July 30th, 2011 / 12:43 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
One of the major reasons I love Infinite Jest is that it seems like it was written by an extremely intelligent alien; someone trying so intricately and direly to figure out humans and so utterly, utterly failing.
I like that a lot.
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no.
But in that effort, still succeeding.
you think no i think yes and no and we’re both wrong
of course. that central paradox is a small part of the whole point (which he, I’m afraid, and i believe he was afraid, was ultimately only partially in control of). it’s also why it’s more moving than even it meant to be.
david foster wallace’s last message to planet earth: fuck this place. it sucks. i’m leaving.
So, I’ve tried like 4 or 5 times, but especially 2 of those times, to read Infinite Jest, and I get stuck.
I love the pothead character, I’m intrigued by the diplomat watching the tape, and I am on the slightly positive side of neutral about Hal and the tennis academy stuff.
But I fucking can’t stand the cross dressing secret agent’s conversation and it feels like it keeps going on and on and on and on and on so I quit reading.
Should I keep reading, does it get better, or is it just a book that I’ll have to accept is not for me despite (because of?) its brilliance?
I think the writer communicates human failure pretty well
why do you think it seems like the failure of the writer to figure out humans is utter
It gets better. Way better.
“The sun was starting to go down over the West Newton hills through the
double-sealed windows, now, trembling slightly, and the windowlight
against the far wall was ruddled and bloody. The heater vents kept
making a sound like a distant parent gently shushing. When it starts to
get dark out is when the ceiling breathes. And everything like that.”
Like that much better, only for 650 pages.
I think there was a conversation here once about books that are antagonistic towards their readers. Infinite Jest has always seemed like that sort of book to me. On my last (and, hopefully, final) attempt, I made it about 600 pages in.
yea, hopefully.
I think that’s a bittersweet, elegiac way of putting it. It reminds me a bit of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s long form review of The Pale King in GQ-
“Wallace’s work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative
sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about
American novelists, “I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to
do the impossible.” Wallace failed beautifully.”I thought it was a great read- http://www.gq.com/entertainment/books/201105/david-foster-wallace-the-pale-king-john-jeremiah-sullivan#ixzz1TdVvwptc
I don’t know why the quote was formatted that way. Sorry.
more like dfw’s last message to dfw
more like dfw’s last message to dfw
i feel the opposite. seems like wallace is dishing out pleasure to his readers on every single page, if they’re properly attuned to receive it. but it also helps to take a breather (say a month or more) somewhere in the middle…
failed!
i read IJ in January and have been saying ever since I’m going to
read it again. you just have to read it. now.
That semi-colon should be a dash.
NICK GIVE ME A BREAK ITS BEEN A LONG DAY
He was only half right.
I think the struggle to physically deal w/ reading it — the heft, learning the double bookmark trick, tight font and big spreads, many false starts — there is a “learning to walk” aspect to it that leaves the reader, once finished, painfully accomplished. Finishing feels the way real-world important things feel, like learning how to stitch yourself up after performing a self-tracheotomy.
—
um, actually it’s called a hyphen you dumb butt
The very last part (utter failure) notwithstanding, this is a good description of what I find so compelling about “Shoplifting from American Apparel,” and to a certain degree about Tao Lin in general.
that’s a much better blurb than the sven birkerts quote back bay slaps on the book. the “think” quote. that quote has always bothered me. dfw could only have failed. but that failure reads so well. i too found the marathe/steeply thread slightly taxing the first time i tried to read the whole book. but there’s so much more to enjoy you learn to Roll with it, regardless.
Amen to that, Blakeman, but I do tend to think he knew how moving the book he was making was going to be. How could he not? Homeboy had a cardioid apparatus that equaled the size of his noggin.
And the smart alien trying to understand humans thing, which I really Facebook like as an idea, and which I’ve never heard put that exact way, is actually a pretty standard literary trope, if I’m reading you right. Tolstoy called it disassociation, I think (I’m not bothering to be a smart alien and Google it right now), where you (the narrator) try to describe something in an overly literal way in order to make a very mundane and ordinary thing, event, emotion seem foreign, funny, etc. Classic example of trying to describe an opera to someone who’s
never heard of one. “A woman is standing and screaming in front of
a theater full of people, etc.”
See also the “Ithaca” chapter of ULYSSES where Bloom, making tea for him and Stephen, busts a freestyle RE: water, where the excessive, gushing narration about scientific and hydrological facts acts as a stand-in for the excessive, gushing emotion the character is feeling and, we understand, suppressing. I put DFDub in this Joycean and Tolstoyian lineage, as our best contemporary remixer of dramatic, self-conscious disassociation. Of course, he took it to
exalted, exuberant, culturally-relevant new heights.
In a way, he was overdescribing early 21st-cent human beings not to show off to them how smart of an alien he was, as is often something you hear unfair human beings criticize him for. But he was doing it (overdescribing), I think, for our sakes. He was worried we wouldn’t understand (not condescendingly), because he wanted us to understand, the way Hal is so anxious to be clearly understood (with traumatic consequences) in that bravura first scene of IJ.
That very DFDubian anxiety, to me, is (a) totally relevant, I think, to the way we interact in everday 2011 life, in blog comments, etc., (b) very consciously done by the author, and (c) I think, at the end of this 2011 day, whether you want to give him full or partial credit for his control of the effect or not (kind of a negligible point if you ask me) very deeply moving.
http://cutewriting.blogspot.com/2008/06/en-dash-em-dash-and-hyphen.html
hyphen –
en dash –
em dash —
alright, this article is a bit overly dramatic, but it does raise the point, does he know everything if a huge number of his facts were wrong? is encyclopedia brown still encyclopedia brown if he’s talking out his ass?
http://exiledonline.com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/
(Remix.)
What creates the movement and intensity of the catechism of Ithaca is surely the nozzling intrinsic to it: the channeling of amity then eros by care.
Have a look (and forgive at least some of the misprints): http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/17/ .
time to get on the train and re read the dictionary pal cos i think ur getting confused.
it’s technically called and ‘um dash’. as in, “um—i guess i’ll put a daaaash here—lol”
like you know sometimes you’re writing and you stick a dash there but really there’s a gap in the sentence you can’t be bothered to fill cos you just got back from a 14 hour shift at cinnabon and it’s like, ‘i gotta get this done it’s nearly bed time’.
time to get on the train and re read the dictionary pal cos i think ur getting confused.
it’s technically called and ‘um dash’. as in, “um—i guess i’ll put a daaaash here—lol”
like
you know sometimes you’re writing and you stick a dash there but really
there’s a gap in the sentence you can’t be bothered to fill cos you
just got back from a 14 hour shift at cinnabon and it’s like, ‘i gotta
get this done it’s nearly bed time!’
who iz most human
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