David Foster Wallace

[containercore]

What is the Dagger consensus on the work of the late great American author David Foster Wallace?

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I like his non-fiction a lot.

[KHOKABOG]

Thought he was a faggot, but upon seeing that Star Wars (TM) CIS Droid (TM) shirt I cannot help but roger-roger him as based.

[nfl69]

when i lived in syracuse i spent some time trying to get into his old apartment that he apparently holed up in and wrote a bunch of shit...finally got to check it out one day and it was a super bleak zone

prefer the non-fiction at this point, but his fiction is pretty clever if nothing else

[hayden]

The first piece of his writing that I had read was "Consider the Lobster." I bought Infinite Jest soon after, but I've yet to read it all the way through (there's something really daunting about a book so long--particularly with DWF's penchant for footnotes). DFW's non-fiction is what I enjoy the most, with "Big Red Son" being among my favorites. I have a posthumous collection of his writings on tennis, String Theory, which I adore. My favorite piece from him is, strangely enough, "Tense Present," his review of a new edition of a usage dictionary. I wish I could get through his fiction, though. I'm sad he's gone.

[samuraiblues]

haven't read infinite jest. would like to at some point. "This is water!" he complains about having to wait in line at a supermarket, he sees fit to do this great self-reflective analysis, which I find pompous and self-aggrandizing and concludes that we are specks of dust / Buddhist, the world is suffering epiphany. The world is what we choose it to be. outlook/ perspective, which is more a half truth than "Capital T truth." We must have compassion. the backing music strikes me as the template for shitty empty wisdom TED talks. This solution of being content in your suffering I find odd. enjoy getting fucked.
I take a pragmatic approach.
I ask myself, why doesn't he simply shop at a different time, or hire someone to do his shopping. this is deep thinking?

[vanya]

DFW wrote very soft, his sentences hit you like a pool noodle swung by a child. His style was simply an abundance of words, thrust on a page, in the hopes of affecting the reader. He hid behind a veneer of intellectualism. A big red flag when I read him was the occasional times he would bring up math. It was obvious he had a shallow understanding of the topic, and clearly he never wrote any proofs. Math is a beautiful subject, whose aesthetics is revealed only after a couple years of dedicated study, once you get a feel for the well-oiled machinery. It is learned in large part by sitting alone in a library, constructing it for yourself. You construct and you read other people's proofs, marveling at the consistency and interlink between these theorems. This intuitive understanding is shown by someone like Pynchon, who in Crying of Lot 49 wrote

Trembling, unforrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years, to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among "uhs" and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; "dt," God help this old tattooed man, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was the high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright.

That is infinitesimals, the basis of calculus, is a way of measuring the derivative, i.e. the change in a projectile. In reality, we only see the average velocity, because you can’t divide by zero time (and for any time change you can always choose a smaller change), so we take the limit (shortening time infinitely), to get the true value. The TRUE value, in a period of complete stasis and isolation, outside of the reference of time, this is an abstraction not grounded in reality. This non-existent, infinitesimal time is “dt” in calculus. This person suffering from alcohol withdrawal, in his misery has complete clairvoyance, separated from everyone else (frozen, alone). Hence the connection of DT (Delirium Tremens) to dt. This is called style: Inventive and deep. Style is not adding two hundred pages of endnotes at the end of your novel. Information is not depth. I digress because when DFW talks about math it is incredibly shallow (hurr I took the square root of a number, durrrrr the barbershop paradox in logic man… its so deep you can go crazy man…) which indicates that he was poseur. Imagine a nerdy guy hunched over playing a fugue on his 12 string guitar. He hasn’t washed for days, has acne over his face, and his hair is matted. He plays for no one except in the name of beauty, driven by his own love for music. Some douchebag in a tailored suit comes by and takes notes, picks up an expensive guitar, learns to finger pluck, and plays a “complex” piece to a bunch of girls (which is just slightly re-arranged from something he found online), with his biceps pressing against the body of the guitar. Everyone claps for him, and he gets to fuck some of the broads too.

DFW is almost corporate with how he manages to bite other artists’ style, and dilutes it to appeal to as many people as possible. I never I understood why he faked knowing math or linguistics, until I realized that he doesn’t really give a shit about telling a story or projecting his conception of beauty, but rather selling the idea of him being a “genius” author who know all these “things” and understands “what it means to be human”. He wants his readers to feel dumb and perhaps submissive to his “smart” writing, which in reality is very shallow and hardly scratches the surface on the human condition. He goes on Charlie Rose two times over the course of a year, and pontificates on the effect of television, six years after the introduction of UseNet. Television was introduced thirty years prior, and the internet was burgeoning as a forum to discuss news without the presence of authority and DFW was fucking talking about the addicting effects of television like a wise sage! He could not have been more out of touch. I think he was falling to obscurity pretty fast toward the end of the 2000’s and then he killed himself, which immortalized him along with his vapid writing. I read a lot of his short stories, and even those were always boring and trivial. And for some reason whenever I read them, I always felt that emanating from the text was a faint, smug smile. I never quite knew why. That bastard.

[weaksausage]

Consider the lobster was awful, had to read it for a teachers training seminar for AP Comp. Feel sorry for the lobster, I think not...