September 10th, 2010 / 12:07 pm
Snippets

I’m tired of people using David Foster Wallace’s championing of “heart” in fiction as an argument for watery, sentimental prose. Have you read the man? Perhaps he was less in tune to humans than he imagined: more alien math than home-ec. This is part of what makes him so by-the-throat. By the way, he gave up. If you want to grab my heart, don’t use grease.

467 Comments

  1. Mark

      “By the way, he gave up.”

      Obviously, if you equate suicide with quitting, you’ve had a life bereft of pain. Jolly good for you.

  2. Blake Butler

      you are mistaking what i mean by “gave up”

      you wrote “life bereft of pain”

  3. Moly Bloom

      >I’m tired of people..

      Who?*

      *This is a serious question.

  4. Blake Butler

      it’s a general trend that comes up when people are discussing heart in fiction. they always box quote wallace’s tendency to talk about the importance of it. very often it is out of context and misused.

  5. JGS

      Hey Blake,

      Before I make any comment on your interpretation of Wallace, can you give context (an anecdote, article, etc.) about why you feel this way? Who’s using DFW as an excuse for Picoult’s goodness or whatever “watery, sentimental prose”? Because any person writing that isn’t worth your energy in criticizing. He/she hasn’t read DFW.

      K THX.

  6. Moly Bloom

      I think wholeheartedly that Wallace’s career is foretold in the first ~15 pages of Infinite Jest: he (Hal) says, Hobbes is Rousseau in a dark mirror, all of that; that a person is more than the total sum of objective facts you might collect about him or her, that a person is more than what you can see and hear,
      and we all said, “What…in God’s name are those sounds???”

      “Perfect, however, “Infinite Jest” is not: this 1,079-page novel is a “loose baggy monster,” to use Henry James’s words, a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace’s mind. It’s Thomas Wolfe without Maxwell Perkins, done in the hallucinogenic style of Terry Gilliam and Ralph Steadman. The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.”

      **arbitrary and self-indulgent**
      http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/13/books/books-of-the-times-a-country-dying-of-laughter-in-1079-pages.html?ref=david_foster_wallace

  7. RICH BAIOCCO

      “If you want to grab my heart, dont use grease”. damn. good call blake

  8. h hg

      As Blake points out, a lot of this confusion comes from people who haven’t read much of his work. The impression that one would get of DFW from interviews with the media or from the commencement speech is much different than the impression you’d get from reading his work. He’s pretty cuddly in the interviews. Less so in the books.

      I really hope someone brings up Eggers in this thread.

  9. seventydys

      What’s heart? Blood, tough muscle, dirty tubes, electricity. Yeah – write like that.

  10. Blake Butler

      it’s more verbally and in forums that i’ve heard it: no specific impetus today, just a general idea. in discussing fiction not obvious for its heart, people say that the heart is missing, as if heart has to smack you in the face in order to be heart. wallace is anything but obvious, though perhaps sometimes it seems he felt he was more obvious than he was, though this is also part of his power.

      many of these people have been self proclaimed wallace fanatics, using him as what i feel is a misread soundbite. so, you’re right, they haven’t really read him, not (i feel) correctly, or even on the right page. but it still bothers me.

  11. Moly Bloom

      Michiko Kakutani takes the form of IJ to be a function of DFW’s personality, rather than the context in which he wrote it (late 20th century, America). When that happens, the writer becomes an asshole. Somewhere, some interview, DFW pre-empts feminist critics who might accuse him (Wallace) of asserting his giant 1,000++ page phallus on everyone else.

  12. Blake Butler

      “What…in God’s name are those sounds???” is so correct.

  13. Joseph Riippi

      I’m just generally tired of hearing about DFW. I liked the essays and I liked some of the short fiction and I gave up on the Jest.

      But even what I like i don’t love. DFW conversations usually end with me shrugging my shoulders.

      Do people really love him that much or just want to love him that much? Isn’t part of it that he’s branded so well as a cool/hip/awesome writer? Part of that being the way he presented himself in interviews?

  14. Lincoln

      I don’t get why people can’t except that other people love writers without assuming its just marketing or poseur stances.

      DFW was incredible. Both his non-fiction and fiction (thought not all of it) are indispensable IMHO.

  15. d

      When I think of ‘heart’ and David Foster Wallace, I think of the story in ‘Oblivion’ when he describes the father eating lunch everyday in front of the patch of grass outside the insurance company building. Holy shit.

  16. Lincoln

      nice

  17. JGS

      Joseph–it’s fair to have that opinion. Personally, I think you should give IJ another shot, but many share your feeling that his journalism/essays are his best work.

      IJ isn’t a book that necessarily gratifies or satisfies you with an ending. I finished it recently after probably 4 months of interrupted reading, and the last scene is so seemingly out of place and inconclusive as to the rest of the plot that I was left feeling that I had somehow missed key points that wrapped up the stories of Hal, the AFR, Joelle, etc. The last scene is among the most outrageous and imaginative of the whole book, though. So I think it’s worth your time to get there.

      And just for its sheer energy and creativity (something I don’t think I’ve seen matched in my incomplete reading of “the canon”) it’s really quite special.

  18. Steven Augustine

      Extremely important writer with no apparent heir, sadly. I had this involuntary response (which sort of addresses the DFW/Franzen dichotomy) the instant I heard DFW had died: it’s always Lennon and never McCartney.

  19. JGS

      That’s fair. Let me know if you find any articles as such.

      After I finished the book this summer I looked around for the press Wallace received after he died. I thought a lot of it, particularly the WSJ tribute to him linked below, was on point:

      http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122185639587957991.html

      And the idea of his being “obvious” in his fiction. Do you mean he subjected you to the full blast of his intellect? Yes, I agree, and also that it is “part of his power,” as you say, even if sometimes you get bogged down in it (i.e. that huge explanation of the calculus of Eschaton in the footnotes of IJ).

  20. Joseph Riippi

      Lincoln, I can easily accept that people love writers. I was simply asking the question. I’m simply saying he doesn’t do it for me. Neither do a lot of really important writers I still recognize can recognize as being important. IMHO, there’s a general lauding surrounding his work that the writing never paid off.

  21. Amy McDaniel

      has it occurred to you that there are other questions to consider about someone’s art besides Do I Like It? and Is It Important?

  22. Joseph Riippi

      JGS–

      I think with a big book like Jest the opinions get inflated too. Just for the commitment reading it requires, maybe, I don’t know.

      I certainly admire the accomplishment of Jest, just doesn’t do it for me. Made the comment I made to see if I was alone in my general nonplussedness with the work.

      I know a lot of people who can’t stand Bolano’s 2666, whereas I’m one of those devotees to the thing and would probably fall on the other side of the comment fence if that were what was being discussed.

      And I’m sure I will give IJ another shot at some point–there’s no denying there’s something that touches a lot of people within it.

  23. Joseph Riippi

      Yes. I don’t like it and it is important. Can’t I ask the question if anyone else feels that way?

  24. alan

      >>I’m tired of people..

      >Who?*

      Well, there’s Sam Anderson in New York magazine last month:

      “Franzen seems more deeply invested in his characters’ happiness. He’s tilted the compassion:contempt ratio slightly toward the former. I found myself identifying with the book—thinking in new ways about recent events in my friends’ lives, in my own life. It made me think, many times, of one of David Foster Wallace’s favorite edicts about fiction: that the good stuff can make readers feel less lonely.”

  25. Tim Jones-Yelvington

      that’s my favorite. but also because of how rigorously its digressions are structured. the fucking comic panels, wow.

  26. Tim Horvath

      Right on point. And I’ll throw in rhythm, arhythmmia, murmur, and an ongoing relationship with spleen, pancreas, and kidneys. All things to strive for.

  27. Moly Bloom

      Wow. That’s a colossal mis-understanding of DFW on Loneliness. Thanks for the link.

      Am I in the minority when I say that understanding a work of literature in terms of your feelings towards characters on a compassion-contempt spectrum is a pretty useless, meaningless, superficial exercise, or mode?

  28. Neil

      “By the way, he gave up.” That was a ridiculous thing to write. You can’t sum up suicide so simply. Anyone who knows someone who has committed suicide knows that things are a little more complicated than “he gave up.” I think it’s rather callous and mean spirited.

  29. Amy McDaniel

      Of course. I’m just pointing out that you might tire less easily of discussions about art if you look past the extremely tiresome questions of personal taste and cultural significance. Blake’s post addresses something entirely more alive about heart, affect, sentiment, despair

  30. Brett George

      blake, what did you mean by “gave up”?

  31. Matt Cozart

      poor paul. nobody likes paul. poor paul.

  32. Blake Butler

      you are mistaking what i mean by “gave up” also

      i wholly understand the terror: i mean nothing mean but at myself.

  33. mimi

      one way passages, flow, leaky not good

  34. reynard

      McCARTNEY II FORVER

  35. JGS

      Re: Lennon and never McCartney

      Wow, that’s an apt comparison. I’m going to put that in my lexicon and I’ll keep a mental tally running for you, Steven Augustine, you of the strong literary name.

      I’m reading The Corrections right now, and I’m actually seeing more similarities in their writing than the dichotomy than everyone talks about. I.e. both seem to have tortured consciences about “how we live”–just that IJ deals with a sort of dystopic future and The Corrections deals with the dystopia underlying all the “success” of the Lambert children (particularly think of Gary and ANHEDONIA and that tortured section where he tries to catch his wife in lying about injuring herself playing in the yard).

      Also, each deals a lot with mental health. Obviously, and to touch briefly on OP’s comment about DFW’s “giving up,” Wallace’s consciousness/depression, etc. sort of did him in. Reading his famous graduation speech (“This is Water” I think they’re calling it), you get an upbeat philosophy to go with the “everyday life is tremendous mental burden” ideas that run through IJ, and The Corrections as well.

      I wouldn’t go as far as to say DFW gave up. More like “gave in.” And it’s a tragedy on par with Lennon’s death to lose him.

  36. Blake Butler

      i mean even the master succumbs to his own terror

  37. Blake Butler

      and that’s not what i mean at all

      if you don’t understand what giving up is, you don’t understand

  38. Brett George

      seems like you are equating giving up to mean suicide, which is a fairly common way of describing it. when Mark said that was pretty shitty, you said you were misinterpreted. when i asked a simple question, you obfuscated things by saying what sounded like a “cool” (master succumbing yada yada) to then saying that’s not what you mean at all. then you said if i don’t know what giving up is, i don’t understand.

      am i right that you are merely stating that he gave up life/”the good fight”/etc by killing himself? i give up on things every day of my life. i keep at things. i go up to a point i think i can go but want to do more and castigate myself for the difference. my best friend killed himself. my friend Bill’s Uncle Pete, he killed himself. my dog’s other owner, Ruth, tried to kill herself.

      And I’m married. So I know from succumbing to my own terror.

  39. Blake Butler

      i i i

      i i my i i i i my my my

      I’m I my

  40. Brett George

      There is a reason people think you are a condescending ass. Chalk me in that category. You are so superior in your brainpower, so above the fray. When asked a few simple questions, you have to completely neutralize your prey. Good on you Blake, didn’t mean to waste your time with my pedestrian thoughts.

  41. Joseph Riippi

      Sure. i didn’t mean to imply that I tire about discussions about art, just recently discussions around DFW. In terms of heart, affect, sentiment, despair, I chose to respond to Blake’s post by wondering aloud if anyone else is nonplussed by Foster Wallace’s work.

      That people care deeply about his work and art I find wonderfully satisfying. I don’t think there’s a person that reads posts like Blake’s above without caring about art in some deep way. That we disagree about DFW is part of what I love about art, why I’m reading your response.

      And to the point of the question “Do I like it?” (which I take as synonomous to “Does this move me?”) that’s the first thing I think anyone should ask of a work of art. If it does move us, then many, many deeper questions follow. But if it doesn’t, perhaps I should just keep my trap shut.

  42. Blake Butler

      im not condescending you
      there is not an answer i can give that will fulfill what i meant by giving up
      i don’t know why it is subject to such scorn, why it would be assumed to be mean spirited
      each person is a person, i don’t know why it’s complicated
      it is a nothing

  43. Brett George

      “Don’t condescend me, man, I’ll fucking kill ya, man.”

      Floyd says it best.

      Okay, apologies for the ad hominem post a minute ago. I give up in this conversation. Have a good life, as Sam said to Diane.

  44. Blake Butler

      really not trying to be a dick here, really

      i’m sorry to have come off wrong. i think the ‘i’ is the problem in all things. wasnt trying to be smarmy

      it’s impossible i guess not to come off smarmy with a mouth like a bitch like mine

  45. Brett George

      All good, thanks. I’m the schmo who violated his Logic training by taking the ad h route.

  46. A. Alvarez

      I don’t want to feel less alone. I like being alone. As a matter of fact, I can’t find the time to be alone because I have a job and kids. This whole “make readers feel less lonley” thing is becoming a mantra and is dangerously close to becoming a cliche.

      And Blake is a cockburger. I like this site but he has always brought out the troll in me. See, he did it again.

  47. A. Alvarez

      People like him because he could write like a motherfucker. You need this explained to you?

  48. Joseph Riippi

      I guess I do.

  49. Tony O'Neill

      Wow, Joseph Riipi – since you seem to be voicing a pretty unpopular opinion here, I’ll stick my head above the parapet and say that while I can admire DFW’s talent as a writer he never really moved me, either. While I can admire the proficiency and skill it takes to do it, his stuff just doesn’t hit me in the gut the way my favorite writers do.

      Feel this way about a few writers who are also seemingly “untouchable” in this respect (i.e. any criticism of their work, tacit or otherwise, results in a spew of disbelief.)

      So, as Michael Jackson once wisely said, “you are not alone” ha ha. Or maybe Popeye is better: “I yam what i yam…”

  50. magick mike

      man i haven’t even read dfw but i didn’t read blake’s “gave up” as related to dfw’s suicide, aren’t we talking about sentiment here?

  51. Neil

      That’s my point. I don’t think you, or anyone else for that matter, can wholly understand why another human being would end his life. It might not be “terror” it might not be “giving up.” It’s something with a a lot of variables and factors, which cannot be enumerated in a a few words. I’m definitely not discounting your experience with “the terror” and I don’t think you meant anything cruel about what you wrote, but I think you have to be careful about projecting or mistaking your internal experiences with another person.

  52. A. Alvarez

      Own it, duder. The only way out is back inside. Can you dig it?

  53. jereme

      loneliness and aloneness are two different things

  54. Steven Augustine

      Thing is, it’s in DFW’s “short” stories that I think he made his greatest contribution. Even the relatively-unpopular “…Hideous Men” pushes the American Fiction Truck over a hill it was kinda stalling on (now I think the fucking thing is rolling backwards again and at near-free fall speeds but that’s another argument). “Little Expressionless Animals” is one of the most perfect post-War American short stories I’ve ever read… what a fucking reach, what a seamless blend of Didion-type super-smart cynicism and Alex Trebek’s teeth. “Little bits of Los Angeles wink on and off, as light gets in the way of other light,”… what a sentence.

      “The early Pacific is a lilac cube. The women’s feet are washed and abandoned by a weak surf.”

      or

      ““A dream,” says Trebek. “I have this recurring dream where I’m standing outside the window of a restaurant, watching a chef flip pancakes. Except it turns out they’re not pancakes—they’re faces. I’m watching a guy in a chef’s hat flip faces with a spatula.”
      The psychiatrist makes a church steeple with his fingers and contemplates the steeple.
      “I think I’m just tired,” says Trebek. “I think I’m just bone-weary. I’m tired of the taste of my teeth in my mouth. I’m tired of everything. My job sucks string. I want to go back to modeling. My cheek muscles ache, from having to smile all the time. All this hair spray is starting to attract midges. I can’t go outdoors at night anymore.”

      Tired of the taste of his teeth in his mouth… !

      The vogue is to disparage the wonderful sentence but if it’s a wonderful sentence with a purpose (along with the other wonderful sentences whose purpose it is to lead toward or away from that sentence), that’s what Wonderful Fucking Writing is all about. And that’s where Franzen falls behind, imo: JF’s always choosing between a sentence that looks great and one that advances the story. But in DFW these functions are synonymous.

  55. jereme

      suicide is an act of anger. mostly.

      it is not “giving up.”

      blake is not attacking dfw. why can’t people read something without immediately feeling slighted or put down.

  56. Steven Augustine

      Also: DFW’s death was the result of a biochemical malfunction of his brain. He wasn’t pissed off; his mind wasn’t working right.

  57. jereme

      that’s a nice way of saying crazy.

  58. Steven Augustine

      not really; “crazy” is a vague way of lumping lots of (often unrelated) behaviors together.

  59. jereme

      yeah man that’s what crazy means to society.

      i am very experienced with mental illness.

      brain salt deficient

  60. Steven Augustine

      the guy suffered from clinical depression; he went off his meds, tried new ones, the new ones didn’t work right… something of that nature, is what I read.

  61. Mark

      “By the way, he gave up.”

      Obviously, if you equate suicide with quitting, you’ve had a life bereft of pain. Jolly good for you.

  62. Blake Butler

      you are mistaking what i mean by “gave up”

      you wrote “life bereft of pain”

  63. Moly Bloom

      >I’m tired of people..

      Who?*

      *This is a serious question.

  64. Blake Butler

      it’s a general trend that comes up when people are discussing heart in fiction. they always box quote wallace’s tendency to talk about the importance of it. very often it is out of context and misused.

  65. Amy McDaniel

      “he gave up” is so much more respectful and complicated and truthful than “biochemical malfunction” … “went off his meds” … “something of that nature.”

      and sorry, Neil, but I’m speaking as someone who knows not just “someone who has committed suicide” but as someone who knew Wallace personally. when you know someone (and wallace wasn’t just “someone”), you have emotions, and these include terror and anger, and thank god. we’re talking about a life, a death, not a case study in a diagnostic manual.

  66. JGS

      Hey Blake,

      Before I make any comment on your interpretation of Wallace, can you give context (an anecdote, article, etc.) about why you feel this way? Who’s using DFW as an excuse for Picoult’s goodness or whatever “watery, sentimental prose”? Because any person writing that isn’t worth your energy in criticizing. He/she hasn’t read DFW.

      K THX.

  67. Steven Augustine

      he didn’t suffer from clinical depression for decades?

  68. Moly Bloom

      I think wholeheartedly that Wallace’s career is foretold in the first ~15 pages of Infinite Jest: he (Hal) says, Hobbes is Rousseau in a dark mirror, all of that; that a person is more than the total sum of objective facts you might collect about him or her, that a person is more than what you can see and hear,
      and we all said, “What…in God’s name are those sounds???”

      “Perfect, however, “Infinite Jest” is not: this 1,079-page novel is a “loose baggy monster,” to use Henry James’s words, a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace’s mind. It’s Thomas Wolfe without Maxwell Perkins, done in the hallucinogenic style of Terry Gilliam and Ralph Steadman. The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.”

      **arbitrary and self-indulgent**
      http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/13/books/books-of-the-times-a-country-dying-of-laughter-in-1079-pages.html?ref=david_foster_wallace

  69. RICH BAIOCCO

      “If you want to grab my heart, dont use grease”. damn. good call blake

  70. h hg

      As Blake points out, a lot of this confusion comes from people who haven’t read much of his work. The impression that one would get of DFW from interviews with the media or from the commencement speech is much different than the impression you’d get from reading his work. He’s pretty cuddly in the interviews. Less so in the books.

      I really hope someone brings up Eggers in this thread.

  71. seventydys

      What’s heart? Blood, tough muscle, dirty tubes, electricity. Yeah – write like that.

  72. Blake Butler

      it’s more verbally and in forums that i’ve heard it: no specific impetus today, just a general idea. in discussing fiction not obvious for its heart, people say that the heart is missing, as if heart has to smack you in the face in order to be heart. wallace is anything but obvious, though perhaps sometimes it seems he felt he was more obvious than he was, though this is also part of his power.

      many of these people have been self proclaimed wallace fanatics, using him as what i feel is a misread soundbite. so, you’re right, they haven’t really read him, not (i feel) correctly, or even on the right page. but it still bothers me.

  73. Moly Bloom

      Michiko Kakutani takes the form of IJ to be a function of DFW’s personality, rather than the context in which he wrote it (late 20th century, America). When that happens, the writer becomes an asshole. Somewhere, some interview, DFW pre-empts feminist critics who might accuse him (Wallace) of asserting his giant 1,000++ page phallus on everyone else.

  74. Blake Butler

      “What…in God’s name are those sounds???” is so correct.

  75. Joseph Riippi

      I’m just generally tired of hearing about DFW. I liked the essays and I liked some of the short fiction and I gave up on the Jest.

      But even what I like i don’t love. DFW conversations usually end with me shrugging my shoulders.

      Do people really love him that much or just want to love him that much? Isn’t part of it that he’s branded so well as a cool/hip/awesome writer? Part of that being the way he presented himself in interviews?

  76. Lincoln

      I don’t get why people can’t except that other people love writers without assuming its just marketing or poseur stances.

      DFW was incredible. Both his non-fiction and fiction (thought not all of it) are indispensable IMHO.

  77. d

      When I think of ‘heart’ and David Foster Wallace, I think of the story in ‘Oblivion’ when he describes the father eating lunch everyday in front of the patch of grass outside the insurance company building. Holy shit.

  78. Amy McDaniel

      seriously? that’s what you took from what i said? because i didn’t say that at all. help me out here, i am trying to say something for serious, please overlook the tone of it, i’m really trying to say something actual.

  79. Lincoln

      nice

  80. jereme

      lol

      foxnews says a lot of shit. i figured you for a thinker.

  81. JGS

      Joseph–it’s fair to have that opinion. Personally, I think you should give IJ another shot, but many share your feeling that his journalism/essays are his best work.

      IJ isn’t a book that necessarily gratifies or satisfies you with an ending. I finished it recently after probably 4 months of interrupted reading, and the last scene is so seemingly out of place and inconclusive as to the rest of the plot that I was left feeling that I had somehow missed key points that wrapped up the stories of Hal, the AFR, Joelle, etc. The last scene is among the most outrageous and imaginative of the whole book, though. So I think it’s worth your time to get there.

      And just for its sheer energy and creativity (something I don’t think I’ve seen matched in my incomplete reading of “the canon”) it’s really quite special.

  82. Steven Augustine

      Extremely important writer with no apparent heir, sadly. I had this involuntary response (which sort of addresses the DFW/Franzen dichotomy) the instant I heard DFW had died: it’s always Lennon and never McCartney.

  83. Steven Augustine

      Amy, I’m a little baffled by your response(s), in that I can’t see how I’ve made insulting or even remotely controversial comments here. If you knew DFW on a personal level, I’m sincerely interested in reading what you have to say about him.

  84. JGS

      That’s fair. Let me know if you find any articles as such.

      After I finished the book this summer I looked around for the press Wallace received after he died. I thought a lot of it, particularly the WSJ tribute to him linked below, was on point:

      http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122185639587957991.html

      And the idea of his being “obvious” in his fiction. Do you mean he subjected you to the full blast of his intellect? Yes, I agree, and also that it is “part of his power,” as you say, even if sometimes you get bogged down in it (i.e. that huge explanation of the calculus of Eschaton in the footnotes of IJ).

  85. jereme

      amy if i were next to you i would give you a hug. i don’t think anyone is being disrespectful

      the truth of the matter is suicide is personal. we don’t get to ever know. people have a hard time understanding why someone would kill themselves. they want easy things to blame.

      i don’t even know how we are on suicide. let’s talk about love.

  86. jereme

      she already said it dummy.

  87. deadgod

      JGS, I can’t tell what you mean by “the idea of his being ‘obvious’ in his fiction”, but Blake says, in the comment you’re tree’d under, that wallace is anything but obvious.

      In the mini-blogicle, Blake asserts that Wallace is unusually “by-the-throat”, which sounds like a kind of “obvious”, so, for Blake, there are probably different kinds of “obvious”, two being: “obvious” in the sense of ‘undeniably effective’, and “obvious” in the sense of ‘ineffective due (maybe among other things) to transparency of goals’ – sometimes a good thing and almost always a bad thing, respectively.

  88. Steven Augustine

      “James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful.”

      http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html

  89. jereme

      well i guess the fucking things didn’t cure the “depression” now did they?

      ever.

      don’t be such an ass.

  90. Justin

      I don’t know why we’re still talking about this. I thought it was pretty clear that “he gave up” didn’t refer to DFW’s suicide.

  91. Steven Augustine

      calm down, Jereme. No one is battling with you here.

  92. deadgod

      Horripilation can mean accurate dowsing rods for “heart”.

  93. Steven Augustine

      jereme: wtf are you on?

  94. deadgod

      always Lennon and never McCartney

      Are you invidiously comparing Yoko to Heather again, mister?

  95. Joseph Riippi

      Lincoln, I can easily accept that people love writers. I was simply asking the question. I’m simply saying he doesn’t do it for me. Neither do a lot of really important writers I still recognize can recognize as being important. IMHO, there’s a general lauding surrounding his work that the writing never paid off.

  96. jereme

      bro, when i am the one who has to tell you to drop something, you are seriously disconnected from the emotions of other people.

      how are you not getting this?

  97. Amy McDaniel

      has it occurred to you that there are other questions to consider about someone’s art besides Do I Like It? and Is It Important?

  98. Steven Augustine

      Hard to avoid, Deaders… hard to avoid. Meanwhile: I hope to fucking Gawd you’re hear to talk Lit re: DFW… I was into it until… uh…. some very strange Internet-style effects seemed to have kicked in…

  99. Joseph Riippi

      JGS–

      I think with a big book like Jest the opinions get inflated too. Just for the commitment reading it requires, maybe, I don’t know.

      I certainly admire the accomplishment of Jest, just doesn’t do it for me. Made the comment I made to see if I was alone in my general nonplussedness with the work.

      I know a lot of people who can’t stand Bolano’s 2666, whereas I’m one of those devotees to the thing and would probably fall on the other side of the comment fence if that were what was being discussed.

      And I’m sure I will give IJ another shot at some point–there’s no denying there’s something that touches a lot of people within it.

  100. Joseph Riippi

      Yes. I don’t like it and it is important. Can’t I ask the question if anyone else feels that way?

  101. alan

      >>I’m tired of people..

      >Who?*

      Well, there’s Sam Anderson in New York magazine last month:

      “Franzen seems more deeply invested in his characters’ happiness. He’s tilted the compassion:contempt ratio slightly toward the former. I found myself identifying with the book—thinking in new ways about recent events in my friends’ lives, in my own life. It made me think, many times, of one of David Foster Wallace’s favorite edicts about fiction: that the good stuff can make readers feel less lonely.”

  102. Tim Jones-Yelvington

      that’s my favorite. but also because of how rigorously its digressions are structured. the fucking comic panels, wow.

  103. Tim Horvath

      Right on point. And I’ll throw in rhythm, arhythmmia, murmur, and an ongoing relationship with spleen, pancreas, and kidneys. All things to strive for.

  104. Moly Bloom

      Wow. That’s a colossal mis-understanding of DFW on Loneliness. Thanks for the link.

      Am I in the minority when I say that understanding a work of literature in terms of your feelings towards characters on a compassion-contempt spectrum is a pretty useless, meaningless, superficial exercise, or mode?

  105. Neil

      “By the way, he gave up.” That was a ridiculous thing to write. You can’t sum up suicide so simply. Anyone who knows someone who has committed suicide knows that things are a little more complicated than “he gave up.” I think it’s rather callous and mean spirited.

  106. Steven Augustine

      ooops: “here”

  107. Amy McDaniel

      Of course. I’m just pointing out that you might tire less easily of discussions about art if you look past the extremely tiresome questions of personal taste and cultural significance. Blake’s post addresses something entirely more alive about heart, affect, sentiment, despair

  108. Brett George

      blake, what did you mean by “gave up”?

  109. Steven Augustine

      Restart:

      “I’m tired of people using David Foster Wallace’s championing of “heart” in fiction as an argument for watery, sentimental prose.”

      Discuss

  110. Matt Cozart

      poor paul. nobody likes paul. poor paul.

  111. Blake Butler

      you are mistaking what i mean by “gave up” also

      i wholly understand the terror: i mean nothing mean but at myself.

  112. mimi

      one way passages, flow, leaky not good

  113. reynard

      McCARTNEY II FORVER

  114. JGS

      Re: Lennon and never McCartney

      Wow, that’s an apt comparison. I’m going to put that in my lexicon and I’ll keep a mental tally running for you, Steven Augustine, you of the strong literary name.

      I’m reading The Corrections right now, and I’m actually seeing more similarities in their writing than the dichotomy than everyone talks about. I.e. both seem to have tortured consciences about “how we live”–just that IJ deals with a sort of dystopic future and The Corrections deals with the dystopia underlying all the “success” of the Lambert children (particularly think of Gary and ANHEDONIA and that tortured section where he tries to catch his wife in lying about injuring herself playing in the yard).

      Also, each deals a lot with mental health. Obviously, and to touch briefly on OP’s comment about DFW’s “giving up,” Wallace’s consciousness/depression, etc. sort of did him in. Reading his famous graduation speech (“This is Water” I think they’re calling it), you get an upbeat philosophy to go with the “everyday life is tremendous mental burden” ideas that run through IJ, and The Corrections as well.

      I wouldn’t go as far as to say DFW gave up. More like “gave in.” And it’s a tragedy on par with Lennon’s death to lose him.

  115. Blake Butler

      i mean even the master succumbs to his own terror

  116. Blake Butler

      and that’s not what i mean at all

      if you don’t understand what giving up is, you don’t understand

  117. ryan

      I’ve been clinically depressed for like a decade and I don’t find the “biochemical malfunction” stuff insulting or necessarily all that uncomplex. Yeah, there’s personal shit involved–idiosyncratic personal problems that may have triggered or exacerbated that physical susceptibility–but at some level it’s similar to dealing with any other non-mental affliction. DFW himself intimated several times in his work that it’s not like he was walking around all the time all sad and weepy; “psychotic” depression is more like a physical force, especially in that it can hurt like hell w/o really feeling like a part of “you.” i.e. the “you” that thinks things like ‘Gee, this is a wonderful cup of coffee!’ More like the part of of you that needs to pee 3x a day. (Incidentally I am drinking a truly awesome cup of coffee right now–man!)

      And I agree w/ the idea that Wallace’s most important work may well be his short stories. I’ve been reading back over them lately. . . dude was so gifted.

      But did Wallace really “give up” on heart? He was always (or at least post-Broom) committed to achieving it while maintaining a certain technical virtuosity. What were you thinking of when you said he gave up? He was never really committed to sentiment or affect.

      I agree that his comments on “heart” are misread so hard it hurts. It seems like some use the ending bit of his TV essay as an excuse for indiscriminately indulging their narcissism. New Sincerity my ass. Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is so-called “sincerity.”

  118. Brett George

      seems like you are equating giving up to mean suicide, which is a fairly common way of describing it. when Mark said that was pretty shitty, you said you were misinterpreted. when i asked a simple question, you obfuscated things by saying what sounded like a “cool” (master succumbing yada yada) to then saying that’s not what you mean at all. then you said if i don’t know what giving up is, i don’t understand.

      am i right that you are merely stating that he gave up life/”the good fight”/etc by killing himself? i give up on things every day of my life. i keep at things. i go up to a point i think i can go but want to do more and castigate myself for the difference. my best friend killed himself. my friend Bill’s Uncle Pete, he killed himself. my dog’s other owner, Ruth, tried to kill herself.

      And I’m married. So I know from succumbing to my own terror.

  119. Justin

      What little I have read of DFW (mostly interviews, and some stories from Oblivion) has always felt sincere. No, not sentimental. Mostly pretty sad in terms of the fiction. But fairly honest. When I think of heart, that’s usually what I think. It has nothing to do with being sentimental, it has to do with ‘being a fucking human being man.’ I mean, nowadays maybe that’s too sentimental. I don’t think so.

  120. Blake Butler

      i i i

      i i my i i i i my my my

      I’m I my

  121. Brett George

      There is a reason people think you are a condescending ass. Chalk me in that category. You are so superior in your brainpower, so above the fray. When asked a few simple questions, you have to completely neutralize your prey. Good on you Blake, didn’t mean to waste your time with my pedestrian thoughts.

  122. Joseph Riippi

      Sure. i didn’t mean to imply that I tire about discussions about art, just recently discussions around DFW. In terms of heart, affect, sentiment, despair, I chose to respond to Blake’s post by wondering aloud if anyone else is nonplussed by Foster Wallace’s work.

      That people care deeply about his work and art I find wonderfully satisfying. I don’t think there’s a person that reads posts like Blake’s above without caring about art in some deep way. That we disagree about DFW is part of what I love about art, why I’m reading your response.

      And to the point of the question “Do I like it?” (which I take as synonomous to “Does this move me?”) that’s the first thing I think anyone should ask of a work of art. If it does move us, then many, many deeper questions follow. But if it doesn’t, perhaps I should just keep my trap shut.

  123. Chris L

      DFW got *this* man’s heart more than just about any other author. Maybe the composition of the human heart is more complicated and various and alien than you think…

      “Giving up” is, likewise, just one subjective opinion on the meaning of suicide. You have a right to it, but my experience tells me otherwise. Unless the “give up” is referring to something else, such as Wallace’s own writing, in which case I still disagree but would add: you could be a bit more clear.

      That being said, it’s hard to argue with the consistent misapplication of DFW’s argument, examples of which typically do more to expose the sere solipsistic heart of personal aesthetics than they do to illuminate whatever piece of fiction is being defended (or excoriated)…

  124. Blake Butler

      im not condescending you
      there is not an answer i can give that will fulfill what i meant by giving up
      i don’t know why it is subject to such scorn, why it would be assumed to be mean spirited
      each person is a person, i don’t know why it’s complicated
      it is a nothing

  125. Brett George

      “Don’t condescend me, man, I’ll fucking kill ya, man.”

      Floyd says it best.

      Okay, apologies for the ad hominem post a minute ago. I give up in this conversation. Have a good life, as Sam said to Diane.

  126. A. Alvarez

      I AM A FUCKING HUMAN BEING!

  127. Blake Butler

      really not trying to be a dick here, really

      i’m sorry to have come off wrong. i think the ‘i’ is the problem in all things. wasnt trying to be smarmy

      it’s impossible i guess not to come off smarmy with a mouth like a bitch like mine

  128. Steven Augustine

      “Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is so-called “sincerity.”

      Exactly. But this was the thing that shook me a bit: reading “Good People” in the NYer. This text seemed so “sincere” (scare quotes very much intended to scare) that it was actually boring and disappointing and made me a little worried about a possible “new direction”. I read it two or three times to make sure a meta-level wasn’t eluding me, but the only “meta” I could find was the expectation I brought to the first reading of it. “Good People” struck me as being “watery, sentimental prose”. Unlike 99.99% of everything else I’d ever read by him (and he’s not in my top 5, btw, but, still, the work is persistently great).

  129. Brett George

      All good, thanks. I’m the schmo who violated his Logic training by taking the ad h route.

  130. seventydys

      I think exploring the notion of sentiment and how it’s meaning has changed since Sterne is worthwhile & potentially fruitful. What is meant by ‘sentimental’ can be argued over but it’s commonly found in literature that has a simplicity, ‘finishedness’ and insufficiency that is enjoyed because of those qualities and also because it passes for realistic, especially regarding emotion, despite being – in my mind – determinedly unrealistic. Setting aside Infinite Jest for a moment, there’s plenty of plenty in DFW’s Girl With the Curious Hair stories that takes the reader into the sinews and out to the shadows of being. It’s precise but it’s not neat and it’s work that doesn’t finish being read after it’s read. (The sentimental ends with a few echoes and then nothing – which is the most real thing about it).

      I was fortunate enough to first read IJ as an uncorrected galley. I didn’t want it to end then and I’m glad to say that – for me at least – it hasn’t yet.

  131. A. Alvarez

      I don’t want to feel less alone. I like being alone. As a matter of fact, I can’t find the time to be alone because I have a job and kids. This whole “make readers feel less lonley” thing is becoming a mantra and is dangerously close to becoming a cliche.

      And Blake is a cockburger. I like this site but he has always brought out the troll in me. See, he did it again.

  132. A. Alvarez

      People like him because he could write like a motherfucker. You need this explained to you?

  133. Joseph Riippi

      I guess I do.

  134. Tony O'Neill

      Wow, Joseph Riipi – since you seem to be voicing a pretty unpopular opinion here, I’ll stick my head above the parapet and say that while I can admire DFW’s talent as a writer he never really moved me, either. While I can admire the proficiency and skill it takes to do it, his stuff just doesn’t hit me in the gut the way my favorite writers do.

      Feel this way about a few writers who are also seemingly “untouchable” in this respect (i.e. any criticism of their work, tacit or otherwise, results in a spew of disbelief.)

      So, as Michael Jackson once wisely said, “you are not alone” ha ha. Or maybe Popeye is better: “I yam what i yam…”

  135. John Minichillo

      I’m jumping in on this late, but here goes.

      There’s the head and the heart. It’s a longstanding dualism, so it is easily deconstructed, but there may be writers who fall into these catagories. The traditional assumptions are realism = character, satire / metafiction / self-conscious narratives, or nonrealistic narratives = langauge / artifice. It’s harder for me to care about a character who exists in a nonrealistic narrative because the artifice makes it harder for me to forget this is not a real person, but a puppet of a character. These are traditions as old as fiction, older than modernism and might be represented by the sentimental novel versus a book like Tristram Shandy.

      What gets tricky, is that for writers who don’t write realistic narratives (Wallace? sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, but what he’s more famous for is when he didn’t), they can sometimes pull it off and do both. Head AND heart. This is a high bar, and I would want to suggest it should also apply to realistic narratives (realistic writers, at their best, should also get away with making me notice the language).

      But writers like Wallace, Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, maybe even sometimes even Blake, when they are at their best, they can do both. We are impressed with the verbal gymnastics, but he also made you care. Character is harder to do than verbal landscapes. It takes the right gesture. And we live in a word where it’s harder and harder to be genuine because there’s always some snarky ass ready to mock the whole endeavor, and I think maybe this is one of the things Wallace really cared about.

      It’s a humanist fallacy that intelligence and education are going to make us all better people. So there really a place for heart, and there are a lot of good writers who (whether it’s true or not) happen to believe that fiction is the place to show it, i.e. the moralist tendency.

      In some pieces, Wallace may seem less interested in character than in others. For my money, the essays are where he was really innovative because it was always in the service of knowledge and there’s less chance that the play for heart will miss it’s mark.

      Take the Lobster essay. Here is a guy who completely deconstructs any argument against eating lobster, and to do it he visits a vulgar absurdity of a lobster festival. He is arguing with gluttons about morality. He sincerely has compassion for this sea creature and he thinks we should too.

      Set this essay next to a story (I forget the title, but it gets anthologized) from Brief Interviews where a baby has boiled water spilled into it’s diaper. This is also a story where the there is some narrative play, and for a moment we get the point of view of a bird outside looking down at this house as the baby wails. Time passes. The story is excruciating. But setting this story next to the Lobster essay does something. The message is compassion. The message is heart. We should care about people and animals, and dammit we should be smarter about all this stuff.

      So there’s room for confusion. I think it’s more likely a reader will reject the baby story as manipulative, or maybe even easy. But it’s not easy, and he handles it pretty deftly.

      I blame the critics. There is a lack of serious criticism that really makes intelligent sense of a writer like this…or Donald Barthelme…or George Saunders…or you BB. Prepare to be misunderstood about a lot more than just suicide.

      P.S. it probably doesn’t help that you’ve got that personal blog, with that title, that, no matter how you may feel about the subject, seems to make light, and sends out that message to the world.

  136. Steven Augustine

      though I think the concept of “heart” itself is pretty fuzzy; I think plenty of material that’s lazily condemned as “cold” because it’s “too intellectual” is lots more moving than obvious efforts at “emotion”. I’m more moved by the realization that a human being… a breathing, shitting, mortal animal… can produced Art so sublime that it’s almost possible to imagine a God exists… than some manipulative kitsch about the old washerwoman or orphaned puppies. I think discussions about “heart” in Lit are too often haunted by the finger-wagging specter of anti-intellectualism. Well, writing (unless it’s just a cliche-by-the-numbers-fest) is an intellectual activity. And “heart” is all in the mind, of course, any way.

      (The last time Art induced verifiable horripilation here was This Mortal Coil with “Song to the Siren”…)

  137. magick mike

      man i haven’t even read dfw but i didn’t read blake’s “gave up” as related to dfw’s suicide, aren’t we talking about sentiment here?

  138. Neil

      That’s my point. I don’t think you, or anyone else for that matter, can wholly understand why another human being would end his life. It might not be “terror” it might not be “giving up.” It’s something with a a lot of variables and factors, which cannot be enumerated in a a few words. I’m definitely not discounting your experience with “the terror” and I don’t think you meant anything cruel about what you wrote, but I think you have to be careful about projecting or mistaking your internal experiences with another person.

  139. A. Alvarez

      Own it, duder. The only way out is back inside. Can you dig it?

  140. deadgod

      I’m tired of people using [anything] as an argument for watery, sentimental prose.

      It sounds like Blake wants to protect Wallace against careless (or candy-assed) fans and wet-jointed imitators – like Blake is irritated by convention and/or lazy comfort.

      That “watery” appreciation/homage are justified by reference to “heart”? Well, hell – look at literature from the point of view of the sentimentally slack: are ‘brain’ or ‘libido’ really preferable options?

      more alien math than home-ec

      What’s “less in tune to humans” about “alien math”?? I think Wallace is one of those for whom the imaginary ‘mind/heart’ contest is most misconceived.

      By the way, he gave up.

      It reads on this thread like some correspondents think Blake means something like ‘Wallace gave up on championing “heart”‘ or ‘Wallace gave up on alien-math lit’ or ‘Wallace gave up on greasy heart-grabs (???)’ or ‘Wallace gave up on something not here mentioned’.

      Really?

      Blake didn’t make an unkindly simplistic summary of Wallace’s suicide, a dismissal that she or he is having trouble walking back? What else did Wallace ‘give up on’ other than his life and whatever that would reasonably have continued to entail (writing, his values)?

  141. jereme

      loneliness and aloneness are two different things

  142. STaugustine

      Thing is, it’s in DFW’s “short” stories that I think he made his greatest contribution. Even the relatively-unpopular “…Hideous Men” pushes the American Fiction Truck over a hill it was kinda stalling on (now I think the fucking thing is rolling backwards again and at near-free fall speeds but that’s another argument). “Little Expressionless Animals” is one of the most perfect post-War American short stories I’ve ever read… what a fucking reach, what a seamless blend of Didion-type super-smart cynicism and Alex Trebek’s teeth. “Little bits of Los Angeles wink on and off, as light gets in the way of other light,”… what a sentence.

      “The early Pacific is a lilac cube. The women’s feet are washed and abandoned by a weak surf.”

      or

      ““A dream,” says Trebek. “I have this recurring dream where I’m standing outside the window of a restaurant, watching a chef flip pancakes. Except it turns out they’re not pancakes—they’re faces. I’m watching a guy in a chef’s hat flip faces with a spatula.”
      The psychiatrist makes a church steeple with his fingers and contemplates the steeple.
      “I think I’m just tired,” says Trebek. “I think I’m just bone-weary. I’m tired of the taste of my teeth in my mouth. I’m tired of everything. My job sucks string. I want to go back to modeling. My cheek muscles ache, from having to smile all the time. All this hair spray is starting to attract midges. I can’t go outdoors at night anymore.”

      Tired of the taste of his teeth in his mouth… !

      The vogue is to disparage the wonderful sentence but if it’s a wonderful sentence with a purpose (along with the other wonderful sentences whose purpose it is to lead toward or away from that sentence), that’s what Wonderful Fucking Writing is all about. And that’s where Franzen falls behind, imo: JF’s always choosing between a sentence that looks great and one that advances the story. But in DFW these functions are synonymous.

  143. jereme

      suicide is an act of anger. mostly.

      it is not “giving up.”

      blake is not attacking dfw. why can’t people read something without immediately feeling slighted or put down.

  144. Neil

      Amy, I never said anything about it being wrong about feeling emotions about DFW’s death. Obviously it’s an emotional issue. And I probably am just a little touchy about the subject.

  145. Steven Augustine

      Also: DFW’s death was the result of a biochemical malfunction of his brain. He wasn’t pissed off; his mind wasn’t working right.

  146. jereme

      that’s a nice way of saying crazy.

  147. Steven Augustine

      not really; “crazy” is a vague way of lumping lots of (often unrelated) behaviors together.

  148. jereme

      yeah man that’s what crazy means to society.

      i am very experienced with mental illness.

      brain salt deficient

  149. Steven Augustine

      the guy suffered from clinical depression; he went off his meds, tried new ones, the new ones didn’t work right… something of that nature, is what I read.

  150. Amy McDaniel

      “he gave up” is so much more respectful and complicated and truthful than “biochemical malfunction” … “went off his meds” … “something of that nature.”

      and sorry, Neil, but I’m speaking as someone who knows not just “someone who has committed suicide” but as someone who knew Wallace personally. when you know someone (and wallace wasn’t just “someone”), you have emotions, and these include terror and anger, and thank god. we’re talking about a life, a death, not a case study in a diagnostic manual.

  151. m.b.

      DFW’s heart was as big as a Lincoln Continental, and just as misunderstood.

  152. Steven Augustine

      he didn’t suffer from clinical depression for decades?

  153. Amy McDaniel

      seriously? that’s what you took from what i said? because i didn’t say that at all. help me out here, i am trying to say something for serious, please overlook the tone of it, i’m really trying to say something actual.

  154. jereme

      lol

      foxnews says a lot of shit. i figured you for a thinker.

  155. Steven Augustine

      Amy, I’m a little baffled by your response(s), in that I can’t see how I’ve made insulting or even remotely controversial comments here. If you knew DFW on a personal level, I’m sincerely interested in reading what you have to say about him.

  156. jereme

      amy if i were next to you i would give you a hug. i don’t think anyone is being disrespectful

      the truth of the matter is suicide is personal. we don’t get to ever know. people have a hard time understanding why someone would kill themselves. they want easy things to blame.

      i don’t even know how we are on suicide. let’s talk about love.

  157. jereme

      she already said it dummy.

  158. deadgod

      JGS, I can’t tell what you mean by “the idea of his being ‘obvious’ in his fiction”, but Blake says, in the comment you’re tree’d under, that wallace is anything but obvious.

      In the mini-blogicle, Blake asserts that Wallace is unusually “by-the-throat”, which sounds like a kind of “obvious”, so, for Blake, there are probably different kinds of “obvious”, two being: “obvious” in the sense of ‘undeniably effective’, and “obvious” in the sense of ‘ineffective due (maybe among other things) to transparency of goals’ – sometimes a good thing and almost always a bad thing, respectively.

  159. Steven Augustine

      “James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful.”

      http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html

  160. jereme

      well i guess the fucking things didn’t cure the “depression” now did they?

      ever.

      don’t be such an ass.

  161. Justin

      I don’t know why we’re still talking about this. I thought it was pretty clear that “he gave up” didn’t refer to DFW’s suicide.

  162. Steven Augustine

      calm down, Jereme. No one is battling with you here.

  163. deadgod

      Horripilation can mean accurate dowsing rods for “heart”.

  164. Steven Augustine

      jereme: wtf are you on?

  165. deadgod

      always Lennon and never McCartney

      Are you invidiously comparing Yoko to Heather again, mister?

  166. Roxane Gay

      Unless you have an X-Ray machine, I find it hard to believe you could assess the size of his heart.

  167. jereme

      bro, when i am the one who has to tell you to drop something, you are seriously disconnected from the emotions of other people.

      how are you not getting this?

  168. Steven Augustine

      Hard to avoid, Deaders… hard to avoid. Meanwhile: I hope to fucking Gawd you’re hear to talk Lit re: DFW… I was into it until… uh…. some very strange Internet-style effects seemed to have kicked in…

  169. Milly Bloom

      In B4 literature is a Lincoln Continental-sized x-ray machine.
      Really, it is though.

  170. Steven Augustine

      ooops: “here”

  171. Steven Augustine

      Restart:

      “I’m tired of people using David Foster Wallace’s championing of “heart” in fiction as an argument for watery, sentimental prose.”

      Discuss

  172. ryan

      I’ve been clinically depressed for like a decade and I don’t find the “biochemical malfunction” stuff insulting or necessarily all that uncomplex. Yeah, there’s personal shit involved–idiosyncratic personal problems that may have triggered or exacerbated that physical susceptibility–but at some level it’s similar to dealing with any other non-mental affliction. DFW himself intimated several times in his work that it’s not like he was walking around all the time all sad and weepy; “psychotic” depression is more like a physical force, especially in that it can hurt like hell w/o really feeling like a part of “you.” i.e. the “you” that thinks things like ‘Gee, this is a wonderful cup of coffee!’ More like the part of of you that needs to pee 3x a day. (Incidentally I am drinking a truly awesome cup of coffee right now–man!)

      And I agree w/ the idea that Wallace’s most important work may well be his short stories. I’ve been reading back over them lately. . . dude was so gifted.

      But did Wallace really “give up” on heart? He was always (or at least post-Broom) committed to achieving it while maintaining a certain technical virtuosity. What were you thinking of when you said he gave up? He was never really committed to sentiment or affect.

      I agree that his comments on “heart” are misread so hard it hurts. It seems like some use the ending bit of his TV essay as an excuse for indiscriminately indulging their narcissism. New Sincerity my ass. Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is so-called “sincerity.”

  173. Justin

      What little I have read of DFW (mostly interviews, and some stories from Oblivion) has always felt sincere. No, not sentimental. Mostly pretty sad in terms of the fiction. But fairly honest. When I think of heart, that’s usually what I think. It has nothing to do with being sentimental, it has to do with ‘being a fucking human being man.’ I mean, nowadays maybe that’s too sentimental. I don’t think so.

  174. Justin RM

      His heart was so big and throbbed so mightily that it made many a blind woman moisten and melt.

  175. Chris L

      DFW got *this* man’s heart more than just about any other author. Maybe the composition of the human heart is more complicated and various and alien than you think…

      “Giving up” is, likewise, just one subjective opinion on the meaning of suicide. You have a right to it, but my experience tells me otherwise. Unless the “give up” is referring to something else, such as Wallace’s own writing, in which case I still disagree but would add: you could be a bit more clear.

      That being said, it’s hard to argue with the consistent misapplication of DFW’s argument, examples of which typically do more to expose the sere solipsistic heart of personal aesthetics than they do to illuminate whatever piece of fiction is being defended (or excoriated)…

  176. A. Alvarez

      I AM A FUCKING HUMAN BEING!

  177. Steven Augustine

      “Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is so-called “sincerity.”

      Exactly. But this was the thing that shook me a bit: reading “Good People” in the NYer. This text seemed so “sincere” (scare quotes very much intended to scare) that it was actually boring and disappointing and made me a little worried about a possible “new direction”. I read it two or three times to make sure a meta-level wasn’t eluding me, but the only “meta” I could find was the expectation I brought to the first reading of it. “Good People” struck me as being “watery, sentimental prose”. Unlike 99.99% of everything else I’d ever read by him (and he’s not in my top 5, btw, but, still, the work is persistently great).

  178. seventydys

      I think exploring the notion of sentiment and how it’s meaning has changed since Sterne is worthwhile & potentially fruitful. What is meant by ‘sentimental’ can be argued over but it’s commonly found in literature that has a simplicity, ‘finishedness’ and insufficiency that is enjoyed because of those qualities and also because it passes for realistic, especially regarding emotion, despite being – in my mind – determinedly unrealistic. Setting aside Infinite Jest for a moment, there’s plenty of plenty in DFW’s Girl With the Curious Hair stories that takes the reader into the sinews and out to the shadows of being. It’s precise but it’s not neat and it’s work that doesn’t finish being read after it’s read. (The sentimental ends with a few echoes and then nothing – which is the most real thing about it).

      I was fortunate enough to first read IJ as an uncorrected galley. I didn’t want it to end then and I’m glad to say that – for me at least – it hasn’t yet.

  179. John Minichillo

      I’m jumping in on this late, but here goes.

      There’s the head and the heart. It’s a longstanding dualism, so it is easily deconstructed, but there may be writers who fall into these catagories. The traditional assumptions are realism = character, satire / metafiction / self-conscious narratives, or nonrealistic narratives = langauge / artifice. It’s harder for me to care about a character who exists in a nonrealistic narrative because the artifice makes it harder for me to forget this is not a real person, but a puppet of a character. These are traditions as old as fiction, older than modernism and might be represented by the sentimental novel versus a book like Tristram Shandy.

      What gets tricky, is that for writers who don’t write realistic narratives (Wallace? sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t, but what he’s more famous for is when he didn’t), they can sometimes pull it off and do both. Head AND heart. This is a high bar, and I would want to suggest it should also apply to realistic narratives (realistic writers, at their best, should also get away with making me notice the language).

      But writers like Wallace, Donald Barthelme, George Saunders, maybe even sometimes even Blake, when they are at their best, they can do both. We are impressed with the verbal gymnastics, but he also made you care. Character is harder to do than verbal landscapes. It takes the right gesture. And we live in a word where it’s harder and harder to be genuine because there’s always some snarky ass ready to mock the whole endeavor, and I think maybe this is one of the things Wallace really cared about.

      It’s a humanist fallacy that intelligence and education are going to make us all better people. So there really a place for heart, and there are a lot of good writers who (whether it’s true or not) happen to believe that fiction is the place to show it, i.e. the moralist tendency.

      In some pieces, Wallace may seem less interested in character than in others. For my money, the essays are where he was really innovative because it was always in the service of knowledge and there’s less chance that the play for heart will miss it’s mark.

      Take the Lobster essay. Here is a guy who completely deconstructs any argument against eating lobster, and to do it he visits a vulgar absurdity of a lobster festival. He is arguing with gluttons about morality. He sincerely has compassion for this sea creature and he thinks we should too.

      Set this essay next to a story (I forget the title, but it gets anthologized) from Brief Interviews where a baby has boiled water spilled into it’s diaper. This is also a story where the there is some narrative play, and for a moment we get the point of view of a bird outside looking down at this house as the baby wails. Time passes. The story is excruciating. But setting this story next to the Lobster essay does something. The message is compassion. The message is heart. We should care about people and animals, and dammit we should be smarter about all this stuff.

      So there’s room for confusion. I think it’s more likely a reader will reject the baby story as manipulative, or maybe even easy. But it’s not easy, and he handles it pretty deftly.

      I blame the critics. There is a lack of serious criticism that really makes intelligent sense of a writer like this…or Donald Barthelme…or George Saunders…or you BB. Prepare to be misunderstood about a lot more than just suicide.

      P.S. it probably doesn’t help that you’ve got that personal blog, with that title, that, no matter how you may feel about the subject, seems to make light, and sends out that message to the world.

  180. Steven Augustine

      though I think the concept of “heart” itself is pretty fuzzy; I think plenty of material that’s lazily condemned as “cold” because it’s “too intellectual” is lots more moving than obvious efforts at “emotion”. I’m more moved by the realization that a human being… a breathing, shitting, mortal animal… can produced Art so sublime that it’s almost possible to imagine a God exists… than some manipulative kitsch about the old washerwoman or orphaned puppies. I think discussions about “heart” in Lit are too often haunted by the finger-wagging specter of anti-intellectualism. Well, writing (unless it’s just a cliche-by-the-numbers-fest) is an intellectual activity. And “heart” is all in the mind, of course, any way.

      (The last time Art induced verifiable horripilation here was This Mortal Coil with “Song to the Siren”…)

  181. deadgod

      I’m tired of people using [anything] as an argument for watery, sentimental prose.

      It sounds like Blake wants to protect Wallace against careless (or candy-assed) fans and wet-jointed imitators – like Blake is irritated by convention and/or lazy comfort.

      That “watery” appreciation/homage are justified by reference to “heart”? Well, hell – look at literature from the point of view of the sentimentally slack: are ‘brain’ or ‘libido’ really preferable options?

      more alien math than home-ec

      What’s “less in tune to humans” about “alien math”?? I think Wallace is one of those for whom the imaginary ‘mind/heart’ contest is most misconceived.

      By the way, he gave up.

      It reads on this thread like some correspondents think Blake means something like ‘Wallace gave up on championing “heart”‘ or ‘Wallace gave up on alien-math lit’ or ‘Wallace gave up on greasy heart-grabs (???)’ or ‘Wallace gave up on something not here mentioned’.

      Really?

      Blake didn’t make an unkindly simplistic summary of Wallace’s suicide, a dismissal that she or he is having trouble walking back? What else did Wallace ‘give up on’ other than his life and whatever that would reasonably have continued to entail (writing, his values)?

  182. Neil

      Amy, I never said anything about it being wrong about feeling emotions about DFW’s death. Obviously it’s an emotional issue. And I probably am just a little touchy about the subject.

  183. Pemulis

      Blake fail.

  184. m.b.

      DFW’s heart was as big as a Lincoln Continental, and just as misunderstood.

  185. Neil

      Justin, what else could “he gave up” refer to, besides his suicide?

  186. Ridge

      “There’s the head and the heart. It’s a longstanding dualism…”

      Ah, but you’ve neglected the genitals. A lot fine writing comes from there, too. Also: the shoulder, the one with the chip. Me, I try and write from the gut. I even knew one guy who wrote from his appendix. Then he had it removed and went to law school. Now he writes from his ass.

  187. Chris

      If the work is a function of the author’s personality, and not the context in which the author wrote it, the author’s an asshole?

      Does this mean anything?

      Over 400 pages were cut from Infinite Jest in the editing process.

      Believe it or not, the exuberance is sincere. He made a hundred self-deprecating jokes about its length because he wanted people to look beyond it.

      The experience of reading it, for me, defies cynicism. In fact, it’s kind of about defying cynicism.

  188. Roxane Gay

      Unless you have an X-Ray machine, I find it hard to believe you could assess the size of his heart.

  189. Chris

      Interesting comments, Joseph.

      I loved 2666 (at least Wimmer’s translation) and Infinite Jest. I found them both difficult and totally addicting in different ways.

      The pay-off at the end of IJ is pretty huge, though.

      Anyway I think all reading is a matter of timing.

  190. Milly Bloom

      In B4 literature is a Lincoln Continental-sized x-ray machine.
      Really, it is though.

  191. Hank

      I feel like “biochemical malfunction of the brain” is a pretty reductionist way of looking at things.

  192. Justin RM

      His heart was so big and throbbed so mightily that it made many a blind woman moisten and melt.

  193. Blake Butler

      apparently almost no one got what i was getting at. not surprising.

  194. marshall

      ayo

  195. ael

      Well, citing “people” without a firm definition was going to lead to some vagueness. I liked this part of what you said the best: “Perhaps he was less in tune to humans than he imagined: more alien math than home-ec. This is part of what makes him so by-the-throat.”

  196. Steven Augustine

      Oh, yeah, sorry, I meant, “he was a tortured Artist who took his own Life so we can strike sanctimonious poses about it long after the fact”.

      Anything interesting to say about the man’s work, Hank? Of course not, Hank.

      Oh and re: Amy’s “(and wallace wasn’t just ‘someone’)”… anyone with a watt of intelligence (moral or otherwise) would be offended at *that*.

  197. Neil

      Blake: If I don’t understand, then please shed some light. What did you mean when you wrote that he gave up? You are referring to his suicide, right? If not, then what? And how do you connect “he gave up” to your greater point about people abusing his “championing of heart” for shitty prose? Illuminate for me. You’re a talented writer, after all.

  198. Steven Augustine

      This thread needs some serious medication.

      Hey, there are, actually, isolated little outbreaks of discussions about DFW’s *work*, somewhere upthread, for anyone interested…

  199. Steven Augustine

      (Neil: not a response to you)

  200. blahblahblah

      wow this post is so annoying I have to shut off my computer and go to sleep now

  201. Pemulis

      Blake fail.

  202. Neil

      Justin, what else could “he gave up” refer to, besides his suicide?

  203. Ridge

      “There’s the head and the heart. It’s a longstanding dualism…”

      Ah, but you’ve neglected the genitals. A lot fine writing comes from there, too. Also: the shoulder, the one with the chip. Me, I try and write from the gut. I even knew one guy who wrote from his appendix. Then he had it removed and went to law school. Now he writes from his ass.

  204. Chris

      If the work is a function of the author’s personality, and not the context in which the author wrote it, the author’s an asshole?

      Does this mean anything?

      Over 400 pages were cut from Infinite Jest in the editing process.

      Believe it or not, the exuberance is sincere. He made a hundred self-deprecating jokes about its length because he wanted people to look beyond it.

      The experience of reading it, for me, defies cynicism. In fact, it’s kind of about defying cynicism.

  205. Chris

      Interesting comments, Joseph.

      I loved 2666 (at least Wimmer’s translation) and Infinite Jest. I found them both difficult and totally addicting in different ways.

      The pay-off at the end of IJ is pretty huge, though.

      Anyway I think all reading is a matter of timing.

  206. Hank

      I feel like “biochemical malfunction of the brain” is a pretty reductionist way of looking at things.

  207. Steven Augustine

      “suicide is an act of anger. mostly.”

      Interesting, jereme. I’ll defer to your greater experience on that one. Q: are you basing this statement on your *own* many suicides, or things you’ve heard from people who have committed the act and got in touch with you, afterward, in order to describe their motivations in detail?

      You can’t beat the irony; the OP writes,

      “I’m tired of people using David Foster Wallace’s championing of “heart” in fiction as an argument for watery, sentimental prose.”

      And the thread becomes a beacon to emo dullards who want to talk about “emotions”. Theirs, mostly, of course.

      “when you know someone (and wallace wasn’t just “someone”), you have emotions, and these include terror and anger, and thank god.”

      As though the point here is to talk about *your* emotions. The subject of this thread isn’t *you*, your *incidental* connection to the subject notwithstanding.

      This pseudo-religious, cult-of-personality (“I touched the hem of his robes!”) bullshit has nothing to do with what is good, or not-as-good, about DFW’s material.

      I wrote, “DFW’s death was the result of a biochemical malfunction of his brain” as a response to jereme’s expert remark about suicide (cited above), not as an attempt to sum up the writer’s life (or death). I don’t know a thing about DFW’s life and I don’t need to. I don’t care if DFW was nice, or nasty, or a great dancer. I’m only interested in the writing and the writing is the only thing anyone on this thread is capable (well, in some cases) of discussing. But you have to be kind of clever to realize that, which is an obvious drawback.

  208. Blake Butler

      apparently almost no one got what i was getting at. not surprising.

  209. Guest

      ayo

  210. ael

      Well, citing “people” without a firm definition was going to lead to some vagueness. I liked this part of what you said the best: “Perhaps he was less in tune to humans than he imagined: more alien math than home-ec. This is part of what makes him so by-the-throat.”

  211. Steven Augustine

      Oh, yeah, sorry, I meant, “he was a tortured Artist who took his own Life so we can strike sanctimonious poses about it long after the fact”.

      Anything interesting to say about the man’s work, Hank? Of course not, Hank.

      Oh and re: Amy’s “(and wallace wasn’t just ‘someone’)”… anyone with a watt of intelligence (moral or otherwise) would be offended at *that*.

  212. Neil

      Blake: If I don’t understand, then please shed some light. What did you mean when you wrote that he gave up? You are referring to his suicide, right? If not, then what? And how do you connect “he gave up” to your greater point about people abusing his “championing of heart” for shitty prose? Illuminate for me. You’re a talented writer, after all.

  213. Steven Augustine

      This thread needs some serious medication.

      Hey, there are, actually, isolated little outbreaks of discussions about DFW’s *work*, somewhere upthread, for anyone interested…

  214. Steven Augustine

      (Neil: not a response to you)

  215. blahblahblah

      wow this post is so annoying I have to shut off my computer and go to sleep now

  216. STaugustine

      “suicide is an act of anger. mostly.”

      Interesting, jereme. I’ll defer to your greater experience on that one. Q: are you basing this statement on your *own* many suicides, or things you’ve heard from people who have committed the act and got in touch with you, afterward, in order to describe their motivations in detail?

      You can’t beat the irony; the OP writes,

      “I’m tired of people using David Foster Wallace’s championing of “heart” in fiction as an argument for watery, sentimental prose.”

      And the thread becomes a beacon to emo dullards who want to talk about “emotions”. Theirs, mostly, of course.

      “when you know someone (and wallace wasn’t just “someone”), you have emotions, and these include terror and anger, and thank god.”

      As though the point here is to talk about *your* emotions. The subject of this thread isn’t *you*, your *incidental* connection to the subject notwithstanding.

      This pseudo-religious, cult-of-personality (“I touched the hem of his robes!”) bullshit has nothing to do with what is good, or not-as-good, about DFW’s material.

      I wrote, “DFW’s death was the result of a biochemical malfunction of his brain” as a response to jereme’s expert remark about suicide (cited above), not as an attempt to sum up the writer’s life (or death). I don’t know a thing about DFW’s life and I don’t need to. I don’t care if DFW was nice, or nasty, or a great dancer. I’m only interested in the writing and the writing is the only thing anyone on this thread is capable (well, in some cases) of discussing. But you have to be kind of clever to realize that, which is an obvious drawback.

  217. marshall

      chill

  218. mts

      This is the lamest comment I have ever heard you make, Roxane. Disappointed. (psst: he was complimenting DFW)

  219. Roxane

      I understand what he was getting at. I am just frustrated by the notion that people think they know anything at all about DFW.

  220. mts

      ok. Just seems strange that of all the offensive comments here you find offense in the one that simply says DFW had a big heart and was misunderstood.

  221. Steven Augustine

      Oh don’t worry, mts, the Archangel David is looking down from his sweet repose among all those pink candy clouds, where the music is forever Coldplay and female angels are never groped or ogled, and he’s smiling on all of his dumbest disciples, who pleaseth him with their simplicity, and vexeth him not with their fucking inability to parse his texts with any but the lamest feelgood intentions

  222. mts

      Is David a professor or what? You lost me…

  223. Guest

      chill

  224. mts

      This is the lamest comment I have ever heard you make, Roxane. Disappointed. (psst: he was complimenting DFW)

  225. blahblahblah

      hey you’re responsible for your own clarity — if it’s not surprising that everyone’s stupider than you, then bring yourself to our level and enlighten us. Otherwise, deal with other opinions like a man.

  226. Roxane

      I understand what he was getting at. I am just frustrated by the notion that people think they know anything at all about DFW.

  227. mts

      ok. Just seems strange that of all the offensive comments here you find offense in the one that simply says DFW had a big heart and was misunderstood.

  228. mts

      Cheers.

  229. Steven Augustine

      A finely-wrought comment.

  230. Steven Augustine

      Oh don’t worry, mts, the Archangel David is looking down from his sweet repose among all those pink candy clouds, where the music is forever Coldplay and female angels are never groped or ogled, and he’s smiling on all of his dumbest disciples, who pleaseth him with their simplicity, and vexeth him not with their fucking inability to parse his texts with any but the lamest feelgood intentions

  231. mts

      Is David a professor or what? You lost me…

  232. mts

      Maybe he gave up smoking?

  233. deadgod

      Alimentary.

      Fibrously enzyme-denying; enterocontractively-wrought.

  234. deadgod

      Wallace was a ‘chewer’, right? – which habit is similarly wrenching to lose (to “smoking”).

      But Neil – and others – are curious about what Blake means with “he gave up” in its context in the post. It sounds, where that assertion is put, like Blake means that ‘giving up’ was an attempt unctuously to grab his heart – a pointlessly cruel jab that (it sounds like) Blake is delphicly evading responsibility for.

      As Steven is implying: not that Wallace’s personal grief has, for a reader who didn’t know him personally, much (or anything) to do with the qualities and effects of Wallace’s writing. (Steven, as I’m pretty sure you understand, the ‘suicide’ detour on this thread is directed at Blake, at his (only perceived?) scurrility – the back-and-forth having nothing really to do with Wallace’s books.)

  235. Steven Augustine

      Deaders:

      Yeah, well, the detour took a detour through my fucking living room and I suddenly found myself facing the nearly-coherent shrieks-n-rants of a faux Foster-widow and an Appalachian waif on crystal meth who wanted, apparently, to hug her.

      But I, too, wondered why Blake backed off that point. I don’t agree that DFW offed himself for any reason more amenable to fixing than terminal biochemical depression (sorry, kids, but it’s just not any more romantic than that, “reductive” or not… grow up a little and you’ll be astonished to find that fucking LIFE is “reductive”, despite the bullshit they’re selling you at New Age summer camp)… but I think it was brave of Blake to treat DFW as anything less than a saint.

      Don’t cave. Don’t give in to the emo throng. Pissing the philistines off is good for ’em.

  236. mts

      No, apparently everyone DID GET what you were saying. I personally don’t see why saying “he gave up” is that insulting. Life is hard. He gave up. That’s just a fact. Pobrecito.

  237. ryan

      I’ve only read that once, and wasn’t very taken by it. I’ll read it again now w/ your comments in mind. . .

  238. mts

      I hate it when posters refer to the rest of the readers as “kids”.

      I think there are many people who look at a guy like Wallace and think, “I have been dealing with as many biochemical imablances as he has, and still I have not offed myself, what a pussy.” Really, if the doctors and chemists are available, any sociologically aberrant behavior can be blamed on a chemical imbalance. And in the long run, especially after listening to Wallace speak and reading his works, he was just an academic pussy, albeit an exceptional one, a well read, modern day Americanly educated pussy. Oh Gordon, did that suicide enhance his legacy! I think he did it to enhance his book sales, and thus benefit his family and publisher. What a great guy he was! No?

  239. ryan

      I write from my elbow.

      But seriously, if I had to go with the physiological analogy, I’d go with: Gut. I like to gobble things up. My heart is the size of a catturd, and it beats but once a year.

  240. Steven Augustine

      “I hate it when posters refer to the rest of the readers as ‘kids’.”

      Kids often do. When you’re no longer a kid, you won’t give a fuck.

  241. mts

      Can’t wait. That must be a glorious day.

  242. Steven Augustine

      I know that one…

      “My heart is the size of a catturd,
      and it beats but once a year,
      ringing the changes for shepherds
      too deep in ewe asses to hear…”

      -Longfellow

  243. Steven Augustine

      It is pretty fucking cool.

  244. mts

      I’m shivering in my knickers in anticipation. I’m curious, though, what is the end goal?

  245. Steven Augustine

      Multi-band enjoyment of Life until the day one drops in the dust and they plant you

  246. Steven Augustine

      the only thing of DFW’s I sort of hated… it’s even clumsily-written in chunks.

      AS I wrote at The Howling Fantods in 2007:

      “Maybe not being fresh is now a form of being fresh for DFW? What else would explain this expanded iteration of Hemingway’s over-anthologized ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ story (the twist being that what was nearly good about the Hemingway was that almost everything removable had been vacuumed—sorry—out of it…and here DFW just glops it all back in again)? Or maybe the submission/acceptance guidelines at the NYer have shifted catastrophically even further towards the banal, clichéd and folksy overnight. Or maybe DFW has been kidnapped by Radical Muslim Structuralists and this is a coded cry for help. Or maybe he met a stupendous girl named Nadine at a n+1 party (Lane A. Dean—say it fast a few times) and this was his way of talking himself out of the infatuation. Or, I dunno. Head injury?”

      and

      “But is this really a ‘fine’ piece of writing? It feels like a second draft…if the blurriness of the writing is deliberate, it’s over-done. This sentence is a good example of what I mean (it’s not cherry-picked…there are plenty to choose from):

      “The only other individual nearby was a dozen spaced tables away, by himself, standing upright.”

      Try:

      “The only other individual was a dozen tables away.”

      Is anything necessary lost by tightening that sentence? Wordiness can be a rhythmic device or a tone-setter and so forth, sure, but isn’t this merely DFW being kinda sloppy? Or, again, over-indulging in the demotic?”

  247. Steven Augustine

      (ancient erratum: “at an n+1 party”)

  248. mts

      Oh…well, I’ll try though I can’t afford those ticket prices. Thanks, Steve!

  249. Steven Augustine

      ha ha… not bad! got me on that one

  250. blahblahblah

      hey you’re responsible for your own clarity — if it’s not surprising that everyone’s stupider than you, then bring yourself to our level and enlighten us. Otherwise, deal with other opinions like a man.

  251. mts

      Cheers.

  252. Steven Augustine

      A finely-wrought comment.

  253. mts

      Maybe he gave up smoking?

  254. deadgod

      Alimentary.

      Fibrously enzyme-denying; enterocontractively-wrought.

  255. deadgod

      Wallace was a ‘chewer’, right? – which habit is similarly wrenching to lose (to “smoking”).

      But Neil – and others – are curious about what Blake means with “he gave up” in its context in the post. It sounds, where that assertion is put, like Blake means that ‘giving up’ was an attempt unctuously to grab his heart – a pointlessly cruel jab that (it sounds like) Blake is delphicly evading responsibility for.

      As Steven is implying: not that Wallace’s personal grief has, for a reader who didn’t know him personally, much (or anything) to do with the qualities and effects of Wallace’s writing. (Steven, as I’m pretty sure you understand, the ‘suicide’ detour on this thread is directed at Blake, at his (only perceived?) scurrility – the back-and-forth having nothing really to do with Wallace’s books.)

  256. Steven Augustine

      Deaders:

      Yeah, well, the detour took a detour through my fucking living room and I suddenly found myself facing the nearly-coherent shrieks-n-rants of a faux Foster-widow and an Appalachian waif on crystal meth who wanted, apparently, to hug her.

      But I, too, wondered why Blake backed off that point. I don’t agree that DFW offed himself for any reason more amenable to fixing than terminal biochemical depression (sorry, kids, but it’s just not any more romantic than that, “reductive” or not… grow up a little and you’ll be astonished to find that fucking LIFE is “reductive”, despite the bullshit they’re selling you at New Age summer camp)… but I think it was brave of Blake to treat DFW as anything less than a saint.

      Don’t cave. Don’t give in to the emo throng. Pissing the philistines off is good for ’em.

  257. mts

      No, apparently everyone DID GET what you were saying. I personally don’t see why saying “he gave up” is that insulting. Life is hard. He gave up. That’s just a fact. Pobrecito.

  258. ryan

      I’ve only read that once, and wasn’t very taken by it. I’ll read it again now w/ your comments in mind. . .

  259. mts

      I hate it when posters refer to the rest of the readers as “kids”.

      I think there are many people who look at a guy like Wallace and think, “I have been dealing with as many biochemical imablances as he has, and still I have not offed myself, what a pussy.” Really, if the doctors and chemists are available, any sociologically aberrant behavior can be blamed on a chemical imbalance. And in the long run, especially after listening to Wallace speak and reading his works, he was just an academic pussy, albeit an exceptional one, a well read, modern day Americanly educated pussy. Oh Gordon, did that suicide enhance his legacy! I think he did it to enhance his book sales, and thus benefit his family and publisher. What a great guy he was! No?

  260. ryan

      I write from my elbow.

      But seriously, if I had to go with the physiological analogy, I’d go with: Gut. I like to gobble things up. My heart is the size of a catturd, and it beats but once a year.

  261. Steven Augustine

      “I hate it when posters refer to the rest of the readers as ‘kids’.”

      Kids often do. When you’re no longer a kid, you won’t give a fuck.

  262. mts

      Can’t wait. That must be a glorious day.

  263. David

      nailed it, blake. ‘heart’ for wallace is not the touching centre of literate feelings. it is an organ that becomes stuck in your throat, and on which you suffocate.

  264. Steven Augustine

      I know that one…

      “My heart is the size of a catturd,
      and it beats but once a year,
      ringing the changes for shepherds
      too deep in ewe asses to hear…”

      -Longfellow

  265. Steven Augustine

      It is pretty fucking cool.

  266. mts

      I’m shivering in my knickers in anticipation. I’m curious, though, what is the end goal?

  267. Steven Augustine

      Multi-band enjoyment of Life until the day one drops in the dust and they plant you

  268. Steven Augustine

      the only thing of DFW’s I sort of hated… it’s even clumsily-written in chunks.

      AS I wrote at The Howling Fantods in 2007:

      “Maybe not being fresh is now a form of being fresh for DFW? What else would explain this expanded iteration of Hemingway’s over-anthologized ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ story (the twist being that what was nearly good about the Hemingway was that almost everything removable had been vacuumed—sorry—out of it…and here DFW just glops it all back in again)? Or maybe the submission/acceptance guidelines at the NYer have shifted catastrophically even further towards the banal, clichéd and folksy overnight. Or maybe DFW has been kidnapped by Radical Muslim Structuralists and this is a coded cry for help. Or maybe he met a stupendous girl named Nadine at a n+1 party (Lane A. Dean—say it fast a few times) and this was his way of talking himself out of the infatuation. Or, I dunno. Head injury?”

      and

      “But is this really a ‘fine’ piece of writing? It feels like a second draft…if the blurriness of the writing is deliberate, it’s over-done. This sentence is a good example of what I mean (it’s not cherry-picked…there are plenty to choose from):

      “The only other individual nearby was a dozen spaced tables away, by himself, standing upright.”

      Try:

      “The only other individual was a dozen tables away.”

      Is anything necessary lost by tightening that sentence? Wordiness can be a rhythmic device or a tone-setter and so forth, sure, but isn’t this merely DFW being kinda sloppy? Or, again, over-indulging in the demotic?”

  269. Steven Augustine

      (ancient erratum: “at an n+1 party”)

  270. mts

      Oh…well, I’ll try though I can’t afford those ticket prices. Thanks, Steve!

  271. Steven Augustine

      ha ha… not bad! got me on that one

  272. deadgod

      to enhance his book sales

      Not to get too hung up on details, but they weren’t suffocatingly high.

      memo to Marketing: Full throttle ahead!

  273. Matthew Simmons

      All above and my friend Amy below:

      This might just be because it’s coming from someone who has and has known a pile of folks with “biochemical malfunctions of the brain,” but I actually think there is no more tragic, graceful, complicated, and respectful way of referring to it.

  274. David

      nailed it, blake. ‘heart’ for wallace is not the touching centre of literate feelings. it is an organ that becomes stuck in your throat, and on which you suffocate.

  275. deadgod

      to enhance his book sales

      Not to get too hung up on details, but they weren’t suffocatingly high.

      memo to Marketing: Full throttle ahead!

  276. Matthew Simmons

      All above and my friend Amy below:

      This might just be because it’s coming from someone who has and has known a pile of folks with “biochemical malfunctions of the brain,” but I actually think there is no more tragic, graceful, complicated, and respectful way of referring to it.

  277. Ridge

      Blake’s remarks were never offensive to begin with… Slow news day(s) is all… needed something to pretend to be angry about besides the CNN crime blog, but I do have a couple qualms:

      1.) Where is Lovelace telling us it’s all right to get going on a Friday night?

      2.) Where is Bauman posting interesting stuff?

      I, I, I, I, I, I, have come to rely on these things…

      Might have to start watching tevee again.

  278. Ridge

      Blake’s remarks were never offensive to begin with… Slow news day(s) is all… needed something to pretend to be angry about besides the CNN crime blog, but I do have a couple qualms:

      1.) Where is Lovelace telling us it’s all right to get going on a Friday night?

      2.) Where is Bauman posting interesting stuff?

      I, I, I, I, I, I, have come to rely on these things…

      Might have to start watching tevee again.

  279. Steven Augustine

      deaders: almost *evil*

  280. Owen Kaelin

      I understood he wasn’t referring to Wallace’s suicide. I think most people did. At the same time I wondered why Blake was using a phrase he must’ve known was so highly charged and would inevitably be misinterpreted . . . and not immediately explaining what he meant . . . or simply using a different phrase.

      But now that he’s explained his meaning: move on.

  281. Owen Kaelin

      Suicide is a lot of things, but it’s not an act of anger. Anger at what? Whom? Yourself?

  282. Owen Kaelin

      @Steve: His mind was working perfectly. Happiness is a delusion.

  283. Owen Kaelin

      Ryan: Not interested in sincerity . . . so . . . you’re interested in phoniness?

  284. Owen Kaelin

      I think the literary world needs serious medication.

  285. deadgod

      down heart beat

      the throat

      up by the throat

      he gave by the throat

      he gave up by the throat

      he gave by the throat up

      by the throat he gave up

      by the throat up

      by the throat

      by-the-throat

      by-the-throat he

      by-the-throat he gave

      by-the-throat he gave up

      by-the-throat

      he gave

      up

  286. Steven Augustine

      It’s Art, Owen, not Faith Healing. See the words “artifice” and “artificial”. One of the downfalls of Art is its hijacking by Therapy Culture… all that tawdry, middlebrow hugs-n-self-expression crap. 500 million pages of banally sincere poetry and counting. When I need “sincerity” I’ll watch a commercial for some eco-friendly, free-trade scarf-making company. When I want Art I go to the Great Tricksters who spin aesthetic platinum from the grubby materials of everyday existence (ie, at no point does Homer mention Helen farting… a lie of omission… but even when Henry Miller does so, essentially, the fart takes on an epic heroism that no fart on earth ever really had… yet who the fuck wants to read about a *sincere* fart…?)

  287. Steven Augustine

      That might fix up a few nuts but the work would seriously suffer (as if it hasn’t already suffered enough)

  288. Owen Kaelin

      Okay.

      For the longest time I’ve been trying not to say anything negative about Wallace, considering how much people on this blog LOVE to talk about him. I used to criticize the guy all the time, but his suicide hit me in a way that none of his work ever did. And so: not just for this reason but for a number of somewhat ineffable reasons that it implies — given my minor familiarity with his work — I try to avoid saying anything negative about the guy.

      Perhaps, since I’ve come to this discussion late, my comment will receive less attention — perhaps not — but at this point I feel like I have to say SOMETHING, kindness be damned.

      Of his work, I’ve read Brief Interviews, the beginning of Broom of the System, and a total of one infuriatingly egocentric and artistically dismissive review he wrote in Rain Taxi. This makes me far less than authoritative on his work. That said:

      Based on all that I’ve read of his work, his work seemed devoid of feeling. Devoid of personality. Sterile. The problem I immediately saw in his work was that it lacked DAVID FOSTER WALLACE. It lacked any element of himself.

      It seemed to me that he was avoiding the subject of himself at all costs.

      His suicide put his work in a new perspective, for me. Perhaps he was trying his damnedest not to be appear to be feeling sorry for himself, to be dwelling on himself, and so all of his works ended up empty, sterile, devoid of humanity, devoid of the artist, devoid of — to use Blake’s word — heart.

      However… knowing that I’ve read so little of his work: perhaps he’s written other work that displayed more humanity, more feeling. I don’t know. I want to find out, but Brief Interviews nearly bored me to death, so naturally I’m wary.

      I’ll say one thing: I read exactly one story in Brief Interviews — something about colors — which moved me and made me think “that’s a great story”. I might have a different opinion if I reread it today.

      A friend of my brothers told me that if an author writes only one great story: that makes the author worthy of respectful attention. I told him he was full of shit. I still say so.

      That’s all. Now that it’s off my chest, I’ll say no more mean things about DFW. Despite what some less-that-genuine people on this site might want to read into this: I’m through being bitter about him. In spite of his ego, he was a good man. He was in pain. He did what he had to to rid himself of that pain. He was a writer and he wrote what he was compelled to write. I’m still trying to get all my past prejudices out of me and respect that guy just for that.

  289. deadgod

      so-called “sincerity”

      so-called = next semantic unit qualified by skepticism
      “sincerity” = not real sincerity; false, fake, untrue, dissembling sincerity [they’re called: scare quotes]

      Possibly a double negative, but context indicates (simply) a redundancy.

      Ryan is “not interested in” phony sincerity. His interest in clumsy reading comprehension is, here, unrecorded.

  290. Steven Augustine

      I actually agree with you on that one, Owen! Laugh. I mean, think about it. My fucking Denial Device is a hearty and infinitely-tunable organ

  291. Owen Kaelin

      Oh, I wasn’t talking about the “nuts”, I was talking about the ones who think they’re sane.

  292. Steven Augustine

      The super-nuts, you mean

  293. Owen Kaelin

      Okay, point taken. I think we’re thinking of different ‘kinds’ of sincerity. The type you’re talking about might be regarded as a forced sincerity, which in effect would be a false sincerity. It’s not true sincerity, it’s closer to a marketing strategy.
      Thing is: I’ve always, always said that the number one priority in art should be sincerity. If your work comes across as insincere: you’re going to lose your audience. They won’t believe you.
      Sincerity comes in many forms. It comes in not just what you talk about but how you talk about it, and not only that but also that way you compose your sentences, what words you use, even the way you write your stories. Do you let your characters speak and act for themselves? Or do you force your own narrative and ideas upon them?

      I’ve been guilty of the latter (the last sentence) for the longest time, even while telling everyone that sincerity is the most important thing. Sincerity is something that’s not necessarily easy to maintain, while lots of people are telling you “this is how you should write”.

  294. Owen Kaelin

      Denial is a highly important survivalist function.
      I still have work to do on my own… it’s malfunctioning.

  295. deadgod

      Steven, why would you think unhappiness is not also produced by your Denial Device??

      For an instant I see the sky, the different skies, then they turn to faces, agonies, loves, the different loves, happiness too, yes, there was that too, unhappily.

      –Beckett, Fizzle 6

  296. Steven Augustine

      Mine is DD 2.0

  297. Owen Kaelin

      Ah, you need v2.1.1 . . . it let’s you believe that trolls aren’t really there.

  298. Steven Augustine

      “If your work comes across as insincere: you’re going to lose your audience. They won’t believe you.”

      I just don’t think it’s a question of “sincerity” as much as a question of Technique plus the perhaps inborn ability to Believe the Lie, yourself, as you’re writing it… all that plus un-quantifiable amounts of the Subconscious, working its magic to shape a consistently-seductive experience. But as to whether Sterne was “sincere” in writing Tristram Shandy or Calvino was “sincere” (with or without scare quotes) in writing Cosmicomics… I think the question itself is a particularly American category error.

  299. Steven Augustine

      Tricky thing here could be that Ryan’s “so-called” is calling into question the sincerity of sincerity itself, or calling into question its presumed default value (goodness)… at least as it qualifies a work of Art (or “Art” or art or “art”… or… so-called Art or so called “Art” or “so-called” Art… or…uh…)

  300. Owen Kaelin

      I think it’s about being ‘sincere’ about who you are and what your feelings and thoughts are and conveying all of that in the most appropriate possible manner . . . whether or not what ends up on the page is there because you, the artist, need it to be there or because you think that’s what your audience wants to read.

      In Cosmicomics: Calvino allowed the characters to speak for themselves. In this way: they spoke Calvino.

      Tristram Shandy is more difficult. I picked it up once and didn’t get very far, I was bored to death . . . so it’s difficult for me to judge that one. Plus, it’s been a while since I picked it up. However: based only on what I read: I seem to remember it not coming across as all that sincere, although if I’d read more it’s very possible I might’ve come to a different conclusion, so don’t set that verdict in stone.

      Plus, this seems to be characteristic of a lot of old works. Eugénie Grandet didn’t come across as very sincere, either. Of course, there’s naturalism, and then there’s other material, like that of the Symbolists, or the Absurdists, or the Decadents… .

      Dostoevsky, to bring up another example, comes across as exceedingly sincere. His characters echoed his own thoughts and experiences. But the characters weren’t dictated to; they were allowed their own lives.

  301. Owen Kaelin

      Hey: if we tie ourselves in knots over the precise meaning and implications of every concept we entertain: at least we can look forward to getting dead drunk at the end of the day and forgetting it ever happened.

  302. Steven Augustine

      deaders: almost *evil*

  303. herocious
  304. Owen Kaelin

      Thanks for that, Herocious.

  305. Owen Kaelin

      I understood he wasn’t referring to Wallace’s suicide. I think most people did. At the same time I wondered why Blake was using a phrase he must’ve known was so highly charged and would inevitably be misinterpreted . . . and not immediately explaining what he meant . . . or simply using a different phrase.

      But now that he’s explained his meaning: move on.

  306. John Minichillo

      Owen,

      There are 2 collections of essays. I think of them as essential reading. His intellect was undeniable, his insights pretty profound. He himself was kind of dismissive of them, because he saw himself as a fiction writer. The excerpts of the unpublished book have looked to be really on. But yes, any particular story or book, can be dismissed. I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt because of the essays. They make it clear to me he really was a genius.

  307. Owen Kaelin

      Suicide is a lot of things, but it’s not an act of anger. Anger at what? Whom? Yourself?

  308. Owen Kaelin

      @Steve: His mind was working perfectly. Happiness is a delusion.

  309. Owen Kaelin

      Ryan: Not interested in sincerity . . . so . . . you’re interested in phoniness?

  310. Owen Kaelin

      I think the literary world needs serious medication.

  311. ryan

      I think one great story’s enough.

      I also think you’re on to something. Usually he’s “inside” he work in only a superficial sense. The writing tics, the slight snobbishness, etc. But what might be considered his ‘self’ is usually avoided at all costs. Someone–on some forum I think, long time ago–once described Jest as an autobiography of evasion, like he wrote about everything but the one thing that “needed” to be written about. Solipsism in reverse, almost. “Everything but the self is real.”

  312. deadgod

      down heart beat

      the throat

      up by the throat

      he gave by the throat

      he gave up by the throat

      he gave by the throat up

      by the throat he gave up

      by the throat up

      by the throat

      by-the-throat

      by-the-throat he

      by-the-throat he gave

      by-the-throat he gave up

      by-the-throat

      he gave

      up

  313. deadgod

      Tricky thing here

      That’s what I meant by “double negative” [direct-quotation quotes], Steven.

      so-called “sincerity” could = ‘not really not-really sincere; actually sincere’ [definition-of-term quotes].

      The simpler, I think: more reasonably taken, understanding would be that Ryan used two techniques redundantly, or emphatically, to make his point: so-called “sincerity” = ‘not real sincerity’.

      . . . I really mean that.

  314. ryan

      Heck yeah!

  315. Steven Augustine

      It’s Art, Owen, not Faith Healing. See the words “artifice” and “artificial”. One of the downfalls of Art is its hijacking by Therapy Culture… all that tawdry, middlebrow hugs-n-self-expression crap. 500 million pages of banally sincere poetry and counting. When I need “sincerity” I’ll watch a commercial for some eco-friendly, free-trade scarf-making company. When I want Art I go to the Great Tricksters who spin aesthetic platinum from the grubby materials of everyday existence (ie, at no point does Homer mention Helen farting… a lie of omission… but even when Henry Miller does so, essentially, the fart takes on an epic heroism that no fart on earth ever really had… yet who the fuck wants to read about a *sincere* fart…?)

  316. Steven Augustine

      That might fix up a few nuts but the work would seriously suffer (as if it hasn’t already suffered enough)

  317. Owen Kaelin

      Okay.

      For the longest time I’ve been trying not to say anything negative about Wallace, considering how much people on this blog LOVE to talk about him. I used to criticize the guy all the time, but his suicide hit me in a way that none of his work ever did. And so: not just for this reason but for a number of somewhat ineffable reasons that it implies — given my minor familiarity with his work — I try to avoid saying anything negative about the guy.

      Perhaps, since I’ve come to this discussion late, my comment will receive less attention — perhaps not — but at this point I feel like I have to say SOMETHING, kindness be damned.

      Of his work, I’ve read Brief Interviews, the beginning of Broom of the System, and a total of one infuriatingly egocentric and artistically dismissive review he wrote in Rain Taxi. This makes me far less than authoritative on his work. That said:

      Based on all that I’ve read of his work, his work seemed devoid of feeling. Devoid of personality. Sterile. The problem I immediately saw in his work was that it lacked DAVID FOSTER WALLACE. It lacked any element of himself.

      It seemed to me that he was avoiding the subject of himself at all costs.

      His suicide put his work in a new perspective, for me. Perhaps he was trying his damnedest not to be appear to be feeling sorry for himself, to be dwelling on himself, and so all of his works ended up empty, sterile, devoid of humanity, devoid of the artist, devoid of — to use Blake’s word — heart.

      However… knowing that I’ve read so little of his work: perhaps he’s written other work that displayed more humanity, more feeling. I don’t know. I want to find out, but Brief Interviews nearly bored me to death, so naturally I’m wary.

      I’ll say one thing: I read exactly one story in Brief Interviews — something about colors — which moved me and made me think “that’s a great story”. I might have a different opinion if I reread it today.

      A friend of my brothers told me that if an author writes only one great story: that makes the author worthy of respectful attention. I told him he was full of shit. I still say so.

      That’s all. Now that it’s off my chest, I’ll say no more mean things about DFW. Despite what some less-that-genuine people on this site might want to read into this: I’m through being bitter about him. In spite of his ego, he was a good man. He was in pain. He did what he had to to rid himself of that pain. He was a writer and he wrote what he was compelled to write. I’m still trying to get all my past prejudices out of me and respect that guy just for that.

  318. deadgod

      So your nth-generation Denial Device filters in fictive-but-useful happiness, and blocks the elsewise-useful sense that unhappiness is also fictive??

      That is “denial”.

  319. deadgod

      so-called “sincerity”

      so-called = next semantic unit qualified by skepticism
      “sincerity” = not real sincerity; false, fake, untrue, dissembling sincerity [they’re called: scare quotes]

      Possibly a double negative, but context indicates (simply) a redundancy.

      Ryan is “not interested in” phony sincerity. His interest in clumsy reading comprehension is, here, unrecorded.

  320. Steven Augustine

      I actually agree with you on that one, Owen! Laugh. I mean, think about it. My fucking Denial Device is a hearty and infinitely-tunable organ

  321. deadgod

      Careful, or that “v2.1.1” will make your appearance to yourself a conundrum of sincerity.

  322. ryan

      This is fun.

      I meant it mostly as a cheesy redundancy, but I left it because I’m not sure this sentence

      Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is so-called “sincerity.”

      means quite the same as this sentence

      Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is “sincerity.”

      or this sentence

      Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is so-called sincerity.

      The second one would seem to imply that I don’t think an un-scarequoted sincerity exists at all. As in: They want “sincerity,” those fools. And I really am not sure what the third one would mean. So-called “sincerity” seems to say a) I’m not interested in the New Sincerity’s sincerity and b) I doubt that the mentioned “sincerity” is really a sincerity at all.

      Maybe I am crzy?

      Honestly I don’t think sincerity is relevant when it comes to the creation of art. When you’re creating, can you tell when you’re being sincere or insincere? I can tell when I’m bullshitting, when I’m reaching for an effect I haven’t justified–but when I’m sincere?

      In my experience most sincerity is bullshit, and most bullshit has a decent chance of being sincere.

      This sentence from Steven pretty much sums up how I feel about it: “When I want Art I go to the Great Tricksters who spin aesthetic platinum from the grubby materials of everyday existence.”

  323. Owen Kaelin

      Oh, I wasn’t talking about the “nuts”, I was talking about the ones who think they’re sane.

  324. Steven Augustine

      The super-nuts, you mean

  325. Owen Kaelin

      Okay, point taken. I think we’re thinking of different ‘kinds’ of sincerity. The type you’re talking about might be regarded as a forced sincerity, which in effect would be a false sincerity. It’s not true sincerity, it’s closer to a marketing strategy.
      Thing is: I’ve always, always said that the number one priority in art should be sincerity. If your work comes across as insincere: you’re going to lose your audience. They won’t believe you.
      Sincerity comes in many forms. It comes in not just what you talk about but how you talk about it, and not only that but also that way you compose your sentences, what words you use, even the way you write your stories. Do you let your characters speak and act for themselves? Or do you force your own narrative and ideas upon them?

      I’ve been guilty of the latter (the last sentence) for the longest time, even while telling everyone that sincerity is the most important thing. Sincerity is something that’s not necessarily easy to maintain, while lots of people are telling you “this is how you should write”.

  326. Owen Kaelin

      Denial is a highly important survivalist function.
      I still have work to do on my own… it’s malfunctioning.

  327. deadgod

      Steven, why would you think unhappiness is not also produced by your Denial Device??

      For an instant I see the sky, the different skies, then they turn to faces, agonies, loves, the different loves, happiness too, yes, there was that too, unhappily.

      –Beckett, Fizzle 6

  328. Steven Augustine

      Mine is DD 2.0

  329. Owen Kaelin

      Ah, you need v2.1.1 . . . it let’s you believe that trolls aren’t really there.

  330. Steven Augustine

      “If your work comes across as insincere: you’re going to lose your audience. They won’t believe you.”

      I just don’t think it’s a question of “sincerity” as much as a question of Technique plus the perhaps inborn ability to Believe the Lie, yourself, as you’re writing it… all that plus un-quantifiable amounts of the Subconscious, working its magic to shape a consistently-seductive experience. But as to whether Sterne was “sincere” in writing Tristram Shandy or Calvino was “sincere” (with or without scare quotes) in writing Cosmicomics… I think the question itself is a particularly American category error.

  331. Steven Augustine

      Tricky thing here could be that Ryan’s “so-called” is calling into question the sincerity of sincerity itself, or calling into question its presumed default value (goodness)… at least as it qualifies a work of Art (or “Art” or art or “art”… or… so-called Art or so called “Art” or “so-called” Art… or…uh…)

  332. Owen Kaelin

      I think it’s about being ‘sincere’ about who you are and what your feelings and thoughts are and conveying all of that in the most appropriate possible manner . . . whether or not what ends up on the page is there because you, the artist, need it to be there or because you think that’s what your audience wants to read.

      In Cosmicomics: Calvino allowed the characters to speak for themselves. In this way: they spoke Calvino.

      Tristram Shandy is more difficult. I picked it up once and didn’t get very far, I was bored to death . . . so it’s difficult for me to judge that one. Plus, it’s been a while since I picked it up. However: based only on what I read: I seem to remember it not coming across as all that sincere, although if I’d read more it’s very possible I might’ve come to a different conclusion, so don’t set that verdict in stone.

      Plus, this seems to be characteristic of a lot of old works. Eugénie Grandet didn’t come across as very sincere, either. Of course, there’s naturalism, and then there’s other material, like that of the Symbolists, or the Absurdists, or the Decadents… .

      Dostoevsky, to bring up another example, comes across as exceedingly sincere. His characters echoed his own thoughts and experiences. But the characters weren’t dictated to; they were allowed their own lives.

  333. Owen Kaelin

      Hey: if we tie ourselves in knots over the precise meaning and implications of every concept we entertain: at least we can look forward to getting dead drunk at the end of the day and forgetting it ever happened.

  334. Owen Kaelin

      Undeniably I have to look into those, and more of his work. I’ve heard that his essays and critiques are remarkably insightful and well thought-out. In talking to other people, our consensus has often been that perhaps Wallace was an essayist at heart, but didn’t want to admit it. So the question is: Why did he cling so closely to fiction? Did he see fiction as more “significant”, the way that Sylvia Plath did, even though she was a better poet than fiction writer?

  335. stephen
  336. herocious
  337. Owen Kaelin

      Thanks for that, Herocious.

  338. John Minichillo

      Owen,

      There are 2 collections of essays. I think of them as essential reading. His intellect was undeniable, his insights pretty profound. He himself was kind of dismissive of them, because he saw himself as a fiction writer. The excerpts of the unpublished book have looked to be really on. But yes, any particular story or book, can be dismissed. I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt because of the essays. They make it clear to me he really was a genius.

  339. ryan

      I think one great story’s enough.

      I also think you’re on to something. Usually he’s “inside” he work in only a superficial sense. The writing tics, the slight snobbishness, etc. But what might be considered his ‘self’ is usually avoided at all costs. Someone–on some forum I think, long time ago–once described Jest as an autobiography of evasion, like he wrote about everything but the one thing that “needed” to be written about. Solipsism in reverse, almost. “Everything but the self is real.”

  340. deadgod

      Tricky thing here

      That’s what I meant by “double negative” [direct-quotation quotes], Steven.

      so-called “sincerity” could = ‘not really not-really sincere; actually sincere’ [definition-of-term quotes].

      The simpler, I think: more reasonably taken, understanding would be that Ryan used two techniques redundantly, or emphatically, to make his point: so-called “sincerity” = ‘not real sincerity’.

      . . . I really mean that.

  341. ryan

      Heck yeah!

  342. deadgod

      So your nth-generation Denial Device filters in fictive-but-useful happiness, and blocks the elsewise-useful sense that unhappiness is also fictive??

      That is “denial”.

  343. deadgod

      Careful, or that “v2.1.1” will make your appearance to yourself a conundrum of sincerity.

  344. ryan

      This is fun.

      I meant it mostly as a cheesy redundancy, but I left it because I’m not sure this sentence

      Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is so-called “sincerity.”

      means quite the same as this sentence

      Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is “sincerity.”

      or this sentence

      Maybe the last thing I’m interested in in art is so-called sincerity.

      The second one would seem to imply that I don’t think an un-scarequoted sincerity exists at all. As in: They want “sincerity,” those fools. And I really am not sure what the third one would mean. So-called “sincerity” seems to say a) I’m not interested in the New Sincerity’s sincerity and b) I doubt that the mentioned “sincerity” is really a sincerity at all.

      Maybe I am crzy?

      Honestly I don’t think sincerity is relevant when it comes to the creation of art. When you’re creating, can you tell when you’re being sincere or insincere? I can tell when I’m bullshitting, when I’m reaching for an effect I haven’t justified–but when I’m sincere?

      In my experience most sincerity is bullshit, and most bullshit has a decent chance of being sincere.

      This sentence from Steven pretty much sums up how I feel about it: “When I want Art I go to the Great Tricksters who spin aesthetic platinum from the grubby materials of everyday existence.”

  345. Owen Kaelin

      Undeniably I have to look into those, and more of his work. I’ve heard that his essays and critiques are remarkably insightful and well thought-out. In talking to other people, our consensus has often been that perhaps Wallace was an essayist at heart, but didn’t want to admit it. So the question is: Why did he cling so closely to fiction? Did he see fiction as more “significant”, the way that Sylvia Plath did, even though she was a better poet than fiction writer?

  346. Justin

      haven’t read “good people” yet, but I hope there was a good reason for it. Yes, the sentence seems superfluous. But, wouldn’t the point of rewriting Hills… be to do it a different way? I mean, you can only put in “unnecessary” stuff. Then again, the point could also be to question the whole point of Hemingway’s pre-minimalism. “So the sentence is wordy. So what? It means something to me, something different. Or, maybe it doesn’t mean something else, or add anything, but I want it this way. And it’s my choice.” This might be what a person would say while writing it. Yes? I’m not sure, but when I think about it like that, there seems to be a very real meta- level to the story…

  347. stephen
  348. Justin

      haven’t read “good people” yet, but I hope there was a good reason for it. Yes, the sentence seems superfluous. But, wouldn’t the point of rewriting Hills… be to do it a different way? I mean, you can only put in “unnecessary” stuff. Then again, the point could also be to question the whole point of Hemingway’s pre-minimalism. “So the sentence is wordy. So what? It means something to me, something different. Or, maybe it doesn’t mean something else, or add anything, but I want it this way. And it’s my choice.” This might be what a person would say while writing it. Yes? I’m not sure, but when I think about it like that, there seems to be a very real meta- level to the story…

  349. stephen

      by separating those details with commas, dfw has drawn attention to 2 things, the man’s aloneness and his standing upright. there is 1 individual in this sentence, designated by 2 details, who is 12 tables away from 1 other individual. the story narrates the thought/feeling process by which 1 individual comes to discover something about himself and his (lack of) courage in relation to another 1 individual (at the end of the story, the latter 1 individual uses her 2 hands to “turn” the former (via a gambit, in which she says 1 thing but hopes for another)). similarly, the man 12 picnic tables away is only alone in a sense, just as the protagonist is only alone, apart from his girlfriend in his mind, in a sense (“two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way”). furthermore, augustine, the man, UPRIGHT, is mirrored by the downed tree ON ITS SIDE in the lake with its roots in the water (mentioned in the very first sentence).

      there is no one way to “properly” write a sentence or a story or anything. technique and personal feelings are not mutually exclusive. as a critic/reader, you can be as much of an aesthete, a misanthrope, a cynic, whatever applies, as you like, but that has no bearing on what some other person, an artist, has done or will do.

  350. stephen

      to be precise: the other man in the sentence is apart from lane and his girlfriend, who in a spatial sense are 1 unit at the picnic table. then there is the relation between lane and his girlfriend re their feelings and ideas about the relationship, which is again 1 and 1, 2 individuals, seemingly alone and apart from each other.

  351. Steven Augustine

      Stephen:

      “there is no one way to “properly” write a sentence or a story or anything.”

      Never once used the word “properly” in my comment on the story, Stephen.

      “by separating those details with commas, dfw has drawn attention to 2 things, the man’s aloneness and his standing upright.” (etc)

      If DFW employs redundancies (“the only other individual nearby… was alone”) to “draw attention” to a point/idea/metaphor which DFW might have drawn attention without redundancies (using say, “upright” without the “standing”), I don’t see the advantage in it. Sure, there’s a schematic (the presence of symbolism to support the apparent aims of the apparent narrative doesn’t make it “meta”, necessarily, btw), but it’s a schematic like a treasure map that leads to a buried box of Saltines, imo. That kind of schematic makes me think of the Nabokov story that ends with a secret acrostic spelling out info pertinent to the tale… it always felt, to me, like a long way to go for a disproportionately small payoff. It’s a taste thing, as ever. But isn’t it an irony that this plain, awkward style (the “style of The People”?) has less visceral impact than more fluent, compressed writing? Well, for me, at least, it does.

      Still curious about why “Lane A. Dean” should sound so much like “Lay Nadine”. Maybe the answer is somewhere in Medieval Christian teleology…?

      Justin:

      “But, wouldn’t the point of rewriting Hills… be to do it a different way? I mean, you can only put in “unnecessary” stuff. Then again, the point could also be to question the whole point of Hemingway’s pre-minimalism.”

      I don’t have any proof that DFW actually set out to respond to the Hemingway story with this one, so this is a risky discussion (unless DFW himself made that point somewhere). But, in general, I think it’s a mistake to relativize the accomplishment of Hemingway’s “minimalism” when it’s more than a trademark style-tic but a step forward in the aesthetics of narrative (despite how corny Hemingway’s narratives could be). It’s the difference between the all-inclusive literalism of an illustration for one of my daughters’ picture books and a modernist (highly compressed) work of Art (if “Guernica” were an illustration for one of my daughters’ books, Picasso would have shown the fascists fueling the planes before takeoff… and the peasants in the hospital afterward), which is much more powerful for all the things left out of it.

  352. Steven Augustine

      “Lane was very still and immobile”…

      It’s obvious that the redundancies are a formal exercise (the word “part” is used half a dozen times, or so, on the first page of the story) but does the formal exercise “work”? Maybe Wallace is drawing a distinction between physical descriptions and spiritual states (“still” in an “inner” sense vs “immobile” as a physical description; likewise “alone” vs “alone” and “upright” vs “standing”). But the narrative never engages my imagination enough for me to care to parse the secret (or blatant) sermon. But that’s my taste: I think of polemic (political or spiritual) as a minor art.

      “The shallows lapped from different directions at the tree as if almost teething on it.”

      Would have been so much more wonderful as,

      “The shallows teethed from different directions on the tree.”

      … despite whatever point DFW wanted to make with the deliberate sophomore artlessness (so familiar to him from the work he’d graded for so many years) of “as if almost”.

  353. Steven Augustine

      erratum: “to a point/idea/metaphor ***to*** which DFW might have drawn attention”

  354. deadgod

      The shallows whetted their teeth around the tree.

  355. Steven Augustine

      PS deaders: someone should do a study on water in DFW’s oeuvre (no yolk jokes, please)…look at the last line in the speech (at the Guardian) herocious posted a link to (near the threadbottom)

  356. Steven Augustine

      So effing pleased this thread has finally shifted towards addressing DFW’s work. Nice. I don’t agree with Stephen’s general point, upthread, about “Good People”, but I think his close-reading of the text is a great thing to do.

  357. stephen

      by separating those details with commas, dfw has drawn attention to 2 things, the man’s aloneness and his standing upright. there is 1 individual in this sentence, designated by 2 details, who is 12 tables away from 1 other individual. the story narrates the thought/feeling process by which 1 individual comes to discover something about himself and his (lack of) courage in relation to another 1 individual (at the end of the story, the latter 1 individual uses her 2 hands to “turn” the former (via a gambit, in which she says 1 thing but hopes for another)). similarly, the man 12 picnic tables away is only alone in a sense, just as the protagonist is only alone, apart from his girlfriend in his mind, in a sense (“two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way”). furthermore, augustine, the man, UPRIGHT, is mirrored by the downed tree ON ITS SIDE in the lake with its roots in the water (mentioned in the very first sentence).

      there is no one way to “properly” write a sentence or a story or anything. technique and personal feelings are not mutually exclusive. as a critic/reader, you can be as much of an aesthete, a misanthrope, a cynic, whatever applies, as you like, but that has no bearing on what some other person, an artist, has done or will do.

  358. stephen

      to be precise: the other man in the sentence is apart from lane and his girlfriend, who in a spatial sense are 1 unit at the picnic table. then there is the relation between lane and his girlfriend re their feelings and ideas about the relationship, which is again 1 and 1, 2 individuals, seemingly alone and apart from each other.

  359. STaugustine

      Stephen:

      “there is no one way to “properly” write a sentence or a story or anything.”

      Never once used the word “properly” in my comment on the story, Stephen.

      “by separating those details with commas, dfw has drawn attention to 2 things, the man’s aloneness and his standing upright.” (etc)

      If DFW employs redundancies (“the only other individual nearby… was alone”) to “draw attention” to a point/idea/metaphor which DFW might have drawn attention without redundancies (using say, “upright” without the “standing”), I don’t see the advantage in it. Sure, there’s a schematic (the presence of symbolism to support the apparent aims of the apparent narrative doesn’t make it “meta”, necessarily, btw), but it’s a schematic like a treasure map that leads to a buried box of Saltines, imo. That kind of schematic makes me think of the Nabokov story that ends with a secret acrostic spelling out info pertinent to the tale… it always felt, to me, like a long way to go for a disproportionately small payoff. It’s a taste thing, as ever. But isn’t it an irony that this plain, awkward style (the “style of The People”?) has less visceral impact than more fluent, compressed writing? Well, for me, at least, it does.

      Still curious about why “Lane A. Dean” should sound so much like “Lay Nadine”. Maybe the answer is somewhere in Medieval Christian teleology…?

      Justin:

      “But, wouldn’t the point of rewriting Hills… be to do it a different way? I mean, you can only put in “unnecessary” stuff. Then again, the point could also be to question the whole point of Hemingway’s pre-minimalism.”

      I don’t have any proof that DFW actually set out to respond to the Hemingway story with this one, so this is a risky discussion (unless DFW himself made that point somewhere). But, in general, I think it’s a mistake to relativize the accomplishment of Hemingway’s “minimalism” when it’s more than a trademark style-tic but a step forward in the aesthetics of narrative (despite how corny Hemingway’s narratives could be). It’s the difference between the all-inclusive literalism of an illustration for one of my daughters’ picture books and a modernist (highly compressed) work of Art (if “Guernica” were an illustration for one of my daughters’ books, Picasso would have shown the fascists fueling the planes before takeoff… and the peasants in the hospital afterward), which is much more powerful for all the things left out of it.

  360. STaugustine

      “Lane was very still and immobile”…

      It’s obvious that the redundancies are a formal exercise (the word “part” is used half a dozen times, or so, on the first page of the story) but does the formal exercise “work”? Maybe Wallace is drawing a distinction between physical descriptions and spiritual states (“still” in an “inner” sense vs “immobile” as a physical description; likewise “alone” vs “alone” and “upright” vs “standing”). But the narrative never engages my imagination enough for me to care to parse the secret (or blatant) sermon. But that’s my taste: I think of polemic (political or spiritual) as a minor art.

      “The shallows lapped from different directions at the tree as if almost teething on it.”

      Would have been so much more wonderful as,

      “The shallows teethed from different directions on the tree.”

      … despite whatever point DFW wanted to make with the deliberate sophomore artlessness (so familiar to him from the work he’d graded for so many years) of “as if almost”.

  361. STaugustine

      erratum: “to a point/idea/metaphor ***to*** which DFW might have drawn attention”

  362. deadgod

      The shallows whetted their teeth around the tree.

  363. Steven Augustine

      PS deaders: someone should do a study on water in DFW’s oeuvre (no yolk jokes, please)…look at the last line in the speech (at the Guardian) herocious posted a link to (near the threadbottom)

  364. Steven Augustine

      So effing pleased this thread has finally shifted towards addressing DFW’s work. Nice. I don’t agree with Stephen’s general point, upthread, about “Good People”, but I think his close-reading of the text is a great thing to do.

  365. Justin

      The reason I thought of it in the first place was this interview w/ Larry McCaffery.

      I don’t know the intent behind good people, and it may be a stretch, but I would like to give someone I think is a pretty smart writer the benefit of the doubt. Let me know what you think of this quote–it definitely felt relevant to me.

      “Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem’s still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end up empty…Minimalism’s even worse, emptier, because it’s a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there “is” no narrative consciousness in its text…”

      http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100621780&extrasfile=A09F8296-B0D0-B086-B6A350F4F59FD1F7.html

  366. Owen Kaelin

      Here’s a tough question for everyone.

      1. Given the background that I’ve read Brief Interviews and received the impression I described above, as well as the beginning of Broom (although: I understand that this was his first book and so I forgive him for everything I disliked about it)
      2. Given that everyone familiar with DFW I’ve talked to says that his essays are really the thing to read
      3. Given that it’s primarily his fiction that I’m concerned with at this very moment, as far as making a decent judgment of his fictive range of talent that might’ve been misrepresented by Brief Interviews . . .

      …Which work should I read next? Not Girl with Curious Hair I’m guessing (since I’ve heard the same disappointments about that collection that I’ve expressed about Brief Interviews) . . . not Infinite Jest since most people I’ve talked to seems to have similar feelings about that one (although I still feel I have to get to that book at some point). . .

      What, then? His essays? Is there a good collection available (without checking Amazon first: I’m being lazy)?
      People, let me know. I like to be adequately informed.

      Recommend something to me. To us.

  367. Owen Kaelin

      One story is not enough, any more than a “one-hit wonder” can be described as a great songwriter.

      But . . . thanks for reading my comment. (I tend to write long ones, too often, and I worry that people don’t read them.) It’s something that really concerns me and seems highly relevant to the variety of psychologies adoptable by The Writer. There’re all sorts of neuroses we’re beset with, for various reasons, depending on whom we choose to listen to.

      The description you give of Infinite Jest is interesting, especially since it dovetails with the impression I myself gained of his work. It’s sad that only after his death was I given the opportunity (or else I simply hadn’t read the occasional implicative writings, if there were any) to really start to try to put him and his writing in a somewhat more ‘fair’ perspective.

      I imagine him trying to write something heartfelt and then finding it always drifted into something he perceived as moaning, self-pity, mawkishness, osv. I imagine him looking at this, being sickened at his own self-absorption, and that his only way of avoiding this was to completely distance himself emotively.

      …Either that or the “mirror” of that sort of fiction was too much for him. With most people: the mirror is cathartic. But Wallace was hardly the typical writer.

      …Again, however, this all begs an asterisk, since I’m not really authoritative on his writings: I’ve read too little of his work for that. (But then again: honestly, I’ve read enough to get an idea of his writing, which is really what any writer feels obligated to do. Nothing ever gave me the impression, while he was alive, that I should read everything he’d written.)

      I also recall telling people that his writing recalled Tina Fey’s line, as the SNL ‘news anchor’: “Alanis, Alanis! Not everything you write in your journal is a song!”

      Plus… that obnoxious attack on prose poetry he wrote in Rain Taxi somewhat pissed me off.
      Sorry, it seems I’m being critical again. This is the problem: I had strong opinions on him and his work: and then he died and I was given a new perspective, a new narrative, a new context to put his writing in. It’s an odd thing.
      To quote a writer from the Boston Phoenix (in an article about Ian Curtis of Joy Division): “What a difference a death makes.”

  368. Steven Augustine

      1) That interview with McCaffery is the one in which DFW outdoes himself with digressive bullshit, as I recall (he even wedges his knowledge of higher mathematics into it with show-off pointlessness; I’ll have to click the link after this to refresh the memory)

      2) We’re only discussing “minimalism” here because we’ve used the term descriptively on a Hemingway style-choice… which isn’t the same as the Minimalism DFW invokes here (attacking, essentially, Gass and Coover and all those sideburned swingers of a certain era; he later attacked Updike on a moral charge, too… I think it’s Oedipal, or DFW hanging on to his Youth Credential a wee bit too long)

      3) “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” had, as its conceit, at the core of most of the stories in it, a Metafictional gimmick of pretty extreme disposition (interviews in which the questions were edited out [within the reality of the fiction] after they were answered ).

      So Q: wtf is Dave doing, playing both sides of this question? A: He’s being a deeply-conflicted Super-Smart Ass (see the Higher Math bullshit cited in point 1) who has been raised with the PC/noblesse-oblige/egalitarian impulses of the upperish-middle-classes. Dave was essentially an Intellectual Snob in his (pre-Good People) fiction and a Man of the People in most of his interviews. Maybe “Good People” was an attempt to synthesize the two Daves. I don’t think it works. He should have killed off the side that wants to give the world a hug and let the Smartass (from whence is best stuff came) live.

      Remember Positive Kirk and Negative Kirk from that one episode of Star Trek…? And the Spock with a mustache….?

  369. Steven Augustine

      Yup, that’s the interview I recall, all right, and passages like the following are utter fucking show-offy bullshit of a highly awkward nature… try as one might, one can not, in good faith, establish the fundamental utility of that straining undergradish *decadent-postmodern-wanking vs daringly-useful-breakthroughs-in-calculus* comparison:

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

      DFW […] The modernists and early postmodernists—all the way from Mallarmé to Coover, I guess—broke most of the rules for us, but we tend to forget what they were forced to remember: the rule-breaking has got to be for the “sake” of something. When rule-breaking, the mere “form” of renegade avant-gardism, becomes an end in itself, you end up with bad language poetry and “American Psycho” ’s nipple-shocks and Alice Cooper eating shit on stage. Shock stops being a by-product of progress and becomes an end in itself. And it’s bullshit. Here’s an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn’t divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption. Then some genius titans came along and said, “Yeah, maybe you can’t divide by zero, but what would happen if you “could”? We’re going to come as close to doing it as we can, to see what happens.”

      LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus—”the philosophy of as if.”

      DFW: And this purely theoretical construct wound up yielding incredibly practical results. Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this “as if.” But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It’d never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn’t yield results. It’s hollow. Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenuous because it was in the service of something. The math world’s shock was a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself.

      LM: Of course, you also have examples like Lobochevsky and Riemann, who are breaking the rules with no practical application at the time—but then later on somebody like Einstein comes along and decides that this worthless mathematical mind game that Riemann developed actually described the universe more effectively than the Euclidean game. Not that those guys were braking the rules just to break the rules, but part of that was just that: what happens if everybody has to move counter-clockwise in Monopoly. And at first it just seemed like this game, without applications.

      DFW: Well, the analogy breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They’re like building a cathedral: each generation works off the last one, both in its advance and its errors. Ideally, each piece of art’s its own unique object, and its evaluation’s always present-tense. You could justify the worst piece of experimental horseshit by saying “The fools may hate my stuff , but generations later I will be appreciated for my ground breaking rebellion.” All the beret-wearing “artistes” I went to school with who believed that line are now writing ad copy someplace.

      **********

      And may I direct your attention to the smug, score-settling arrogance of that last line?

  370. stephen

      feeling as if you are getting a sense (a vague thing) of some other human being or consciousness, whether fictional or quasi-fictional, can i think make a person feel less lonely. it doesn’t have to be on a compassion-contempt spectrum; it doesn’t have to be an identification with the author (as you may think you know her) or character(s).

  371. stephen

      i also don’t think “understanding” the work has to be involved with this. also, “all art is quite useless.” also, what’s meaning, etc.

  372. stephen

      not to be annoying, btw, moly. just you know, my thoughts. feeling less lonely is a vague and abstract concept, i think, but it seems like maybe everything is, maybe? not sure what i’m talking about. i have felt a need to call someone at the end of the book. i have felt like an exclamation mark at the end of a book. that is merely my experience.

  373. stephen

      beckett (et al.) disagrees with you about writing being an intellectual activity.

  374. stephen

      william carlos williams…

  375. stephen

      salinger…

  376. stephen

      by the end of his life, dfw…

  377. stephen

      “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”
      —Nabokov

  378. Tim Horvath

      Oblivion, I’d say, is the work of fiction which maybe feels closest to the essays–that is, it reconciles the essayish mode of intellect with the pleasures of fiction most seamlessly.

      But the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is an essay that doesn’t feel like one. Read it as genre-blindly as possible and I think you’ll dig it.

  379. ryan

      I don’t really get what you’re after, Steven. Sure, the math analogy is tortured, but the guy majored in that stuff and later wrote a book about it. Seems reasonable that a math analogy would come to his mind.

      I read the two passages you quoted as just two guys shooting the shit. Sure, he said some goofy things, but. . . so what? It’s an interview.

  380. Steven Augustine

      response to Justin’s post, Ryan: the point is that DFW is, in fact, a Super-Smart Ass (btw: I like Super Smart Asses), not a Hugger of the Common People and Champion of the Average

  381. ryan

      This thread is so out of control that I can’t even find where Justin said that.

      He was a smartass, but, judging by the comments of those who knew him, he was also unusually kind. Not sure if that makes one a Hugger of Common People, but there was more to him that the smartass / shrill grammarian stuff.

      I, on the other hand, am neither a smartass, nor unusually kind. I’m a pretty hearty sleeper though.

  382. deadgod

      LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus

      No; “dividing by zero” (properly) gets you the differential calculus (as in: “do rate-change calculations”).

      The infinitesimal calculus consists of adding an infinite number of infinitely small ‘areas’ (line segments) and getting a finite number: an area. (As Wallace says, “[calculate] the area under a curve”. Not sure what he means by “plot”.)

  383. Steven Augustine

      (justin’s comment appears right above mine)

      No one asks what the “results yielded” were when Picasso decided to paint Cubist canvases; it was an Artistic Decision. Why is DFW holding Lit to the functionality-standard of Industrial Design in this comment:

      “Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this “as if.” But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It’d never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn’t yield results. It’s hollow.”

      What “good” “in the world” does “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” do? It’s literature. Fine if it makes someone reading it feel “less alone” but demanding that it do that…? There’s a pretty powerful Cog Diss there and people seem slow (or reluctant) to pick that up about DFW

  384. Owen Kaelin

      Here’s a tough question for everyone.

      1. Given the background that I’ve read Brief Interviews and received the impression I described above, as well as the beginning of Broom (although: I understand that this was his first book and so I forgive him for everything I disliked about it)
      2. Given that everyone familiar with DFW I’ve talked to says that his essays are really the thing to read
      3. Given that it’s primarily his fiction that I’m concerned with at this very moment, as far as making a decent judgment of his fictive range of talent that might’ve been misrepresented by Brief Interviews . . .

      …Which work should I read next? Not Girl with Curious Hair I’m guessing (since I’ve heard the same disappointments about that collection that I’ve expressed about Brief Interviews) . . . not Infinite Jest since most people I’ve talked to seems to have similar feelings about that one (although I still feel I have to get to that book at some point). . .

      What, then? His essays? Is there a good collection available (without checking Amazon first: I’m being lazy)?
      People, let me know. I like to be adequately informed.

      Recommend something to me. To us.

  385. Owen Kaelin

      One story is not enough, any more than a “one-hit wonder” can be described as a great songwriter.

      But . . . thanks for reading my comment. (I tend to write long ones, too often, and I worry that people don’t read them.) It’s something that really concerns me and seems highly relevant to the variety of psychologies adoptable by The Writer. There’re all sorts of neuroses we’re beset with, for various reasons, depending on whom we choose to listen to.

      The description you give of Infinite Jest is interesting, especially since it dovetails with the impression I myself gained of his work. It’s sad that only after his death was I given the opportunity (or else I simply hadn’t read the occasional implicative writings, if there were any) to really start to try to put him and his writing in a somewhat more ‘fair’ perspective.

      I imagine him trying to write something heartfelt and then finding it always drifted into something he perceived as moaning, self-pity, mawkishness, osv. I imagine him looking at this, being sickened at his own self-absorption, and that his only way of avoiding this was to completely distance himself emotively.

      …Either that or the “mirror” of that sort of fiction was too much for him. With most people: the mirror is cathartic. But Wallace was hardly the typical writer.

      …Again, however, this all begs an asterisk, since I’m not really authoritative on his writings: I’ve read too little of his work for that. (But then again: honestly, I’ve read enough to get an idea of his writing, which is really what any writer feels obligated to do. Nothing ever gave me the impression, while he was alive, that I should read everything he’d written.)

      I also recall telling people that his writing recalled Tina Fey’s line, as the SNL ‘news anchor’: “Alanis, Alanis! Not everything you write in your journal is a song!”

      Plus… that obnoxious attack on prose poetry he wrote in Rain Taxi somewhat pissed me off.
      Sorry, it seems I’m being critical again. This is the problem: I had strong opinions on him and his work: and then he died and I was given a new perspective, a new narrative, a new context to put his writing in. It’s an odd thing.
      To quote a writer from the Boston Phoenix (in an article about Ian Curtis of Joy Division): “What a difference a death makes.”

  386. Steven Augustine

      1) That interview with McCaffery is the one in which DFW outdoes himself with digressive bullshit, as I recall (he even wedges his knowledge of higher mathematics into it with show-off pointlessness; I’ll have to click the link after this to refresh the memory)

      2) We’re only discussing “minimalism” here because we’ve used the term descriptively on a Hemingway style-choice… which isn’t the same as the Minimalism DFW invokes here (attacking, essentially, Gass and Coover and all those sideburned swingers of a certain era; he later attacked Updike on a moral charge, too… I think it’s Oedipal, or DFW hanging on to his Youth Credential a wee bit too long)

      3) “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” had, as its conceit, at the core of most of the stories in it, a Metafictional gimmick of pretty extreme disposition (interviews in which the questions were edited out [within the reality of the fiction] after they were answered ).

      So Q: wtf is Dave doing, playing both sides of this question? A: He’s being a deeply-conflicted Super-Smart Ass (see the Higher Math bullshit cited in point 1) who has been raised with the PC/noblesse-oblige/egalitarian impulses of the upperish-middle-classes. Dave was essentially an Intellectual Snob in his (pre-Good People) fiction and a Man of the People in most of his interviews. Maybe “Good People” was an attempt to synthesize the two Daves. I don’t think it works. He should have killed off the side that wants to give the world a hug and let the Smartass (from whence is best stuff came) live.

      Remember Positive Kirk and Negative Kirk from that one episode of Star Trek…? And the Spock with a mustache….?

  387. Steven Augustine

      Yup, that’s the interview I recall, all right, and passages like the following are utter fucking show-offy bullshit of a highly awkward nature… try as one might, one can not, in good faith, establish the fundamental utility of that straining undergradish *decadent-postmodern-wanking vs daringly-useful-breakthroughs-in-calculus* comparison:

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

      DFW […] The modernists and early postmodernists—all the way from Mallarmé to Coover, I guess—broke most of the rules for us, but we tend to forget what they were forced to remember: the rule-breaking has got to be for the “sake” of something. When rule-breaking, the mere “form” of renegade avant-gardism, becomes an end in itself, you end up with bad language poetry and “American Psycho” ’s nipple-shocks and Alice Cooper eating shit on stage. Shock stops being a by-product of progress and becomes an end in itself. And it’s bullshit. Here’s an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn’t divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption. Then some genius titans came along and said, “Yeah, maybe you can’t divide by zero, but what would happen if you “could”? We’re going to come as close to doing it as we can, to see what happens.”

      LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus—”the philosophy of as if.”

      DFW: And this purely theoretical construct wound up yielding incredibly practical results. Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this “as if.” But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It’d never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn’t yield results. It’s hollow. Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenuous because it was in the service of something. The math world’s shock was a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself.

      LM: Of course, you also have examples like Lobochevsky and Riemann, who are breaking the rules with no practical application at the time—but then later on somebody like Einstein comes along and decides that this worthless mathematical mind game that Riemann developed actually described the universe more effectively than the Euclidean game. Not that those guys were braking the rules just to break the rules, but part of that was just that: what happens if everybody has to move counter-clockwise in Monopoly. And at first it just seemed like this game, without applications.

      DFW: Well, the analogy breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They’re like building a cathedral: each generation works off the last one, both in its advance and its errors. Ideally, each piece of art’s its own unique object, and its evaluation’s always present-tense. You could justify the worst piece of experimental horseshit by saying “The fools may hate my stuff , but generations later I will be appreciated for my ground breaking rebellion.” All the beret-wearing “artistes” I went to school with who believed that line are now writing ad copy someplace.

      **********

      And may I direct your attention to the smug, score-settling arrogance of that last line?

  388. stephen

      feeling as if you are getting a sense (a vague thing) of some other human being or consciousness, whether fictional or quasi-fictional, can i think make a person feel less lonely. it doesn’t have to be on a compassion-contempt spectrum; it doesn’t have to be an identification with the author (as you may think you know her) or character(s).

  389. stephen

      i also don’t think “understanding” the work has to be involved with this. also, “all art is quite useless.” also, what’s meaning, etc.

  390. stephen

      not to be annoying, btw, moly. just you know, my thoughts. feeling less lonely is a vague and abstract concept, i think, but it seems like maybe everything is, maybe? not sure what i’m talking about. i have felt a need to call someone at the end of the book. i have felt like an exclamation mark at the end of a book. that is merely my experience.

  391. stephen

      beckett (et al.) disagrees with you about writing being an intellectual activity.

  392. stephen

      william carlos williams…

  393. stephen

      salinger…

  394. stephen

      by the end of his life, dfw…

  395. stephen

      “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.”
      —Nabokov

  396. Tim Horvath

      Oblivion, I’d say, is the work of fiction which maybe feels closest to the essays–that is, it reconciles the essayish mode of intellect with the pleasures of fiction most seamlessly.

      But the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is an essay that doesn’t feel like one. Read it as genre-blindly as possible and I think you’ll dig it.

  397. ryan

      I don’t really get what you’re after, Steven. Sure, the math analogy is tortured, but the guy majored in that stuff and later wrote a book about it. Seems reasonable that a math analogy would come to his mind.

      I read the two passages you quoted as just two guys shooting the shit. Sure, he said some goofy things, but. . . so what? It’s an interview.

  398. Steven Augustine

      response to Justin’s post, Ryan: the point is that DFW is, in fact, a Super-Smart Ass (btw: I like Super Smart Asses), not a Hugger of the Common People and Champion of the Average

  399. ryan

      This thread is so out of control that I can’t even find where Justin said that.

      He was a smartass, but, judging by the comments of those who knew him, he was also unusually kind. Not sure if that makes one a Hugger of Common People, but there was more to him that the smartass / shrill grammarian stuff.

      I, on the other hand, am neither a smartass, nor unusually kind. I’m a pretty hearty sleeper though.

  400. deadgod

      LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus

      No; “dividing by zero” (properly) gets you the differential calculus (as in: “do rate-change calculations”).

      The infinitesimal calculus consists of adding an infinite number of infinitely small ‘areas’ (line segments) and getting a finite number: an area. (As Wallace says, “[calculate] the area under a curve”. Not sure what he means by “plot”.)

  401. Steven Augustine

      (justin’s comment appears right above mine)

      No one asks what the “results yielded” were when Picasso decided to paint Cubist canvases; it was an Artistic Decision. Why is DFW holding Lit to the functionality-standard of Industrial Design in this comment:

      “Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this “as if.” But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It’d never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn’t yield results. It’s hollow.”

      What “good” “in the world” does “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” do? It’s literature. Fine if it makes someone reading it feel “less alone” but demanding that it do that…? There’s a pretty powerful Cog Diss there and people seem slow (or reluctant) to pick that up about DFW

  402. Owen Kaelin

      Thanks, man, I’ll check it out.

  403. Owen Kaelin

      Thanks, man, I’ll check it out.

  404. Steven Augustine

      Medical science has fairly-well established the heart as a blood-pumping muscle and the brain as the generator/location of “thoughts” and “feelings”. I think you mean that Beckett, Nabokov and DFW (et al) mean that the kind of intellectual activity their minds get up to (professionally) on the page is to use extremely controlled language (artfully) to elicit emotional responses in the reader. Or is it just a coincidence (or a paradox) that every single writer you cite happened, also, to be unusually intelligent?

  405. Steven Augustine

      “ ‘Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades’ .” So you’re saying that this is evidence that Nabokov meant that his mind wasn’t responsible for Lolita and that some anti-intellectual organ “between the shoulder blades” was the intended receptor?

      Okay, Stephen, now let’s hear your literal interpretation of the Bible, too.

  406. zusya

      if that ‘tween correspondent’ from the gagarde thread has legs…

      what would y’all say to an HTML version of the daily show’s “Even Stepvhen” segment?

      i dunno about you, but i could watch these two yell (or talk with indoor voices) about stuff at it for hours.

  407. Steven Augustine

      Zus: I am *not* up for endless “is God powerful enough to create a boulder too heavy for him to lift”-style debates! Oh fuck no. I mean, sure, I get locked into that sort of thing anyway (I am now in the “old gunfighter mode” of my online-opinionating arc) but not willingly. I’d rather, for example, do a Siskel-and-Ebert-style review of YouTube response-videos. But Stephen wouldn’t be interested and, anyway, you’d have to pay us in “likes” and “recommends” but they haven’t worked out how to make those transferable yet…

  408. Steven Augustine

      ****(by the twists of the cool non-Euclidean topology of comment thread timespace, I see that my last comment in this thread is just a few centimeters above my first comment in this thread, which happened five days ago! and this is one of my favorite threads… lots of very smart people left some fucking print-worthy comments about Lit here)****

  409. Steven Augustine

      Medical science has fairly-well established the heart as a blood-pumping muscle and the brain as the generator/location of “thoughts” and “feelings”. I think you mean that Beckett, Nabokov and DFW (et al) mean that the kind of intellectual activity their minds get up to (professionally) on the page is to use extremely controlled language (artfully) to elicit emotional responses in the reader. Or is it just a coincidence (or a paradox) that every single writer you cite happened, also, to be unusually intelligent?

  410. Steven Augustine

      “ ‘Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades’ .” So you’re saying that this is evidence that Nabokov meant that his mind wasn’t responsible for Lolita and that some anti-intellectual organ “between the shoulder blades” was the intended receptor?

      Okay, Stephen, now let’s hear your literal interpretation of the Bible, too.

  411. zusya17

      haha that would be great: reviewing response videos. if i could make it happen i would. that kind of wheeling and dealing would likely require meatspace interaction.

      the potential exists! kinetically throttle it!

  412. Steven Augustine

      Zus: I am *not* up for endless “is God powerful enough to create a boulder too heavy for him to lift”-style debates! Oh fuck no. I mean, sure, I get locked into that sort of thing anyway (I am now in the “old gunfighter mode” of my online-opinionating arc) but not willingly. I’d rather, for example, do a Siskel-and-Ebert-style review of YouTube response-videos. But Stephen wouldn’t be interested and, anyway, you’d have to pay us in “likes” and “recommends” but they haven’t worked out how to make those transferable yet…

  413. Steven Augustine

      ****(by the twists of the cool non-Euclidean topology of comment thread timespace, I see that my last comment in this thread is just a few centimeters above my first comment in this thread, which happened five days ago! and this is one of my favorite threads… lots of very smart people left some fucking print-worthy comments about Lit here)****

  414. stephen

      “Molloy and what followed became possible the day I became aware of my stupidity. Then I began to write the things I feel.”
      —Beckett

  415. mimi

      “the day I became aware of my stupidity” – ha ha – I am continually discovering the extent of my stupidity and continually trying to shed my selfish or self-interested notions that I am actually smart or actually “know something”. I’m being sincere here, guys.

      “is God powerful enough to create a boulder too heavy for him to lift” ha ha ha!
      Takes me back to sixth grade!

      I’m loving your htmlg back & forths (all of them).

  416. Steven Augustine

      Stephen, did Beckett write the tightly-controlled “Molloy” with a Ouija board or using the knowledge, creative vision, recollected sensations and observations accumulated in his mind (ie, with his intellect)?

      He wrote the “things he felt” but in order to write these things in the extremely formalized language of the text he had to use his…uh… his… heart. Yes, that’s it, I see it now… Beckett’s *heart* (a versatile fucking pump if ever there was one) wrote his material for him. Beckett was, famously, a monoglot, un-tutored, anti-intellectual idiot savant who would sit down, pour it all out on the page in one go, as guided by the bloody muscle in his chest, never revising the results and having copious weeping/raging/yodeling fits for the duration of the process. Can I go now?

  417. Steven Augustine

      (famous writers really should be careful about the shit they say in moods of generous self-deprecation or sly self-aggrandizement because, as Religion shows us time and time again, there’s no end to the confusion/mischief that always results when disciples take that shit literally/seriously)

  418. stephen

      if you were smarter you would understand

  419. Steven Augustine

      that’s pretty obvious

  420. mimi

      I myself will admit to being perpetually confused and mischieviously-inclined, but I am not religious, and there are only a very few things that I take literally or seriously.

  421. Steven Augustine

      Just promise me you’ll never use a brain surgeon or an auto-mechanic who brags about her/his “stupidity”, Mimi! Laugh

  422. Tony O'Neill

      I’m with Stephen here. Relying on pure intellect to create art is a fast track to making beautifully constructed, but ultimately empty works. Coldness. “heart”, or “guts” or “balls” or whatever you want to call it is vital. SA, i think you’re taking the piss a bit when you keep referring to heart in terms of the muscle that pumps blood, and not that shadowy collection of indescribable things inside of us that is responsible for irrational things like love (which is not an intellectual proposition, is it?) Obviously this is what Stephen was referring to.

      James Chance said it best in “Contort Yourself” – “First you gotta take out the garbage thats in your brain” Creating anything – books, paintings, music – is as more a process of unlearning all of the shit that you have picked up in your lifetime than it is about ‘honing your intellect’. Pure intellect is fine for debating, or math, (or brain surgery or fixing cars to use your analogy), not so much for creating art which all about emotional response.

      “Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.” ~ Nietzsche

  423. deadgod

      on the road, I’ll be on the road for as long as I’m on the road which I’ve been on for a while a long while while I’ve been on the road which is creeping at a crawl at which all roads creep whether or not anyone is on the road that I’m on, on the road

  424. deadgod

      Nietzsche on ‘depth’: “Spiritual explanations are considered profound; in fact, they’re not even superficial.” (Gay Science, sect. 126)

  425. stephen

      i really dig that nietzsche quote, tony. thanks

  426. Steven Augustine

      “I’m with Stephen here. Relying on pure intellect to create art is a fast track to making beautifully constructed, but ultimately empty works.”

      Tony and Stephen, WTF is “pure intellect”? I think you’re talking about a grab-brag of character-attributes from movies and television… let’s see, there’s the Cambridge accent, the disdain for rock music, saucy chicks and shaggy dogs and an inordinate attachment to one’s mother… those are the qualities you seem to be projecting on the concept of “intellect”. But that’s just a populist cliche; corny as the Spock vs Kirk dichotomy.

      “and not that shadowy collection of indescribable things inside of us that is responsible for irrational things like love (which is not an intellectual proposition, is it?)”

      Certainly don’t need your intellect to enjoy love but try writing about “love” without your higher brain functions switched on and see how far you get.

      To write about emotions (or situations that will trigger an emotional response) in a way that will reach *any one*, you need the intellect. Tony, hate to break it to you, but your sitting down and coming up with the right voice (tone/style/cadence etc) and ordering your words/sentences in a way that will tell the story you want to tell requires the use of your intellect; you need it both to structure the text and to access and make sense of the recollected emotions that will inform your text. You make complex intellectual choices with every page you lay down (eg, making sure you don’t come off “too intellectual” is an intellectual effort).

      Writing with *any* skill requires more conscious-and-unconscious intellectual activity than randomly splashing a canvas with color does or kicking a ball or banging out two chords on an out-of-tune guitar. The problem being that the “intellect” is seen as “patrician” (think about the crypto-elitism of that attitude for a second) and, even worse: “feminine”.

      Which is why so many writers affect to be “anti-intellectual”… it’s an obvious insecurity about one’s masculinity (see: Ernie H) and the more macho society is, the louder the “anti-intellectuals” get. But, fuck it: I’m 6’1″, 180 pounds, nothing to prove, guys.

      And, Tone: thanks for quoting Nietzsche as part of your “anti-intellectual” presentation! (laugh)

      (And I do hope you’ve noticed that I’m *fundamentally* against “obscurity” in both argument and Art that I’m one of the most clarity-utilizing fuckers you’ve ever tangled with)

  427. stephen

      hate to break it to you, you’re steven augustine.

  428. Steven Augustine

      stephen, if coming off like a snippy, callow dumbshit is your master plan for arguing against “the intellect”… at least you’re consistent. Highly effective, Sir

  429. mimi

      Instead of the “intellect” vs. “heart” maybe we can talk about the “analytical mind” (good for brain surgery and auto repair) vs. the “creative mind”.

      Discuss.

  430. Ryan Call

      and maybe instead of a ‘versus’ contest, we can discuss how the parts work together. everyone wins!

  431. stephen

      that was mean. sorry for doing that to you, steven. could you stop acting like you are the preeminent literary authority and wit in the known universe? could you stop pretending you know what other people are thinking? i feel like all you do on here is argue and try to be clever. to what end? “the betterment of literary society”? “for the enlargement of our minds”? the things you are arguing about are merely theoretical. being nice to other people and creating art can have a palpable effect on other people, one they might remember for a long time. and it doesn’t need to be talked about in phony ways. unless one really gets a bang out of intellectual arguments (god help you), those arguments don’t do shit for shit. you’re the reason i don’t want to go to graduate school. i’m guessing you have redeeming qualities irl.

  432. Tony O'Neill

      Hey Steve

      Well not to hammer the point home, or get into a long pointless protracted debate which ultimately means nothing as it will not change either your, or my attitudes toward this (the sun is out, I knocked out 3,000 words today, I’m getting off this damn computer next), but a quick response anyway because I’m masochistic:

      ” Tony and Stephen, WTF is “pure intellect”? I think you’re talking about a grab-brag of character-attributes from movies and television… let’s see, there’s the Cambridge accent, the disdain for rock music, saucy chicks and shaggy dogs and an inordinate attachment to one’s mother… those are the qualities you seem to be projecting on the concept of “intellect”. But that’s just a populist cliche; corny as the Spock vs Kirk dichotomy.”

      Nope, that’s your projection. You actually project quite a lot Steve, usually when trying to undermine someone without actually listening to what they’re saying. I see you doing it here all the time, you used to do it all the time when you posted at the guardian and I still read things over there regularly, and its always been something that really irritated me about you.

      But, no, that is not what I meant by pure intellect. I mean that all of the other shit that comes part and parcel with being a human being is a HUGE factor in creating art. Nobody is saying that there isnt an intellectual component to creating, but what I am saying is that it is a smaller component that you insist. All of the other shit that we have to deal with as human beings – unhappiness, shit jobs, too much booze, not enough booze, bad drugs, good drugs, politics, love, self loathing, small ecstasies, boredom, lust, etc etc… all of this shit is a vital ingredient, something which you seem quick to deny.

      You are a big believer that we cannot (or should not) consider the personal life of the person who created the art, that it has nothing to offer (except maybe voyeuristic thrills). I am of the opinion that all of that stuff is vital to experiencing – and creating – art, and to throw that out is to throw out all understanding. If your assertion was true, then everybody who took an MFA would be producing works of genius, and the prisons and the streets would have thrown up no great works of art.

      “Certainly don’t need your intellect to enjoy love but try writing about “love” without your higher brain functions switched on and see how far you get.”

      Again, nobody said it was about turning off your higher brain functions. But try to explain love in purely intellectual terms to someone who has never experienced it, and see how far YOU would get.

      “To write about emotions (or situations that will trigger an emotional response) in a way that will reach *any one*, you need the intellect. Tony, hate to break it to you, but your sitting down and coming up with the right voice (tone/style/cadence etc) and ordering your words/sentences in a way that will tell the story you want to tell requires the use of your intellect; you need it both to structure the text and to access and make sense of the recollected emotions that will inform your text. You make complex intellectual choices with every page you lay down (eg, making sure you don’t come off “too intellectual” is an intellectual effort).”

      No, it’s not an either / or. I guess what we’re arguing about here is percentages. I’m not saying that creating art is NOT an intellectual process. I’m saying that it cant be a PURELY intellectual process. Otherwise it would be very, very fucking dull.

      “Writing with *any* skill requires more conscious-and-unconscious intellectual activity than randomly splashing a canvas with color does or kicking a ball or banging out two chords on an out-of-tune guitar. The problem being that the “intellect” is seen as “patrician” (think about the crypto-elitism of that attitude for a second) and, even worse: “feminine”.”

      This is your projection again. I have no fears or phobias about femininity or whatever, Steve. I live with two women, a wife and a daughter, I dont play sports, and I have no aspirations towards any kind of hyper masculinity as you seem to be suggesting. i just like my writing to live and breathe, and to be hewn out of sterner stuff than text books and literary theory.

      “Which is why so many writers affect to be “anti-intellectual”… it’s an obvious insecurity about one’s masculinity (see: Ernie H) and the more macho society is, the louder the “anti-intellectuals” get. But, fuck it: I’m 6′1″, 180 pounds, nothing to prove, guys.”

      And yet you gave us your stats (although im glad you drew the line at telling us your penis size). But nice bit of pop-psychology on Hemingway, when were you employed as his analyst by the way?

      ” And, Tone: thanks for quoting Nietzsche as part of your “anti-intellectual” presentation! (laugh)”

      your welcome, although again youre simplifying my argument so you can score easy points. As I said above, its a matter of percentages. Since you enjoyed that quote so much, here’s another I quite like:

      “Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.”

      As a PS – I am usually pretty suspicious that when people want to take “personality” out of the equation when it comes to writing, its usually because they don’t have one of their own and feel a bit left out…

  433. deadgod

      mimi, Steven’s point is that one never ‘creates’ without simultaneously being “analytical”. The apparent intrusion of over-analysis is a matter of degree, misplaced or too-narrow focus, over-bearing priority – not a matter of an alien, oncogenetic virus.

      Mind and heart are only falsely – albeit sometimes pragmatically – discerned as being apart. They only ever happen entwinedly.

  434. Steven Augustine

      stephen: it’s a comment thread about Lit, man… it’s not group-therapy. If you have issues with the fact that I don’t frame every single comment with an “and remember, this is merely my opinion, it doesn’t hold any particular weight, it’s just what I think about this, is all, please don’t be offended”… that’s not my problem. Grow a skin, Dude!

      If you don’t want to argue ideas… don’t. But don’t fucking try to turn it into a moral issue when you lose a debate. And I didn’t “come to you”, you came to *me*. The first comment in this sub-thread was *not* addressed to you. Three days after I left it, you begged to differ. Which is fine. Just try to control the trembly lip now that it didn’t work out the way you’d hoped, okay…? And stop appealing to the audience, Oprah-style, for back-up. It’s cheezy.

  435. deadgod

      Excellent! – Ryan, stephen, Tony, and I constitute a circular firing squad facing outward.

      I hit my tree . . . well, fourth. But still: I win!!

  436. stephen

      “Molloy and what followed became possible the day I became aware of my stupidity. Then I began to write the things I feel.”
      —Beckett

  437. Steven Augustine

      deaders: har!

  438. deadgod

      When life gives you lemons, share your lemon-rind scrumpy.

  439. stephen

      i’m not treating whatever this is as group therapy. i don’t have issues. i don’t care about you. i have a skin. ok. i’m not fucking trying to do anything and i didn’t lose a debate. i didn’t come anywhere. nice asterisks. three days. thank you for your tolerance. my lip isn’t trembling; chilling, shirt off, coffee. what audience. i’d like to see you cheezy sometime; let’s get vulnerable.

  440. Steven Augustine
  441. deadgod

      i’m not dangerous on the internet. i’m an oldboy oddballer. i’m not “reading this thread”; i’m writing in a comment box. i never smirk, though i often laugh and a bit less often shake my head ‘no’. i don’t care “who” i am. i’m “interested in” the 49ers winning more super bowls, which should keep me alert for another half century. i use the shift key to make question marks, parentheses, and double-quotation marks, but not to capitalize my eyes.

  442. mimi

      “the day I became aware of my stupidity” – ha ha – I am continually discovering the extent of my stupidity and continually trying to shed my selfish or self-interested notions that I am actually smart or actually “know something”. I’m being sincere here, guys.

      “is God powerful enough to create a boulder too heavy for him to lift” ha ha ha!
      Takes me back to sixth grade!

      I’m loving your htmlg back & forths (all of them).

  443. Steven Augustine

      Stephen, did Beckett write the tightly-controlled “Molloy” with a Ouija board or using the knowledge, creative vision, recollected sensations and observations accumulated in his mind (ie, with his intellect)?

      He wrote the “things he felt” but in order to write these things in the extremely formalized language of the text he had to use his…uh… his… heart. Yes, that’s it, I see it now… Beckett’s *heart* (a versatile fucking pump if ever there was one) wrote his material for him. Beckett was, famously, a monoglot, un-tutored, anti-intellectual idiot savant who would sit down, pour it all out on the page in one go, as guided by the bloody muscle in his chest, never revising the results and having copious weeping/raging/yodeling fits for the duration of the process. Can I go now?

  444. Steven Augustine

      (famous writers really should be careful about the shit they say in moods of generous self-deprecation or sly self-aggrandizement because, as Religion shows us time and time again, there’s no end to the confusion/mischief that always results when disciples take that shit literally/seriously)

  445. stephen

      if you were smarter you would understand

  446. Steven Augustine

      that’s pretty obvious

  447. mimi

      I myself will admit to being perpetually confused and mischieviously-inclined, but I am not religious, and there are only a very few things that I take literally or seriously.

  448. Steven Augustine

      Just promise me you’ll never use a brain surgeon or an auto-mechanic who brags about her/his “stupidity”, Mimi! Laugh

  449. Tony O'Neill

      I’m with Stephen here. Relying on pure intellect to create art is a fast track to making beautifully constructed, but ultimately empty works. Coldness. “heart”, or “guts” or “balls” or whatever you want to call it is vital. SA, i think you’re taking the piss a bit when you keep referring to heart in terms of the muscle that pumps blood, and not that shadowy collection of indescribable things inside of us that is responsible for irrational things like love (which is not an intellectual proposition, is it?) Obviously this is what Stephen was referring to.

      James Chance said it best in “Contort Yourself” – “First you gotta take out the garbage thats in your brain” Creating anything – books, paintings, music – is as more a process of unlearning all of the shit that you have picked up in your lifetime than it is about ‘honing your intellect’. Pure intellect is fine for debating, or math, (or brain surgery or fixing cars to use your analogy), not so much for creating art which all about emotional response.

      “Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.” ~ Nietzsche

  450. deadgod

      on the road, I’ll be on the road for as long as I’m on the road which I’ve been on for a while a long while while I’ve been on the road which is creeping at a crawl at which all roads creep whether or not anyone is on the road that I’m on, on the road

  451. deadgod

      Nietzsche on ‘depth’: “Spiritual explanations are considered profound; in fact, they’re not even superficial.” (Gay Science, sect. 126)

  452. stephen

      i really dig that nietzsche quote, tony. thanks

  453. Steven Augustine

      “I’m with Stephen here. Relying on pure intellect to create art is a fast track to making beautifully constructed, but ultimately empty works.”

      Tony and Stephen, WTF is “pure intellect”? I think you’re talking about a grab-brag of character-attributes from movies and television… let’s see, there’s the Cambridge accent, the disdain for rock music, saucy chicks and shaggy dogs and an inordinate attachment to one’s mother… those are the qualities you seem to be projecting on the concept of “intellect”. But that’s just a populist cliche; corny as the Spock vs Kirk dichotomy.

      “and not that shadowy collection of indescribable things inside of us that is responsible for irrational things like love (which is not an intellectual proposition, is it?)”

      Certainly don’t need your intellect to enjoy love but try writing about “love” without your higher brain functions switched on and see how far you get.

      To write about emotions (or situations that will trigger an emotional response) in a way that will reach *any one*, you need the intellect. Tony, hate to break it to you, but your sitting down and coming up with the right voice (tone/style/cadence etc) and ordering your words/sentences in a way that will tell the story you want to tell requires the use of your intellect; you need it both to structure the text and to access and make sense of the recollected emotions that will inform your text. You make complex intellectual choices with every page you lay down (eg, making sure you don’t come off “too intellectual” is an intellectual effort).

      Writing with *any* skill requires more conscious-and-unconscious intellectual activity than randomly splashing a canvas with color does or kicking a ball or banging out two chords on an out-of-tune guitar. The problem being that the “intellect” is seen as “patrician” (think about the crypto-elitism of that attitude for a second) and, even worse: “feminine”.

      Which is why so many writers affect to be “anti-intellectual”… it’s an obvious insecurity about one’s masculinity (see: Ernie H) and the more macho society is, the louder the “anti-intellectuals” get. But, fuck it: I’m 6’1″, 180 pounds, nothing to prove, guys.

      And, Tone: thanks for quoting Nietzsche as part of your “anti-intellectual” presentation! (laugh)

      (And I do hope you’ve noticed that I’m *fundamentally* against “obscurity” in both argument and Art that I’m one of the most clarity-utilizing fuckers you’ve ever tangled with)

  454. stephen

      hate to break it to you, you’re steven augustine.

  455. Steven Augustine

      stephen, if coming off like a snippy, callow dumbshit is your master plan for arguing against “the intellect”… at least you’re consistent. Highly effective, Sir

  456. mimi

      Instead of the “intellect” vs. “heart” maybe we can talk about the “analytical mind” (good for brain surgery and auto repair) vs. the “creative mind”.

      Discuss.

  457. Ryan Call

      and maybe instead of a ‘versus’ contest, we can discuss how the parts work together. everyone wins!

  458. stephen

      that was mean. sorry for doing that to you, steven. could you stop acting like you are the preeminent literary authority and wit in the known universe? could you stop pretending you know what other people are thinking? i feel like all you do on here is argue and try to be clever. to what end? “the betterment of literary society”? “for the enlargement of our minds”? the things you are arguing about are merely theoretical. being nice to other people and creating art can have a palpable effect on other people, one they might remember for a long time. and it doesn’t need to be talked about in phony ways. unless one really gets a bang out of intellectual arguments (god help you), those arguments don’t do shit for shit. you’re the reason i don’t want to go to graduate school. i’m guessing you have redeeming qualities irl.

  459. Tony O'Neill

      Hey Steve

      Well not to hammer the point home, or get into a long pointless protracted debate which ultimately means nothing as it will not change either your, or my attitudes toward this (the sun is out, I knocked out 3,000 words today, I’m getting off this damn computer next), but a quick response anyway because I’m masochistic:

      ” Tony and Stephen, WTF is “pure intellect”? I think you’re talking about a grab-brag of character-attributes from movies and television… let’s see, there’s the Cambridge accent, the disdain for rock music, saucy chicks and shaggy dogs and an inordinate attachment to one’s mother… those are the qualities you seem to be projecting on the concept of “intellect”. But that’s just a populist cliche; corny as the Spock vs Kirk dichotomy.”

      Nope, that’s your projection. You actually project quite a lot Steve, usually when trying to undermine someone without actually listening to what they’re saying. I see you doing it here all the time, you used to do it all the time when you posted at the guardian and I still read things over there regularly, and its always been something that really irritated me about you.

      But, no, that is not what I meant by pure intellect. I mean that all of the other shit that comes part and parcel with being a human being is a HUGE factor in creating art. Nobody is saying that there isnt an intellectual component to creating, but what I am saying is that it is a smaller component that you insist. All of the other shit that we have to deal with as human beings – unhappiness, shit jobs, too much booze, not enough booze, bad drugs, good drugs, politics, love, self loathing, small ecstasies, boredom, lust, etc etc… all of this shit is a vital ingredient, something which you seem quick to deny.

      You are a big believer that we cannot (or should not) consider the personal life of the person who created the art, that it has nothing to offer (except maybe voyeuristic thrills). I am of the opinion that all of that stuff is vital to experiencing – and creating – art, and to throw that out is to throw out all understanding. If your assertion was true, then everybody who took an MFA would be producing works of genius, and the prisons and the streets would have thrown up no great works of art.

      “Certainly don’t need your intellect to enjoy love but try writing about “love” without your higher brain functions switched on and see how far you get.”

      Again, nobody said it was about turning off your higher brain functions. But try to explain love in purely intellectual terms to someone who has never experienced it, and see how far YOU would get.

      “To write about emotions (or situations that will trigger an emotional response) in a way that will reach *any one*, you need the intellect. Tony, hate to break it to you, but your sitting down and coming up with the right voice (tone/style/cadence etc) and ordering your words/sentences in a way that will tell the story you want to tell requires the use of your intellect; you need it both to structure the text and to access and make sense of the recollected emotions that will inform your text. You make complex intellectual choices with every page you lay down (eg, making sure you don’t come off “too intellectual” is an intellectual effort).”

      No, it’s not an either / or. I guess what we’re arguing about here is percentages. I’m not saying that creating art is NOT an intellectual process. I’m saying that it cant be a PURELY intellectual process. Otherwise it would be very, very fucking dull.

      “Writing with *any* skill requires more conscious-and-unconscious intellectual activity than randomly splashing a canvas with color does or kicking a ball or banging out two chords on an out-of-tune guitar. The problem being that the “intellect” is seen as “patrician” (think about the crypto-elitism of that attitude for a second) and, even worse: “feminine”.”

      This is your projection again. I have no fears or phobias about femininity or whatever, Steve. I live with two women, a wife and a daughter, I dont play sports, and I have no aspirations towards any kind of hyper masculinity as you seem to be suggesting. i just like my writing to live and breathe, and to be hewn out of sterner stuff than text books and literary theory.

      “Which is why so many writers affect to be “anti-intellectual”… it’s an obvious insecurity about one’s masculinity (see: Ernie H) and the more macho society is, the louder the “anti-intellectuals” get. But, fuck it: I’m 6′1″, 180 pounds, nothing to prove, guys.”

      And yet you gave us your stats (although im glad you drew the line at telling us your penis size). But nice bit of pop-psychology on Hemingway, when were you employed as his analyst by the way?

      ” And, Tone: thanks for quoting Nietzsche as part of your “anti-intellectual” presentation! (laugh)”

      your welcome, although again youre simplifying my argument so you can score easy points. As I said above, its a matter of percentages. Since you enjoyed that quote so much, here’s another I quite like:

      “Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.”

      As a PS – I am usually pretty suspicious that when people want to take “personality” out of the equation when it comes to writing, its usually because they don’t have one of their own and feel a bit left out…

  460. deadgod

      mimi, Steven’s point is that one never ‘creates’ without simultaneously being “analytical”. The apparent intrusion of over-analysis is a matter of degree, misplaced or too-narrow focus, over-bearing priority – not a matter of an alien, oncogenetic virus.

      Mind and heart are only falsely – albeit sometimes pragmatically – discerned as being apart. They only ever happen entwinedly.

  461. Steven Augustine

      stephen: it’s a comment thread about Lit, man… it’s not group-therapy. If you have issues with the fact that I don’t frame every single comment with an “and remember, this is merely my opinion, it doesn’t hold any particular weight, it’s just what I think about this, is all, please don’t be offended”… that’s not my problem. Grow a skin, Dude!

      If you don’t want to argue ideas… don’t. But don’t fucking try to turn it into a moral issue when you lose a debate. And I didn’t “come to you”, you came to *me*. The first comment in this sub-thread was *not* addressed to you. Three days after I left it, you begged to differ. Which is fine. Just try to control the trembly lip now that it didn’t work out the way you’d hoped, okay…? And stop appealing to the audience, Oprah-style, for back-up. It’s cheezy.

  462. deadgod

      Excellent! – Ryan, stephen, Tony, and I constitute a circular firing squad facing outward.

      I hit my tree . . . well, fourth. But still: I win!!

  463. Steven Augustine

      deaders: har!

  464. deadgod

      When life gives you lemons, share your lemon-rind scrumpy.

  465. stephen

      i’m not treating whatever this is as group therapy. i don’t have issues. i don’t care about you. i have a skin. ok. i’m not fucking trying to do anything and i didn’t lose a debate. i didn’t come anywhere. nice asterisks. three days. thank you for your tolerance. my lip isn’t trembling; chilling, shirt off, coffee. what audience. i’d like to see you cheezy sometime; let’s get vulnerable.

  466. Steven Augustine
  467. deadgod

      i’m not dangerous on the internet. i’m an oldboy oddballer. i’m not “reading this thread”; i’m writing in a comment box. i never smirk, though i often laugh and a bit less often shake my head ‘no’. i don’t care “who” i am. i’m “interested in” the 49ers winning more super bowls, which should keep me alert for another half century. i use the shift key to make question marks, parentheses, and double-quotation marks, but not to capitalize my eyes.