/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3679059]

W-why does no one talk about this book?

It's amazing.

[Anonymous No.3679061]

I'm only 100 pages in but it's great so far. I haven't read IJ but I can't wait to after this

[Anonymous No.3679071]

Wow.....Thanks for drawing our attention to that.....

David Foster Wallace, eh? The name seems vaguely familiar. I believe he is even beginning to develop a sort of a following in certain nigh-inaccessible nooks and crannies of the Deep Web.

But someone really ought to write a review article about him in the cultural supplement of one of the major US newspapers.

Or in two or three of them.

Or in EVERY FUCKING ALLEGEDLY 'QUALITY' PIECE OF PRINTED MATTER YOU CAN POSSIBLY PICK UP ANYWHERE IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD FOR ABOUT FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS NOW!

[Anonymous No.3679072]

Because its all people would talk about last year (or was it the year before?) when it was fashionable for posters to put DFW threads on this board daily ad nauseum. Before that it was Pynchon, weeks and weeks of everybody being told how great Gravity's Rainbow was.

Sorry bro you missed the boat, its all been said and done.

[Anonymous No.3679079]

>>3679072
Wallace once sold poop. I bet that hasn't been talked about yet

[Anonymous No.3679099]

>>3679079
>Wallace once sold poop.

It's usually just referred to as "Infinite Jest".

[Anonymous No.3679105]

>>3679099
sadly I was expecting that joke too much. still chuckled though

[Anonymous No.3679179]

>>3679072

Even in those threads they'd rarely mention The Pale King.

I thought it was better than Infinite Jest, even down to simple stylistic changes like using footnotes instead of a back section of end notes.

[Anonymous No.3679198]

>>3679099

[Anonymous No.3679203]

Anybody else get really emotional when reading DFW?

I cried a lot during this book

[Anonymous No.3679240]

>>3679072
But Gravity's Rainbow is a really great book. it's one of the most important cultural works of the twentieth century. There is really nothing quite like it. It is extremely beautiful, extremely terrifying and extremely lighthearted all at once.

DFW is a product of a middle brow hype machine, half fed by hipsters, half fed by the higher end book clubs, that wants a "great post modern author" of generation X to parade about. He's no substance, no staying power, nothing substantial to contribute on the level he is being proposed for. In every respect, from quality of writing to those he is popular among, he has the distinct markings of a breezy, nauseating trendy idiot.

[Anonymous No.3679245]

>>3679240
I agree with this.

[Anonymous No.3679279]

DFW is at best a B/B+ author.

He makes his prose intentionally clunky because he's incapable of writing something belletristic (e.g. Nabakov) or calculated and serious (e.g. Pynchon) without sounding like a try-hard. The psychology of his characters would redeem him if he didn't espouse a horrid self-defeating thesis that makes a mockery of what it means to be human: that slavery to senseless and silly twelve step plans is the best man can do for himself, that absolute freedom is batshit terrifying for him.

[Anonymous No.3679319]

>>3679240
I have to say that even Pynchon, aslthough inarguably of a different order of quality from Foster Wallace, already represents a marked decline vis-a-vis the great works of high modernism. Sorry, but in terms of such failings as a tendency toward over-indulgence in whimsicality, a splitting at the seams under the burden of historically obligatory erudition and so on, Gravity's Rainbow is to Ulysses pretty much what Infinite Jest is to Gravity's Rainbow. I'm afraid even that; much as I personally love Joyce, I'm bound to say that maybe Ulysses is to A Sentimental Education what Gravity's Rainbow is to Ulysses.

I don't think this is just old-fogeyism or projection of some really non-existent Golden Age of literature into the early modern(ist) past. One thing that shocked and impressed me when I first read Matthew Arnold's The Function of Criticism at the Present Time was the bravery and the extreme plausibility of this perceivedly fogeyish Victorian's thesis that there are long historical periods in which great literature is produced relatively easily and in large quantities and also long historical periods in which it becomes extremely unlikely that anything of very much value will be produced.

Is it conceivable that we are currently in a long period of creative sterility that began around 1980, or even around 1930, or even - sit venia verbo - around 1880?

[Anonymous No.3679345]

>>3679319
The period you describe corresponds to the rise of new media like film and television that inherently neuter creativity or outright prohibit it. Although I wouldn't go so far as to disagree with Aristotle on the value of spectacle in art, the moment a way was found to make it more spectacular at the expense of substance, the masses were doomed to a passive, animalistic mode of consumption. Our culture lives in a Skinner box. Games and the internet have exacerbated the situation to the point of entire book store chains going out of business, and the "print is dead" motto is picking up speed. Reading is seen as an unusual pastime, like stamp collecting or butterfly pinning. Someday it will be taboo. I fear our written language is not long for this world. If there is such a thing as peak oil, we are now in the midst of "peak writing."

[Anonymous No.3679353]

>>3679203

>that pic
top lel

[Anonymous No.3679489]

>>3679279
>Nabakov
ಠ_ಠ
ಠಠ__ಠಠ
ಠಠಠ___ಠಠಠ

[Anonymous No.3679535]

>>3679345
Very dumb, pls stfu^

[Anonymous No.3679615]

>>3679535
>not actually refuting the argument at all
>tantamount to admitting it was right all along

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679636]

More than 10 years ago, when I was a sophomore in college, my friend Karina loaned me a copy of David Foster Wallace’s second collection of short stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I picked it up in the morning and spent the day out on the quad, skipping my classes to tear through the whole book in a single sitting. The next day, Karina passed on Infinite Jest. My experience of the book was entirely fragmented: after finishing it, I could describe individual characters (cheerful, deformed Mario, lugging his camera behind him) brief scenes (the spasms of Hal’s failed Arizona interview) and one-off jokes (The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment) but I had no cohesive grasp of chronology, theme, or plot.

Eager to fill the gaps in our understanding, over the course of that semester Karina and I began talking about taking a road trip out to Illinois, where David Foster Wallace taught. In imagining this trip, I constructed a picture of the three of us sitting outside on a lawn, rows of green corn behind us, as The Bandana Man himself explained his book to us. Despite the outright scariness of the “Interviews” and the impenetrability of Infinite Jest, I envisioned him as a soft-spoken, sympathetic teacher, honored by our interest and eager to communicate. I can’t speak for Karina, but I must admit that, for me, part of the appeal of such a trip was the possibility that at the end of our impromptu book club meeting, the author might be willing to make out.

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679639]

Karina and I never made that pilgrimage, but if we had, David Foster Wallace would have had a term for us at the ready: “audience pussy.” That’s the brutal phrase that surfaces in DT Max’s recent biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, along with a series of similar anecdotes that suggest that if we’d actually found Wallace on the Illinois campus, he might not have explained Infinite Jest to us, but he may well have fucked us, in more ways than one.

Even the reviewers who didn’t much like Max’s biography tend to sound similar notes about it. Michiko Kakutani describes the book as “a sympathetic appraisal of Wallace’s life and work,” Lee Polevoi of Highbrow Magazine calls it “sympathetic and engrossing,” and even Dave Eggers blurbs it is as “deeply sympathetic.” Which is strange, because for me, the book unfolded like anything but a love story, and the sympathy Max makes evident on every page seems less for Wallace than for those he left behind. Running through the pages of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is a streak of violence and cruelty, often targeted towards women, that is especially disturbing in a man that The Guardian has described as someone who, “More than any other contemporary novelist, his younger readers look to… for guidance on how to be a fucking human being.”

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679646]

It starts early: “When [Wallace’s sister Amy] was three, he knocked out her front teeth. When he was in ninth grade, he got so mad at her… that he pushed her down and dragged her through the backyard through the excrement left by their dog.” But it explodes onto the page in Max’s description of his relationship with Mary Karr. The two had the kind of relationship that, back in the day, we might have written off as “tempestuous,” but reading the account today, it’s hard to justify the behavior Max describes as anything other than abuse.

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679651]

Karr was married with a child when they met, in a tenuous early stage of recovery. She told him she wasn’t interested, but, as Max bluntly puts it, “Wallace did not hear subtle variations in no.” He showed up uninvited at the house she shared with her family and crashed her recovery meetings. She asked people to tell him that “his attentions were not welcome,” and he ignored her. He lied to their friends, telling them the two were involved when they weren’t — this despite the fact that she was still with her husband. He came to her office and swore at her from outside her window and as he left, he put his fist through a car window. During this period, he demonstrated violent behavior in other aspects of his life, once purposely ramming his car into the vehicle of a person who cut him off. And eventually: “One day, Karr remembers, he arrived at a pool party she was at with her family with bandages on his left shoulder.” Underneath? “A tattoo of her name and a heart.”

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679655]

This may not sound as scary to you as it does to me; the difference between stalking and single-minded romance is one that our culture often has trouble keeping straight. The confusion is amplified, though it shouldn’t be, by the fact that he and Karr did eventually enter into a relationship. But Wallace’s behavior escalates beyond any ambiguity, as the actions of rage-fueled men often do. In her memoir, Karr described his “black-eyed red outs,” the way he flung things at her, “book and backpack not least,” and — in an anecdote both she and Max describe — throwing a coffee table so hard it smashes to pieces on the wall behind her. The scariest part of Max’s account, though, is one that does not appear in Karr’s memoir, because she didn’t know about it. At one point, Wallace contacted an ex-con and tried to make arrangements to buy a gun: “He had decided he would wait no longer for Karr to leave her husband; he planned to shoot him instead.” (The ex-con reported him and Wallace never showed up to the meeting.)

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679658]

One might argue that it is precisely his ability to overcome such destructive behavior, through his dedication to the recovery process that would come to define him, that makes Wallace so admirable. This behavior occurred post-recovery, though; he moved to Syracuse to be with Karr with the money he got as an advance from Infinite Jest. It’s true that the level of violence and fury he displayed toward Karr never recurred. Instead, it “mellowed” into a casual cruelty that’s easily dismissed as nothing more than writerly dickishness but strikes me as something more. [...]

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679665]

[...] He refers to the women he sleeps with as the “bimbo brigade.” (This phrase appears in Karr’s book, not Max’s.) He goes home with Elizabeth Wurtzel only to turn “furious” with her when she changes her mind about sex. He takes full advantage of the “audience pussy” that becomes available to him after the publication of Infinite Jest; telling Jonathan Franzen he wonders whether his only purpose is “to put [his] penis in as many vaginas as possible.” He dismisses one woman he’s slept with by telling her, “I told you not to come here,” as she approaches him after a reading, and refers to another one (“unchivalrously,” Max notes) as “A three-day weekend I’m still paying the credit card bill on.” In New Orleans, he sleeps with a fan who is “underage,” though whether this means someone who is under 21, or under 18, or under 17 (the age of consent in Louisiana) is unclear. He tells one single mother he’s dating that he is jealous “her breasts [are] ‘no longer public property.’” He sleeps with his graduate students. He sleeps with his undergrads. He cruises recovery meetings for hookups, preying on the newly sober despite the fact that no one has ever written so eloquently about the damage such encounters can do.

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679669]

Maybe it’s crude to note all of this — insensitive, shrill. After all, no one was more aware of his own failings than Wallace, and for that he paid the price. He eventually got married to a woman, Karen Green, who comes off very well in the biography — thoughtful and sensitive, although inevitably in enormous pain.

And writers can be assholes. We all know that. It’s a fact of life that their books are almost always better than they are. Wallace’s treatment of women does not alter our understanding of his fiction any more, or less, than the fact that he was once an alcoholic, or that he ultimately committed suicide, or that apparently Avril Incandenza strongly resembles his mother.

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679671]

But when I closed Max’s biography, the feelings I had didn’t have anything to do with the quality of Wallace’s fiction. They were deeply, weirdly personal. I did not feel sorrow for Wallace and his too-short life, nor even pity for people he’d treated badly or left behind, but instead a mixture of sadness and embarrassment and relief for dumb, deluded, easily exploitable 19-year-old me, who’d imagined she could wander out to Illinois and sit down on the green and be treated with respect and affection by a man who, by the end of the book, had come to seem like a monster.

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679675]

I don’t think this is as selfish as it sounds. The only David Foster Wallace you (probably) and I (certainly) can know is the one we made up in our heads, so we are entitled to feel about him in any way we like. But compounding my sadness was a kind of loneliness, because for a long time, my idea of David Foster Wallace was the same one most other people had, that of a sensitive, brilliant mensch. This imagined personality is indisputably a central part of the David Foster Wallace cultural phenomenon, and it seems obvious to me that Max’s book ought to blow the David Foster Wallace cult — a cult that is as heavily based on our collective belief about who he was as an individual as it is on the strength of his writing — to pieces. Hey, the world should ruefully be saying right about now, so, unfortunately, despite how good he looked in a bandanna, it turns out that this guy sucked. Stalking a woman and throwing books and backpacks and furniture at her, trying to buy a gun so that you can shoot her husband, calling women “bimbos” and sleeping with teenagers and students and other vulnerable people… someone like that cannot be our model for how to be a ‘fucking human being.’ And I feel lonely because — to state the obvious — this doesn’t seem to be happening. Most reviews I’ve read address the incident with Karr’s husband in isolation, if at all, and they treat it as a juicy piece of gossip, nothing more.

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679679]

I don’t expect people to be angry at Wallace, or even to spend time condemning him. Obviously, he had a lot of shit on his plate, and he struggled mightily with the burdens he had. All I expect is a quiet, un-showy disqualification for the role of hero, mentor or saint. I would like the “statue” (Wallace’s word) of his public image to be carefully dismantled, for the overblown ideas we have of him and what his life meant to slowly begin to deflate. I would like him to become just another writer, imbued with no moral authority beyond what is contained in his words on the page. In other words, I would like our generational role model not to be another selfish genius of a guy who, in exchange for doing his job unusually well, got away pretty much his whole life with treating other people as though they were disposable. There are a lot of these people in the world, but as Wallace himself said, “We get to choose what to worship.” We don’t have to worship this.

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679688]

But because as a culture we value what we value and worship what we worship, I have little doubt that the David Foster Wallace juggernaut will continue to roll on. Brainy undergraduates will continue to idolize him; ambitious writers will continue to imitate him, and young female fans reading Max’s biography might feel a flash of discomfort, imagining the way Wallace might have treated them if they had encountered him on the green Illinois lawn, but they will tell themselves it doesn’t matter and in a way they will be right.

LE FIN

>DFW so deep writer he understands me like nobody else can ;_;
>writer of our generation he just knew what it mean to be a #fuckinghumanbeing
>I like when he put footnotes about chemistry in his book lol I thought that was really clever it shows how postmodern and ironic we are lol

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679706]

This man had a indescribably better understanding than the culture we're living in than DFW had, and he lived 150-200 years ago.

[Anonymous No.3679719]

>>3679706
>>3679688

>still giving a shit about DFW
>15 years after 1998

No wonder you trip. Trying real hard to be relevant, aren't ya, bud.

[Virgin 20/m/UK !VIRGIN/FJM No.3679727]

>>3679719
I am the best poster on /lit/