Miscellany

I couldn't figure out where to put this.

David Lipsky interviewed David Foster Wallace over the course of five days at the end of Wallace's book tour for IJ a few weeks after it came out. The piece was for Rolling Stone, but it never got published for whatever reason. Recently, Lipsky dug out all his old tapes from these five days and compiled transcripts of them into a book called Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which was published recently. It's really a fascinating book.

Lipsky's been making the media rounds himself recently, promoting this book, and in a radio interview the other day, they broadcasted a short snippet of one of Lipsky's tapes! Man, I hope all that audio gets released some day. Click on the image in the upper right corner to listen to the interview. The excerpt with Wallace speaking starts around 6:30. I think it's cool because, while, yes, he's being interviewed, the way this interview worked was much more conversational and longer-term than most other interviews, and the two guys get to be sort of friends by the end of it. So this is as close as any of us are going to get to hearing the way Wallace spoke in a fairly casual setting. Oh, and also because you can hear Wallace talking around the tobacco in his lip haha.

http://www.hereandnow.org/2010/05/book-excerpt-although-of-course-you-end-up-bec...

Thanks for that Sutpen.

I read the article (will listen to the interview later) and that really fills in some holes for me in understanding what the hell happened to DFW.

I've gotta say, though, having some experience in the "psych" world (not ward per se, world, I said) how incredibly (and if you'll pardon my passionate euphemistic blast) psychiatrically BARBARIC it sounds to me for DFW to be taking Nardil in the 21st Century!

Granted, I don't know if his psychiatrist(s) had already tried less side-effectish SSRIs like Prozac (coming into vogue at that time, I sure hope they did), but even by the late 80s, Nardil was a dinosaur, considered a last resort option because of those very life-threatening side effects. MAOIs like Nardil are real SOBs among psychotropic meds, side effectwise. I'm stunned (and saddened) that he'd remained on it for so long. I think some second and third or fourth opinions among doctors and psychiatric pros back then when he first began treatment (of course, again, perhaps he did get those second opinions and there were other private, mitigating factors in deciding upon Nardil); but still...I'm just shaking my head at this. I don't get it. I hope at some point an explanation can be given, by those in the know, why DFW remained on Nardil (or even began Nardil) for so long.

I really really believe, if they could've somehow hospitalized him one more time - for months, until they found the right psychotropic combo (and talk therapy too, and diet and exercise and other newer innovative treatments) - there before the end, had he been willing, perhaps (yeah yeah, hindsight's 20-20, and who the hell am I? but I have to say this) when he'd lost all that weight, and considering the resources available to him, he would've eventually recovered. There's a lot more treatments available these days than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest type ECT (it's still appropriate at times and maybe it indeed was for DFW, I have to say); but nevertheless, I think it's possible his psychiatrist(s) and/or recovery team may have let him down and not fully explored the more innovative treatments for Major Depression readily available especially for someone with the financial means like a DFW.

BWTFDIK? Suicide just really pisses me off. Second-guessing from a distance comes with the terrible territory. My best friend from childhood took his life a couple years ago (who hasn't been affected by suicide in some way, once you've lived long enough?) so perhaps I'm "transferring" - there's a psych term for ya - from my experience with him onto DFWs incredibly sad situation.

sutpen - Thanks. This past Sunday's New York Times has review on the book by Ken Kalfus (not sure if access is free): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Kalfus-t.html?scp=2&sq=David+...

ETA - the NYTimes dates it May 20. (My Kindle has it on May 30 - a reprint, I guess.)

Great article. I'm eagerly anticipating The Pale King, though as it's incomplete, it'll probably be an anticlimactic read. Though I can't complain about getting something new from DFW, complete or not.

Excellent "non-review" of IJ, Dan!

Five more from this group have reviewed IJ. Here they are:

Iriley’s

tomcat’s

katieinseattle’s

snykanen’s

my “review”

I loved all those reviews. katieinseattle's reminded me of something, though. Particularly this part:

"The question 'is it really possible to know another person's heart' is so trite that I pretty much won't read any book whose review or blurb contains it..."

This is so, so at the core of what Wallace was concerned with. And his engagement with this seeming paradox between sincere communication and empathy being good and important, and at the same time saccharine and dopey (and how this conflicted attitude is unavoidable for people in our culture nowadays), got more direct as he got older. The end of his story "Good Old Neon," from the collection Oblivion, which I really can't read anymore because pretty much every time I do, I sort of break down in sobs, is almost a paraphrase of that part of katie's review. (I'm going to quote from the end of the story, cutting here and there to preserve a sort of brilliant structural thing that happens toward the end, for those of you who haven't read it YET):

"...fully aware that the cliche that you can't ever truly know what's going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere...the realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’"

Amen.

From that article: "There will also be a "network analysis" by Ed Finn, a graduate student in Stanford's English department, that maps Wallace's work on Amazon.com and LibraryThing;..."

One of us is a real scholar it looks like.

Inspiring article. Very excited to read all that. I first read IJ in 2001 and was surprised to see at that time that, yeah, pretty much all there was on him on the web was the excellent (at the time) Howling Fantods fan site. I love that it's his fans who got the ball rolling academically first, and not the academics. He's the real deal and always will be, and even when the inevitable DFW-backlash comes along as the scholars oversaturate us with him and turn him into a cottage industry of redundancy like they've done for Joyce, I'll still go to my grave pimping his infinite greatness.

"You could imagine him writing until his 80s."

That's thirty-five years of him (and his writing) we won't ever get.

tragic.

http://www.slate.com/id/2278655/pagenum/all/#p2

This may already have been posted in the group. apologies for redundancy if it has.

It's an excellent piece; one not posted here to my knowledge, and apropos for what I'm reading presently. Thanks! In fact, I'm off to repost it ...

Memo to check in here more often. Another great article, Murr. I've never read Iris Murdoch. I think I'd like her, though it's disappointing to hear that she tried keeping her philosophy separate from her fiction, which sounds counter-intuitive to me. How exactly is one who's so immersed in the discipline, able to not have it be absorbed into her fiction, if not deliberately, then at least unconsciously at some level.

I hope you get to The Broom someday soon, Murr, and everybody here who's yet read it. No matter much how DFW later disparaged it, he was definitely too hard on himself. It's excellent.

I've seen that 36 Arguments for the Existence of God around. Could be worth a closer look ... or maybe not, as in this edit I've discovered that the ValproMartini man has already decimated it with one star.

Murdoch's fiction is saturated with her philosophy, and vice versa, which is why I find her 'pronouncements' so interesting. There's always the possibility that she was pulling the leg of her interviewer. She is one of my great saints, both her philosophy and her fiction.

Especially recommended is Mystics and Existentialists, on the phil side, and her first and best novel Under the net, which I think is a fabulous masterpiece, but mac disagrees with me on that.

I"m getting to Broom. don't worry.

David Foster Wallace would've voted for Andrew Stancek's "The Magician" were he alive to do so. Since you're still alive, why don't you do so in his stead?

http://www.bartlebysnopes.com/stories.htm

I listened to this radio doc this morning. Some interesting interviews, and some great clips from a recorded interview that Wallace evidently did with someone from the BBC soon after IJ was published.

http://conversationalreading.com/video-new-bbc-david-foster-wallace-documentary

I just quickly transcribed two of the little clips from that Wallace interview that they include.

1)
Say, 40 or 50 years ago: the big priority, if you wanted to be a reasonably decent fiction writer, was you didn't offend people. As far as I can tell, for my generation and maybe the kids younger than us, there are different things we're afraid of. We're afraid of being trite, we're afraid of being sentimental, we're afraid of being mawkish, we're afraid of being stale and formulaic UNLESS we are stale and formulaic in a way that pokes fun at its stale formulaic qualities--I mean we have been taught so much, both by the lessons of television and the saturation of television what are the things to be afraid of. And one of the big reasons why irony--I mean, its been the mode of discourse in the culture for the last 30 years--has really ceased to be palliative or helpful is that irony is this marvelous carapace that I can use to shield myself from seeming to you to be naive, or sentimental, or to buy the lush banalities that television gives, right? If I show you that I believe we're both bastards, and that there's no point to anything, and that I was last naive at about age six, then I protect myself from your judgment of the worst possible flaw in me: sentimentality and naivete, the way a proper appearance of decorum would shield me from your judgment of me as deviant or offensive 30 or 40 years ago. And I can't quite figure it out, but I think TV and popular culture have everything to do with that shift--of what's the fundamental stuff that we're scared of, not just as people and as writers, and what techniques do we use to shield ourselves from that judgment.

2)
Those of us who write, partly as a subject, about popular culture are, I think, doing something important, which is that television and popular culture has become so saturated for people our age that we don't notice it's there. We don't notice that much of our experience isn't {just?} mediated, but it's got an agenda. Heh. Right? It's trying to sell us things. That an attempt to, I don't know what you would call it: get behind the scenes, humanize, de-familiarize the experience of a mediated world is, I think a good and important thing. If nothing else than to slap people kind of unpleasantly across the face and say, "There may not be something wrong with 6-8 hours of television a day, but it would be very nice for you to remember that you're essentially being offered a sales pitch and a seduction 6-8 hours a day." If we forget that, then for some reason, just intuitively, I think we're in huge trouble. At a time in the US, I think, when it's very hard to find and commit to things that you think are important or good, at least for me, in some elements of fiction it seems to me...it's a rather high-minded agenda: to try to wake people up to the fact that our experience is weird now. There's something weird and thrice-removed from the real world about it. And a lot of us don't realize it. What's at stake is, in many ways, human agency about how we experience the world. Would I rather go muck around in the hot sun by the seashore or watch a marvelously put together documentary about the death of egrets? But by the time I go to the god damned seashore and have seen the egrets, I have already experienced the smooth documentary so many times that it becomes, quickly, incoherent to talk about an extra-mediated, or an extra-televisual reality. Now that fact in and of itself is frightening. And it's that kind of almost just sort of shooting a flare into the sky and inviting people to say how weird that is. I can go to the ocean that I've never seen before, but I've spent a thousand hours {there}. I mean it's...who would wanna live when you can...watch?

>17 Sutpen: very well and truly said, all of it. In re this:

"we're afraid of being mawkish, we're afraid of being stale and formulaic UNLESS we are stale and formulaic in a way that pokes fun at its stale formulaic qualities"

Not only that, isn't that particular kind of stale formulaicity a positive good? A central aesthetic aspect of our cultural production?

Thanks for that sutpen. Makes me want to stop reading what I'm reading and read DFW instead.

http://www.thecommonreview.org/article/article/our-psychic-living-room.html?sp=1

I am not sure if this was posted before but I don't think so? It was shared on the lit snobs list and I had to make sure everyone here had read it of course...

anna, you beat me to it.

So many quotables in that. I liked the ending especially. It's exactly how I feel about dear ol' Dave.

*SPOILERS*
http://dfwforever.tumblr.com/post/3757820680/infinite-jest-plot-egg

That got posted on wallace-l recently. Great tool to show how intricately the plot is structured, for anybody who still thinks it lacks a satisfying ending or that it's a jumbled mess. The only thing I noticed that I'd want to quibble with is that Hal's communication issues should be put at the lowest point in the chart, to correspond with Lucien Antitoi's murder (the mute gaining the ability to sound a "nearly maternal alarmed call to arms in all the world's well-known tongues" vs. a hyper-verbal kid losing the ability to communicate entirely). This is kind of a silly oversight, given that we definitely know that Hal is pretty far gone by the time he and Gately are digging up the head, since the best he can do is mouth the words "TOO LATE" at Gately when they reach the grave. But everything else about it is awesome.

beelzebubba forwarded me this interesting Salon blip from '99: DFWs picks for five of the most under-appreciated American novels written since 1960:

http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/04/12/wallace

Early interview with DFW from '87 from a defunct lit. journal that McSweeney's got permission to republish:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2008/11/7katovsky.html

excellent portrait of the man just after his first novel was published.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/03/geoff-dyer-david-foster-wallace-pale-k...

In which Geoff Dyer makes it clear that even when it comes to stuff to *read*, the pallid, middlebrow landscape of contemporary British novelists is more than adequate, thank you very much. Also, Geoff Dyer shouldn't write the word "phat" anymore.

No wonder these people hailed Cloud Atlas as an innovative tour de force.

This new guy Geoffery D. might have a lot to teach us about patience and tolerance.

Clearly I have a long way to go haha.

Very short piece about DFW on Fresh Air

Pyro, link?

Ha! I was coming over here to post your piece and there you are, already done it.

For those of you obsessed DFW completists, thou grad-studentish-geekoids of loquacious lugubriousness who must possess every book he wrote (easy) as well as every periodical-issue and anthology featuring his work (hard), don't forget Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (1992), that features "Everything is Green," originally published in Girl with Curious Hair.

I've just recently begun the hunt for the original publications and pieces anthologized, and stumbled across this one.

Does anybody have a bibliography handy of all his periodical and anthology publications?

http://www.tnr.com/article/books/magazine/92794/david-lipsky-foster-wallace-pale...

Piece on DFW from The New Republic.

Thanks Murr. I'll read it this weekend.

http://quarterlyconversation.com/

Symposium on DFW

ETA: Thanks to KSwolff from the Lit Snobs list for finding it

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/david-foster-wallace-adapted-in-new-decembe...

Thanks to Cliff Burns from the Lit Snobs list for finding.

I reside in the Decembrist's town and I sort of like them at least partly because they're local. I absolutely can't stand that "why we fight" song though. But anyhow this is pretty darned cool of them.

Thanks for that Anna! I'm pleased to see that. I would love someday, to see a 100 part PBS mini-series production of IJ, with episodes devoted solely to the "Notes And Errata" end papers.

In 2005 DFW wrote an article in the Atlantic about the right-wing radio racket. Topical reading in 2012.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/3812/

Remarkable article, Anna. Apropos of the times indeed. I'm glad to be reminded of this piece. Didn't recall it at first, but in reading it remembered it was the first published version of "Host" that he later collected and included as the end piece to Consider the Lobster. I like how they handled the footnotes in the article.

DFW didn't employ his usual footnoting style in the revised version -- "(*at least a tiny bit)" he didn't -- he slyly notes about the revisions to this piece on the copyright page of Lobster; but instead went wild with lines and arrows directing the reader's eyes through the linguistic maze of rectangular blocks of passages in smaller fonts and types he'd like them to follow. Many of the pages then become like collages of headlines, excerpts, and sound bytes that are amusingly confusing to follow at first, but in effect (and to great effect) mirror and ultimately mock, through this unorthodox textual formatting, the sound byte rhetoric of his subjects.

Reposting a link from the Steve Erickson group, but it fits here too:

http://blackclock.org/blog/13th-hour/2008/david-foster-wallace-1962-2008/

>2 absurdeist:

Sorry I am responding so late to this post. I just saw it.

I read somewhere, it might have even been in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, that DFW got a new doctor and when the new doctor found out that he was on Nardil convinced DFW to change to a new, safer med (I don't know if it was Prozac or what...). That med didn't work for him. Whatever meds they tried didn't work. So after awhile they decided to put him back on Nardil. Then they found out that Nardil no longer worked for him. Apparently sometimes if a patient goes off of a med that is working for him, when he goes back on it it no longer works. This apparently happened to DFW.

BTW, David Lipsky is a LT author. He responded to one of my comments, so if you have questions or comments for him, you could reach him on here.

Thanks for the tip. I'll send him an invite.

A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (After David Foster Wallace).

"The First Draft Version of Infinite Jest" by Steven Moore

Wow! That's really cool. Hey, he's the guy who did the guide to Gaddis' "The Recognitions," right?

Interesting to read that DFW had intended to open with the "professional conversationalist" chapter.

One of these days imma gonna mosey on over to the HRC and read through the 400+ pages that didn't make the cut. One of these days.

I hope someone besides the wayback machine is storing that!

Bubba, you best be sure and take discreet photographs of those 400 + pages of excised manuscript, and then send them promptly to me. I'm predicting that in 2021, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of IJs publication, the uncut edition will arrive to much blustery brouhaha. Brace yourselves for maximal triple-wide margins, a novel the size of a coffee table book, maintaining its original 1079 pages (not including annotations), plus an additional 388 pages of appendices. Suggested retail price just shy of $300.00. The first 192 numbered copies to include an external hard drive the size of a present-day flash drive, snuggled secure in its frontispiece pocket sleeve, labelled samizdat underneath the peel-off, circular, smily-face sticker, attached to it. Yeah, I wish!

That's the same guy, Steven Moore, the Gaddis expert. Check out another one he wrote, The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600, sometime.

David Foster Wallace Symposium

Very long and sometimes dry, but having read about Wallace's agent, Bonnie Nadell, for so long, it's nice to finally see her and hear her recollections.

http://www.amazon.com/Microwave-One-Sonia-Allison/dp/1852250437

Go here, and read the first review. Then notice the first reviewer's name.

Merry Xmas and happy New Year to all DFW acolytes.

How on Earth did you happen upon that, Anna? IJ miscellaneous arcana is everywhere!

A blog thread about the world's worst ideas for Xmas presents. The book was mentioned as "the world's loneliest book."

Is anyone else troubled by the footnoted Apes of God in this group's description? The link leads to a White Nationalist blog. The review is actually well done, but a bit troubling coming from a fascist sympathizer.

Aaaack, I just spent two hours on that site grimacing in horror and now I have to wash my brain.

Having just finished IJ last night, I can only say "What the fuck?"

Congrats, Jesse!

(I think?)

Amy Wallace interview in which she talks about her brother DFW. Cool to hear, at the beginning, what rock bands she remembers her brother being into.

Hi everyone, this article made me think about that part of IJ about people having video phones and then creating masks to talk on the video phones because it was too stressful to try to put on the persona.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2015/0715/No-more-fake-smiles-Can-a-C...