.

[Anonymous No.1713474]

Franzen is mad that his friend killed himself, pretty standard in the range of emotions when someone you care for kills themselves.

Also, Franzen and Wallace were lovers.

[Anonymous No.1713496]

no one is suggesting that franzen isn't upset that his close friend killed himself. i would never ever argue that his sadness isn't honest. but there's a real intangible sense of a lifetime's worth of frustration and envy here. it's like, if DFW never existed franzen would be the top dog in american letters. but because DFW was just that 10% above his ability and solidified himself in the western literary cannon with a romantic early death, franzen is trying to dissipate or bring down to earth as much of the hyperbole that floats about his dead friend as he can.

[Anonymous No.1713501]

Is DFW worth it? I haven't tried infinite jest, but on the basis of Brief Interviews with Hideous men he seemed more a literature than an artist. It reeked of MFA program.

[Malavox !1CuTO6dxKo No.1713503]

>>1713501
Brief Interviews is a great place to start with him. Totally worth it.

[Donne !!+SByMppsy+r No.1713510]

>>1713501
Infinite Jest is ridiculously worth it, but it is hard work. I haven't read brief interviews as yet, but I do recommend Oblivion: Stories. It comes in at 300 odd pages, a third of IJ, and is similar in style and thematic content. If you enjoy that, you'll enjoy IJ, but there WILL be passages you just want to rip your eyes out over.

[Anonymous No.1713560]

>>1713510
Wardine momma be cry.

The most mind-fucking part of Infinite Jest, for me at least, were the footnotes that constituted, like, thirty pages of fucking petri-dish text.

[Anonymous No.1714018]

/lit/ is really, really full of babbies if they think nobody was sucking dfw's dick before he died

[Anonymous No.1714027]

>I'll never write like DFW
>sadfrog.jpg

[Anonymous No.1714033]

What a shameless act of photoshopping and dramatic lighting that photo is

[Anonymous No.1714037]

>>1714033

He still looks cockeyed too...

[Anonymous No.1714043]

>>1714037
oh my god, can't unsee. he looks like david bowie's boring cousin

anyway they should do a law and order svu about a novelist planting kiddy porn in the attic of his legendary dead friend's house in an attempt to knock his legacy down a few pegs

[Anonymous No.1714055]

>>1714043

Fuck yeah. Then Stabler punches him in the face, because Stabler hates pedophiles.

[Anonymous No.1714071]

>>1714033

[Anonymous No.1714209]

ITT: many foolish comments.

This piece is not about taking DFW down, dirtying him up, or exposing his ugly spots, all of which have been suggested ITT.

Actually, quite the opposite. Franzen is adding to the heroic legend that has formed halo-like over DFW's corpse. He's poeticizing and more closely than ever before delineating the deep psychological fault-lines and weaknesses.

Really withholding his words would be more of an "insult." By caving in to his place in post-DFW lit,, he is making his peace and moving on in a way, just as he says in the peace. I only found the long sections about Robinson Crusoe and descriptions of the island to be dull; you can just read the middle 12 paragraphs and skip the rest; but on the re-read, the metaphor of the journey clicked for me and I realized what a polished art object the piece is. (That opens up whole other questions about whether Franzen can be a trusted guide if he creates metaphor and literary text within his own life, literally; does that matter, or is only the coincidental worthy of consideration in non-fiction? -but we can leave that for now).

Pics is NY art.

[Anonymous No.1714212]

>>1714209
This guy should draw a Franzen fanfic adventure webcomic, I'd read it. Have him hook up with some hot pirate wenches

[Anonymous No.1714213]

>>1714212
and set up a pre-urbanized island culture's first MFA workshop