7 ms·

The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace

54 points by samclemens 11y ago

danielrakh 11y ago
Here's an amazing commencement speech by David. Definitely worth a listen. https://soundcloud.com/cloudroutine/this-is-water-david-foster https://soundcloud.com/cloudroutine/this-is-water-david-fost...
- samclemens 11y ago
  I admire DFW's writing a lot but I have to say that I largely agree with this critique of that speech (from the posted article): "To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page. But an unquantifiable number of online readers, millions of YouTube viewers, and thousands of bookstore shoppers disagree. Among the more dispiriting aspects of the Wallace canonization is how much it has been built out of his suffering — the way the cult has revived, for precisely the post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint."
- swordswinger12 11y ago
  Did you even read the article before posting that?
  - rfrank 11y ago
    almost certainly not.
  - evmar 11y ago
    My stomach sank at reading the GP comment, to have missed the exact point the article was making. (I almost wonder if it was intentional?) But then somehow it is so appropriate to DFW that an article about him becoming a caricature of a writer and bemoaning that speech in particular produced that particular comment, a sort of circular irony or something that I almost imagine he'd appreciate.
    - firstworldman 11y ago
      Actually kind of a meta-parody about the idea that no one's actually read IJ.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Its borderline shameful you've been downvoted solely because someone at "vulture.com" thinks that speech is too "treacly" and doesn't represent whatever "real" view of DFW we're supposed to have. Yeah, he wasn't a liberal, he was a Reagan voter and didn't buy into the boomer hypocritical 60's freelove liberalism that was dying out by the 90s (and rightfully so by me). I think today's liberals and far left can't stand that. Why isn't he one of us? How can someone critical of causal sex, liberal politics, etc also have an somewhat enlightened view of how people work and how people should work all picked up from what seems popularized Eastern thought and heaps of cognitive behavioral therapy. We don't tolerate those who aren't like us it seems! As a snide note, my god, if you go against the far left on social media which is almost totally ruled by college identity politics, expect a harsh reaction. I read some really disingenuous hit pieces here and elsewhere about Chicago's recent election and statements about Rahm that were somewhat if not mostly unfair and a complete and utter obedience to Chuy, who was the epitome of an empty suit protest candidate. Pointing any of this out simply was not allowed. Chicagoans voted and kicked Chuy to the curb but if you read only social media you'd think he won in a landslide. I can see how kids today look at DFW's moderate if not sometimes conservative politics as some kind of betrayal and his pieces romanticizing middle America as "giving in to the man" or some other crap. This article really seems to resonate with that crowd who really like to over-politicize everything, lower the discourse level, and bully those who they disagree with. So, someone at vulture.com said its terrible, so now we downvote in earnest. There's a real idiocy here and appeal to authority that has always bothered me about sites like HN and reddit where opinions expressed via up and down votes are often just stemming from a fairly emotional place. "How dare you link to something the article said was crap? Enjoy your downvotes!" Its so petty and uncritical. Article: "post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint" This is just a bullshit statement. Wallace was a lot of things, and in the role of giving a commencement speech he played up being a mature adult laying down some wisdom for the graduating class. How this suddenly makes him some kind of self-help guru is beyond me. I also don't see how anyone could ever seee him as 'hip' or 'post-romantic'; he came off as a super nerdy goon with poor social skills in all his interviews, hell his Charlie Rose interview is just hard to watch, even for fans. His other interviews are almost painful and I've never seen him try to build some kind of guru superstar image either for himself or for him by his fans. We all knew he was a messed up weirdo and somewhat, if not very, unlikeable, overly academic, overly elitist, etc. I think the author just doesn't like DFW, which is fine, but she certainly isn't giving him a fair shake and seems to have written a fairly dull hit piece for outrage which translates often into ad impressions. Which is hilariously ironic as DFW would have satirized the hell out of treating a dead writer like this. Its just so plain-faced and mercenary faux-outrage writing, the same way anyone can write a piece about Steve Jobs being a jerk and how stupid Apple customers are. HN would see through that instantly but apparently not through this considering the upvotes and uncritical reception its gotten.
RodericDay 11y ago
A large part of Wallace’s appeal, for me anyway, was that you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just to himself. Banishing contempt entirely may be a good way to live, but it’s another kind of death for writing. Which is one reason it’s worth remembering, as the image of Wallace as slacker saint and liberal sage hardens into Hemingwayesque concrete, that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter; a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband; and a person who put to paper both the notion that the “good thing” about 9/11 was that it brought Americans together, and that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all.” Wallace never wanted that piece republished in a collection — in fact, he wanted it forgotten. He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own sainthood. This is the DFW that always has jumped out starkly clear to me from the pages, ever since I hit on the "Yours Truly" chapters in IJ. People who try to spin him as some trans-human wise sage of universalism seem to me like the people who see Jesus in toast. He was an excellent writer, and he hit numerous home runs ("How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" resonates with me particularly). However, I still think he would've been better if he developed less bland stances than his "apolitical but vaguely pro-status quo" fare. His romanticizing of the goodness of "Middle America", as in "The View from Ms. Thompson's" (about 9/11), is probably him at his worst.
- djur 11y ago
  I had a similar experience. People had really pumped him up for me, and yet essay after essay left me either cold or disgusted. As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day, and I couldn't agree less with his moralizing attacks on irony. And his piece on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is basically nonsense. But it was the 9/11 essay that made me give up on him. Not just its stunning lack of insight as to what America's reaction to the attacks was and would lead to, although that was bad enough. But there's this point where he mentions that the people he was staying with didn't know where various buildings in NY were in relation to the Twin Towers; he explicitly describes his hosts' ignorance of the layout of the NYC financial district as a sign of their parochialism and isolation. What amazes me is that the eternally self-reflective Wallace apparently never considered that the vast majority of Americans, parochial and cosmopolitan alike, never have had any reason to know anything about the layout of the NYC financial district. In that moment the parochial viewpoint was _his_. DFW was a fine stylist and made the occasional apt observation, but the man doesn't even begin to live up to the myth. The best thing I can say about him is that he would have been the first to admit that, too.
tptacek 11y ago
In a 2011 New Yorker essay, Franzen named Wallace’s relationship to his own fame as the central battle of his adult life. He also gave voice to more than one “interpretation” of Wallace’s death that most journalists have been careful to avoid and many others probably found unseemly, that Wallace “had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels”; that his suicide “took the person away from us,” his loved ones, “and made him into a very public legend”; and that he had therefore, in hanging himself, “chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.” Franzen said it might well have been “suicide as career move” — the “Kurt Cobain route.” Based on firsthand accounts of what Wallace suffered, this seems like an irresponsible account of his death to run unqualified --- though it fits with the rest of the one-note cynicism that runs through the article. Wallace had a life-long struggle with clinical depression, and was hospitalized in his 20s. He was for years on a regimen of Nardil, a third-line medication for treatment-resistant depression. The major depressive episode that preceded his suicide appears to have been triggered by an effort to wean himself off the drug. Mental illness is a real thing. Just as Steve Jobs cancer didn't make him a martyr to tech and Keith Haring's AIDS didn't make him a martyr to art, succumbing to clinical depression doesn't make Wallace "Kurt Cobain" or his death a "career move". The whole article bugs me, with its shrill hipsterism, a literary version of Courtney Love's "REM's important work was done before they signed to IRS". On a limb: I think the article itself is doing the same thing it accuses the world of doing by rewriting any sincerity out of the stuff people like about Wallace's writing. This despite the fact that in addition to being by all accounts kind of a dick, Wallace was also apparently just a "treacly" kind of dude, as the essays he wrote in Normal, IL indicate.
- evmar 11y ago
  I agree with your point. But as far as I know Franzen was one of his real life friends (in the New Yorker essay Franzen says he was given DFW's ashes to spread) and maybe has special insight into this particular situation.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    The circumstances leading up to Wallace's death have been documented by his family in great detail, in fact-checked reported stories. Just prior to his suicide, Wallace suffered an intense, crippling bout of depression, during which his parents flew to Claremont to watch him. According to the same accounts, in the year before that, he was weaned off Nardil, suffered a relapse of depression, tried to resume his old Nardil regime, and found the drug had become ineffective.
kjdal2001 11y ago
I’m not a fan of the tone of this article, at least the first half or so. Its got something of a “if you hadn’t read Infinite Jest before Wallace died then you aren’t a true fan” vibe to it. Is it really such a terrible thing that people who hadn’t heard about DFW while he was alive are seeing and enjoying his This Is Water speech? I think it does a good job of describing how easy it is to fall into a pattern of letting the world around you control how you feel on a minute-to-minute basis. Yeah he ties the whole idea up too neatly, but it’s a commencement speech not a long form essay. Sure, there are probably plenty of people out there putting DFW up on a “tortured artist too brilliant for this world” pedestal. But I think the author isn’t giving people enough credit to assume that is the only reason for his recent popular appeal. Maybe people stumbled upon the This Is Water video, watched it, and it inspired them to think a bit differently about their own thought process and feelings. You don’t need to have consumed everything an artist has produced to be inspired by one of them.

54 points by samclemens 11y ago

Here's an amazing commencement speech by David. Definitely worth a listen. https://soundcloud.com/cloudroutine/this-is-water-david-foster https://soundcloud.com/cloudroutine/this-is-water-david-fost...

samclemens 11y ago
I admire DFW's writing a lot but I have to say that I largely agree with this critique of that speech (from the posted article): "To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page. But an unquantifiable number of online readers, millions of YouTube viewers, and thousands of bookstore shoppers disagree. Among the more dispiriting aspects of the Wallace canonization is how much it has been built out of his suffering — the way the cult has revived, for precisely the post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint."
swordswinger12 11y ago
Did you even read the article before posting that?
- rfrank 11y ago
  almost certainly not.
- evmar 11y ago
  My stomach sank at reading the GP comment, to have missed the exact point the article was making. (I almost wonder if it was intentional?) But then somehow it is so appropriate to DFW that an article about him becoming a caricature of a writer and bemoaning that speech in particular produced that particular comment, a sort of circular irony or something that I almost imagine he'd appreciate.
  - firstworldman 11y ago
    Actually kind of a meta-parody about the idea that no one's actually read IJ.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Its borderline shameful you've been downvoted solely because someone at "vulture.com" thinks that speech is too "treacly" and doesn't represent whatever "real" view of DFW we're supposed to have. Yeah, he wasn't a liberal, he was a Reagan voter and didn't buy into the boomer hypocritical 60's freelove liberalism that was dying out by the 90s (and rightfully so by me). I think today's liberals and far left can't stand that. Why isn't he one of us? How can someone critical of causal sex, liberal politics, etc also have an somewhat enlightened view of how people work and how people should work all picked up from what seems popularized Eastern thought and heaps of cognitive behavioral therapy. We don't tolerate those who aren't like us it seems! As a snide note, my god, if you go against the far left on social media which is almost totally ruled by college identity politics, expect a harsh reaction. I read some really disingenuous hit pieces here and elsewhere about Chicago's recent election and statements about Rahm that were somewhat if not mostly unfair and a complete and utter obedience to Chuy, who was the epitome of an empty suit protest candidate. Pointing any of this out simply was not allowed. Chicagoans voted and kicked Chuy to the curb but if you read only social media you'd think he won in a landslide. I can see how kids today look at DFW's moderate if not sometimes conservative politics as some kind of betrayal and his pieces romanticizing middle America as "giving in to the man" or some other crap. This article really seems to resonate with that crowd who really like to over-politicize everything, lower the discourse level, and bully those who they disagree with. So, someone at vulture.com said its terrible, so now we downvote in earnest. There's a real idiocy here and appeal to authority that has always bothered me about sites like HN and reddit where opinions expressed via up and down votes are often just stemming from a fairly emotional place. "How dare you link to something the article said was crap? Enjoy your downvotes!" Its so petty and uncritical. Article: "post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint" This is just a bullshit statement. Wallace was a lot of things, and in the role of giving a commencement speech he played up being a mature adult laying down some wisdom for the graduating class. How this suddenly makes him some kind of self-help guru is beyond me. I also don't see how anyone could ever seee him as 'hip' or 'post-romantic'; he came off as a super nerdy goon with poor social skills in all his interviews, hell his Charlie Rose interview is just hard to watch, even for fans. His other interviews are almost painful and I've never seen him try to build some kind of guru superstar image either for himself or for him by his fans. We all knew he was a messed up weirdo and somewhat, if not very, unlikeable, overly academic, overly elitist, etc. I think the author just doesn't like DFW, which is fine, but she certainly isn't giving him a fair shake and seems to have written a fairly dull hit piece for outrage which translates often into ad impressions. Which is hilariously ironic as DFW would have satirized the hell out of treating a dead writer like this. Its just so plain-faced and mercenary faux-outrage writing, the same way anyone can write a piece about Steve Jobs being a jerk and how stupid Apple customers are. HN would see through that instantly but apparently not through this considering the upvotes and uncritical reception its gotten.

RodericDay 11y ago

A large part of Wallace’s appeal, for me anyway, was that you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just to himself. Banishing contempt entirely may be a good way to live, but it’s another kind of death for writing. Which is one reason it’s worth remembering, as the image of Wallace as slacker saint and liberal sage hardens into Hemingwayesque concrete, that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter; a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband; and a person who put to paper both the notion that the “good thing” about 9/11 was that it brought Americans together, and that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all.” Wallace never wanted that piece republished in a collection — in fact, he wanted it forgotten. He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own sainthood. This is the DFW that always has jumped out starkly clear to me from the pages, ever since I hit on the "Yours Truly" chapters in IJ. People who try to spin him as some trans-human wise sage of universalism seem to me like the people who see Jesus in toast. He was an excellent writer, and he hit numerous home runs ("How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" resonates with me particularly). However, I still think he would've been better if he developed less bland stances than his "apolitical but vaguely pro-status quo" fare. His romanticizing of the goodness of "Middle America", as in "The View from Ms. Thompson's" (about 9/11), is probably him at his worst.

djur 11y ago
I had a similar experience. People had really pumped him up for me, and yet essay after essay left me either cold or disgusted. As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day, and I couldn't agree less with his moralizing attacks on irony. And his piece on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is basically nonsense. But it was the 9/11 essay that made me give up on him. Not just its stunning lack of insight as to what America's reaction to the attacks was and would lead to, although that was bad enough. But there's this point where he mentions that the people he was staying with didn't know where various buildings in NY were in relation to the Twin Towers; he explicitly describes his hosts' ignorance of the layout of the NYC financial district as a sign of their parochialism and isolation. What amazes me is that the eternally self-reflective Wallace apparently never considered that the vast majority of Americans, parochial and cosmopolitan alike, never have had any reason to know anything about the layout of the NYC financial district. In that moment the parochial viewpoint was _his_. DFW was a fine stylist and made the occasional apt observation, but the man doesn't even begin to live up to the myth. The best thing I can say about him is that he would have been the first to admit that, too.

tptacek 11y ago

In a 2011 New Yorker essay, Franzen named Wallace’s relationship to his own fame as the central battle of his adult life. He also gave voice to more than one “interpretation” of Wallace’s death that most journalists have been careful to avoid and many others probably found unseemly, that Wallace “had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels”; that his suicide “took the person away from us,” his loved ones, “and made him into a very public legend”; and that he had therefore, in hanging himself, “chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.” Franzen said it might well have been “suicide as career move” — the “Kurt Cobain route.” Based on firsthand accounts of what Wallace suffered, this seems like an irresponsible account of his death to run unqualified --- though it fits with the rest of the one-note cynicism that runs through the article. Wallace had a life-long struggle with clinical depression, and was hospitalized in his 20s. He was for years on a regimen of Nardil, a third-line medication for treatment-resistant depression. The major depressive episode that preceded his suicide appears to have been triggered by an effort to wean himself off the drug. Mental illness is a real thing. Just as Steve Jobs cancer didn't make him a martyr to tech and Keith Haring's AIDS didn't make him a martyr to art, succumbing to clinical depression doesn't make Wallace "Kurt Cobain" or his death a "career move". The whole article bugs me, with its shrill hipsterism, a literary version of Courtney Love's "REM's important work was done before they signed to IRS". On a limb: I think the article itself is doing the same thing it accuses the world of doing by rewriting any sincerity out of the stuff people like about Wallace's writing. This despite the fact that in addition to being by all accounts kind of a dick, Wallace was also apparently just a "treacly" kind of dude, as the essays he wrote in Normal, IL indicate.

evmar 11y ago
I agree with your point. But as far as I know Franzen was one of his real life friends (in the New Yorker essay Franzen says he was given DFW's ashes to spread) and maybe has special insight into this particular situation.
- tptacek 11y ago
  The circumstances leading up to Wallace's death have been documented by his family in great detail, in fact-checked reported stories. Just prior to his suicide, Wallace suffered an intense, crippling bout of depression, during which his parents flew to Claremont to watch him. According to the same accounts, in the year before that, he was weaned off Nardil, suffered a relapse of depression, tried to resume his old Nardil regime, and found the drug had become ineffective.

kjdal2001 11y ago

I’m not a fan of the tone of this article, at least the first half or so. Its got something of a “if you hadn’t read Infinite Jest before Wallace died then you aren’t a true fan” vibe to it. Is it really such a terrible thing that people who hadn’t heard about DFW while he was alive are seeing and enjoying his This Is Water speech? I think it does a good job of describing how easy it is to fall into a pattern of letting the world around you control how you feel on a minute-to-minute basis. Yeah he ties the whole idea up too neatly, but it’s a commencement speech not a long form essay. Sure, there are probably plenty of people out there putting DFW up on a “tortured artist too brilliant for this world” pedestal. But I think the author isn’t giving people enough credit to assume that is the only reason for his recent popular appeal. Maybe people stumbled upon the This Is Water video, watched it, and it inspired them to think a bit differently about their own thought process and feelings. You don’t need to have consumed everything an artist has produced to be inspired by one of them.