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No Thomas Pynchon? No David Foster Wallace? No Heidegger? No Kundera? No Kerouac? Oh what a terrible person, to have not read everything in an arbitrary list o

by replicant2020 11y ago

No Thomas Pynchon? No David Foster Wallace? No Heidegger? No Kundera? No Kerouac? Oh what a terrible person, to have not read everything in an arbitrary list of authors and books that I feel like name dropping.

dschiptsov 11y ago
"On the road" is there. I forgot Philip K. Dick and Yukio Mishima! Oh, sorry, because it is His list it must be exceptional.
- sambeau 11y ago
  His list is interesting because he is an interesting person. He is also a highly original and highly influential person. Trying to get-to-know what his influences are is a (probably flawed) but understandable exercise. I think it would be fair to argue that he, himself, was an exceptional character. It's very human to want to try to understand exceptional people. Is that wrong of us?
  - dschiptsov 11y ago
    Where did I argued against his personality? I just considered this particular list being rather poor and provided some suggestions.
laxatives 11y ago
Is David Foster Wallace really among that calibre of writers? I'm reading Infinite Jest and I think I kind of hate it. There's some amazing chapters, but I can't help but loathe a lot of it. It just feels like pretentious drivel that isn't written by someone who has a clear idea of whats occurring, but by someone who wants to write what sounds "cool". Its almost like emotional pandering. I know he lead a pretty eventful life, but he tries to have so much depth on so many different topics, I get the impression he did the shallowest research time could afford. It would be the equivalent of trying to fit as many highlighted words on a wikipedia page into a paragraph as possible, without understanding what any of them mean. For example, he has some kind of obsession with optics, but every description reduces to convex/concave mirrors and "it just works".
- bshimmin 11y ago
  I think it's an incredibly challenging book, but also a masterpiece. It's really hard work to get through in places, and some chapters are much, much better than others. Some parts of it are astonishingly and gleefully excellent, some parts work less well (I was more interested in tennis than in Quebec separatism, to be honest). For me, it bears comparison with Ulysses in that both are works of epic length and a singular uniqueness. Sometimes when I read a book I can conceive, even without being a writer myself, of how it came into being; with Infinite Jest I just can't even begin to imagine how that book appeared.
- replicant2020 11y ago
  I'm currently reading it too, and am about 100 pages from the end. On a chapter-by-chapter level I think the quality is mixed, in the sense that not every chapter has the impact and pace that the first chapter has. In some chapters it feels like he labours a point for far longer than necessary for the reader to get the message. One criticism I hear quite a lot is that DFW's own writing on the topics of addiction and depression are shallow and not representative, though I can't really say how true this is for lack of experience. The thing that worked for me in I.J. was that Wallace managed to combine elements of comedy and tragedy, not just in alternating parts but often within the same body of text. Some chapters are so tragic as to be darkly comic, in particular some of the descriptions on the backgrounds of members of AA. Plus, don't forget that Infinite Jest isn't his only work :). I haven't read The Pale King but have heard that it does away with a lot of the verbosity of I.J. and feels a lot more focused, and there are other works of fiction and also his more journalistic essay-ish type pieces, for example those from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the collection, though the titular piece in particular I found very funny). I'd also highly recommend Oblivion: Stories, even if Infinite Jest didn't gel with you, as I think it's as emotionally powerful but a lot more focused than Infinite Jest. It doesn't attempt the comedy/tragedy mix that I.J. seems to try for, and as a result the stories are shorter but just as affective.
  - laxatives 11y ago
    The addiction and depression thing really bothered me too. There was so much detail on those topics I figured he must have gone through a lot of it himself before I read up on his life. Yet, there's so much that's just patently false. He goes on and on about the depravity of marijuana addiction and has a character try to commit suicide from overdosing on 4-5 hits. Ridiculous. I guess this is some parallel world where things aren't exactly as they are in real life, but that just seems like an easy out. I'm barely half way through the book, but some of the chapters written in ebonics are atrocious. He starts out the chapter totally over the top and it seems like he forgets he was writing in ebonics by the end. There's just so many places it feels like his editor just said "fuck it". There are definitely a few sections that I get lost in, but they are so few are far between. I could probably count them on one hand. More than half the book I am pretty neutral about and then there is a significant portion I read and just look up and think, this author is full of shit. I guess its just his style, but when he was describing "eschaton", he has no idea how the game would actually be played. I guess the way it ends up kind of describes that the depths of the game were really beyond those playing it, but thats kind of pattern throughout the book. He has this grand idea and exposition, but it just sort of devolves out of laziness, or style, or I don't know what. I'm kind of terrified I'm going to reach the end of the book and he's going to devolve again and introduce some stupid non-sequiter to wrap things up cleanly, without any introduction or background.

dschiptsov 11y ago

"On the road" is there. I forgot Philip K. Dick and Yukio Mishima! Oh, sorry, because it is His list it must be exceptional.

sambeau 11y ago
His list is interesting because he is an interesting person. He is also a highly original and highly influential person. Trying to get-to-know what his influences are is a (probably flawed) but understandable exercise. I think it would be fair to argue that he, himself, was an exceptional character. It's very human to want to try to understand exceptional people. Is that wrong of us?
- dschiptsov 11y ago
  Where did I argued against his personality? I just considered this particular list being rather poor and provided some suggestions.

laxatives 11y ago

Is David Foster Wallace really among that calibre of writers? I'm reading Infinite Jest and I think I kind of hate it. There's some amazing chapters, but I can't help but loathe a lot of it. It just feels like pretentious drivel that isn't written by someone who has a clear idea of whats occurring, but by someone who wants to write what sounds "cool". Its almost like emotional pandering. I know he lead a pretty eventful life, but he tries to have so much depth on so many different topics, I get the impression he did the shallowest research time could afford. It would be the equivalent of trying to fit as many highlighted words on a wikipedia page into a paragraph as possible, without understanding what any of them mean. For example, he has some kind of obsession with optics, but every description reduces to convex/concave mirrors and "it just works".

bshimmin 11y ago
I think it's an incredibly challenging book, but also a masterpiece. It's really hard work to get through in places, and some chapters are much, much better than others. Some parts of it are astonishingly and gleefully excellent, some parts work less well (I was more interested in tennis than in Quebec separatism, to be honest). For me, it bears comparison with Ulysses in that both are works of epic length and a singular uniqueness. Sometimes when I read a book I can conceive, even without being a writer myself, of how it came into being; with Infinite Jest I just can't even begin to imagine how that book appeared.
replicant2020 11y ago
I'm currently reading it too, and am about 100 pages from the end. On a chapter-by-chapter level I think the quality is mixed, in the sense that not every chapter has the impact and pace that the first chapter has. In some chapters it feels like he labours a point for far longer than necessary for the reader to get the message. One criticism I hear quite a lot is that DFW's own writing on the topics of addiction and depression are shallow and not representative, though I can't really say how true this is for lack of experience. The thing that worked for me in I.J. was that Wallace managed to combine elements of comedy and tragedy, not just in alternating parts but often within the same body of text. Some chapters are so tragic as to be darkly comic, in particular some of the descriptions on the backgrounds of members of AA. Plus, don't forget that Infinite Jest isn't his only work :). I haven't read The Pale King but have heard that it does away with a lot of the verbosity of I.J. and feels a lot more focused, and there are other works of fiction and also his more journalistic essay-ish type pieces, for example those from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the collection, though the titular piece in particular I found very funny). I'd also highly recommend Oblivion: Stories, even if Infinite Jest didn't gel with you, as I think it's as emotionally powerful but a lot more focused than Infinite Jest. It doesn't attempt the comedy/tragedy mix that I.J. seems to try for, and as a result the stories are shorter but just as affective.
- laxatives 11y ago
  The addiction and depression thing really bothered me too. There was so much detail on those topics I figured he must have gone through a lot of it himself before I read up on his life. Yet, there's so much that's just patently false. He goes on and on about the depravity of marijuana addiction and has a character try to commit suicide from overdosing on 4-5 hits. Ridiculous. I guess this is some parallel world where things aren't exactly as they are in real life, but that just seems like an easy out. I'm barely half way through the book, but some of the chapters written in ebonics are atrocious. He starts out the chapter totally over the top and it seems like he forgets he was writing in ebonics by the end. There's just so many places it feels like his editor just said "fuck it". There are definitely a few sections that I get lost in, but they are so few are far between. I could probably count them on one hand. More than half the book I am pretty neutral about and then there is a significant portion I read and just look up and think, this author is full of shit. I guess its just his style, but when he was describing "eschaton", he has no idea how the game would actually be played. I guess the way it ends up kind of describes that the depths of the game were really beyond those playing it, but thats kind of pattern throughout the book. He has this grand idea and exposition, but it just sort of devolves out of laziness, or style, or I don't know what. I'm kind of terrified I'm going to reach the end of the book and he's going to devolve again and introduce some stupid non-sequiter to wrap things up cleanly, without any introduction or background.