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Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace
- jsomers 18y agoHmm, DFW's sentences are occasionally indulgent, but they don't sound like this. Here's a sample chosen (somewhat) haphazardly: If we want to know what American normality is -- what Americans want to regard as normal -- we can trust television. For television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror. Not the Stendhalian mirror reflecting the blue sky and mud puddle. More like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors his biceps and determines his better profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is just invaluable, fiction-wise. His style begs to be parodied but this is a facile attempt, in my opinion.
- unalone 18y agoThe difference between DFW and this article is that DFW writes really, really good sentences, that just happen to be incredibly huge. A parody most likely won't be as good unless the parodist is brilliant as well (see the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter in Ulysses).
- lacker 18y agoAre you sure this isn't an actual DFW sentence? This sentence sounds like an excerpt from Infinite Jest.
- tptacek 18y agoYou can do this to any sentence fragment. "Eleanor Rigby was lonely [1], like many others." Fuckin' Beatles. It sure does help to have the ideas to back up the style, though. [1] (Here I should mention a habit of hers I had long noticed but never commented on, which habit was that she would walk through churches after weddings, employing her falcate digits to retrieve the spent grains of the matrimonial offering.)
- andrewljohnson 18y agoMan, I wish he would have written another epic work of fiction before he died. So sad. I loved Infinite Jest and Broom of the System.
- tptacek 18y agoYou saw they're publishing The Pale King? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_...
- andrewljohnson 18y agoOh wow, thanks for the link!
- rms 18y agoNot an epic work of fiction, actually just the opposite, but in case you haven't seen it, check out the complete nonfiction by David Foster Wallace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AaronSw/David_Foster_Wallace_nonfiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AaronSw/David_Foster_Walla...
- relme 18y agoDFW's latest fiction in the New Yorker was really scary: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309fi_fiction_wallace http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/03/09/090309f...
- Silentio 18y agoCompare DFW with authors like Albert Camus and Simone Weil and it becomes pretty clear a particular style has little to do with an author's perceived brilliance -- it's about ideas.
- bryanwoods 18y agoIt's worth taking a look at the results of the David Foster Wallace Parody Competitions: http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/parody.htm http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/parody.htm Making lighthearted jokes about Wallace's syntax and verbosity are the common first steps I've watched people make when they begin reading his prose, but it usually doesn't take very more reading at all for these people to see that even attempting to parody Wallace on a humorous, surface level would require the kind of introspection and effort that takes a near-lifetime and of the sort that probably isn't the most satisfying or healthy way for a person to spend their time.
- jacoblyles 18y agoMaybe the grammar section of my brain is slow today, but I didn't understand the "absolute construction" at the end.