David Foster Wallace

[Levin]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

STFU, Donnie.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=101434881

You're irrepressibly . . . empty headed. Or perhaps you're just too "quiet" and "subtle" for me. Go back to your hiding place where your lap dogs are.

Most of all you're a coward, Mike. There's nothing more scornful than a coward. But you have your guns, and your secret caves. So does Osama, on both counts. Cowards.

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by Levin

You're irrepressibly . . . empty headed. Or perhaps you're just too "quiet" and "subtle" for me. Go back to your hiding place where your lap dogs are.

Most of all you're a coward, Mike. There's nothing more scornful than a coward. But you have your guns, and your secret caves. So does Osama, on both counts. Cowards.

You probably encounter a lot of people who don't value your opinion very much. Most of them are surely very polite. Even the ones you make cry.

I'm doing you a favor by letting you know what I really think. My failing, as it were, is that I am not polite.

You don't belong at the adults' table.

[Levin]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

You probably encounter a lot of people who don't value your opinion very much. Most of them are surely very polite. Even the ones you make cry.

I'm doing you a favor by letting you know what I really think. My failing, as it were, is that I am not polite.

You don't belong at the adults' table.

Your wit almost makes up for your lack of class.

[MikeWaters]

Originally Posted by Levin

Your wit almost makes up for your lack of class.

I really don't have the energy to correct your foolishness. Remember, you are the dumbass who stepped in without even knowing what was going on, who made statements about what I said that were just plain wrong.

I have no interest in engaging you on it, because I can hear the rattling sound of your poor engineering from a distance, and I prefer not to get any closer.

If it makes you feel any better, then I will say YES DAVID FOSTER WALLACE KNEW NOTHING, DID NOTHING, CARED ABOUT NOTHING. Now go home and tell your mom that the mean kid down the street told you he doesn't ever want to see your face again.

[Levin]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

I really don't have the energy to correct your foolishness. Remember, you are the dumbass who stepped in without even knowing what was going on, who made statements about what I said that were just plain wrong.

I have no interest in engaging you on it, because I can hear the rattling sound of your poor engineering from a distance, and I prefer not to get any closer.

If it makes you feel any better, then I will say YES DAVID FOSTER WALLACE KNEW NOTHING, DID NOTHING, CARED ABOUT NOTHING. Now go home and tell your mom that the mean kid down the street told you he doesn't ever want to see your face again.

You're not the mean kid down the street, Mikey! You're the kid who invokes an odd sympathy in the rest of the class, the kid whose parents have to remove from many situations because you can't handle distress in a socially acceptable way. While your mom removes you from the most recent playground confrontation (your brow sweaty and mouth clenched, legs kicking and arms punching the air robotically as if you can't control it) the rest of the class just watches you silently, slightly uncomfortably, as your mom carts you away. The class feels an odd sympathy for you, but it's all a little weird too. After recess, the teacher says in an effort to smooth things over, "Mike will be back with us tomorrow. He needs a little break right now." I encountered a few kids like you growing up; they usually got the crap beat out of them once or twice in junior high or high school. Smart kids, all of them, but just a little odd; longish hair, baggy pants, packrat backpacks, something visibly uncomfortable about their demeanor and always a little on edge. They usually turned out okay in the end, but it's interesting meeting one like you who still suffers into adulthood.

[MikeWaters]

Look, Levin, I have been rejected, stabbed in the back, forsaken, kicked, screamed, cussed at, hated, and that's just a brief introduction to my online existence in Mormon cyber-wasteland.

I've seen it coming and going. I'm in my waning years, approaching my grave, and God have mercy, I hope someone more worthy than you throws the last shovelfuls of dirt over me.

[Levin]

Yep, most of the kids also had martyr-complexes. Check.

[SeattleUte]

You guys are both hugely entertaining. But Waters is right.

Ultimately, DFW knew himself best. From the article:

"Of course, as he recognized even then, maybe the drug wasn’t the problem; maybe he simply was distant, or maybe boredom was too hard a subject. He wondered if the novel was the right medium for what he was trying to say, and worried that he had lost the passion necessary to complete it."

"He wasn’t sure all those filled notebooks had been worth it, though; he now saw himself as having been driven by a 'basically vapid urge to be avant garde and post structural and linguistically calisthenic. This is why I get very spiny when I think someone’s suggesting this may be my root motive and character because I’m afraid it might be.'”

"'I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic.'"

He wanted to be a great artist, but his life was all about his disease and his own thoughts. What was David Foster Wallace's fiction other than stream of conciousness set down in superficially clever and quickly tiresom run-on sentences? Yes, in the final analysis, thousands of pages of "tics". If you read the critical reception carefully, he was not widely regarded a great novelest. He was a phenomoenon. Really, just a fad. What's wrong with drama, conflict, plot, resolution, character development, economy? Nothing. Those are good things.

Tolstoy traveled throughout Russia and Europe, raised a family, had a difficult marriage and was unfaithful, was in the Russian army, was a member of the Russian aristocracy he wound up lampooning late in life (after romanticizing them in War and Peace), and led a religious movement that got him excommunicated from the religion of his fathers. Tolstoy was well grounded, productive, organized, and he sucked the marrow out of life. He painted on a huge, multi-faceted canvas. Cormac McCarthy, you just know (though he won't talk aobut it), has lived and breathed, soaked in, the abused and vanishing Southwest wilderness and the rural peoples with capacity for extreme cruelty and inexplicable redemptive kindness he writes about so poetically and beautifully. What helped qualify Jonathan Littell to write his epic about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany? He worked for the international humanitarian organization Action Against Hunger, heading the agency’s mission in Chechnya, where he was a victim of an ambush and a colleague was kidnapped.

Levin, the unkinest cut comes from you. From the article:

“I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket.”

No doubt his best work was nonfiction, but competent nonfiction writers are a dime a dozen. DFW wanted to be a great artist, but his life didn't give him material for great art. Great artists are infinitely more rare, and DFW's knowledge that he really wasn't one and never would be one fed his depression. I don't doubt bipolar affliction is a terrible, probably incurable disease. Regardless, his novels seem to me a portrait of a narcisist, reflecting the life he led. Yes, boredom was a fitting subject. His first novel in which his lead character is a character in a novel within a novel is an apt metaphore for David Foster Wallace's life and art.

[SeattleUte]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

As I was reading about him, I was reminded of the comment concerning Updike: minor novelist with a major style.

What did Wallace ever do in real life that would make him have any insight into anything? Depressions, drugs, alcohol, rehab. What else? It's like he wanted to create redemption through literature without ever living it first. You got to get off your ass and do something for other people. Maybe, because of his demons, he couldn't. And that is sad. He couldn't create the thing he longed to, because he wasn't the person he longed to be.

This reminded me of the Nobel committee's recent attack on American literature.

http://www.slate.com/id/2201447/

[MikeWaters]

I am very well aware that I am looking at Wallace through the lens of one man--the writer of the New Yorker article, who possesses his own biases.

His portrayal of Wallace's life showed much insularity and navel-gazing, as well as personal trials and suffering. You had the impression that he was part of the American writing machine, with the right American writing friends, that he was moving along with the right gigs, but otherwise unhappy, unfulfilled, unconnected. Is any of this true? Hell if I know.

You can't blame a man for shooting high and falling short. How often is a person born that will end up not writing an epic novel for the ages? Every second?

Wallace's desire to accomplish something that he hadn't the ability to do, is something many of us can relate to. Except we have even less chance than he.

Wallace had a beautiful basketball athleticism, let's say. But that was not enough. He wanted the beautiful game. He wanted the shot, the court-vision, the anticipation, the ball-handling, the ability to inspire and move his teammates. Hell, he was in the NBA, most would be happy just with that. But as I said before, some are cursed to wish they were Jordan when they are only Paxton. To sit next to Jordan, to feel his sweat dripping on you, but to be a million miles away.

I've never read a single book by Pynchon, Roth, Updike, Delillo, or Wallace. Honestly, even after reading about them in these articles, and a review here or there, I have little desire to do so. I revulse at the thought of tiring myself that way.