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“The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace (1998) [pdf]
- tnorthcutt 10y agoAnyone have a link to this in plain text?
- roflc0ptic 10y agocurl http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-0... > depressedwallace.pdf pdftotext depressedwallace.pdf > depressedwallace.txt
- hprotagonist 10y agoEvery time I read "Infinite Jest", i wonder how much of it is basically autobiographical with a thin veneer of difference and a heap of really, really tight prose. The recursive spiral of recursion is really hard to avoid with DFW to the point you think it is the point, which, of course, is itself recursive.
- platz 10y agoOn the other hand, DFW was against the cute, post-modernist self-references in things like Danielewski's "House Of Leaves". Infinite Jest was acclaimed academically because it was a fresh return to un-ironic content and narrative. I think IJ is more layers than recursive loops.
- chipgap98 10y agoI think you are exactly right about his view on self-references [0] [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2doZROwdte4
- cmyr 10y agoon the point of recursive loops: The most amazing thing about IJ, to me, is how the book itself _does_ recurse; chronologically the first scene in the book takes place after the last, and when you reach then end you could reasonably start again from the beginning, with the knowledge you've picked up on your first reading informing your second and fundamentally changing the tone and mood of the book. i.e./tl;dr, Infinite Jest is itself the infinite entertainment it describes.
- niels_olson 10y agoHow many times have you read a 1000 page book?
- pklausler 10y agoThis one, or any 1000-pager?
- niels_olson 10y agoboth
- pklausler 10y agoI've read Infinite Jest three times -- the second reading being immediately after the first, of course, since the narrative is circular and the first part makes full sense only when you cruise into it from the last bits. I read it for the third time this year due to all of the 20th anniversary publicity and enjoyed it even more. Other kilo-page doorstop-sized single narratives that I've read and recommend include Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Wm. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. (The world is also full of good single narratives that span multiple thick volumes, of course.)
- jfoutz 10y agoAuthors have a way about telling a story. I guess it's "style". With longer books, you sort of build up a predictive parser for that particular author, so they get easier and easier to read. For example Douglas Adams likes punchlines. He'll give a long and detailed description of a kitchen, and oh by the way there's a dead body bleeding in the middle of the floor. You kind of learn detailed descriptions are garden paths, the details don't matter. If you're just kind of trying to get through the book you can skim to the punchline, smile, and move on. Casual reading isn't like technical reading. Missing a detail won't cost you a week of effort. Song of Ice and Fire(game of thrones) is a better example. If you don't particularly care for a character, just skimming their part of the story isn't going to kill the book. You get that so and so is sad, and went for a long walk. Ok, whatever. If you like reading for entertainment, there's nothing special about page count. It's just the fun of being on an adventure. I'm not exactly saying you just skip the boring parts, it's more that you internalize the author's style, and implicitly read the boring parts less closely.
- roymurdock 10y agoThis essay, especially the part detailing the I.-C.-F.E.T. retreat, reminds me of his brilliant description of AA meetings in Infinite Jest and the bizarre rituals that people undergo to help one another behind closed doors. Reading thru this essay, you definitely get a sense of how tight his prose is - what would be egregiously long and cumbersome run-on sentences for any other writer are fluid and make perfect sense as spiraling thoughts. I'd recommend "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story," D.T. Max's biography of DFW. It gives a good outline of his life without straying too far into speculation/psychoanalysis. I usually try to approach books without any knowledge of the author but I feel like knowing DFW's history enhanced my enjoyment of his writing (especially non-fiction).
- chipgap98 10y agoI think Wallace disliked the idea of trying to read into an author as a person from their work. His writing on suicide/addiction/depression in this book doesn't necessarily give you insight into his personal struggles
- zwischenzug 10y agoI read his biography 'Every Story is a Ghost Story' (which is very good BTW) and was struck by how much matched IJ in terms of experience at both ends of the social spectrum he describes.
- mercer 10y agoAnd as a counter-point, I really, really hated 'The End Of The Tour', which felt icky and cheap somehow. If you're interested in knowing more about DFW, go for 'Every Story is a Ghost Story'!
- dilap 10y agoi believe a lot of it is lifted from AA meetings he attended. i remember reading an interview with a few of the fellow attendees who seemed a little miffed that he'd taken their stories. but beware! that's what happens when you're around a writer. IJ is by far my all-time favorite book. just amazing. (though the tech and math parts are cringe-worthy!)
- ethanbond 10y agoHow are they cringe-worthy? The tech stuff especially is incredibly prescient, considering when it was written.
- dilap 10y agohe nailed the social factors, but his attempt to describe the mean-value theorem was incoherent, and his attempts at cyber-punky computer descriptions i found to be basically mimicking language without a deep understanding, resulting in something somewhat ridiculous. i think stuff by e. g. william gibson from even earlier still holds up, so it's not just a "oh, time passed him by" thing. apparently the book originally had much more of a cyber-punk bent, and his editor convinced him to trim most of that out, which has got to be one of the all-time great wins in editing.
- pklausler 10y agoDon't make the mistake of confusing the text in Infinite Jest with David Foster Wallace's actual understanding of the Mean Value Theorem. (Read Everything and More, his really awesome book on the mathematical history of calculus, if you need a demonstration.)
- dilap 10y agoperhaps. but it was in a footnote that seemed to be in the author's voice, rather than some sort of pov garbling. i've been skeptical yet intrigued by everything & more since forever; will definitely have to pick it up at some point.
- lisper 10y agoI took a whack at IJ and got bogged down after ten pages or so. This is from TDP, not IJ, but it's illustrative: "And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a supportive friend the venomous struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle's legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, a matter of "principle," though unfortunately not a "principle" that took into account their daughter's feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected-here she nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment-to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in." That was one sentence. There are many favorable adjectives one could reasonably apply to it, but IMHO "tight" is not one of them. (BTW, that sentence is not an isolated example. Here's the very next sentence: "The approximately half-dozen friends whom her therapist-who had earned both a terminal graduate degree and a medical degree-referred to as the depressed person's Support System tended to be either female acquaintances from childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives.")
- eastbayjake 10y agoI think in Infinite Jest the writing style -- not just sentences like these but jumping between text and endnotes -- gives the reader a deeper experience with his argument about attention, boredom, and the ways modern society seeks to constantly distract us. Much of his non-fiction writing explores these themes more directly and succinctly, particularly his Kenyon College commencement speech. This particular work seems to use complex sentence structure to embody the emotional distance the depressed person feels from others, the difficulty he raises in the first sentence of expressing one's pain to others making you more isolated.
- vessenes 10y agoI've been hunting for someone that has read IJ without reading the footnotes for a long time. My hypothesis is that the story has a completely different plot without the footnotes. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I read the footnotes, and don't think I can really hold the two plots in my head during a re-read.
- fullshark 10y agoHow would that even work? The footnotes contain clues about how things all tie together if I recall. Ignoring the footnotes just means fewer clues. The basics of the plot are in the main text I recall (basically the first 50 pages are the ending and wouldn't change by ignoring the footnotes).
- vessenes 10y agoI think one major plot element contained only in the footnotes is the PGOAT's face status, that is, the status of the face is very different if you read only one and not the other. But it's been a long time since I read it, maybe 20 years, so I'm only telling you what I remember thinking.
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- ericzawo 10y agoI'm really trying to start and finish Infinite Jest but the sheer girth of the book is discouraging me from bringing it on my commute.
- Fricken 10y agoLugging that brick of a book around with you everywhere you go for several weeks is intrinsic to the experience of reading it.
- kjdal2001 10y agoI love Infinite Jest, but its not for everybody. If you do want to read it, I wouldn't recommend reading it on a commute. Its very dense and requires a lot of attention, and I don't feel like it would work well if you are in a place with a lot of distractions and hard cutoff times to stop reading.
- mdpye 10y agoI read it during my commute. I had ~40 minute uninterrupted on a train each way, each day. It was problematic. During that period were the only times I ever missed my stops, both going to work and home. And that's with 2 voice announcements per stop over the train PA. Far too engrossed. Also the closest I've come to getting seriously injured in the station because I refused to stop reading on arrival.
- kjdal2001 10y agoI can see how that happens. The thing that impressed me most about Infinite Jest is the incredibly deep introspection that the characters had. But the passages were very long, and because they weren't about actual stuff happening, its tough to just stop reading all of a sudden. You cant just jump back in where you left off. It wouldn't make any sense unless you were following the entire train of thought, which means you need to backtrack quite a bit. I honestly have no idea how people read that book in public. I read it during the winter in my bedroom, which was perfect because there was nothing to pull my attention away and interrupt the experience.
- networthless 10y agoAaron Swartz's explanation of Infinite Jest's ending comes highly recommended-not to mention their convergent trajectories. Their deaths greatly impoverished the public intellect.
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- dominotw 10y agowhy are depressed ppl always shown to be hanging out with cats. Maybe cats are depressing them [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/02/20/cat-bites-depression_n_4823339.html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/02/20/cat-bites-depression...
- NumberCruncher 10y agoI don't get it why would anyone read something like this. I mean it is not bad but simply hurts my brain.
- haroldp 10y agoTo gain insight into minds like the Depressed Person's - not just as described dryly, but actually experienced first-hand as a result of the way it is written.
- NumberCruncher 10y agoI understand the purpose of the writing style. And it works on me. That's why my brain hurts. My question was why anybody would do this to himself? Masochism?
- haroldp 10y agoProbably the most important thing that literature can do, in my opinion, is transport us into someone else's mind. Even if it isn't necessarily pleasant, it can still be broadening. I feel the way you do about Eraserhead, to some extent. It's an amazing work of genius that I'll never watch again, because it made me feel physically il. I'm still glad I watched it once.
- NumberCruncher 10y agoOk, that's a valid point. I putted the movie on my to do list.
- fullshark 10y agoMy understanding is that David Foster Wallace wrote this about Elizabeth Wurtzel and it was meant to be a kind of slam of her as not being depressed but merely narcissistic. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/six-things-you-didnt-know-about-david-foster-wallace-20120827 http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/six-things-you-didn... There's probably a better source but that's the first one I found on google.
- tptacek 10y agoThat's my understanding as well, and there's a lot of sources for that just a Google search away.
- westoncb 10y agoIt seems like he's also making some similarly unkind statements about therapy in the story. Most of the character's issues seem to derive from her being given all these dimensions to constantly measure herself on (being a narcissist helps to amplify the effect here of course), so that she can't just be natural with others—and yet she has also been given all these goals by her therapist which presumably would just happen organically by interacting with others, if she didn't always have this agenda of being maximally empathetic and non-toxic etc. And then there are the issues she's dealing with in therapy explicitly stated to derive from therapy in the story.
- mercer 10y agoThe tension between overanalyzing everything and trying to focus on the 'small things' and 'little truths' is by far my favorite DFW 'theme', because I feel that tension in myself constantly. The only other writer I've come across who does this as well (if not better) is Dostoevski. And to make it all a bit meta, I can't help but wonder how much good it does me to read too much of this type of hyper-aware stuff.
- westoncb 10y agoI wonder about that too. I don't think it's unhealthy as long as you don't believe it's going to provide you with a solution. The only thing I've found that actually helps is spending sufficient time doing things that don't involve thinking so that you form different habits. Meditation has helped in my case, but I bet prolonged exposure to sports/exercise or anything else like that would be of similar benefit. Any particular Dostoevski you liked?
- draw_down 10y agoIt's our parents' fault we're fucked up. But it's our fault that we stay fucked up.
- hughes 10y agoExplaining depression with childhood trauma always makes me uncomfortable. What are those without vestigial wounds to make of their own misery?
- mercer 10y agoWhy would one exclude the other?
- nartsbtaa 10y agoDFW's writing comes up from time to time, and I always react by venting the frustration I feel with his work, which I promptly destroy because it seems wrong to criticize a (relatively recently) dead man. But I'll say it: his writing style is incredibly self-indulgent and dreadfully dull. I guess it's a matter of taste, but it takes a unique talent to attend a pornography award show and afterparty, and churn out something as soulless, humorless, and completely devoid of a point-of-view as "Big Red Son." I'll probably delete this soon -- I feel like an awful person for writing it, although I'm not entirely sure why.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ap22213 10y agoIt's quite acceptable to criticize a dead person's writing. In fact, almost all literary criticism does it. So, definitely don't feel bad. But, I disagree with the opinion of the work. It's hard to take Wallace's style and content without considering the 90s and its historical and social context. A lot of what you don't like about his writing is actually his point.
- nartsbtaa 10y agoI've considered that "Big Red Son," to use that example again, is intentionally tedious and humorless. Readers expect something titillating, or at least mildly interesting, and instead DFW reflects the mundaneness of the awards show through brutally dull prose. Perhaps, and the original title, "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment," would support this. But at the end of the day, you're just left with an exceptionally boring essay.
- elliotec 10y agoYou're totally right. I can't stand his work. Just even trying to read it feels pretentious.
- JoBrad 10y agoThe only book of his that I can recall reading was 'Infinite Jest'. My opinion lines up with your's, based on that book. However, his commencement speech 'This is water' is amazing, and I highly recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI