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David Foster Wallace’s final attempt to make art moral
- themisto 4y agoI haven't read any books by David Foster Wallace, though every time he comes up I feel obliged to share a fantastic speech of his about finding joy in the monotony of life. I heard it years ago and it's always stuck with me. Video[1], transcript[2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI [2] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david...
- tanseydavid 4y agoI want to second this recommendation. This commencement speech that Wallace gave is deeply moving and thought-provoking to me every time I listen to it -- and I have probably heard it at least 10 times. I have shared it with others, most of whom have had a very similar reaction to it.
- closedloop129 4y agoHow should one interpret the speech in light of his suicide? [1] He didn't shoot his head which suggests that his mind wasn't a master. Still, it makes me a bit worried that his thoughts could be the structure that made him suffer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Death
- tanseydavid 4y agoI agree this is a very complex matter to consider but I dwell on the parts where he emphasizes the degree to which his own "default thinking mode" was like everyone else's, any you can choose to either suffer it or manage it.
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- zemvpferreira 4y agoA great speech but this is the first I hear it interpreted as an ode to monotony. I've always thought of it as an essay on the value of questioning our default way of thinking in the day-to-day, on the implicit biases we carry with us into the world and how they can trap us in loneliness. Not ashamed to say I've cried more than once listening to it. It's a lifesaver.
- ethanbond 4y agoThe Pale King, his last novel (unfinished at the time of his death) is a really gorgeous elaboration on the same topics as This Is Water. It is not so much about rejecting the day to day monotony of the modern world, but rejecting the default reaction to the monotony of the modern world. We have complete control over our reaction, and almost none over the reality. One line I’ll paraphrase that sticks with me still: “In the modern world, if you can bear extreme boredom, there is literally nothing you can’t accomplish.” The general theme is that regardless of the monotonous reality, there’s still plenty of beauty and intrigue to find within it if you look closely enough. To make this point, The Pale King is about an IRS agent and it includes long, meditative descriptions of turning the pages of extremely long tax forms. I don’t know what philosophical ideas DFW ran into explicitly, i.e. whether he was reframing or actually deriving them, but he was absolutely rubbing up against what we now call mindfulness. Edit to add one of my favorite scenes in literature ever, with no spoiler or even narrative substance: There's a scene where two characters are talking to one another and one party becomes so engrossed by the conversation that he begins to literally levitate out of his chair. I find this such a simple description of a truly profound experience (~~flow state).
- zemvpferreira 4y agoReally good point, I might have misread the original commenter. Will pick up The Pale King this summer!
- nemo44x 4y agoIt's a great way to approach life in general. There's many things we have to do that we don't want to. Chores, etc. Like cutting the lawn. One approach can be to hate it and cut it super short and not take care of it and it slowly turns into a weed patch and something you resent even more. But you still have to get out there and cut it. Another approach is to learn about cultivation and care and take pride in it and think of the benefits like exercise and having a lawn you take pride in. You also open up the option to learn a lot of things. So now something that has to be done isn't something you dread because you were determined to find something good in it. If you can't find any way to take this approach with something then you have to make it not exist (don't have a lawn) or outsource it (pay landscaping company to cut it).
- adamgordonbell 4y agoThis excerpt from The Pale King is powerful and I recommend it over the "This is Water" speech, esp for software developers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJXrXf-0yoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJXrXf-0yoQ People laugh, and it is a bit funny, but it's also deadly serious. True heroism receives no ovation. It's just you against the world with no one to see or cheer.
- justsocrateasin 4y agoI have a calendar reminder to read this speech every 3 months. It's one of the few reminders that I actually listen to and don't just ignore.
- pcarolan 4y agoInfinite Jest is feeling more prescient every day ( the titular theme is about media addiction ). Worth the steep climb.
- floxy 4y agoGetting off topic here, but is there a word for the concept of an anti-joke? Along with examples? As in, a joke consists of a setup story, and then there is a lull or pause, enough time for the listener to contemplate what going to happen next. And then the joke teller says something unexpected but somewhat related, and it is funny. There is a moment in the speech that I would classify as sort of the opposite. DFW starts relating about the ugly people sitting in traffic with the large SUVs with religious and patriotic bumper stickers, and the crowd starts cheering and laughing, seemingly agreeing that those "others" deserve mockery. But then there comes the punch line, that maybe the others have some worse hardship like bone cancer, which is definitely not funny. Or stated another way, for a joke, the setup story is neutral, and the after effect is funny. For the anti-joke, the setup is funny, and ends somber, and maybe makes you feel bad for laughing at the beginning? The anti-joke start at about 13:28: https://youtu.be/8CrOL-ydFMI?t=808 https://youtu.be/8CrOL-ydFMI?t=808
- Hallucinaut 4y agoThere is definitely the concept of the anti-joke. Anti-humour has the wiki page. The sadly-late Norm Macdonald was a good proponent. Fwiw though I watched this after your post and I'd say that's not really the same. I'm not sure what you call this technique in speeches with such a setup but it adds great emotional gravity and is something I see and appreciate a lot in speeches like this (or even shows like The Good Place which is incredible but can't be described further without spoilers).
- zafka 4y agoThanks much for this! First time I have heard this. Now saved for repeats.
- randycupertino 4y agoI love his cruise ship essay. He's such a smug intellectual brat HOWEVER he's fully self-aware of his personality shortcomings and seems to set his qualms and enjoy himself despite of himself by the end. https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
- npilk 4y agoThough unfinished, I highly recommend the Pale King. It's not as consistently great as some of DFW's other works, but the highs are as high as anything else he wrote and IMO it's a little more accessible than Infinite Jest. (For a new reader, I would start with some of his essays, e.g. Consider the Lobster: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)
- adam_ellsworth 4y agoThe link you provided didn't work for me. I was able to find another copy here: https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/lobster_dfwallace.pdf https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/lobster_dfwallace...
- boldslogan 4y agoSpoiler: don’t read this unless spoiled But the part describing the teacher who wanted to kill the child was the funniest chapter of a book I’ve ever read. And I recommend this book based only on this one chapter. I have never seen this kind of comedy in a book. Maybe something like it’s always sunny in Philadelphia or futurama comes slightly close. But I’ve never laughed out loud from a book like that.
- nelsondev 4y agoAs for comedy in books, I find Bukowski - Post Office to be quite hilarious at times.
- havblue 4y agoI liked the David Foster Wallace reader to start with. It was basically a greatest hits of his best material including a decent chunk of Infinite Jest.
- rintakumpu 4y agoThe first time I read Infinite Jest I was expecting something as inaccessible as Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow but ended up finding the book pretty readable and a total delight. And but so I would highly recommend it, just take the off-beat sci-fi setting at face value and skip the footnotes if you feel like you want to focus on the story. You can always return to those later.
- ww-picard-do 4y agohttps://archive.ph/LCzr8 https://archive.ph/LCzr8
- Arubis 4y agoI wish I could still love DFW's work the way I used to, but it's colored by [allegations of significant relational abuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Personal_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Personal_...).
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- redtexture 4y agoFrom the article. > Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace’s friends... >...They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing these things about him. > It’s worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of Wallace’s fiction, little of the news about his personal life could come as a surprise. Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his contemporaries—one that sometimes opened him to charges of hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy sentimentalism—was his commitment to doing more than merely cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives like Fogle’s, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.
- Arubis 4y agoThis is fair, and familiar. A common sensation over the last half-decade or so is to be shocked without being surprised. That this was a predictable facet of DFW's character doesn't make his purported actions less saddening and hurtful. It's okay--expected!--to struggle. It's common--awful, but repairable!--to hurt others in the process. The open question is whether that repair would have ever been available had he lived.
- everybodyknows 4y ago
- lotw_dot_site 4y agoInfinite Jest was largely a collection of various scenes, some of them recurring and some not. Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop overlooking Tuscon. Marathe is a legless French Canadian agent of uncertain allegiance and Steeply is a US agent posing as a female reporter called Helen. Closely following the back-and-forth between the two allows the reader to put together major aspects of the grand narrative of the novel. My favorite scene was a one-off involving the younger kids (pre-teens) at a tennis academy playing an extraordinarily convoluted and physically intense game called Eschaton (think Risk played with tennis gear). If any particular thing made the 1,000 page slog worthwhile, I would say it had to be that. The footnotes alone could have made up an entire book.
- rockostrich 4y ago> Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop overlooking Tuscon. The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, if you will.
- iggldiggl 4y ago> My favorite scene […] Eschaton […] And a band that apparently has some David Foster Wallace fans amongst its members did a music video based on that chapter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni7T18UUBUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni7T18UUBUI (The Decemberists - "Calamity Song")
- dailyrorschach 4y agoAnd directed by Office, Parks Rec, Good Place Mike Schur - who once definitely owned the film rights to Infinite Jest, not sure he still does or not.
- MissionInfl 4y agoAn additional Mike Schur Infinite Jest connection: https://www.vulture.com/2013/04/last-nights-parks-and-rec-was-full-of-references-to-infinite-jest.html https://www.vulture.com/2013/04/last-nights-parks-and-rec-wa...
- platz 4y ago> “Infinite Jest” transformed private torment into a vast metafictional diagnosis of our entertainment-bedizened cultural condition, and, weirdly, sounded the first notes of a quest for an irony-free sincerity that has become a ruling style of David’s generation and the ones that followed. - http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/i_know_why_bret_easton_ellis_hates_david_foster_ http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/i_know_why_bret_easton_ellis... > I sometimes wish Wallace had never written on irony or given that famous commencement address. Both are unfairly used as a stand-in for his entire ideology. He is in turn praised and totally dismissed by large groups of people who have no idea what his larger project as a writer really was. Also I'm pretty sure that he's made it abundantly clear that he never meant to say irony has no proper place in society, merely that it becomes a crutch and a shield for many who would rather not engage earnestly with the world. - https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/274v9c/what_hannah_arendt_understood_about_irony_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/274v9c/what_han... https://medium.com/@kunaljasty/a-lost-1996-interview-with-david-foster-wallace-63987d93c2c https://medium.com/@kunaljasty/a-lost-1996-interview-with-da... https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/05/good-people https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/05/good-people
- swayvil 4y agoTo be fair, morality is just aesthetics in a more general context. Ie : This brush stroke is aesthetic. This deed is moral. Both boil down to feeling-of-rightness. But ya, that larger context. Maybe Dave is telling artists to get out of the studio.
- ComputerCat 4y agoYikes, I had suppressed the memory of a terrible university prof I had who was obsessed with DFW, this instantly took me back.
- llamaimperative 4y agoI too hate when people like things a lot
- CTmystery 4y agoReading this makes me feel quite insecure in my own comprehension of these books. I've read Pale King, Infinite Jest, Consider the Lobster, and Broom of the System. I liked them all. But I read this article and I don't really understand the majority of it, which makes me think that I also missed a lot of what I was supposed to take from the books. Genuine question, does this make sense to most readers? Do you need to be a literature major to understand this article?
- jrm4 4y agoDon't be. I don't think the author of this piece is saying much at all. I think they're doing a nerd thing of trying to insist that DFW had some "clear plan" that he was trying to execute. But I think what's really happening is that the author of the article wants there to be some clear plan instead of the truth that what DFW did with his amazing work defies summary in this way.
- thenerdhead 4y agoIf you watch some interviews with DFW and other similar authors, you may come to the conclusion that nobody really knows what they are talking about and it's usually the ego speaking(including Wallaces). I think that's the point of much of his works: > Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. While the article makes sense to me, there's plenty of filler that detracts from the point. Wallace's work was writing moral fiction for a generation ahead of his time. Many of the themes in his work are more prevalent and pervasive today than they were at the time he wrote them.
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