Obviously, equivalencies are problematic. The Canadian anything seems to be paler version of the American thing. (Call me nationalistic.) That is, they aren’t really equivalent. And yet, there seems to be some value in these equivalencies, right? (Maybe I’m wrong.)

That being said: Is DFW the American Roberto Bolano?

I have a hard time commenting on someone’s blog, or even this website, telling so and so I really liked their post or their story or whatever. If my feelings are very strong, I email them. If I can’t find their email, I say to myself: “This person will do fine in life without getting an email from me,” or “it should not matter to this person if I like their story — they should be writing on behalf of the story, not its reception.” And it all fits perfect in my head: 1) writers write, 2) readers read, and 3) everybody lives a nice modest life, 4) in relative obscurity, and 5) maybe one day, if applicable, a writer may be recognized, however mildly, for their contribution to literature.

That’s not the formula, rather: 1) start a blog, 2) comment on everyone else’s blog until your name is so pervasive that out of sheer curiosity one clicks on your blog, 3) continue doing so for >6 months until 40 – 60 strangers recognize your name. This is a shortcut to fame, a diluted and over-eager fame.

Enter Fictionaut, a “private” workshopping literary site in which authors can help other authors out using forums or comments. This sounds nice, but it seems to me, essentially, that published stories are being reposted simply to garner positive feedback, a way to milk the egotistical currency of each publication. Does one really need people to say “great story,” “love it,” and “nice”? Can not the story simply reside in on its own without being tugged from every angle with glib sentiment?

And for the commenters, the selfless enthusiasts and supporters of their peers’ work — is there some part of you, deep down inside, that is really more invested in propogating/promoting your own name (with that golden link to your account) with each comment? Isn’t “love it” simply a stand-in for “click here”? Is not the so called democracy of comments really micro self-promotion?

I’m not trying to be small, and while it is Mean Week, I really do respect everyone in this literary community on some fundamental level. But here’s my problem: Fictionaut is simply too nurturing of an environment, and it makes for weaker writers who are more n’ more dependent on constant affirmation. I think writers should write with that bug in their brain that tells them they fucking suck, without any reassurance. Each story should be a terrifying self-challenge to escape from suckdom. I like my writers unsatisfied, maybe a little self-loathing. Kafka did okay for himself.

David Foster Wallace often hated his writing, and the adverse opinions of our most esteemed literary critics didn’t really matter. “Great story,” even “Genuis” simply didn’t do it for him. His writing, perhaps more than any other writer I can name, was bigger than his concept of “self,” and what little “self” was left chewed away at him. He was a guilty writer, the best kind.

I think we should all slow down with all this ostensibly nurturing support — because it’s actually corrosive; it turns writing into a comment competition. Every one is having too good a time. Too many people are too good of friends with too many other people, and I don’t trust it. If a circle jerk is to be our metaphor, this bookake is just too messy for me – look out.

Sentimental. Happy to be.

You’ve been meaning to do it for over a decade. Now join endurance bibliophiles from around the web as we tackle and comment upon David Foster Wallace’s masterwork, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages¹ ÷ 93 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat. 

Ladies and gentlemen, let us make the summer of 2009 David’s.

At the height of my obsession with David Foster Wallace, garnered after reading ‘Infinite Jest’ over several weeks in 2001, an act which literally changed my life, I began going after any and every piece of writing not only of his, but that he had recommended, blurbed, mentioned in interviews, taught, etc. Many of these books also had a profound influence on my brain, including Gass’s ‘Omensetter’s Luck,’ McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ and ‘Suttree,’ Donald Barthelme, and countless others.

During this period I began constructing a list of these texts as I found them. The list, which I remember as being several pages long, is now likely floating somewhere in one of my many expired computers. I was able, though, to find at least what makes up part of the list in an old email folder, and as such it appears below.

I know this is not an exhaustive list at this point, and if I find a later draft of it I will repost: in the meantime, however, if you have any other knowledge of blurbs or etc. (and any that might have occurred later in his life, after I stopped making the list, will obviously be absent) please comment them. Where I could, I tried to include the actual blurbs and/or comments, and in other places just included the names of authors mentioned in passing or other ways.

(It likely should be noted that many of these refs came from the amazing and wonderful interview conducted with Wallace by Larry McCaffery for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which if you have not yet, you should read.)

Also included is a Reading List from a class Wallace taught on postmodern fiction (I believe), which is a pretty fantastic collection of texts.

Incomplete list is after the break:

*******************

– Books Blurbed by DFW –

Desperate Characters – Paula Fox
* “A towering landmark of postwar Realism….A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved.”

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

Jack – A.M. Homes
* “A moving novel, and a very refreshing one. Jack is such an engaging, attractive human being, it’s a pleasure to believe in him.”

Thirst – Ken Kalfus

Wittgenstein’s Mistress – David Markson
* “A work of genius . . . an erudite, breathtakingly cerebral novel whose prose is crystal and whose voice rivets and whose conclusion defies you not to cry.”
* “’W’s M’ is a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism. A monologue, formally very odd, mostly one-sentence ¶s. Tied with “Omensetter’s Luck” for the all-time best U.S. book about human loneliness. These wouldn’t constitute ringing endorsements if they didn’t happen all to be simultaneously true — i.e., that a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde that could also be so moving makes “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.”

How to Breathe Underwater: Stories – Julie Orringer

Tourmaline – Joanna Scott
* “the absolute cream of her generation”

The Acid House – Irvine Welsh
Dogwalker – Arthur Bradford
Big If – Mark Costello
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

The Middle Mind – Curtis White
* “Cogent, acute, beautiful, merciless, and true.”

??
Susanna Moore
William T. Vollmann

– Books Recommended by DFW in Conversation –

Halls of Fame: Essay – John D’agata
The Lost Scrapbook – Evan Dara

Omensetter’s Luck – William H. Gass
* “Gass’ first novel, and his least avant-gardeish, and his best. Basically a religious book. Very sad. Contains the immortal line “The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.” Bleak but gorgeous, like light through ice.”

Angels – Denis Johnson
* “This was Johnson’s first fiction after the horripilative lyric poetry of “Incognito Lounge.” Even cult fans of “Jesus’ Son” often haven’t heard of “Angels.” It’s sort of “Jesus’ Son’s” counterpoint, a novel-length odyssey of mopes and scrotes and their brutal redemptions. A totally American book, it’s also got great prose, truly great, some of the ’80s’ best; e.g. lines like ‘All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces.’”

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce

Steps – Jerry Kosinski
* “This won some big prize or other when it first came out, but today nobody seems to remember it. “Steps” gets called a novel but it is really a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.”

Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
* “Don’t even ask.”

Suttree – Cormac McCarthy

There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning to Do – Michael Ondaatje

The Shawl – Cynthia Ozick

Donald Barthelme (esp. The Balloon)
A.S. Byatt
Robert Coover
J. Cortazar
Don Delillo
Mary Karr
Phillip Larkin
Manuel Puig
George Saunders
William T. Vollmann

DFW’s Syllabus Texts

Speedboat – Renata Adler
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
Play It as It Lays – Joan Didion
Desperate Characters – Paula Fox
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
The Moviegoer – Walker Percy
The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead

Steven Pinker had a piece in the NYT yesterday about John Roberts’ flub of the Oath of Office, and why, from a grammatical standpoint, it doesn’t matter. He argues that the long-standing injunction against infinitive splitting is “a myth.”

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

I thought it was a pretty interesting argument, and I’m always glad to see a shibboleth overturned, so I forwarded the link to my friend Amy McDaniel, who of all my friends is probably the most interested in such things, as well as the best at them. (In addition to being an expert grammarian, she’s also an expert on food, and you can/should check out her contributions to the Slashfood blog.)  She replied to my message with a one-liner: “Steven Pinker is an enemy of proper usage,” to which I replied that “his insidious claims are deeply seductive.” I imagine at this point she realized I don’t know anything about Steven Pinker–or as much as I should about grammar–and so she sent me a passage of David Foster Wallace’s “Tense Present,” wherein DFW critiques Pinker’s “descriptivist” approach to usage. The essay, which originally appeared in Harper’s in 2001, can be read in its entirety here, or you can find just the part that Amy sent me to settle the matter pasted in after the jump.

Wallace on Pinker:

As Descriptivist Steven Pinker puts it, “When a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to order words into everyday sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential decorations.”

 

This argument is not the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it’s still vulnerable to some objections. The first one is easy. Even if it’s true that we’re all wired with a Universal Grammar, it simply doesn’t follow that all prescriptive rules are superfluous. Some of these rules really do seem to serve clarity, and precision. The injunction against twoway adverbs (“People who eat this often get sick”) is an obvious example, as are rules about other kinds of misplaced modifiers (“There are many reasons why lawyers lie, some better than others”) and about relative pronouns’ proximity to the nouns they modify (“She’s the mother of an infant daughter who works twelve hours a day”).

Granted the Philosophical Descriptivist can question just how absolutely necessary these rules are, it’s quite likely that a recipient of clauses like the above could figure out what the sentences mean from the sentences on either side or from the “overall context” or whatever. A listener can usually figure out what I really mean when I misuse infer for imply or say indicate for say, too. But many of these solecisms require at least a couple extra nanoseconds of cognitive effort, a kind of rapid sift-and-discard process, before the recipient gets it. Extra work. It’s debatable just how much extra work, but it seems indisputable that we put some extra neural burden on the recipient when we fail to follow certain conventions. W/r/t confusing clauses like the above, it simply seems more “considerate” to follow the rules of correct SWE … just as it’s more “considerate” to de-slob your home before entertaining guests or to brush your teeth before picking up a date. Not just more considerate but more respectful somehow — both of your listener and of what you’re trying to get across. As we sometimes also say about elements of fashion and etiquette, the way you use English “Makes a Statement” or “Sends a Message” — even though these Statements/Messages often have nothing to do with the actual information you’re trying to transmit.

 

We’ve now sort of bled into a more serious rejoinder to Philosophical Descriptivism: From the fact that linguistic communication is not strictly dependent on usage and grammar it does not necessarily follow that the traditional rules of usage and grammar are nothing but “inconsequential decorations.” Another way to state the objection is that just because something is “decorative” does not necessarily make it “inconsequential.” Rhetorically, Pinker’s flip dismissal is bad tactics, for it invites the very question it begs: inconsequential to whom?